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Gushing Over the Pour

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I’ve long admired Eric Asimov’s column or blog at the New York Times entitled “The Pour.” Asimov is one of those rare wine writers who not only enjoys good beer but also understands it. He occasionally writes about it, too, and when he does so it compares favorably to the best beer writing. So while I often bristle at wine and food writers tackling a subject they know precious little about, Asimov is the exception to the rule. His column today, Beers Worth Waiting For, is another stellar example and as a study in contrasts neatly demolishes the debacle at the Wall Street Journal from last Friday.

Asimov, while waiting in a very long line in the hot sun for the outdoor salmon bake at this year’s International Pinot Noir Celebration with two French winemakers, was not having any fun. The winemakers fortuitously suggested a beer run. After enjoying several craft brews, their waiting was made considerably more congenial, sparking Asimov to ruminate about beer and wine. His sentiments filled me with admiration, and a lot of head nodding.

In the course of a day it seems that many winery workers drink a good bit more beer than wine. The two beverages in fact co-exist quite well, and therefore it irritates me when wine and beer are pitted against each other, especially when wine-lovers demean beer. Beer-lovers have a bit of catching up to do in terms of achieving status and understanding, so I have a little more tolerance for them when they feel compelled to demonstrate how well good beers can go with certain foods, usually at the expense of wine.

My friend Garrett Oliver, the brewmaster at the Brooklyn Brewery, has engaged in more than a few competitive wine-and-beer tastings, because he has a point to prove. Yet he has the excellent sense to be an unapologetic wine-lover as well as a beer-lover. Rigidity and self-deprivation rarely win people over, but open minds go a long way to opening other people’s minds.

Amen, brother. If only more wine writers and wine lovers shared his views, what a better world this would be for both grain and grapes.
 

Putting On Airs

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A friend sent me this link (thanks Steve) to a Wall Street Journal article entitled When Beer Takes On Vintners’ Airs, about craft brewers making beer with more complex flavors. There’s a lot of good in the article, but I can’t help but feel like it’s dripping with a certain condescension. I don’t know if it’s intentional or simple ignorance. Of the last 43 articles by author Conor Dougherty, only two were about beer, with the vast majority of his writing being about economics. And in one of the two he likens cask ale to flat beer, a fundamental mistake and in that article his writing barely conceals a disdain similar to the current piece. In the article published on Friday, he starts out with a particularly fallacious statement.

Small brewers have long boasted that their beer can stand up to the finest wine. Their new strategy: Make beer that tastes like wine.

No brewer I know sets out to make his beer taste like wine. That’s never been the goal, nor is it the result. The brewers mentioned in the article merely are trying to stretch the boundaries of beer and make unique and original works of liquid art for their customers. Just because they may have some flavors that wine also has doesn’t mean the brewers who made them set out to make a wine. Taste any of them side by side with a wine. If you can’t tell the difference, stick to water. They’ll never be mistaken for wine.

Though many winos may be loathe to admit it, brewing is a far more complicated and involved process, requiring far more equipment, ingredients and education or experience than does making wine. Winemakers — at least all the ones I know — will freely admit this. A winemaker from Mondavi that I sat with at a dinner there told me she thought winemaking was easy compared to brewing, that all she did was get the grapes ready and let nature do its thing. Brewers, on the other hand, have figurative knobs and buttons to fiddle with in endless combinations. In the same way a mere twelve notes account for all the world’s music, four main ingredients account for a diversity in beer that is truly staggering. While a sad majority believe, as Dougherty puts it, that beer is “plain and even watery,” they couldn’t be more mistaken. The major beer companies have been passing off an industrial product as beer for so long now — and with so much marketing muscle behind it — that a majority of Americans today believe that’s what beer is. Simply put, they’re wrong. Or more kindly, that it’s not all that beer is or can be.

People might refer to Wonder Bread as bread but does anybody think it’s the only kind of bread? Who doesn’t know there are many kinds of bread or that there are lots of better breads? I’m sure Wonder Bread and all of the other nutritionally challenged white breads far outsell gourmet artisanal bread but it seems to me most people at least recognize that there is a difference. Yet time and time again, people seem to think that all beer is the same and often seem quite surprised to discover that there are literally dozens of distinctive styles of beer. That’s a triumph of marketing that’s perpetuated by a media that insists on remaining as ignorant as the public at large. Even when some do appear to at least realize there is beer beyond the industrial lagers, they are often dismissive and condescending which only serves to maintain the status quo opinion.

But back to the Journal. Just because brewers use grapes as an adjunct or age the beer in oak wine barrels doesn’t make it wine or even a wine beer. Winemakers don’t own grapes. Not everything made with grapes is wine. Are cork dorks up in arms over grapes in jams and jellies trying to make winey jam? And like jams, brewers also use many other fruits in beer, too, there’s nothing sinister about a few using grapes.

But Dougherty concludes that “the concept with all of these” beers it to add “extra layers of complexity” and refers to them all with a broad brush, branding them all “winey beers,” which I find more than a little derogatory. Every time he finds any similarity between one of these boutique beers and his beloved wine — such as serving temperature, bottle size, or the fact that it uses a cork — he takes it as a sign of beer trying to copy wine or be like wine. It’s as if he believes that these features are somehow the exclusive domain of wine, and none dare do the same lest they be accused of envy or stealing. It’s a very weird position to take. Beer has used corks for over a century, it’s nothing new. Many Belgian beers have been using corks since the 19th century right up to the present. 750 ml bottles likewise are nothing new for beer outside our shores. And as for being consumed at warmer temperatures, that’s also been the case for centuries. It only seems strange to Americans since the major companies so vigorously promote the notion of ice cold beer. The colder the beer, the less of the flavors that will come through. It’s not magic. If you make a beer that actually has good rich, complex flavors you’ll want to taste those, won’t you? And so you drink them at a slightly warmer temperature. So what?

The article also calls these so-called “winey beers” hybrids just because they “have a stronger aroma, fruitier tastes — and alcohol levels that, at 10% to 15%, are two to three times that of a typical beer.” Huh? IPAs have strong aromas, plenty of mild beers have fruity esters and barleywines, bocks and Belgian tripels are plenty strong. That makes them hybrids … why? Dougherty also calls them a detour, because for craft brewers they’re a relatively recent phenomenon. As the craft beer segment matures, why wouldn’t you expect brewers to make increasingly sophisticated products? Why is that a detour, and not simply the vanguard brewers leading the way?

Apparently cheese and food pairings and the ability of some beers to be aged is also infringing on wine’s cache, because Dougherty seems surprised that pairing might even be suggested. Cheese and beer have long been a far better pairing than wine. It’s only that the wine industry has done a great job of inextricably linking the two that most people don’t realize it. But the monks at Chimay, to give one example, have been making cheese as long as they’ve been making their fine beer. Together, as you might expect, they’re a heavenly delight. Beer dinners, of course, are becoming more common every day and there’s nothing noteworthy about strong beers ability to be aged.

The article finishes up with a tasting, naturally not by experts, but by journalists who are fans of either beer or wine. It’s the rare wine tasting that includes amateurs, but that seems de rigueur for media beer tastings. Just bring in a few shlubs off the street and see what they think. It’s just beer, after all. Who needs people who know what they’re tasting? That seems especially egregious given this whole piece is talking about beers who by definition are not the usual “plain and even watery” beers. So perhaps that’s why they chose journalists instead of just the man on the street. Either way, it’s infuriating. What did they learn? Nothing, apparently. Here’s the write-up:

On a recent afternoon, we gathered a panel of reporters and editors made up of both beer and wine fans to sample winey beers from around the country. Our first discovery: These beers aren’t for everyone. Comments ranged from “interesting” to “terrible.” A number of our testers said most of the brews tasted like neither beer nor wine but made them pine for one or the other. “Is it possible that there is beer and wine and the two should never meet?” asked one befuddled sampler.

Wow, they “discovered” that something you taste isn’t universally beloved? Tell me, please, what is “for everyone?” Wine? Nope. Whisky? Nope. Coffee? Nope. Water? Probably, but that’s got to be the only liquid I can think of that truly is for everyone. Saying some people found them “interesting” and some “terrible” without any context like who they are,what their predispositions are, or their backgrounds makes these cryptic one-word comments completely meaningless. Of course they didn’t taste like wine, they’re not wines no matter how many times you insist on calling them “winey beers.” That some people didn’t think they tasted like beers merely displays how little the tasters know about beer and its diversity. Beer doesn’t have just one taste or flavor. It doesn’t all taste the same. And more importantly, each bottle they tasted (although to be fair I don’t even know what beers they tasted because that isn’t revealed) is a unique beer and isn’t meant to taste like anything else. Why did the tasters expect that it would taste like either beer or wine?

But my favorite line is that last sentence of the paragraph, “‘[i]s it possible that there is beer and wine and the two should never meet?’ asked one befuddled sampler.” Befuddled is the word for it, alright. Dictionary.com’s second definition for “befuddled” is “to make stupidly drunk.” The first involves confusion, which is what this particular taster and perhaps the entire article seems to be. Beer and wine have not “met” in any of these beers. They are strictly beers. They are complex beers with full, rich flavors which some people cannot help comparing to wines just because they happen to also have some of the same flavors. Dark beers often have coffee notes from the roasted malt, too, but nobody complains about brewers making beer that tastes like coffee. No matter how “winey” the beers are, or how much whining the author insists upon, they are not beers that taste like wine, nor are they meant to be. Please, for the love of everything holy, stop calling them “winey beers.”

Over a lifetime of tasting beer, I’ve used terms also used by wine tasters in describing beers like the ones mentioned in the article, as well as many others, without once thinking they were beers trying to emulate wine. To my way of thinking, any phrase that someone reading a description would understand and recognize is useful in communicating the elusive and largely personal sensation of taste. It’s hard enough to train one’s palate to discern minute flavor compounds, aromas and defects, let alone be able to write them down so that others can readily understand what you’re talking about and get a sense of what the beer they’re reading about might taste like. So any descriptor that conveys something recognizable is worth using if it furthers that goal, even if it’s commonly used to describe a wine. I know there any many people who believe that beer should never be described using anything but very basic language, usually because such advocates believe beer itself too basic to be discussed in loftier terms. That’s a mistake and merely serves to perpetuate the myth that all beer tastes the same and will not yield subtle nuances of flavor. I also think there’s a backwards prejudice that thinks discussing beer as the complex beverage that it is will necessarily make it take on the snobbish airs that many ascribe to wine aficionados. But the beers mentioned in this Wall Street Journal article are already as complex as wine, and so to not describe them in similarly complex terms is to not do them justice. That’s a very different thing from presuming because they’re complex they must be trying to be like wine. How insulting it is to presume complexity equals wine and as ales and lagers they couldn’t possibly stand on their own as fine beers. But my point is that we should be able to describe any of these beers using allusions to wine and winelike flavors without the presumption that they either are wines or beer trying to be like wines. They’re beers simply trying to be as flavorful and unique as they possibly can. If the wine community can’t understand what to me seems so self-evident, perhaps they’re not as sophisticated as their reputation suggests. It can’t be bottle envy, can it?

From time to time, I am accused — even by colleagues — of going too far and overreacting to articles like this one, usually because they claim some attention paid to beer is better than no attention, or it’s not all bad or because they sense no malicious intent. All of those arguments may be true, but I still think at least part of the reason beer is so often lambasted by the media is that no one calls them on their mistakes or their unflatteringly offensive portrayals. Appeasement is almost always a bad way to go. Nobody’s going to change people’s attitudes if everyone remains passive and quiet.

So yes, maybe this latest Wall Street Journal article helps spread the word about craft beers that are every bit as good as fine wine. But I don’t think it’s asking too much that they do so without insulting beer in the process. Maybe hiring someone to write about beer who actually likes the stuff, has an open mind or knows something about it would be a good start.

In the end, I find it strange that the author’s title suggests that wine has airs that brewers are attempting to copy or emulate. To put on airs is “to assume an affected or haughty manner.” I am certainly willing to agree that there are segments of the wine industry that reflect such pretentiousness, but don’t understand why the wine community would be so willing to paint themselves so unflatteringly and then suggest that beer, by making complex, flavorful beers that rival wine, they, too, are putting on similar airs. Why can’t we just talk about the new, complex beers and leave wine out of it altogether.

 

MSNBC On the Drinking Age

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MSNBC had a very interesting article about the recent surge in support for lowering the drinking age to from twenty-one to eighteen again. Apart from nations that don’t permit alcohol at all — usually for religious reasons — we have the highest age for allowing drinking of any country in the world. For the vast majority of nations, it’s eighteen. To me it’s as simple as if you can vote and die as a soldier defending our country, you should at least be able to drink a beer. I’ve never heard a convincing rebuttal to that. In my opinion, it should be a part of how we define adulthood.
 

Penny Wise and Pint Foolish

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Seth Kugel, a travel writer for the New York Times who writes a regular column entitled “Weekend in New York,” tackles such Big Apple topics as where to take your dog, ice cream and where to picnic in Central Park. His most recent column (sent to me by my friend Maureen. Thanks Maureen.) is called “For Beer Tastes, on Beer Budgets” and aims to steer tourists and locals alike to the cheapest possible beer that can be had in the city that never sleeps. To which I can only ask … why? What is our national obsession with buying the cheapest possible anything and everything?

I’m sure I’ll be in the minority — again — but I think beer is already too inexpensive and should actually cost more. As it is, few small brewers make buckets of cash for their considerable efforts. Many are fine hand-crafted artisanal products that are akin to other gourmet food products people are willing to spend more for, such as cheese, bread or chocolate. Even the big brewers make their money on volume, not individual margins. Their markup is really quite low when compared with many other types of goods. Even as the cost of ingredients, transportation and marketing continue to rise, the big guys engage in price wars with one another making the cost of a beer artificially low. Most people think this is a good thing because we’ve been conditioned to believe cheaper is somehow better. That whatever is least expensive is inherently most desirable. Wal-Mart has become the biggest retailer in the world by pandering to this cheapskate ethos. People may say they want quality, good customer service and selection but they’re generally full of shit. When they open their wallets, they want to pay as little as possible.

Some of that is understandable, of course. Few of us are as rich as Croesus with virtually unlimited amounts of money to spend, so making choices about what and how much of your money to spend is inevitably necessary. But that doesn’t mean finding the cheapest price should be our mantra. Being cheap shouldn’t be a philosophy or way of life the way it seems to have become. Naturally, the propagandists have been selling conspicuous consumption for close to a century now and most of us have internalized the drive for buying more and more stuff. Couple that with real wages dropping for decades and the only way to keep up with the Joneses is to spend less and less for the same useless crap. We live in a society dominated by business, whose interests have been sold to our politicians. It’s so bad that when terrorists attack us our leaders tell us to “go shopping.”

Kugel likens finding a “cheap beer” to big game hunting, “like trying to find a cheetah on the African savanna.” He adds, “[s]ure, $7 pints dot the landscape like plump antelope, but the rare sub-$3 brew lurks in the underbrush like the fleetest footed of the big cats, hard to bring down without the help of a skilled guide savvy in sniffing out tell-tale footprints or happy-hour specials.” He finds 50-cent Budweiser on the Upper West Side in a bar where “bras hang from above the bar and snapshots of women who had apparently until recently been wearing those bras are posted on the wall.” Then there’s $7 pitchers of beer at the aptly named “Cheap Shots.” Kugel tells us of finding $2 cans of PBR, $5.75 quarts of light beer, and $2 Yuengling drafts. One place in Brooklyn features “’Crap-o-copia,’ a bucket of ice jammed with six cans of whatever the beer-loving cat dragged in for $12. On a recent visit, that included American classics like Stroh’s, Schmidt’s, Genesee Cream Ale and Miller High Life.”

But what he fails to mention or justify throughout his article is just what is the point of the hunt? Why must we find the Cheetah? If Cheetah tastes like Bud, PBR or Coors — the tastes-like-chicken sameness of the beer jungle — then who cares how cheap it is. I wouldn’t drink it if it were free. I want my beer to taste of something, to actually have flavor and I’m willing to pay for Antelope, though I’m confident he could have found discount Antelope — say a $5 pint of something worthwhile. But Kugel seems to take the position that it’s more important for it to be cheap, that it simply doesn’t matter which big game you find because they’re all the same. It’s hard for me to believe that a travel writer has never noticed that all beer is not the same. After all, travel writers are paid to experience new people, places, and things. How is it possible one could remain completely ignorant of the world’s most popular alcoholic beverage to the point where price is the only way to differentiate between them?

The two-buck Chuck phenomenon aside, can you imagine stories in the New York Times about finding the cheapest wine or whisky when you’re out on the town? I can’t, and it seems to me this is just another of the countless insults beer endures. Why is beer the Rodney Dangerfield of alcoholic beverages? Why is it so acceptable for the media to take cheap shots (yes, pun intended) at beer without even realizing how insulting they’re being? It’s a bit like telling Polish jokes at a Pulaski Club or fat jokes at an Overeaters Anonymous meeting without even realizing your poor taste. It’s that bone-chilling ignorance that really gets me going. When I lived in North Carolina several decades ago, you’d still hear older white people address black men casually as “boy” without the slightest inkling that they were doing anything wrong, insensitive or insulting. That may be an extreme example, but that’s what these constant attacks on beer feel like to me. I don’t think Seth Kugel, or indeed most of the rest of the beer-ignorant press, sets out maliciously to insult beer. They simply don’t know any better. And that may be the saddest fact of all. It might be downright funny if it weren’t for the fact that people read the Times as America’s “paper of record” and believe what is written in its pages. So while I believe the entire media has a duty to try to be accurate, the Times has an even higher standard to uphold. Yet in the one subject I know at least a little about, they very often fail miserably to show even a passing familiarity with beer (with Eric Asimov being a notable exception).

Beer has been struggling mightily for over 25 years to gain some respect. Given the strides made by the craft beer industry in that time it certainly deserves its place among the other fine gourmet beverages of the world. Once the laughingstock of the world, American beer today is known throughout the world to be of the finest quality. There are now more different beer styles brewed in the U.S. than anywhere else in the world. That’s an unbelievable swing in a little over two short decades. It’s a shame that something like 95% of all Americans didn’t get the news. Here, thanks in part to our mainstream media, the perception of beer as interchangeable cheap swill for the hoi polloi remains how most people think about beer, including our intrepid Times author. So instead of searching for the cheapest beer, how about trying to find out what the difference is between a $7 antelope and $3 cheetah. It should be obvious, I agree, but so long as the mainstream media remains so beer-blind such ignorant advice like where to find the cheapest beer will continue to pass for real journalism.

 

Researchers Target Beer As Binge Drink of Choice

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There’s more nonsense coming from the CDC, the Center for Disease Control (the same government yahoos who refuse to acknowledge mercury’s role in my son Porter’s autism, as well as millions of other children) who is publishing a study in next month’s American Journal of Preventive Medicine suggesting people are more likely to binge on beer than other types of alcoholic drinks. The CDC apparently surveyed 14,000 binge drinkers in 18 states who told them that they like beer best. Of those surveyed, 67% preferred beer, 22% liked spirits and 11% were winos with a taste for the grape or premixed drinks (don’t ask me why they lumped those two types of drinks together) with 74% of “binge drinkers” having beer either exclusively or in combination.

Of course, it all comes down to your definition of binge drinking, which they define as “five or more drinks in a row.” Now let’s just think this through for a moment. Beer has an average alcohol content of maybe 4.5% abv. Wine has around 14% and spirits, while harder to pin down, has as alcohol percentage far above wine or beer. So of those three types of drinks, which one is it most possible for the greatest number of people to drink five or more of in a single sitting? Anyone, anyone? Bueller, Bueller? Even if you don’t compare equal amounts of liquid consumed but just typical servings it’s considerably easier to down a six-pack of beer than six glasses of wine, six shots of whisky or even six mixed drinks. So it shouldn’t take a genius or even a doctorate to predict that the lowest alcoholic drink would be consumed more often by people on a binge. After all, it’s not really much of a binge if you pass out in under an hour. Not to mention beer outsells wine 4 to 1 and spirits by a considerable margin, too, so why wouldn’t you expect that to remain consistent among “binge drinkers,” too?

Why blame the drink? What is the point of this ridiculous exercise? Should beer be treated differently because more people abuse it, but keep wine and spirits untouched, since their drinkers are among the sophisticated upper class? With beer being more popular why wouldn’t it be proportionally involved in instances of abuse. You would expect that to be the case. I can’t help but thinking “yeah … and … so what.” Once alcohol enters your bloodstream your body doesn’t discriminate between what form it originally came in — inside you alcohol is just alcohol — a chemical compound: C2H5OH. It’s merely societal features that determine which drink people choose.

So what possible policy changes might flow from this study? It just doesn’t make any sense. This seems like a case where the statistics don’t really mean anything useful. All the study appears to do is confirm what you’d expect would be the case if you think about it for a few seconds. Good thing our tax dollars were channeled into something anyone with a high school diploma should have been able to figure out. Is the CDC setting up conditions for neo-prohibitionists to promote making beer harder to access than wine and spirits, the way the state of Tennessee recently did? Heaven forbid we suggest ways to reduce “binge drinking” that involves lowering the drinking age in line with the rest of the civilized world or allow parents to educate their children on how to drink responsibly by introducing it in the home. Those kinds of ideas — which should be taken for granted — are rarely, if ever, even discussed by policymakers and politicians.

An article in Forbes, via HealthDay News, stated that the “study also found that beer was the primary choice of binge drinkers who were most likely to cause alcohol-related harm, such as drinking and driving.” Of course, that could just as easily be that someone with five beers in them is in much better shape to drive (not that I’m saying that they should drive) than someone with five glasses of wine or five glasses of vodka. It’s as if they’re targeting beer precisely because it’s not impairing people enough.

The Forbes piece continues:

“This study isn’t looking at alcohol consumed by people drinking responsibly, or moderately; this is alcohol consumed by people drinking five or more drinks in a sitting, so almost all of them are going to be impaired — if not overtly intoxicated,” Naimi said in a prepared statement. “This is exactly the kind of drinking behavior that leads to so many deaths and secondhand problems that inflict real pain and costs on society, not just the drinker.”

What that statement ignores is what it means to “drink responsibly, or moderately.” That idea has changed over the years. People’s attitudes towards drinking — and driving — used to be much more tolerant. Have lives been saved by changes to the law and to its more statutory enforcement? Possibly, but I remain somewhat skeptical of what statistics have been offered and continue to believe that even if that is indeed the case, that the price that our society has paid as a whole is too high. Education and altered attitudes quite possibly could have done the same thing, without the draconian measures MADD undertook creating a world where people are literally afraid to have a good time.

When I was first old enough to drive (and then drink) five beers over a few hours would not have made me impaired by the then standard of 0.10% blood alcohol level (BAC). By my weight, I could consume seven drinks in one hour and still be under that BAC level. Even under our present standard of 0.08% BAC I can theoretically still have six drinks in one hour and be legally able to drive. That means even if I decided to become a “binge drinker” I could legally do so, and possibly even drive. But most binges involve greater periods of time and thus could conceivably involve even more drinks. I would much rather have my five drinks over several hours of conversation, food or games than quaff it down as fast as possible. But that’s what education and being a responsible adult can do for you. I find it highly insulting that if I have five pints of beer over the course of an evening’s enjoyment that I am branded a “binge drinker,” with all the derogatory associations that entails. I hold down two jobs (one paid, the other a labor of love), pay my taxes, am involved in my community and my children’s schools. I vote, I support local businesses and frequent my local library. But for some I’ll always be an unrepentant deviant because on occasion I drink a half dozen pints in one day? Bullshit.

In the modern, post-MADD, world, the bar for drinking responsibly is growing lower and lower and it is quite clear the neo-prohibitionists will not be satisfied until all alcohol is again removed from society. In a recent story (sent in by Seth. Thanks Seth.) from the San Francisco Chronicle, MADD doesn’t even want people drinking on Amtrak trains, even though there’s no driving involved. Is this study more fuel for the neo-probs? If so it’s more than a little unsettling that my government is helping the cause of another prohibition with my tax dollars. After all, it’s my country, too. Love it or drown your sorrows.
 

NOTE: Davis on Draft also has a nice rant on a different version of this story, his was from MSNBC.

 

Miami’s New Vices

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A south Florida distributor friendly to craft beer, Fresh Beer Inc., sent in the following article that ran in Thursday’s Miami Herald, entitled “Microbrewers push the envelope with extreme beer” (thanks Adam). It’s a nice overview of the recent spate of big beers with some history and examples, perfect for the uninitiated and enthusiast alike. Florida, in part because of their hot, humid weather and also an entrenched distributor network (not to mention the Florida crown and package size laws instituted after Prohibition, both of which happily have finally gone the way of the Dodo), Florida has for a long time been a tough sell for craft beer and many imports. Oh, there are definitely fans — I’ve met more than a few over the years — but by and large statewide sales are driven by big brands that rely heavily on price. It sounds like things are beginning to change, which is terrific news for craft beer.
 

A Grill’s Best Friend

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My good friend and colleague, Lisa Morrison scored a nice coup in the Oregonian yesterday with the publication of an article by her entitled “A Grill’s Best Friend,” and not only just in the food section, but on the front cover. The Oregonian’s attitude toward beer has been much like that of the San Francisco Chronicle, which is to say adversarial and often condescending — in both cases quite odd given the vibrancy of their respective beer scenes — so it’s great to see her crack the glass bottle ceiling. Hopefully, it’s a signal of changing attitudes in the press generally or even in Portland, more specifically, whose attitude toward their local beer has been less hostile than in many places, at least.

Rosy News About Hollister Brewing

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Brewer Eric Rose’s new brewpub, Hollister Brewing, in Goleta, California (just outside Santa Barbara), got a nice write-up in the L.A. Times today in their food section. Really the piece was about Santa Barbara’s beer scene and included Telegraph Brewing, Island Brewing as well as Firestone Walker (which at one point the Times referred to as Walker Firestone), but Hollister got most of the attention. Also, I discovered Santa Barbara brewers don’t like a lot of hops. That should come as a bit of a shock to Eric Rose, whose IPA in the past has been fairly loaded with the stuff. All kidding aside, it’s nice to see some attention paid to craft beer by the LA Times, which is the fourth largest newspaper in the U.S.