Brookston Beer Bulletin

Jay R. Brooks on Beer

Socialize

Lagunitas Labels Trashed by Beer Man

By

The Beer Man, Todd Haefer, is at it again. A few weeks ago he wrongly accused wood-aged beers of being a passing fad, despite record numbers of them entered at GABF. The upcoming Barrel Age Beer Festival at The Bistro was expecting to get about 50 beers entered and as of a few days ago 65 were coming. So for that reason I was a bit suspect of his using a moniker that implied expertise and respect. He may be “a” beer man, but I don’t think he’s “the” beer man.

Today’s prouncement confirms that, I think. In a review of Lagunitas’ Censored Ale (f.k.a. Kronick) which in and of itself wasn’t bad, he attacked brewery owner Tony Magee’s delightful beer label ramblings with a no-holds-barred, tell-me-how-you-really-feel, full-frontal-assault. Here’s what Todd had to say:

I do have to mention that Lagunitas has some of the dumbest beer-style descriptions I’ve ever seen on a Web site. Just check out this link for Censored Ale and you’ll see what I mean. It’s not funny, not cool, not cute, it’s just … dumb and doesn’t tell you anything about the beer.

Here on the left coast, Lagunitas’ labels have something of a cult following and articles have been written on the labels alone. Not the beer, mind you, just about the labels. Of course, we also have the benefit of context and knowing Tony. Oh, and we have a sense of humor, too. Because Tony’s labels are often hysterical, and many times confounding and perplexing. But the one thing they never are is dull. Who said beer labels have to tell you something about the beer or the beer style? Go in your refrigerator right now. How many beers have a story about the beer on the label? Half, maybe less? So why can’t Lagunitas let the beer speak for itself and have a little fun on the labels? After re-reading this label I’m a little confused as to why Beer Man thought it was a beer description, albeit a “dumb” one, in the first place. Here is the label rant from Lagunitas Censored Ale:

Anyway, we were going out to, uh,the ,uh, you know, thing, and all, and when we got there, well, uh, the dude was, like- “whoa man!” I mean, and we were all, uh, you know – “whoa!” and stuff, and when I said to him, like, you know, “hey man”, and all they, I mean he, was all “what?” and stuff- and I just told him what you said and all and they were all man- “not cool dude”, but whatever- so, uh, we split and went back to my lair and just hung out and whatever, but the whole thing was, like, just SUCH a bummer and all but, you know, it was cool and stuff, but you just gotta, you know, about the dude and all, like, it’s cool and all you know, but what’s up with that “blah blah blah”? Whatzit got to do with beer and all? I mean, really, dude, whatever…but, it’s cool and all…

So what part of that did Beer Man think was a “beer-style description?” Honestly, even if you don’t find it funny, cool, cute or informative, you can’t really believe it’s trying to describe the beer, can you? You’d have to figure it was ironic and not serious wouldn’t you? But it proves once again Tony Magee’s most prophetic quote.

“Beer Speaks. People Mumble.“

Hip Trip Trips Up on Beer Pairings

By

The Sunday edition of the Philadelphia Inquirer ran a syndicated feature news service for daily newspapers called the Rand McNally Travel News. As near as I can tell, a division of Rand McNally produces travel pieces for a number of prominent newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune, the Dallas Morning News and others. With dwindling readership and severe under-staffing at many daily newspapers as most struggle to remain economically viable these days, they’re increasingly turning to syndicated content to supplement original staff-generated stories. It’s a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, in my opinion. As less and less people get their news from newspapers, they turn increasingly to AP, Reuters and other wire services, especially for their national and regional coverage, which has the effect of making them all look more and more the same. This homogenization loses them more readers which in turn causes them to layoff more staff and generate still less original content, which again causes a drop in readership.

Yesterday’s example of this cheap excuse for original content was by Mary Lu Laffey for the Rand McNally Travel News and the name of her monthly series is called “Hip Trip.” It’s apparently travel tips for younger people and presumably younger people with money since they would be the only ones who would plan their vacations. The “Hip Trip’s” tagline advice is simple. “Time and money may be in short supply for many younger travelers. Each month, Hip Trip brings you advice on how not to waste either.”

But whether by accident or design, her article is nothing short of an infomercial where in some cases she acts as a foil to corporate propaganda and at other times displays total ignorance for the subject at hand. It’s as if she took a press release, did no research or fact-checking, added a few sentences to personalize it and then added her byline. Of course, she appears to be writing in the first person as if she actually attended a beer dinner, but what we get is her impressions of the experience, what her host tells her and little else. There’s certainly no questions from Laffey as misinformation and laughable advice flows freely from Brent Wertz, chief executive chef at Kingsmill Resort. The Williamsburg, Virginia resort is, of course, an Anheuser-Busch company, a fact Laffey fails to disclose (or perhaps she’s not even aware of it). But it certainly makes what follows more understandable, if no less absurd. She undoubtedly had her beer dinner at the Eagles Restaurant, which lists three beer dinner menus on their website, one with Budweiser, one with Michelob Ultra Light and one with World Select.

So without further ado, let’s begin the show.

Laffey’s first few paragraphs are doozies, and they set an unquestioning tone that permeates the whole article. Here they are, in their entirety.

Brent Wertz doesn’t flinch as he twists open a bottle of ultra light, low-carb beer and pours it straight down the middle of a chardonnay glass. He tilts his head only slightly as he watches it splash big at the bottom. Wertz says the big splash is necessary to break the carbonation and to open the nose of the beer.

Stemmed glass? Nose? Beer?

That’s a big “yes” from Wertz, chief executive chef at Kingsmill Resort. He plans menus around beer, marinates and cooks with it, and passionately recommends beer whether you’re dining plain or fancy.

That’s a big “whoa” from me. In the bigger picture, does drinking beer with dinner mean I have to put keggers behind me?

Just out of curiosity, do many people “flinch” when opening a twist-off cap? Or is the pouring it into a chardonnay glass that should cause the twitch in her mind? Her next reaction — her quizzical “Stemmed glass? Nose? Beer?” aside — is becoming the standard neophyte knee-jerk in virtually every one of these type of pieces. Some ignorant journalist is shown beer in a different light for the first time (where were all these people living for the last 25 years, in a box? The Moon? Prison?) and their first reaction is always one of great surprise that someone might even be capable of taking beer seriously. Worldwide, people have been drinking beer from stemmed glassware for centuries. And did it never occur to anyone that at least the people making the beer would be smelling it, checking it’s “nose,” to insure they were making a consistent product? How out-of-touch with the real world and common sense do you have to be in order to be surprised that people might smell beer to gauge it’s quality? And finally there’s the kicker reaction, that it’s beer and that someone might think of it as more than cheap swill with no discernible flavors worth talking about. The pervasiveness today of this manufactured stereotype of beer as unworthy is frankly quite astonishing, especially from presumably educated journalists who one would assume would be paying a little more attention to the news than the average person that good craft beer has been around for over 25 years? How could anyone have completely missed that phenomenon to present actual shock when confronted with better beer? But here it is on display again, proving once again that the depths of ignorance in the press know no bounds.

When she gets her “big yes” from Kingsmill’s chef she responds with a “big whoa” and wonders whether she has to give up her apparently precious keggers, I feel like I’ve fallen into “Mary Lu’s Excellent Adventure” and I’m reading the term paper of a failing high school student. How bogus is that? Why she thinks that you can’t have fine beer with a meal and also enjoy beer from a keg in a totally different context is beyond my grasping. Perhaps she thinks there’s only one way to do anything, who knows? And the sentence seems to infer that this is the very first time she’s ever had a beer with dinner! How is that even possible?

Of course, I’m using the term “fine beer” here metaphorically since the only beers mentioned in the article by name are Michelob Ultra Light, Budweiser, and Michelob Amber Bock, not exactly “big” beers by any stretch of the imagination. But to our intrepid author, in her “90-minute sojourn into silver-placed settings on table linen, with stemmed glasses, haute cuisine – and beer” she does just that. She describes “swirling the contents of [her] burgundy glass” with its full-bodied Bud coat[ing] the sides of the glass” and imagined herself “talking about how the big flavor of this big beer exhaled deeper with each twirl.” Stop, stop, my sides are aching with laughter. Okay, no matter how much you love Budweiser it can’t reasonably be called “full-bodied.” Its flavor — if you can even call it that — is so light as to be almost non-existent. But to Mary Lu, this is “big beer” with “big flavor.” I wonder what she’d think of an Old Rasputin Imperial Stout? Or even Sierra Nevada Pale Ale?

For dessert, chef Wertz suggested that they needed “a lager big enough to stand up against chocolate” and gave them Michelob Amber Bock. I hope the double-fudge brownie torte they had for dessert wasn’t too chocolately, because that’s not a beer that can stand up to very much flavor and hold its own. She claims to have “found a rich, full lager that smelled a lot like coffee and caramel.” Uh-huh, that’s not my memory of this beer’s nose. And while I’m generally cautious about using the beer rating websites as a source, I think the Beer Advocate reviews of Michelob Amber Bock are pretty amusing and show a great disparity between the inexperienced beer drinker vs. the more experienced ones. Frankly, her description sounds like it came from a sale sheet provided by A-B.

But let’s turn now to her finale:

What a finale, I thought as I turned my attention to my double-fudge brownie torte. The dessert would put my taste buds to the test. Would they dare use beer in brownies? I bit into the brownie and tasted the caramel sauce that was hiding beneath it. I should have known that even a chef like Wertz would not mess with brownies.

That you’d have to “dare” to use beer in making brownies, implying more broadly that dessert really shouldn’t have beer it, once again demonstrates that we’re back to a high school mentality. Wow, what a revelation. I guess I’ll have to take back all the wonderful desserts I’ve enjoyed over the years made with beer in them. Because beer chef Bruce Paton, among many others, have made some amazing dishes using chocolate and beer. This spring he did an entire chocolate and beer dinner with Chimay and Scharffen Berger chocolate. And chef Eddie Blyden, when he was at 21st Amendment (he’s now at Magnolia), did a terrific multi-course meal in which every dish used both beer and chocolate, including the soup, salad and dessert with Cocoa Pete’s chocolate. And that’s just a small sampling in one city. All across the nation — and the world — people are and have for many years been cooking with beer, including desserts. Beer cook Lucy Saunders, for example, has two recipes for chocolate and beer dishes on her website. This is only news to the monumentally myopic and uninformed.

To be fair, her piece is aimed at young travelers, who apparently in the author’s mind would be as ignorant as she is, and there may be some element of truth to that. I’m no expert on youth culture. But with craft beer’s sales on the rise and a generation of young people turning 21 never having known a time when there wasn’t craft beer, such a position seems harder and harder to maintain. Come on, Rand McNally, why not get some writers who know about beer to write about beer. I double dare you.

Craft Beer Defined as “Unusually Flavored”

By

In ABC News’ online Money section, business writer Eric Noe has a piece entitled For Dessert, How About a Beer?. In the middle of the article, Noe makes the following revelation:

Sales of craft beers, the industry term given to unusually flavored or seasonal beers, grew at 11 percent during the first half of the year.

Let that sink in. ABC defines craft beer as either “unusually flavored” or “seasonal beers.” Perhaps if you listen very carefully you can hear a faint thumping sound. That’s me banging my head repeatedly against my keyboard. The only thing keeping my head from spinning completely around are the laws of physics.

Remind me not to go drinking with Eric Noe. “Here, Eric, try this Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. How about those unusual flavors? We call them hops.” I can only assume by “unusually flavored” he means that they actually have flavor, which is the reason sales of industrial light lagers are down — they don’t have much in the way of flavor at all.

The rest of the article is banal stuff — and old hat — about Miller’s new chocolate beer (Frederick Miller Classic Chocolate Lager), Anhesuer-Busch’s chocolate beer, etc., something the craft beer segment has been doing for years. But, of course, to ABC it’s only news once the big players (you know, the ones who advertise on ABC) begin to make beer with chocolate or chocolate-like flavors. The article also touches on the recent spate of infused beers, beers with added vitamins, caffeine, etc. and manages to confuse those beers with ones having different flavors, too. Last time I checked vitamins don’t have a particular flavor, do they?

As far as I can tell, the author isn’t really sure what flavor is, I mean he seems confused about its very definition. For example, he reports that “Anheuser-Busch has gotten in on the act, too, introducing flavored beers like Michelob Honey Lager and Michelob Amber Bock.” The honey lager may have “a touch of honey,” as A-B claims, but does that really make it a “flavored beer?” More to the point, what flavors have been added to the Amber Bock? Malt?

Eric Shepard, executive editor of the industry trade publication Beer Marketer’s Insights remarks in the article that “[p]eople are saying they want something more flavorful than just malt, yeast, hops and water.” No offense, Eric, but I don’t think that is what people are saying. Malt, yeast, hops and water are more than sufficient to make a bewildering array of rich, flavorful beers. This year’s Great American Beer Festival judged 69 distinct and different beer styles, only a handful of which used anything more than the classic four ingedients. This is exactly what craft brewers have been doing for twenty-five years. People do want those ingredients used to produce something that tastes like … well, something. They want it to taste like beer, for example. That would be a good start.

Noe concludes:

For the major breweries, creating specialty brands isn’t the problem.

But while microbreweries, which have lower operating expenses, can turn a profit by selling relatively small amounts of specialty beers, the bigger operations like Miller and Anheuser-Busch probably won’t see immediate profits from these newer products.

For now, the goal of offering craft beers may be to lure customers back to the major brands.

“So far, the big breweries haven’t proved particularly adept at selling craft beers,” Shepard said. “But it makes a whole lot of sense — this is where the market is going.”

I love the honesty of his remark, “the goal of offering craft beers may be to lure [my emphasis] customers back to the major brands.” People must be “lured” to drink the major brands. That says it all, don’t you think?

Stephen Beaumont vs. New York Magazine

By

Earlier today I got an e-mail from my friend and colleague, Stephen Beaumont:

I like it when consumer magazines publish stories about beer, I really do, even when I don’t write them. But it pisses me off when they accord such a noble and respected beverage about one-twentieth of the respect and consideration they would wine or cognac or gourmet chocolate bars.

Case in point is the new issue of New York Magazine and its panel review of 21 beers. On the surface, it looks like an okay story, but the more you get into it, the more its flaws are exposed. Which is why I’ve written a rebuttal to the piece.

At the most basic, I’m sending you this simply to bring these stories to your attention and get your reaction. At the most, I’d love to spread the message around a bit so that hopefully these kind of review pieces might eventually become the exception rather than the rule.

Amen. This is the same kind of hatchet job I’ve been complaining about a lot lately. Read the original story in New York Magazine first and then Stephen’s rebuttal. Go ahead, I’ll wait. When you come back, I’ve got a few things to add to Beaumont’s wonderful critique.

Finished? Good, here’s a few random observations I can add. First off, the article is titled Ales in Comparison. But of the 21 beers reviewed — the ones “in Comparison” — nine are lagers and four are hybrid wheat styles, meaning more than half are not ales. That would be like having a tasting of eight red wines, nine white wines and four champagnes and calling the whole thing “Red Wines in Comparison.” That would be ridiculous, of course, but it’s exactly what New York Magazine did here in their zeal to be clever.

In his introduction, author Ben Mathis-Lilley claims Budweiser and Stella Artois taste the same. While I’m not a great fan of Stella Artois, on any given day it does taste decidedly different from Budweiser. And though both are adjunct beers, I’ll drink Stella Artois whereas I’d pass on a Bud, the point being they’re different enough that they can’t reasonably be called “taste-alikes” as Mathis-Lilley does.

The tasters are described as a “panel of untrained but enthusiastic drinking aficionados.” Well how scientific. Forget for a moment that calling an “enthusiastic” drinker an “aficionado” is probably oxymoronic, but what value is there in the opinion of people not trained to judge and/or evaluate the quality of a beer? Why is is you never see wine evaluated by enthusiastic amateurs, but it’s fairly common for newspaper articles to assemble an unnamed group of people to taste beer with no training and then report their findings as if they were all Robert Parker? Why do they assume one needs no training to evaluate beer? It’s preposterous, of course, and one more reminder of how ignorant the wine and food media is about beer. Wine takes years of training to learn, its nuanced flavors reveal themselves only to the sophisticated, discerning palate. But beer? That swill can be tasted by anybody — no training necessary — just throw a bunch of random bottles in a styrofoam cooler and voilà, you’ve got a story.

Even if I knew nothing about beer, why should I care if another person, equally ignorant, didn’t like a particular beer. In the New York Magazine article, negative descriptors such as “sissy,” “too girlie” or “eh” are used to describe some of the beers. What does that tell me about how they taste? Absolutely nothing, of course, which makes this entire exercise all but meaningless. In the first group of random beers, some of the panelists even correctly described one of the beers which was revealed in an aside as “accurately, according to our moderator.” So if they comment that on one of the beers some of the tasters actually got it right, showing by mentioning it they were surprised, what does that say about how wrong they got all the others? And if they got it wrong most of the time, as I suspect they must have, why report on it at all? What value does having the opinions of people with no training and no proficiency for what they’re tasting being used to educate others about what they taste like? Isn’t that like asking a blind person to describe a color?

And as Beaumont points out, the tasting flights have almost no logic to them and the beers tasted against one another bear no relation to each other, which would make it difficult for the seasoned taster, and all but impossible for the neophyte. It’s a process doomed to fail from the start, and another reason why this tasting is so comical. I’d be laughing except for the fact that some people will probably take this seriously and base their buying decisions on the article in what is otherwise considered an influential publication.

Also, in the article, the author gives the following advice. “Beer-pairing rule of thumb: Match up similar flavors.” Which is the same as saying white wines with fish. While such a rule of thumb may sometimes work, it’s extremely limiting and rigid, and ignores what choosing a contrasting beer might add to the experience.

For one of the beers, the only thing said about it was it “had a funny name.” How condescending. Thanks. That’s very helpful for me if I might want to drink it. But it’s indicative of the tone of the entire piece. There’s very little here that’s actually useful and they seem to have a great deal of trouble taking the subject seriously so I’m left with one final question. Exactly what is the point of this article?

 

 
UPDATE: New York Magazine invited Stephen to write a letter to the editor for their next issue. In the hopes of having it carry more weight, he graciously invited other beer writers to also sign the letter. Six of us agreed to sign it. In addition to me and Beaumont, the letter was also signed by Julie Bradford (All About Beer), Lew Bryson, Tom Dalldorf (Celebrator Beer News) and John Hansell (Malt Advocate).

 
UPDATE (10.27): New York Magazine has now printed Stephen Beaumont’s letter to the editor.

James Bond’s Beer

By

007-1
I’ve been a huge fan of James Bond since I was a kid. I read all of Ian Fleming’s novels and even the later ones when John Gardner took over the series, among others. And, of course, I’ve seen all of the films many times. Not only am I aware that Sean Connery was not the first James Bond — it was an American, Barry Nelson — I’ve had a videotape of the show for decades. It was originally aired as a teleplay on live television in 1954 (eight years before Sean Connery debuted as James Bond in 1962’s Dr. No) on the show “Climax!.” It was based on Fleming’s novel Casino Royale and Peter Lorre played the villain, Le Chiffre. Suffice it to say I’m a big fan.

So when I read that in the new adaptation of Casino Royale (due in theaters November 17) Bond will drink a Heineken in a six-figure cross-promotion, I must say my first reaction was suspicion. Suspicion because every single time this story was reported it contained a justification for this move, saying that in Fleming’s novel his character James Bond does drink beer for the first and only time. If they want to have Heineken be a sponsor for the film and have the character drink one, that’s their decision even though I really hate these type of deals where products are featured prominently in films for big bucks. To me the insertion of the products into the action is way too obvious so that it distracts you from what makes movies so enjoyable, which is allowing you to escape into the story. It’s hard to feel swept away into a story when a giant bus drives by behind the action with a billboard reading “Drink Coke” every time the characters are walking outdoors. And in Pierce Brosnan’s second film as James Bond, Tomorrow Never Dies, during a “rooftop motorcycle chase in Saigon, Bond returns the bike to street level by using a parked truck which carries cases of Heineken beer as a ramp. Cans fly in every direction. Several kegs of Heineken are seen when the motorcycle briefly skids.” The Amsterdam brewer’s relationship with the Bond films has thus been going on for some time now, so it’s really no surprise that they’d want to crank it up a notch for the new movie.

But trying to justify such a greedy, commercial intrusion by saying it will make the film more accurate since the news stories all claim Bond did drink a beer in the novel seems to me avarice run amuck. A common element all of these news stories shared was that while they all claimed that Bond drank beer in Fleming’s Casino Royale novel, not one of them gave any specifics. For example, in Dowd on Drinks, by William M. Dowd, he writes the following:

In the first Bond novel, “Casino Royale,” the character who became known for his knowledge and enjoyment of wines and spirits actually drank beer. (Pause here for startled gasps by those reading this sacrilege for the first time.)

How opprobrious. “Startled gasps? Sacrilege?” Now why someone who knows and enjoys wine and spirits also drinking beer would be a sacrilege is never explained, perhaps Dowd thinks it self-evident. But it’s highly insulting and it displays that media prejudice I’m always going on about. Here’s another drinks writer who apparently thinks all beer is bad and all wine (and spirits) are good. Must be nice to live in such a black and white world in which reality has no place in your version of things.

Another account, this one from the Hearst Group, said “[i]n the first Bond novel, Casino Royale, the super spy who became known for his knowledge and enjoyment of wines and spirits actually (my emphasis) drank beer.” Oh, he actually drank beer, he didn’t pretend to drink it, or he didn’t just order but actually choked it down, too. What on earth is wrong with these people? Can they not see how ignorant they appear?

The reason, of course, they’re falling all over themselves to justify this move is obvious. The vodka martini, shaken not stirred, is part of the Bond ethos, a big part of his coolness, his personality and his popularity. So tampering with that is obviously risky but since there’s a lot of money at stake, they will do anything to keep the money without losing the fans. So by saying Bond actually did have a beer in the book makes it much easier to sell, as many of the reports have offered. For example, here’s how one wire service put it.

James Bond purists will be grateful to know that the beer plot is not just a money grab by the movie’s makers. Casino Royale was the first Bond book written by Ian Fleming and the only one in which Bond drinks beer.

So then the real question is, is it true? Did Bond drink a beer in the novel Casino Royale? I grabbed my dog-eared copy of Casino Royale from the attic in search of the answer and read it again, because it had been years since I’d cracked it open although I certainly couldn’t remember any reference to beer. I still have my old “complete and unabridged” Signet paperback that was in my parents house growing up. It’s a sixth printing from October 1962. Here’s what I found.

  1. In Chapter 5, on page 30, Bond orders his first drink in the book, an Americano. An Americano is a cocktail made with bitters, sweet vermouth, and soda water.
  2. In Chapter 7, on page 40, Bond orders C.I.A. man Felix Leiter a “Haig-and-Haig” (which is scotch whisky) and himself a “A dry martini” … “One. In a deep champagne goblet.” Then he gives the bartender more detailed instructions on how to make it. “Three measures of Gordon’s, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it’s ice-cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon-peel.” Have I stumbled upon the origin of Bond’s famous “shaken not stirred” predilection? Bond tells Leiter that the drink is his “own invention” and that he plans “to patent it when [he] can think of a good name” demonstrating there are some subjects on which Bond is quite ignorant, patent law for example.
  3. In Chapter 8, on page 46, Bond shared a “cold carafe of vodka, very cold” with fellow agent and Bond girl “Vesper Lynd.”
  4. Later in the same chapter, on pages 47-48, Bond orders a bottle of champagne, a “Taittinger 45” but the waiter persuades him that the “Brut Blanc de Blanc 1943” would be better and Bond agrees.
  5. After long expositions about playing baccarat, Bond returns to drinking finally in Chapter 13, on page 75, when he ordered a bottle of champagne for himself and Felix Leiter to celebrate his victory at cards.
  6. Then in Chapter 14, at page 78, Bond orders another bottle of champagne, this time Veuve Cliquot, to have with his scrambled eggs and bacon, which he shared with Vesper.
  7. Shortly after that, Vesper is abducted and Bond gives chase, getting captured and tortured in the process. For many pages nothing is drunk, as Bond can’t even get a drink of water from his torturers. Eventually he gets away and after recovering in the hospital, goes on a holiday on the French coast with Vesper. In Chapter 24, on page 129, she and Bond share yet another bottle of champagne which he chased a page later with some brandy.
  8. Finally, in the second last chapter, number 26 on page 138, they share a final bottle of champagne before the story concludes unexpectedly (and I won’t give away the ending).

So unless I missed it somehow, there’s not one mention of beer in the novel I can find, much less a scene in which Bond actually drinks one. I skimmed through the book many times before resorting to re-reading the whole thing cover to cover trying to be thorough and not miss finding a bottle in a haystack. It was an awful lot of trouble just to prove a point. (The wonderful website Make mine a 007 also details the drinks Bond has in Casino Royale and reaches the same conclusion). So the propaganda spin machine is in high gear and not one news organization bothered to check the facts or even ask where in the novel Bond drinks this seminal beer that apparently makes crass commercialism justifiable. They all just reported what the press release said and didn’t question a thing, even though a moment’s pause should have been enough to suggest it might be too convenient. What are the odds that the story they were re-making just happened to be the only James Bond novel in which the main character drinks a beer as Heineken was paying them an undisclosed six-figure amount to depict him doing just that. Not one reporter considered exploring that angle? It’s good to know our nation’s media is the hands of such a capable, inquisitive bunch.

But let’s look at the story’s other claim, that Casino Royale is the one and only novel in which Bond chooses beer.

  • In Diamonds Are Forever, Fleming’s fourth Bond novel, 007 takes Bill Tanner to lunch at Scotts where he orders a Black Velvet, which is a mixed pint of champagne and Guinness.
  • Later in the same novel, while driving to Saratoga with C.I.A. compatriot Felix Leiter, they stop at roadside greasy spoon called “Chicken in a Basket” where Leiter and Bond have Miller High Life with their lunch.
  • In Goldfinger, the seventh novel, while chasing the villian through Europe, Bond washed down his lunch at Geneva’s Bavaria brasserie with Löwenbräu beer.
  • In The Hildebrand Rarity, one of the short stories in the collection published under the title For Your Eyes Only, after circling an island in a boat Bond stops for a chicken salad sandwich and a “cold beer” from a cooler. This story first appeared in Playboy magazine in 1960.
  • In On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, the 11th novel (excluding the short stories), Bond has four steins of Franziskaner at the Franziskaner Keller with his taxi driver to celebrate his engagement to Tracy. It is in effect his bachelor party and when he’s reunited with his fiancee, she accuses him of smelling “like a pig of beer and sausages.”
  • In The Man With the Golden Gun, Fleming’s 13th novel, while searching for Scaramanga, Bond orders a Red Stripe in the Dreamland Cafe and has two more before he leaves.
  • In The Living Daylights, part of a second short story collection, this one published under the title Octopussy and the Living Daylights, Bond has a lunch of salted herring and two draft Löwenbräus.

That’s a total of seven instances where James Bond has a beer in six different Fleming stories (four novels and two short stories). So not only does Bond not have a beer in Casino Royale, it was also not the only instance of his doing so as virtually all of the recent news stories have claimed. And lest you think they can weasel their way out of this lie by claiming they meant the Bond films, Bond has also had beer on screen before, too. In the film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, after escaping from Piz Gloria, Bond orders and drinks a beer from an outdoor stand while trying to blend into the crowd. So at every level, the moneyed interests of the film production company and the beer sponsor, with the media’s complicity, is simply rewriting history to fit their short term goals of having Bond drink a Heineken for money in the latest film.

Propaganda aside, I’m certainly in favor of James Bond drinking beer. If they’re trying to re-invent (or reboot) James Bond — which is my understanding of what the new film represents — it makes sense that a modern Bond would have embraced good beer along with the other pleasures of life today. That would be in keeping with the character’s philosophy. Undoubtedly one of the reasons that Bond was not a beer drinker in 1953 and beyond, when Fleming began writing the Bond novels, was that there were not many good beers widely available worldwide and what was available was not often written about. Remember Michael Jackson’s first beer book wasn’t published until 1977. And American wines were held in no better regard during that time period, either. So keeping Bond’s tastes and preferences rooted in a time fifty years ago, when the diversity and quality of alcohol beverages was vastly different than it is today, doesn’t make sense anymore, if indeed it ever did.

But Heineken? Not Heineken. Bond’s character would never drink such swill. He wouldn’t be a snob about wine, food, clothes, cars and practically everything else and then drink such a pedestrian beer. In fact, in the novel Casino Royale, in Chapter 8, just after ordering champagne, Bond makes the following pronouncement:

“You must forgive me,” he said. “I take a ridiculous pleasure in what I eat and drink. It comes partly from being a bachelor, but mostly from a habit of taking a lot of trouble over details. It’s very pernickety and old-maidish really, but then when I’m working I generally have to eat my meals alone and it makes them more interesting when one takes trouble.”

So there is absolutely no way someone who would say that would turn around and order a skunked green-bottle of Heineken. Maybe a Thomas Hardy 1968, a Samuel Adams Utopias, a Deus, or a Cantillon Rose de Gambrinus. He’d more likely order something showy, expensive and impressive; something that showed he had good taste. And that would never be a Heineken. Often Bond orders local specialties in the novels and films, and Casino Royale takes place in northern France. The fictional resort town where most of the novel takes place is supposedly near the mouth of the Somme River in the Picardie region, which is only about two hours from Belgium. So while France is not known for its beers, a good selection of Belgian beers would likely be available at the casino and area restaurants. That’s what a beer savvy Bond would order.

The way I see it, this is simply a money grab despite — or perhaps because of — all of the protestations that it’s not. As entertainment news goes, this seems to be important to a lot of fans, which is no doubt why the spin was necessary in the first place. The story was certainly picked up by a lot of news outlets, both in print and online. That not one I could find got the story right but did the spin doctor’s bidding so completely says quite a lot about the state of our media, I think. Sure, in the end, who cares if a film and the media hoodwinked people into thinking one thing while another was true? It doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of life. It is, after all, just a movie. And while that all may be true, I can’t help but think that in a media culture where the truth seems to have no bearing in editorial decisions that lying to the public about something that really does matter is getting easier and easier to do. Because if the media can lie to the public so unabashedly here, what else are we being lied to about? What else are we not being told? What else is the media not bothering to check or follow up on? And most importantly, when will they start taking beer seriously?

For trivia’s sake, there was also a Bond beer once upon a time. In 1968, there was “James Bond’s 007 Special Blend,” brewed by National Brewing Co. of Baltimore, Maryland. They’re highly collectible because they were produced for only a short time, which was due to having never been officially licensed.

007-3

“A subtle blend of premium beer and malt liquor.” Umm, what will they think of next?

007-cans

S.F. Chronicle Insults Beer … Again

By

Yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle carried a minuscule little item on the Great American Beer Festival and the Bay Area winners. It was the last blurb in “The Sipping News,” a section for news that apparently doesn’t warrant its own story. Despite the fact that a GABF award is essentially the biggest, most prestigious beer award in the Nation and one of the biggest in the world, apparently it’s still not big enough to rate more attention than seven measly sentences in the Chronicle, the last one insulting. Of course, every Podunk wine competition rates practically full page coverage. It doesn’t matter that there are so many little wine competitions that they’re all but meaningless.

In the first six sentences, W. Blake Gray is all business, reporting the simple facts of who won what. It all sounds fine, except that to someone familiar with the awards, it’s painfully obvious he has no idea what he’s talking about and that he’s left out more than he’s included. Gray’s credentials include wine and sake, perhaps that’s why he was handed the no-prestige assignment. A native of Baltimore, Maryland, he’s certainly not going to be mistaken for H.L. Mencken anytime soon.

His first sentence contains his first error — hey, why wait? — where he claims Bear Republic “won two top awards.” Actually they won a single award. The award has two components because one of the trophies stays with the brewery and the other travels with the brewer who won it so he or she retains the honor even if they stop working for that particular brewery.

In the bulk of his last (or second) paragraph, he reports on who won Gold Medals, and not even all of those in Northern California, ignoring silver and bronze entirely. I guess silver and bronze aren’t worthy of being reported, even if it shows multiple wins by the same breweries he’s already mentioned. Bear Republic, for example, won four medals, Russian River Brewing won three, Schooner’s won two, and Eel River Brewing even won two medals for the same beer! Here are sentences three through six:

Several local breweries won medals in the 69 categories for types of beer. Santa Rosa’s Russian River Brewing Co. took a gold medal in the Imperial or Double India Pale Ale category for its Pliny the Elder. Bison Brewing Co. of Berkeley won a gold medal for its Organic Farmhouse Ale in the French-Belgian Style Saison group. And the Oatmeal Stout beer from Antioch’s Schooner’s Grille & Brewery took a gold in the Oatmeal Stout.

So in reporting these three medals Gray completely ignores a total of 17 awards, including four more gold medals, won by breweries in the Bay Area or Northern California. He fails to mention any of the awards listed below.

Gold: Triple Exultation – 2004, Eel River Brewing Co., Fortuna, CA – Aged Beer (Ale or Lager)
Gold: Organic Pilsner, Butte Creek Brewing Co., Chico, CA – German-Style Pilsener
Gold: Otis Alt, Elk Grove Brewery, Elk Grove, CA – German-Style Brown Ale / Düsseldorf-Style Alt Bier
Gold: Winter Wheatwine, Rubicon Brewing Co., Sacramento, CA – Other Strong Ale or Lager

Silver: William Jones Wheat Beer, El Toro Brewing Co., Morgan Hill, CA – American-Style Wheat Beer
Silver: Eagle Pride Pilsener, Elk Grove Brewery and Restaurant, Elk Grove, CA – German-Style Pilsener
Bronze: Aud Blonde, Russian River Brewing Co., Santa Rosa, CA – Golden or Blonde Ale
Bronze: XP Pale Ale, Bear Republic Brewing Co., Healdsburg, CA – American-Style Pale Ale
Silver: Racer 5, Bear Republic Brewing Co., Healdsburg, CA – American-Style Strong Pale Ale
Silver: Apex Ale, Bear Republic Brewing Co., Healdsburg, CA – American-Style India Pale Ale
Silver: Beatification, Russian River Brewing Co., Santa Rosa, CA – Belgian-Style Sour Ale
Bronze: Total Eclipse Black Ale, Hoppy Brewing Co., Sacramento, CA – Robust Porter
Bronze: Peter Brown Tribute Ale, Bear Republic Brewing Co., Healdsburg, CA – Brown Porter
Bronze: Irish Stout, Schooner’s Grille & Brewery, Antioch, CA – Classic Irish-Style Dry Stout
Bronze: San Quentin’s Breakout Stout, Marin Brewing Co., Larkspur, CA – Foreign (Export)-Style Stout
Silver: Seabright Oatmeal Stout, Seabright Brewery, Santa Cruz, CA – Oatmeal Stout
Silver: Tripel Exultation, Eel River Brewing Co., Fortuna, CA – Old Ale / Strong Ale

So is this story shoddy, ignorant or malicious? It’s hard to imagine doing a worse job in such a small space. It’s so bad I think he should have his professional credentials revoked. If I got that many facts wrong or omitted so much I’d be out of a job. But I guess it’s just beer, so it doesn’t really matter. This is beyond frustration. I’ve come to expect a certain amount of this from the mainstream media. Even here in San Francisco, where we enjoy one of the best places in the country for good beer, our media is so nakedly ignorant that it’s a crime. But this example is such a perversion of good reporting that it makes the Weekly World News look positively Pulitzer-worthy by comparison. What makes this all the worse is that Linda Murphy, who’s the Wine Editor for the Chronicle, is supposedly a friend of good beer. Yet a part of her job is being “responsible for all editorial aspects” meaning she green-lighted and/or approved this travesty. [ NOTE: I’ve since learned that Linda Murphy is no longer at the S.F. Chronicle, which means there are no friends of beer there anymore. ]

Of course, it may be that she and/or the Chronicle gave Gray such an infinitesimal amount of words in which to tell the story that he did the best he could under the circumstances. I might be tempted to conclude that were it not for his last sentence, which displays probably his true feelings for the assignment and the depth of his ignorance about beer. After listing some of the medalists of this year’s GABF, he ends his piece with the following. “To them we say, ‘Ziggy socky, ziggy socky, oy oy oy!'”

To those of you who don’t know what that phrase means, consider yourself lucky. It was made popular by the wildly sophomoric television show, The Man Show, which aired on Comedy Central from 1999-2004 and was hosted by Jimmy Kimmel and Adam Carolla until 2003. During the first season, Bill “The Fox” Foster was the show’s emcee and part of his schtick was downing a mug of insipid beer in one quick gulp after shouting “Ziggy sokky, ziggy sokky, Hoy! Hoy! Hoy!.” He was also known as “The World’s Fastest Beer Drinker,” a dubious distinction if ever there was one. Foster owned a bar in Santa Monica, California, the Fox Inn, where he performed from 1961-1989. His catch phrase — spellings vary — is actually “Zicke Zacke, Zicke Zacke, Oi, Oi, Oi!” and in it’s original form is a German toast. The Man Show continued to use Foster’s toast as their own even after he died from prostate cancer in 2000. The show itself extolled the basest impulses of the frat-boy mentality, and indeed that was their audience in a nutshell; young, white college-age males who felt discriminated by political correctness, equality, and women generally. Some of the high brow segments included the “Juggie Girls” (jiggling bikini-clad girls dancing in the audience), a recurring skit in which the hosts visit college campuses, “successfully asking girls to sign a petition to “end women’s suffrage,” demanding the repeal of the 19th Amendment (which guarantees women’s voting rights),” and ending every show with scantily clad girls jumping on trampolines.

So Gray spends his last sentence making reference to a German toast for decidedly “American” awards. On top of that, he’s alluding to one of the worst examples of celebrating bad beer to congratulate some of the local winners of medals who make great beer. I assume he thought he was being clever but whatever you think of the Man Show, it is not an apt reference to use in a story about award-winning beer. By using the catch phrase, perhaps he thought it made him sound “in the know” when in fact it did just the opposite. It proves that yet another drinks writer, one who specializes in wine and sake, remains blissfully ignorant of the most popular alcoholic beverage in the world. And that is the mainstream media in a nutshell.

The San Francisco Chronicle lists an impressive nineteen staff writers for its wine and food section, not one of whom lists in his or her biography even a passing familiarity with beer. Now I like wine, indeed, virtually every beer person I know loves wine. I may not be as expert as any of these nineteen “professionals” but I’m pretty confident I know more about wine, food, sake and spirits than all of them combined know about beer. Given that San Francisco is probably the second-strongest market for craft beer in the country (after Portland, Oregon) the Chronicle is doing a great disservice to their readers. It just doesn’t make any sense that they wouldn’t have at least one beer writer on staff given its popularity, craft beer’s recent ascendancy and the sheer number of worthy stories that come up in the Bay Area alone on a regular basis. Except that unlike craft beer drinkers, the wine writers’ disdain for beer is palpable, on display by its unending omission, error and ignorance.

I consider myself to be a beer snob of the most obnoxious type. I will refuse beer from a bottle if no glass is available. If nothing worthy is listed on a restaurant’s menu, I will drink something other than beer. I will not stoop to drink bad beer just because it’s the only kind available. I will soundly chastise a waiter who brings me a wheat beer with a lemon wedge in it — ruining the beer — without first asking me if I want one. But I will also never miss an opportunity to sample and/or learn more about rival beverages. I have attended countless wine tastings, whiskey and other spirits dinners and events, sake samplings, etc. Not only do I consider it my duty as a beer writer to have at least a passing knowledge of other alcoholic beverages (if for no other reason than simple comparison and contrast), I also greatly enjoy trying new things. And paradoxically, many, if not most, wine makers I know also love a good beer, too. It appears to be only the wine media and the readers they mis-inform that remain so completely ignorant of craft beer and refuse to embrace good beer with the panoply of alcoholic beverages produced by mankind.

One has to wonder why this is so? I wish I had some simple answers to this bewildering enigma. Is it simply that wine writers are afraid their wine snob credentials will be revoked if they deign to admit liking beer, a drink of the “common people?” A few years ago, one of the editors of Saveur magazine wrote an editorial on beer displaying such monumental ignorance that several prominent brewers and beer industry leaders canceled their subscriptions and wrote scathing replies to the magazine.

Could it be because retailers and winery’s profit margins allow for more advertising in newspapers and magazines? Perhaps that is too simplistic but following the money is usually a good way to figure out what’s going on. It’s a technique Wal-Mart has mastered in deflecting criticism when entering a new market. They spend a lot on initial advertising locally then ask for favorable coverage, which most small town newspapers are only to happy to give them with the promise of more ad revenue on the line. Of course, as soon as Wal-Mart has estabished themselves in that market, they stop the local advertising entirely, but that’s another story. My point here is merely that it’s not implausable to suggest that beer’s bad coverage could be to protect revenue streams.

Or is is possible that the nation’s wine writers really think that the highly-engineered food products churned out by the big breweries as industrial light lagers is all there is to beer? That might have been acceptable, or at least understandable, twenty — or even ten — years ago. But today? Today it’s completely untenable. How can any food or wine writer ignore the diversity of beer and its superior ability to pair with such a wide range of food dishes? If our food and wine media continue on this path, the consumer will simply have passed them by and perhaps will regard them with the disdain that I do now.

They remind me of the generation of geologists in the 1960s that refused to believe in plate tectonics despite the mounting evidence, because it undermined their careers even when it made them look more foolish the longer they resisted. Today, hardly anyone but adherents of the Flat Earth Society would discount plate tectonics. Will today’s wine and food writers who continue to steadfastly refuse to embrace craft beer be viewed by future readers as ignorant dinosaurs? I think that’s a distinct possibility given the fervor with which they display how much they don’t know. I can’t tell you how many times many of us writing about beer have offered assistance — even free of charge — just so that when newspapers actually do cover beer that they get the story right. And how many times have our offers of assistance been welcomed? To my knowledge, exactly zero times. Apparently ignorance really is bliss, but it’s driving me to drink.

UPDATE (10.13): The Chronicle printed the following letter today in response to this article:

Beer Deserves Respect

Editor — Re: The Sipping News (Oct. 6). Ziggy socky, ziggy socky, oy oy oy? Thanks for mentioning a few of the Bay Area’s many awards at this year’s Great American Beer Festival in Denver. It’s one thing for the award-winning Wine section to remain ignorant of the burgeoning beer scene but quite another to be sophomorically disrespectful.

TOM DALLDORF

Publisher
Celebrator Beer News
Hayward

Bourbon Barrel Beer Waning?

By

history
According to the “Beer Man” of Wisconsin’s Appleton Post-Crescent (and syndicated nationally on the Gannett News Service) — Todd Haefer — bourbon barrel stouts are just a fad. It’s nice to see any newspaper embrace beer and give space regularly to reporting on beer so I hate to contradict such a worthy endeavor, but I think misinformation can be just as damning as no information at all. Todd, who took over for the previous “Beer Man” in October of last year, had this to say in the course of reviewing a beer from Tyranena Brewing of Lake Mills, Wisconsin:

There was a craze a few years ago in microbrewery circles involving the aging of imperial stouts in bourbon barrels. Some were very good. But, as will likely happen with the current trend of “imperial India pale ales” and “imperial pilsners,” it soon ran its course. Examples do still exist, but not on a national scale.

Really? Bourbon Barrel beers are just another fad? As far as I know, there are still dozens of breweries still making a barrel-aged stout. I’m especially troubled by his characterizing them as no longer being “on a national scale.” Were bourbon barrel stouts ever on a national scale, by which I can only presume he means at least one beer that’s distributed nationally to all fifty states? Having just done a barrel-aged tasting for the next issue of the Celebrator, I can say quite comfortably that all beers aged in wood are on the rise. These things are quite literally coming out of the woodwork. More and more brewers are experimenting with what barrel-aging can add to their line-up of beers. Every year, there are more festivals dedicated to this niche style. The Bistro in Hayward, California, just added one which takes place November 11 and will include judging in three categories.

Perhaps Todd is speaking specifically about stouts aged on wood. But if there are less barrel-aged stouts today then a few years ago — and I don’t know of any evidence to suggest that — then there are many more styles now being aged in wood then ever before in the history of American beer. If a brewery today chooses an IPA to age instead of a stout does that make stout just a fad? I think stouts were the obvious place to begin experimenting with barrel aging beers and having found success there brewers are branching out in ever-widening directions to discover what other complexities can be achieved through the aging process. This is an exciting time in brewing and I don’t like the idea of saying that if bourbon barrel stouts led to barrel-aging other beers and a whole new type of beer-making process that they were “just a fad.” It’s just the wrong message to send, especially when the real story is much more positive.

All manner of beer today is being aged not just in bourbon barrels, but in various wine barrels, whiskey barrels, and even fruit barrels and who knows what else with some pretty spectacular results. And having previously been relegated to the experimental category, since 2002 the Great American Beer Festival has been judging “Wood- and Barrel-Aged Beer” as a separate category. Clearly this type of beer is here to stay. Barrel-aged beers are not “dry beers” or “low-carb” beers created by marketing men. The are a legitimate new additive process that produces some spectacular complexities in craft beers. We should celebrate that fact, perhaps with a barrel-aged stout? Who’s with me? I’m pouring.

Fanning the Flames of Phony Fears

By

The mainstream media, well El Paso, Texas anyway, is once again fanning the flames of fear with distorted statistics. They’re using the same misguided survey by the Wine and Spirits Wholesalers of America (WSWA) which others have already shown to be faulty at best and purposely distorted at worst, including Free the Grapes and myself, not once, but twice.

I’m sure this isn’t the only community newspaper trying to fan the flames of another prohibition, but they’ve used some clever tactics in their piece, whether inadvertently or not, that bear examining.

First let’s look at the title that Diana Washington Valdez of the El Paso Times uses for her story: “Youths use Web to buy beer, liquor.” Notice how wine is absent from the title? She does mention wine at the end of the first paragraph, but for the many people who only skim the headlines it reinforces the carefully managed stereotype of wine as angelic and beer and spirits as demonic. I don’t necessarily think this sort of thing is done consciously, but it shows how ingrained those perceptions really are. If you want to catch peoples’ attentions with a headline, pick on liquor and beer, wine won’t generate the same level of fear.

The article trotted out these recent gems:

Millions of underage youths are buying alcoholic beverages over the Internet or know someone who does, according to a survey commissioned by the Wine and Spirits Wholesalers of America in Washington, D.C.

The association also found that 20 states are easing up on the sales of alcohol from Web sites — without adopting corresponding measures to prevent youths from using such sites.

“This is a dangerous situation,” said Stan Hastings, association chairman. “For the first time, we have hard evidence that millions of kids are buying alcohol online and that the Internet is fast becoming a high-tech, low-risk way for kids to get beer, wine and liquor delivered to their home with no ID check.”

The survey is unique because news about the alarming trend comes from an organization that represents the alcohol industry.

This “millions of underage youths” is simply poppycock. The figure is just plain wrong. See my earlier post to take a closer look at how they arrived at this figure, but suffice it to say it’s not using anything resembling a scientific method.

What I find more interesting is that last sentence that while acknowledging that the study was done by an organization which, in their words, “represents the alcohol industry,” the author accepts that at face value. Not only doesn’t she question whether there’s any ulterior motive, but she even suggests that because the WSWA dd the survey that the results are more “alarming.” This is a person, mind you — I think they call them re-port-ers — whose job it is to find out and report the truth. Apparently never once did it occur to ask “why” the WSWA might have even sponsored such a survey. Now why is one of the five Ws in journalism, so I don’t think I’m off base here to expect her to ask that question.

Of course, if she had looked into the WSWA’s agenda, she would have discovered she had no story. Because the WSWA has just as much interest in scaring parents as the El Paso Times does. They don’t want internet sales of alcohol for one very simple reason: it will cut into their monopoly on alcohol sales. The WSWA represents the interests of wholesalers whose business depends on their maintaining exclusive territories to sell their wine and spirits. If someone else can sell alcohol in the same place they do, it will mean they’ll have to compete on price and they’ll no longer have a monopoly. So is it very surprising that a study they commissioned would find that sales they’re not making money on constitutes a problem? And, of course, the surest way to find support for yourself is to align yourself with protecting children. It’s always about the kids, never about the money.

Then the article turns to local concerns:

Another research finding is that little enforcement exists in this area, something that ought to concern parents.

Lt. Mark Decatur, an enforcement official in El Paso for the Texas Alcoholic and Beverage Commission, said the TABC conducted an operation two years ago aimed at identifying Web sites that made it easy for teenagers to buy alcohol.

“We found that a lot of people sold to kids over the Net,” he said. “The investigation used the children of TABC employees (as decoys) that used their parents’ credit card to place orders. Since then, we have taken steps in Texas to make changes in the law to address this.”

Of course, placing orders is not the same as the kids actually receiving any alcohol. They claim to have taken “steps” to address this problem, but unless I’m missing something, it’s been illegal to sell alcohol to underage kids for quite some time now, and delivering alcohol to any destination requires an adult signature. So if busy delivery persons don’t get the required signature, how is that the fault of the internet? And why should it inspire any fear whatsoever? It’s certainly not causing many arrests. As Texas liquor control spokesperson, Carolyn Beck, notes, “the commission does not have any enforcement actions on record for the past two years related to online alcohol sales to minors.” That’s because there are bigger problems, such as “[o]ne in five retailers are willing to sell to minors when they are looking right at them.” That’s obviously not something the WSWA cares much about, since they still reap the rewards of those underage sales.

The author concludes that “[f]or determined youths, none of these checks are impossible to get around.” Which begs the question if trying to stop internet alcohol sales doesn’t work, then why try to restrict such sales entirely since that keeps adults from obtaining goods which are legal for them. If what she says is true — and I suspect it is — what is the point of her article?

I grew up well before the internet age, and I had little trouble getting beer as a teenager. I’m not an alcoholic today. I work; I pay my taxes. By all accounts, I’m a responsible member of society. So what harm did underage drinking cause me? I rebelled a little bit, tried something forbidden at a time when I was struggling to find my identity. I was fumbling toward becoming an adult even before I really knew what that meant. So what? Let’s not forget our esteemed president went so far as to drive drunk and still grew up to be president. So perhaps this isn’t the big problem so many imagine it to be?

Perhaps when my kids hit their teens, they will likewise rebel a little bit. I hope not, and I’ll do my best to keep them safe, but there is a certain inevitability to it happening in one form or another. In the end there are a lot more things keeping me up at night besides whether they can buy beer over the internet. That so many people seem to care so deeply about this relatively insignificant problem, especially while there are so many other more pressing problems in the world today, says more about us than I care to think about.

Cans vs. Kegs

By

Okay, to me kegs are cans, just really big ones, so comparing them seems a little strange. But seriously, an article in today’s Baltimore Sun takes on the topic of football game tailgating and which beer works better, canned or kegged. Boy I miss H.L. Mencken.

The story details tailgating at Baltimore Ravens games and to answer the “kegs vs. cans” inquiry does some blind tasting using some frankly questionable methods. But, oh well, the beers chosen aren’t exactly my favorites though happily Bitburger does come out on top over the corn-fed Yuengling Lager. Though to be fair, among light indistrial lagers and related styles, Yuengling makes some reasonably decent beers.

But it’s his conclusion that had me laughing, in a good way:

I now think of canned beer as the equivalent of a wide receiver. It is mobile, easy to carry and, when poured in the glass, packs more taste wallop than expected. Keg beer is like a lineman. It has substantial body. It has to keep cold to perform well. But once it has iced down and assumed its spot in the middle of the action, it can not be moved until it is drained.