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Bell’s in the Wall Street Journal

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I’m trying to catch up a little with interesting items sent in by Bulletin readers. Last week my cable modem went down and it took a few days for the cable company to come out and replace it, so I missed a few days. It continues to amaze me how dependent I am on internet access, far more than the telephone or cable television or even my car. Despite the fact that I was born when Eisenhower was President, it’s hard to remember what it was like before the internet was such a ubiquitous feature of our modern world. I feel naked without my laptop. Anyway, this comes from Doug in Hawaii (thanks Doug) and is the Wall Street Journal article about Larry Bell’s brewery and his distributor fight in Illinois. I saw the original Journal article when it came out, but I don’t have online access to the WSJ. Happily, it was reprinted on the free site Small Biz.

Beyond Bell’s specific travails, the larger issue of franchise laws is discussed. Franchise laws are one of those things that people in the industry are familiar with but which get very little public attention. They should, because by and large franchise laws are not good for small breweries. There, of course, exceptions — good distributors who care and do a god job with smaller breweries. But in my experience I’ve heard far more horror stories about distributor mistreatment of craft brewers than the other way around.

Distributors love franchise laws, of course, because for them, in many cases, they are a legal stranglehold and something of a disincentive for distributors to actually do a good job promoting a particular brand. In some states, Nevada for example, once a brewer signs up with a distributor, no matter how bad a job they do by law they cannot switch distributors without the distributor’s consent (something which is almost never given). My understanding is that franchise laws were originally enacted to protect distributor’s from spending years building a brand in a particular market only to have the brand go to a competitor. But in most states, distributors — which despite their rhetoric are large businesses — have deep pockets to lobby politicians and get favorable legislation to protect their business at the expense of smaller, weaker microbreweries. As the Wall Street Journal touches on, that balance of power is just beginning to shift slightly, but entrenched power tends to hang on far longer than anybody ever expects, so I’m not persuaded things will change for the better anytime soon.

 

Turkey & Beer Day Tomorrow

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Unlike many people, I always have beer with my turkey dinner. Lately, it’s Anchor’s Christmas beer. I like a good spicy beer with the myriad flavors of turkey, cranberry, stuffing, mashed potatoes and so forth. Pike’s of Seattle used to also make an excellent spicy beer, Auld Lang Syne, which I also liked for Thanksgiving but they stopped making it quite some time ago. But there are almost as many pairings as there are people, and few can really be said to be wrong as long as they’re well-thought out and manage to contrast or compliment the meal.

A survey of the recent news regarding Thanksgiving reveals that a number of sources are finally recommending beer with the Thanksgiving meal. Ten years ago that would have been a veritable rarity but now that suggestion seems to be everywhere and it’s told with a seemingly welcome relief. Relief that people can stop trying to put a square peg in a round hole, trying in vain to force wine to work with a meal it has little business being involved in. The varied tastes in the average Thanksgiving meal yield so much more easily to beer — as in fact does most food, but that’s for another day — than wine that you just know something other than common sense has been driving the wine pairing suggestions for years.

First, the Associated Press (AP) had a story that many outlets picked up under various titles, such as “Craft beers join Turkey Day table,” “Have a beer with Thanksgiving dinner,” and the vaguely insulting “Thanksgiving dinner — and beer?” But the article itself it surprisingly well-done.

There’s also “A Thanksgiving Toast,” a nice editorial in the L.A. Times giving a historical perspective for drinking beer at the Thanksgiving meal. And the Boston Globe has a similar theme in “Ale, ale, the gang’s all here.” Then there’s this piece from Canada called “It’s not Thanksgiving without beer.”

Likewise, Eric Hjerstedt Sharp, writing in the Ironwood, Michigan Daily Globe about Thanksgiving myths, has the following to add:

—Not tee-totalers by any means, the major beverage aboard the Mayflower was beer, primarily because the alcohol kept the bacteria from spoiling the drinking water. However, they continued to brew and drink beer after they landed and settled.

Scripps News has an article entitled “Choosing the best beer for a holiday dinner.” And while I could take issue with some of the author’s ignorance, she also has some good suggestions for the novice, too, so in the holiday spirit I’ll let it pass.

Tim Cotter, writing for The Day in Connecticut, suggests two fine beers to try with your turkey, Ommegang Abbey Ale or Allagash Grand Cru, in his column entitled “Turkey Beers.”

At Epicurious, there’s article called “Thanks for the Brews, Beers for Thanksgiving day,” by Marty Nachel, author of Beer for Dummies.

And there’s also “The beer nut: Giving thanks for good beers” at the Daily News in rural Massachusetts.

This year, the Brewers Association launched its own campaign called “The Year Beer Goes With the Bird” whose aim to show the advantages of pairing beer with your Thanksgiving meal this year. Some of their suggestions:

Traditional Roast Turkey: The roasted and caramelized skin matches well with amber ale, a strong golden ale or an amber lager in the Vienna style.

Smoked Turkey: If your local brewery offers a smoked beer, that can serve as a compliment to smoked turkey as well. Look for a porter, Scotch ale or amber ale in the smoked style.

Cajun Turkey: Celebrated beer writer and New Mexico resident Stan Hieronymus suggests a malty IPA to go with his favorite Cajun turkey recipe. For a malty alternative that will stand up to the heat, try a dark bock or strong Scotch ale.

The recipes on the left are also on the Brewers Association website and are courtesy of my good friend, beer cook Lucy Saunders.

And here’s in an interesting piece of history in itself. It’s an article by Michael Jackson from the Washington Post from November of 1983 called Beer at the Thanksgiving table. And here’s a more recent one on the same subject by Michael’s friend, award-winning beer writer, Carol Smagalski, entitled “Elegant Beer for the Thanksgiving Table.”

And then, of course, there’s my friend Lisa Morrison’s award-winning piece, “This Thanksgiving, Beer Is For The Bird” in which challenges her readers to “Try Serving Well-Crafted Local Beer At The Table, Pilgrim.”

And in case you thought this was a new idea, here’s an ad from 1946 extolling the virtues of beer with turkey by the National Brewing Co. of Baltimore, Maryland.

The Pour on Cask

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Eric Asimov had another great beer piece yesterday at The Pour, this one was an overview on cask-conditioned beers. Personally, if I have a choice I always go with the cask version. In fact last night while out with some old high school buddies, I enjoyed Sara’s Ruby Mild on cask at Magnolia and later Moonlight’s Sublimmminal at the Toronado. Yum.

 
And here’s some general information on casks.

The parts of a beer barrel.

 

Cask Sizes:

  • Pin: 4.5 gallons
  • Firkin: 9 gallons
  • Kilderkin: 18 gallons
  • Barrel: 36 gallons
  • Hogshead: 54 gallons
  • Puncheon: 72 gallons
  • Butt: 108 gallons

 

The Crime of Beer Consumption

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A Bulletin fan (thanks Jim) sent me this link to a an article by Jascha Hoffman in the New York Times, in fact it was from the Magazine section’s Idea Lab this past Sunday and was titled Criminal Element. It’s a very interesting and provocative read, especially if, like me, you’re a fan of economic theory and the kind of oddball ways economics can be used in new ways, in the mold of the recent book Freakonomics. It centers on an idea by Jessica Wolpaw Reyes, an economist at Amherst College, that eliminating the lead from gasoline caused crime rates to fall in the 1990s.

Reyes found that the rise and fall of lead-exposure rates seemed to match the arc of violent crime, but with a 20-year lag — just long enough for children exposed to the highest levels of lead in 1973 to reach their most violence-prone years in the early ’90s, when crime rates hit their peak.

Such a correlation does not prove that lead had any effect on crime levels. But in an article published this month in the B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis and Policy, Reyes uses small variations in the lead content of gasoline from state to state to strengthen her argument. If other possible sources of crime like beer consumption and unemployment had remained constant, she estimates, the switch to unleaded gas alone would have caused the rate of violent crime to fall by more than half over the 1990s.

What an interesting theory that …. hey, wait a minute. What was that? “[O]ther possible sources of crime like beer consumption!?!” WTF! Since when did drinking beer become a source of crime? Where are those statistics? I’ve heard of hardcore heroin addiction leading to crime to support a drug habit, but beer? I don’t think so. If anybody out there has access to more than just the abstract of the article I’d love to run down where she got this idea. All I can find is that “beer consumption” is one of eleven “state-level variables” listed in the article’s appendix and that the information on “Beer consumption is from the Brewers Almanacs, published by the Beer Institute. It is measured as consumption of malt beverages in gallons consumed per capita.” But how does mere consumption lead to crime? Curiously, there’s no mention of spirits or wine consumption leading to crime, just beer, despite the fact that hard liquor was a permanent fixture at every high school and college party I ever attended. Has the demonization of beer just become so internalized and taken for granted that academia doesn’t even need to justify it? Frankly, I’m flummoxed. Am I missing something or just over-reacting as I’m so often accused? I’ve never resorted to crime to support my beer habit? How about you?

 

More on Blogging Ethics

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I was away this weekend at the Northern California Homebrewers Festival and — gasp — had no internet access for two whole days. As a result I missed the Wall Street Journal article about ethics among food bloggers that ran in Saturday’s paper entitled The Price of a Four-Star Rating. Luckily, more than a few people sent me a link to it (thanks, you know who you are) given my recent musings and ramblings on The Ethical Blogging Debate. There are certainly a few parallels to our own issues and it makes for interesting reading, assuming you enjoyed the initial forays into the subject here and at Stonch’s Beer Blog and A Good Beer Blog. There’s also a related WSJ article that lists ten popular restaurant review sites and their general ethical policies.
 

Beer’s Spiritual Problem?

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Apparently liquor and wine are divine, beer … not so much. That’s the apparent take of Wisconsin columnist Joe Orso who in a recent column, concludes that issues with people drinking beer in his local community are a “spiritual problem,” whatever that even means.

Admittedly, his community does appear to have had a spate of bad luck recently, as he relates.

In the past two weeks, a 19-year-old woman has died after drinking alcohol and falling off Grandad Bluff, Miss America has been to the area to speak to high school and college students about underage drinking and drunken driving, and a concert was held at Viterbo University to raise awareness about responsible drinking habits.

That’s a tragic event to be sure, but Grandad Bluff (pictured here) doesn’t look like the sort of place one should go to while drinking. I don’t want to sound cold, but not only did she show poor judgment but so did her friends. How that’s a spiritual problem or the fault of the beer I find somewhat baffling. As for Miss America, her cause celebre is children. I’m sure she’s on a tour of colleges making the same speech, she wasn’t targeting one community. The concert was a benefit for “Safe La Crosse” promoting responsible drinking behavior at the start of the new term. I’m willing to bet almost every campus has an organization like this one. So what?

My point is you can find or make connections wherever you want to find them. There doesn’t appear to be anything remarkable about these three events that would cause a reasonable person to conclude that the youth of today are in spiritual crisis and beer is the bogeyman responsible for it. But our amateur spiritualist isn’t finished. In his own personal life, he once lived with an alcoholic and he recently visited a friend who’s in detox. Oh my god! Two people he’s known throughout his life have problems with alcohol! Alert the media. Oh, wait he is the media. Why not focus on the maybe hundreds of people he knows or has known who aren’t alcoholics? Why try to connect dots that simply may not be there?

He’s heard anecdotally that young people are drinking simply because “there’s nothing else to do,” claiming to hear this excuse over and over again across the country. I have a hard time understanding why both his own lack of imagination and the similar dullness of the people he’s talking to leads to a conclusion that spirituality has anything to do with this. It sounds more like his community may have a problem. But instead his thinking goes like this. “When you look at a society and see so many of us spending weekends between 15 and 22 years old getting drunk, and then saying we do it because there’s nothing else to do, this becomes a spiritual problem.” Huh? When Orso asks “[h]ow are we treating our young people to make them feel like this?” you’d think the answer would be obvious, but apparently it isn’t.

Why say things like “[s]omething seems to be going on here with beer.” The author says he enjoys beer and has a favorite — Busch (ugh) — and he “look[s] forward to drinking it around a backyard fire every Christmas when [his] brothers and neighbors return home and [they] all catch up on each other’s lives.” In other words, he enjoys it in a social setting that creates conversation and a sense of togetherness. Does he not realize that’s precisely what goes on at teenage parties, too. Kids get together, drink, talk and bond as they struggle to figure out how to become adults. Teenagers struggle with all kinds of adult and quasi-adult behaviors and fumble their way through most of them. They’re supposed to, it’s through their failures and mistakes that they learn. But with our present taboos and draconian alcohol laws they have no positive role models for responsible drinking and many kids’ first experiences with beer may indeed be negative. They don’t have to be, but adults have created an environment that all but guarantees such a result. There will always be people who can’t handle certain things, be they alcohol, drugs, food, cigarettes or what have you. With alcohol the problem is exacerbated because of a criminal lack of education and misinformation, which in many places even forbids parents from teaching their own children about alcohol in the home. Such places presuppose that the state should be the ones to teach kids about alcohol but then they do absolutely nothing by way of educating them.

Orso concludes his column by suggesting that “we might shift the message a bit from ‘Drinking can hurt you, maybe kill you’ to ‘Why are you drinking so much?'” Well, for me such simplistic nonsense is what’s making me drink so much. He’s looking for easy answers to complex questions. But if you think the path to spiritual enlightenment is not paved with beer bottles, then I suppose no amount of logic will convince you otherwise. But could we please stop blaming beer for everything that’s wrong with the world? There are undoubtedly numerous reasons for drinking by teenagers (or anyone for that matter), but I seriously doubt that chief among them is a lack of spirituality. Frankly, I’d be shocked if it made the top hundred. But let’s ask all of the Orders of Monks who have been making truly inspired beers for centuries if they believe beer has caused them to be spiritually parched.

 

Men’s Journal Picks Their Favorite Beers Again

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Last year, the magazine Men’s Journal published in their October issue a list they called the “25 Best Beers in America.” This year marks the fourth annual list but this time it’s a departure from their standard list. Instead they chose their five favorites in five broad style categories and a further list of their choice of a beer for a specific occasion. As usual, there are some good beers on the list but probably just as many or more great beers that didn’t grace the list. This year the list also includes beers imported from Europe.

Last year I wrote the following about the list, and it seems just as true today.

It’s great news, of course, for the beers on the list. Hopefully they’ll get more attention and even possibly more sales generated from the article. But it doesn’t mean the beers not on the list aren’t in many cases every bit as good as those who made the cut this year. For those of us who judge beer regularly there are so many factors that come into play that a list like this one can never be truly taken serious for a variety of reasons. But the novelty of it appeals to all of us, myself included, and I imagine I scanned the list with as much interest as the average reader. Anything that shows craft beer in a positive light can’t be all bad, and this annual list is certainly another good way to spread the message of how many good beers are being made all over the country. Now if we can just get more people to start drinking them, that would be really something.

Here’s this year’s introduction from Men’s Journal:

THE DRINKING MAN’S GUIDE TO THE WORLD’S BEST BEERS

Provided it’s not the shakes that makes you reach for that cold one, there’s never been a better time to be a beer drinker. Delicious craft beer – roughly and imperfectly defined as high-quality brew made in smallish batches from the best possible ingredients, instead of corn syrup and generic grain – is everywhere. The average American now lives within 15 miles of a brewery making a fresh, local product. Imports from such beer-mad nations as Belgium and Norway previously unseen here are making their way into stores across the country. Even Anheuser-Busch wants in on the action; why else would the mega-brewer have released more than 85 experimental beers in the past two years? Which raises a fine question: What should you drink next? We canvassed brewers, importers, tavern-keepers, and chefs to find the best of the best.

However, how they really “did it” is explained later as follows. “We surveyed a Rolodex full of prominent beer industry players, asking them to name their favorite beers in several major categories, and tallied the results.” Well how scientific. Now I know these things are largely popularity contests already, but that strikes me as a pretty poor way to go about choosing what is presented as the “world’s best beer.” World’s “favorite” beers, possibly, but even that would be incorrect since they’re only the favorite beers of whoever was in their address book. Yes, I’m a curmudgeon to the end, but for these kinds of lists to be in any way meaningful there should be some kind of standards to get on the list in the first place. Otherwise, it’s just a beauty contest. But playing devil’s advocate, at least there are some very fine beers on the list and that’s a good thing for them, at least. There’s very few here that shouldn’t be enjoyed or sampled if they’re unfamiliar.

So with a few comments (in italics) that I couldn’t resist making, here is the Men’s Journal list for 2007:

 

The Best Pale Ales

  1. Firestone Walker Pale Ale
  2. Sierra Nevada Pale Ale
  3. Deschutes Mirror Pond
  4. Dogfish Head 60 Minute IPA (I guess this means by pale ale they mean any beer that’s pale in color, not the style?)
  5. Ridgeway Bitter (Ditto.)

The Best Stouts & Porters

  1. Deschutes The Abyss
  2. Guinness (Which one?)
  3. Stone Smoked Porter
  4. Bell’s Kalamazoo Stout
  5. Brooklyn Black Chocolate Stout

The Best Belgians (Presumably they mean Belgian-style?)

  1. Saison Dupont
  2. Rochefort 10
  3. Ommegang Three Philosophers
  4. Russian River Damnation
  5. St. Bernardus Triple

The Best Wheat Beers

  1. Aventinus Doppel Weizen-Bock
  2. Ayinger Brau-Weiss
  3. Allagash White
  4. Penn Weizen
  5. Widmer Hefeweizen

The Best Lagers & Pilsners

  1. Lagunitas Pils
  2. Victory Prima Pils
  3. Stoudt’s Pils
  4. Trumer Pils
  5. New Belgium Blue Paddle

 

BEST BEERS FOR EVERY OCCASION

“Best Beer” rankings rarely answer the most important question: What’s the best beer for right now? Here’s what to sneak into the ballpark, tow behind your canoe, drink in the morning, give to the babysitter (kidding!), and more.
 

  • In Case of Natural Disaster: Ommegang Hennepin
  • For Ballpark Hecklers: Miller High Life (Maybe to use as projectile, certainly not for drinking.)
  • Global-Warming Summer Beer: Thiriez Extra
  • Airport Layover Beer: Samuel Adams Boston Lager (Is that because it’s the only one at every airport?)
  • Marijuana Substitute: Deschutes Hop Trip
  • Liquid Courage: Stone Double Bastard
  • Mass Market “Microbrew”: Blue Moon
  • For an All-Nighter: North Coast Red Seal Ale (I’d think a lower alcohol true Session beer would be a better choice.)
  • For a One-Nighter: Celebrator Doppelbock
  • Oktoberfest Beer: Great Lakes Oktoberfest (Nothing against this fine beer, but why wouldn’t a German example be here?)
  • For the Scotch Lover: Lost Abbey Angel’s Share
  • Best with a Shot of Whiskey in It: Harp Irish Lager
  • Best “Light” Beer: Mahr’s Leicht (As light beers go, maybe, but why even bother? It’s like choosing the best way to be executed.)
  • Best Before Noon: North Coast Scrimshaw Pilsner
  • With a Good Cigar: Goose Island Bourbon County Stout
  • River Trip Beer: Dale’s Pale Ale
  • For the Goldman Sachs Broker: Samuel Adams Utopia
  • Hair-of-the-Dog Beer: Southampton Double White
  • Barbecue Beer: Aecht Schlenkerla Helles
  • To Impress a Beer Geek: Cantillon Lou Pepe
  • For Ice Fishing: Brooklyn Black Chocolate Stout
  • For the Earth-Firster: Butte Creek Organic Pilsner
  • Only Decent Mexican Beer: Negra Modelo (There are plenty of awful Mexican beers — with Corona probably the worst — but they’re not all bad.)
  • Ski Town Beer: Avery 14er ESB
  • To Buy with Spare Change: Pabst Blue Ribbon (Why?)

 

Belgian Light

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A day after praising Eric Asimov for leading the way toward detente between beer and wine, his “Ales of the Times” column today is entitled More or Less Pale but All Belgian features a tasting of several lighter Belgian beers suitable for summer. As usual, it’s a reasoned look at several lighter style Belgian ales such as Affligem Blond, Corsendonk, De Koninck and Orval and how they might be every bit as thirst-quenching as an ice-cold industrial light lager but with oodles more flavor and variety. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, this is what we need more of in order to win the hearts and minds of all Americans toward enjoying better beer.