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Price vs. Value

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It’s been said that when you buy something, the price is what you pay and value is what you get. But if you want to get people’s attention, charge an astonishingly high price for something. Case in point, ever since Bloomberg News on Friday did a story about Carlsberg’s new $400-per-bottle beer, touting it as the world’s most expensive, it’s been burning up the blogosphere, online news outlets and forums. And with good reason. There’s a lot not to like about this story, and very little to suggest the $400 price tag is anywhere near reasonable, as many, many have already pointed out, from A Good Beer Blog’s Are You An Utter Fool? to Beer Advocate’s forum responding to the question, Are massively expensive beers good for the craft brew world?

What I find curious about this new beer is that, as far as I can tell, Carlsberg is almost completely silent about it. There’s nothing about it on their website, nothing under media or press releases. Wouldn’t you expect at least some PR information on the supposed release of something called the world’s most expensive beer? But all of the press this has gotten seems to be coming from a single source, the Bloomberg piece, which even more oddly appears to be aimed at the Latin American market.

The beer itself may be called Carlsberg Vintage No. 1, and all we know about it is that it’s 10.5% abv and “contains hints of prune, caramel, vanilla and oak tree from the French and Swedish wooden casks in which it [was] stored. It has a chestnut brown color, little foam and goes well with cheeses and desserts.” That’s according to Jens Eiken, the brewer at the Jacobsen Brewhouse (the small boutique brewery housed in the Visitor’s Center), who created the beer. Given that it’s so expensive, he’s surprisingly tight-lipped about giving any details that might convince one that it’s worth that hefty price tag. He says it’s relatively cheap, “considering the amount of time the brewery spent developing it.” Naturally he’s not saying how long that was, but does add “[w]e’re trying to raise the bar for what a beer can be,” which is maddeningly infuriating since he refuses to say how or to where he thinks this beer has moved the “bar” to.

But unlike other efforts to “raise the bar” where the process and rationale for a higher price tag have been spelled out somewhat convincingly, making beer of great value doesn’t appear to be the point one iota. Price appears to be the driving factor, which at least explains the lack of persuasion or transparency. The $400 price is a conversion from the price in Danish kroners, which is 2,008 — a figure arrived at simply to coincide with the year. Next year, the price will go up to 2009 kroners and 2010 the year after that. The 600 bottles initially being sold in three high-end Copenhagen restaurants aren’t even very large. Each bottle is only 37.5 centiliters, which at 12.68 ounces is just north of our standard beer bottle.

The beer was created for no better reason than to “challenge luxury wines in the gourmet restaurant market and capitalize on rising individual wealth.” You can see the visible hand of marketing in every step of this project. Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but I think the way to challenge wine’s perceived supremacy is to make beers that rival the quality of fine wines, not arbitrarily price them as if they did. Frankly, I think one of the best selling points of better beer is precisely that in many cases it really does already rival that of fine wine, and does so at a spectacularly more reasonable price and one which bears some relation to the ingredients and process of manufacture. In other words, it’s a good value. Even Utopias, at $100 or more, because we know what’s involved and how it was made doesn’t seem too out of whack. Carlsberg Vintage No. 1 on the other hand? Whack job, all the way.

Beyond that, look at the tortured way they arrived at the title “world’s most expensive.” From the Bloomberg news article:

Vintage No. 1 will be the world’s most expensive beer, according to Eiken. That title is currently held by Boston Beer Co.’s Utopia, which costs about $100 for a 72 centiliter bottle, according to the Web site Most-expensive.net.

Bierodrome, a London bar, sells Belgian beer Vielle Bon Secours for 635 pounds ($1,260) per 15 liter bottle, which is 12 times less than the liter price of Vintage No. 1.

And according to The Longest List of the Longest Stuff at the Longest Domain Name at Long Last:

A New Zealander paid $2,595.00 USD for a beer in a Hong Kong bar. He must have had one too many and thought the credit card slip read $2.45 when he signed it, but he claims the bar tampered with the bill. Nevertheless his credit card company did not reverse the charges and the man only known as Mr. B paid $2,595.00 for a beer.

But while I don’t think an accidental over-charging can be more than a footnote in this discussion, reducing it to the price per ounce, liter, or whatever measurement doesn’t really work either. The Bon Secours is still the most expensive bottle, no matter how large it is. I guess if your goal is to have the most expensive anything, and you’re a large enough company, you’ll figure out a way to make that happen.

Is it enough that there are only 600 bottles (50 cases at 12 per or 25 cases at 24 per) to justify the price? Certainly supply and demand is a time-honored economic method of determining fair market value. But in this case while the supply is indeed low, the actual demand is non-existent, completely artificial and will have to be manufactured from scratch.

You have to wonder about what they’re not telling us, because a 10.5% beer that’s been aged on wood is not exactly newsworthy. I can find any number of beers similar to that description. There are entire beer festivals here in the U.S. devoted to wood-aged beers. I judged at the Bistro’s Barrel-aged Beer Festival in my own backyard last year and had at least a dozen beers fitting the description of Vintage No. 1, without having to travel to Denmark. So what could be so different about this one to not only justify the cost but also their claim that even at this price they’re losing money. If I wanted people to plunk down a previously unheard of amount for something I made, I’d go out of my way to justify that high price.

 

But I think the difference between Vintage No. 1 and other high-priced beers, like Deus, Vielle Bon Secours and Boston Beer’s Utopias is the following. I’ve talked to Jim Koch about his Utopias, their earlier Millennium Beer and even the Triple Bock they made in the 1990s. All of those beers are or were relatively expensive beers. But the fact of their high price was at best a secondary consideration, a factor of the cost or making them. Vintage No. 1, from what little we know about it, was just the opposite. The price was created first, as a marketing gimmick (being the same as the year), and specifically to fill a demand by the nouveau riche for something expensive to spend their money on. Jim Koch, on the other hand, at least was truly passionate about the beer he and his team of brewers had made. Love it or hate it — and I’m in the former camp — you have to admit Utopias really does push the boundary of what beer is and can be. Can the same be said of a 10.5% beer aged on wood, without knowing anything more about how it was made?

 

To give my take on the question of whether or not expensive beer is good for the craft beer industry, I think in general it can be. I think that for the most part the price of beer has been kept artificially low for too long and has helped to maintain the image of beer as a cheap, mass-produced commodity not worthy of respect. There is something to the idea of charging a higher price for something giving it more perceived value by that fact alone. Though I think it’s gotten out of hand, wine has been using perceived value for years instead of a cost of goods to mark-up ratio to come up with a fair market price. Beer, especially among the big breweries, works on volume sales rather than a high mark-up per bottle or per package. And to keep volume up, the big breweries have kept their prices low even as their cost of manufacture and for ingredients has steadily risen. This has also forced craft brewers to likewise keep their profit margins thinner, which has had the effect of keeping perceived value lower, too. Now that there are shortages to both hops and malt, that will have to change and it will be interesting to see how consumers react. I think as long as they perceive that for the price they’re still getting a good value, things shouldn’t be too bad.

That’s where I think Carlsberg’s Vintage No. 1 goes off the rails. There’s just no sense that there’s any reasonable value for the exorbitant price they’re asking. I’m sure there will be someone willing to buy it just to show off or impress others with their success. After all, there’s never been a shortage of fools with more money than sense. That doesn’t justify the price, of course, and in this case the utter lack of perceived value could indeed damage the cause of making fine beer more highly prized and priced. I’d pay almost any reasonable price for something I highly value. But I place almost no value in being tricked into paying ten times (or more) for something just because someone thinks they can get away with it.

 

UPDATE 1.29: I’ve found a bit more about what the bottle will look like. “Each bottle is labeled with a hand stenciled original lithographic print by Danish artist Frans Kannike, making the empties worth about $100 apiece.”

 

 

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.

 

Winning Friends Resolution

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For regular Bulletin readers who recall How To Win Friends and Influence People from the beginning of the month, where a South Dakota A-B distributor’s “Contemporary Marketing Coordinator” responded to harsh criticism of one of their products — Rolling Rock — with a textbook example of poor customer relations, has apparently come to a resolution. I received word, not from E-Rokk (the original poster), but from one of his bandmates, Nick Fitt, that the issue had been resolved and he has written up the story of how and why at their Hey Stupid blog. It’s rambling and incoherent at times — Nick’s writing style is reminiscent of someone suffering from Tourette’s Syndrome and an obsessive preoccupation with pornographic imagery — yet pieces of an actual story do peek out from time to time. As far as I can tell, he called the distributor and spoke to Cassie Kimball’s boss, eventually having a conference call with both her boss and that person’s boss, too. Her fate remains vague, though he hints that they told him she “was now hauling skids in the mail room, suffering from many splinters of wood that had been treated with PCP,” whatever that means. In the end, the distributors apparently coughed up some free cases of beer to mollify the situation — Budweiser, not Rolling Rock — and the final paragraphs are spent slobberingly praising “Anheiser Bush” [sic] and their new favorite beer. I’m not sure why, but it all feels a little unsatisfying to me. Considering one of the original complaints was that A-B had sold out by altering E-Rokk’s beloved Rolling Rock, it sure feels like the hey stupid gang do likewise for a few measly cases of free Bud. C’est la vie.

 

How To Win Friends and Influence People

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I got a comment the other day to one of my old posts about Rolling Rock when the brouhaha was going down in Latrobe, Pennsylvania earlier this year. E-Rokk, the person who posted the comment, apparently had a run-in with an Anheuser-Busch distributor’s rep. He also has a blog with four friends called Hey Stupid, which according to their byline “is a collection of writers that are pissed off at society, culture, the world and most importantly…you.” E-Rokk is a former Pennsylvania resident who moved to the Rapid City, South Dakota area and took with him a fondness for Rolling Rock beer. He claims to be a beer connoisseur, but his list of favorite beers is not exactly bursting with esoterica. In fact, more than half of his list includes generic industrial light lagers, most of whom are made by the big three but marketed under their original regional brand names. His favorite three are Yuengling, Iron City Light and Rolling Rock, which pretty much tells you everything you need to know.

Anyway, he tried the new A-B-made version of his beloved Rolling Rock and found that it no longer tasted the way he remembered it, and so he wrote a rant on his blog that spared no one’s feelings and told A-B in no uncertain terms to go fornicate without a companion, though, of course, not in those words. A little while later, he received a response from his local A-B distributor, Eagle Sales of the Black Hills, Inc. The letter was apparently written by the distributor’s “Contemporary Marketing Coordinator,” Cassie Kimball. I can only imagine what that job description entails. Anyway, to satisfy myself that her response was legitimate, I checked out the distributor’s website and sure enough she is the last person listed at the bottom of the web page “Our People.” He reprinted her response in it’s entirety and it’s a terrific example of how not to interact with your customers, especially when E-Rokk still listed several beers as his favorites that Eagle Sales distributes.

Because technically her letter is copywrited material, I won’t publish it here, but please go read it at E-Rokk’s Hey Stupid blog, you won’t be disappointed. She basically swears back at him and further tells him his band will never receive any promotional support from A-B (which is odd since I didn’t even know he was in a band). It’s riddled with typos and grammatical nonsense, which is pretty scary especially since I would think communication skills would be fairly important for someone in marketing. I know people can make mistakes — hell, I make them all the time — but her letter seems to show only a rudimentary familiarity with the English language and how to communicate coherently. But perhaps I’m being too hard on her.

My favorite thing she says, though, is about her beer knowledge. She claims that mainstream beers are called “American premiums” — I just love this aside — “as real beer connoisseurs like to say.” That has me doubling over. American premium is essentially a made-up term used as a category by Nieslen, IRI and other businesses when discussing a particular group of goods, to distinguish them from sub-premium and other categories. It has no meaning in the real world but only as business jargon. And I don’t know many beer connoisseurs, real or otherwise, who refer to this type of beer as American Premium, not with a straight face anyway. It is a subcategory at GABF under category 26, American-Style Lager, but that’s more to allow the big companies a place to enter their products. Likewise, it’s a subcategory under BJCP guidelines for category 1, Light Lager. But you won’t find it coming up in any serious discussion of beer styles. But then again, maybe I’m not as “with it” as she is. After all, she’s the “contemporary” marketing coordinator, whereas I’m just an old curmudgeon.

I also love her revisionist history when she claims A-B bought the Rolling Rock brand “to help it stay alive.” Their own flagship brands’ sales woes had nothing to do with wanting to pick up another brand for their distributors. That’s hilarious. I feel kinda sorry for her, in a way. She just keeps putting her foot in her mouth. At least she does it with confidence, I guess. She really seems to believe what she’s saying and yet appears to have no idea about what’s really going on in the industry she’s a part of. Ah, to be young and ignorant.

The way she just attacked and swore back at her critic has to have come up in PR 101 as how not to communicate with a customer, no matter what they’ve said. It’s frankly pretty astonishing. E-Rokk responded by writing back to her, to what end I can’t fathom. It was just as bad as his original rant but it will be interesting to see if his baiting works and she writes back again to escalate things even farther.

 

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.

 

Beer Is Good For Your Lawn

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lawn-mower
According to lawn expert, Brad Fresenburg, beer can make your grass more green, thanks to the carbohydrates in it. Fresenburg is an extension and research associate at the University of Missouri at Columbia and he’s testing an internet lawn mix called “The Perfect Lawn Tonic” that uses five common household ingredients, one of which is beer. KSDK CBS Channel 5 in St. Louis, Missouri has asked Fresenburg to try out the tonic scientifically.

The five ingredients are beer, non-diet soda, mouthwash, household ammonia, and dish soap. “It’s really a home remedy that is simulating a lot of the bio-stimulants,” said Fresenburg. “There really isn’t anything in the ingredients that are going to be harmful to grasses.” Fresenburg believe the beer will benefit from carbohydrates in it to feed microbes that are in the soil.

When asked if the tonic will work, Fresenburg replied. “Yes and no, but it is going to do what they say it’s going to do as far as green color and maybe perhaps having a lawn look a little more green and lush,” said Fresenburg. “Especially at this time of year when grasses are struggling a little bit due to drought and perhaps turning a little bit brown … it will help with that effect.” At the end of the month, Fresenburg will be re-interviewed to gauge the results.

Here’s the tonic recipe:

The Perfect Lawn Tonic

1 beer (except light beer)
1 can of non-diet soda
1/2 cup mouthwash
1/2 cup household ammonia
1/2 cup dish soap (except anti-bacterial)

Mix all ingredients and pour into a 10-gallon hose end sprayer.

Spray on lawn after mowing — just enough to wet the grass.

Reapply every three weeks.

Hoppy Cooks Read “Grilling with Beer”

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The Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin has a nice write-up of Lucy Saunders‘ book “Grilling with Beer,” including a couple of recipes from the book. This is my favorite paragraph from the article. Foodies take heed.

Saunders rarely refers to beer generically. Her ingredient lists may call for Asian lager on one page, then apple ale, rauchbier (which has a smoky flavor) or a porter. Her cooking advice is for people who recognize the difference, and the beauty, of matching the right beer to an entree, salad or side dish.

And in Philly, Joe Sixpack is also waxing eloquently about Lucy’s book, in his latest column, entitled “Beer, briquettes, barbecue: bee-yoo-ti-ful.”

Without argument, outdoor grilling and beer is the greatest union ever devised by man, and I’m including bacon and eggs, fast cars and loose women and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

Fire and fermentation: It’s the heroic achievement that separates us from monkeys. It’s part of our DNA, this primeval passion for flames and altered reality.

Also, it tastes good.

Well said, Mr. Russell. He sat down with Saunders when she was in town last month for a beer dinner at Monk’s Cafe and Belgian Emporium and they discussed the relationship between food and beer.

The barley malts in beer, Saunders told me over beers on a visit to the city recently, add to the flavor of grilled food, often caramelizing on its surface. Wash down a bite, and the citrusy hops will cut through the fat. Take another gulp, and the carbonation completes the refreshment.

“There are so many different flavors in beer, it’s not very hard to find styles that add to the flavor of food,” she said.

How true, I’m continually amazed at how many people still believe wine pairs better with most food and how entrenched that false notion is in our culture. It’s the perception, of course, that wine is sophisticated and beer is not, but happily that’s slowly — very slowly — beginning to change thanks to the hard work of people like Lucy Saunders and her new book, Grilling with Beer.”

In the interest of full disclosure, Lucy is a friend and colleague, and I contributed a chapter to this book, but either way it doesn’t diminish the fact that you should buy several copies right now, one for yourself and a few more as gifts. With grilling season officially upon us, you need this book right now, but Christmas is only six months away. Do you want to be at the mall Christmas Eve looking for that last minute gift? Or would you rather take care of it now, and save yourself the time to enjoy a few more Christmas beers come December? See, it pays to shop early.

 

Do You Want Some Pizza With Your Pizza Beer?

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I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry. Pizza and beer, of course, are one of the most beautiful pairings and one of the most natural, rivaling such other hit duos as peanut butter and jelly or warm apple pie and vanilla ice cream. But it may have been taken too far, as homebrewer Tom Seefurth has combined the two into one beer, which he calls Mamma Mia Pizza Beer and claims is the “world’s first culinary beer.”

Since Walter Payton’s Aurora Roundhouse has been brewing and selling Tom’s Pizza Beer, the local and national media has been covering the novelty beer in print, television and radio. Sunday’s Daily Herald, a local paper covering Kane County, Illinois where the Seefurths live, has probably the most comprehensive account.

It sounds like an herb and spice beer leaning heavily on Italian seasonings. Adjunct ingredients include tomatoes, oregano, garlic and basil. The Herald article describes it as “tast[ing] of oregano, onions and tomatoes” and they offer that it should be paired with pizza or pasta, though that seems a bit too obvious. I’d be more interested in trying it with some strong Italian cheeses. There have been plenty of herb and spice beers I’ve tasted over the years, using both common and more unusual ingredients. To my way of thinking, they’re a mixed bag. Sometimes they work and sometimes not and it’s not always clear why that is. Some I’ve enjoyed and others not so much. So while my first reaction is somewhat apprehensive, I’ll reserve judgment until I can actually try some, if that’s even possible. I love beer. I love pizza. If it’s all about the beer then who knows, maybe it will be great.


Tom Seefurth in his home brewery.
 

Chicago Beer Society Tackles Beers Inspired by Belgium

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When Ray Daniels and Randy Mosher put on a tasting, I sit up and take notice. This should be a good one. If you’re in the Chicago area in early July, you should definitely try to go to this one.

Chicago Beer Society Tasting Features Flavor & Diversity of Belgian Cuisine

From mussels to carbonnade and risotto to artisanal cheese, Belgian cuisine was made to pair with its flavorful and often quirky beers. On July 8, the Chicago Beer Society showcases the variety of Belgian-style beer and food with “Inspired by Belgium” a tasting grounded in the gustatory traditions of the European lowlands.

“In the past ten years, Belgian-style beers have captured the hearts and tongues of sophisticated American beer drinkers,” said Randy Mosher, organizer of the event and long-time Chicago Beer Society board member. “The unique flavors of the beers go beautifully with the flavors of Belgian cuisine.”

On Sunday, July 8, the Chicago Beer Society celebrates this culture with a tasting of Belgian-style beers and food. The event will take place from 1 to 5 pm, at the Dank-Haus, the German-American Cultural Center, at 4740 N. Western Ave., in Chicago’s Lincoln Square neighborhood. Ticket price will be $50, for member and $60 for non-members.

Catering by the Hearty Boys, an nationally known local firm, will include Belgian-style cheese, kriek-glazed chicken wings, carbonnade Flamande (beef in beer stew) and a beery risotto with sautéed shrimp and asparagus. In addition, The HopLeaf’s Michael Roper, will serve their signature dish: mussels steamed in beer sauce.

A range of beers from Belgium and innovative American brewers will allow attendees to experiment with flavors and pairings of this rich culinary culture. Attendees can expect to find everything from witbier to saison and abbey style to sour beers as well as the utterly uncharacterizable creations that define the Belgian approach to brewing.

As for the facility: “It’s a gorgeous room, with plenty of space for this walk-around event,” says Mosher. And since it is across the street from the Western Avenue stop of the Brown Line and steps away from the intersection of Western and Lawrence, public transportation is readily available.

Founded in 1977, the Chicago Beer Society is America’s oldest beer appreciation society. We are a not-for-profit, volunteer-run group dedicated to promoting great beer in the Chicagoland area. We have a reputation for producing well-run, creative and educational beer events. Our membership currently is around 450 persons. Our website is www.chibeer.org.

For more information and tickets, contact the Chicago Beer Society or call 773-905-ALES.

Sheboygan Brewing History

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maps-wi
Just hearing the word “Sheboygan” brings a smile to my face. I don’t know why exactly — and I certainly mean no disrespect to the town’s residents — but it’s just one of the words. The name is believed to be a Chippewa word, probably meaning “a noise underground,” or “river disappearing underground,” though some scholars think it may have meant “perforated object, as a pipe stem.” It just makes me laugh every time I hear it.

Sheboygan-postcard

In the wonderful Billy Wilder movie “Some Like It Hot,” Josephine and Daphne (played by Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon) went to the Sheboygan Conservatory of Music. It’s located in eastern Wisconsin along the shores of Lake Michigan. The town itself has a population of just under 50,000, or almost exactly the same as the town I live in, Novato, California. But we have only had one brewery throughout the entire history of the town. Sheboygan, by contrast, has had as many as eleven at one time throughout its own history. That’s according to Bill Wangemann’s latest column in the Sheboygan Press where he details some of the breweries that have operated in Sheboygan over the years.

The earliest Sheboygan brewery was the Gutsch Brewing Co (later Kingsbury Brewing Co), which first opened in 1847. In the photo below, from the Sheboygan County Historical Research Center in Sheboygan Falls, a “truck from the Gutsch Brewing Co. is loaded with beer for delivery by driver Edwin Kreuter, right. The other man is unidentified.”

gutsch-brewing