The tiny Northern California town of Weed is home to Mt. Shasta Brewing Co., makers of Weed Ales. The town was named for its founder, Abner Weed. Since the other, more notorious kind of weed is illegal, Mt. Shasta had crowns printed up that read “Try Legal Weed.” Sure, it was a bit of cheek, but all in good fun. Of course, the TTB, who approves what goes on beer labels and such at the federal level, didn’t agree and told the brewery they had to remove the offending crowns because it violated a vague policy against referencing illegal drug use. Of course, given a moment’s thought, reason, common sense and a familiarity with grammar should suggest that what they were saying was exactly the opposite: they wanted people to NOT buy illegal weed but instead spend their money on the legal kind, their beer that is. Like most businesses, they’d like to turn a profit and make a living so it’s hard to understand why the TTB would think they were trying to encourage buying a product other than the one they were selling.

Countless mainstream news outlets spread the story, which further showed our federal government in an increasingly bad light. Last month, there was an even a story about it in the Libertarian magazine Reason. Author Greg Beato pointed out that there is a perfume called Opium, soft drinks called Coke, energy drinks called Fixx, Bong Water, Buzzed, Speed Freak, and even Cocaine! And not one of those required any federal approval whatsoever. But add alcohol, and suddenly everyone loses their collective minds. Or as Robert Lehrman, an alcohol attorney sees it. “I don’t think they like making all these immensely subjective decisions on every cotton-picking label that comes down the pike. But that’s how the legislature set it up. The government decided that liquor’s taboo and therefore needs restrictions beyond those for food generally.” You have to ask why that should be so, especially when so many other beverages, foods and other goods openly exploit the very subject that TTB want to protect consumers from when it’s associated with beer. But more curiously, the prohibition against drug references came not from Congress, but is the result of a 1994 internal memo that set “new guidelines for socially acceptable labeling.” But it’s entirely unclear how restricting so-called allusions to drugs protects anyone, especially when every other product sold in America is under no such similar restrictions. Not to mention that alcohol can only be legally sold to adults, and why do we need to protect adults from language that might make some passing reference to drugs? I mean, so what? Does the government believe as an adult that I can’t handle it if I read words about drugs? Do they think I’ll be unable to resist actually trying illegal drugs from simply seeing a reference to them on a bottle of beer? If I haven’t done so from seeing drug references on cologne, soda pop, energy drinks and god knows what else, what makes them think beer will push me over the edge into a drug induced lifestyle? I’m simply baffled at the inanity of it all.

Dallimann was prepared to fight the ruling, but his initial appeal was denied. He was in the process of contacting his legislators and consulting with attorneys, but then, late last week, the TTB dispatched a registered letter to Weed, California, telling the brewery they could once more put “Try Legal Weed” on their bottle caps. They gave the following rationale. “Based on the context of the entire label, we agree that the phrase in question refers to the brand name of the product and does not mislead consumers.” I’d like to believe that the TTB honestly thought about their ruling and based their reversal on reason, but it seems more likely that they didn’t count on all the publicity that sprouted up like … well, weeds. Dallimann shared the letter with the Associated Press, who wrote a story detailing the end of the dispute.

Over the 2-1/2+ years I’ve been blogging here I think I’ve revealed a number things about which I’m a self-avowed geek: beer, of course, but also calendars, potato chips, economics and View-Master reels, to name a few. Well, I guess I have to unfurl yet another geeky passion of mine: vexillology. For the uninitiated, that’s the study of flags. Since I was a kid, I’ve loved pouring over books of flags, learning the meanings behind the colors and the symbols on the flags. I find it fascinating while my wife just shakes her head every time we pass a flag unknown to her that I can identify without a moment’s hesitation. I confess it’s not the kind of information that comes in handy very often, but it sure makes watching the Olympics easier.

So I was thrilled when I stumbled across these yesterday while trying to find a picture of Batman holding a beer. An ad agency in Boston, Arnold Worldwide, last December created a series of flags for a beer bar in Boston, the Sunset Grill & Tap. Their website claims they have the best beer selection in Boston with 112 beers on tap and 380 bottled, but given the looks of the site I rather doubt that quality is the driving force, just the quantity of their selection. If I had to guess — and I could be wrong, of course — I’d say they carry things like Stella Artois and not Westmalle from Belgium and Asahi but not Hitachino Nest Beer from Japan.

But the flags that their ad agency did for them are terrific, in my opinion. Simple is often best, I think. They just took the flags from three countries (at least these are the only ones I know of) and altered them ever so slightly to make you think of both beer and that nation in one simple image, their flag. The logo for Sunset Grill & Tap is the lower right-hand corner, but it’s unobtrusive. Now that’s creative, especially to the average amateur vexillologist.
 

If you’re like me you probably don’t have six-pack abs, but now you can at least wear a six-pack on your abs. Thanks to Urban Outfitters, you can carry a six-pack of bottles (or cans, as far as I can tell) on their new Beer Belt.

Or perhaps hiking through the woods in the hopes of getting drunk enough to get lost and racking up a lot of tax-payer dollars to rescue your sorry ass. It would certainly make a long plane ride more bearable, provided your were seated next to a bathroom and it was before the 21st Century when air travel was still civilized.

The only beer belt I’ve ever heard of is the geographic one in Europe that runs from Great Britain southeast to Austria and Slovakia, which separates the wine belt in the southwest and the vodka belt to the northeast.

The Beer Belt on what I can only presume is a real live human being.

There’s a stretch of water on the Wolf River, near Memphis, Tennessee, where the easiest thing you can do when paddling through it is to get lost. That’s because only one of the dozen or so paths that meander through the dense trees actually goes anywhere; the rest are blind alleys, dead ends and red herrings. For this reason, this 8 1/2 miles section of water between LaGrange and the Bateman Bridge became known as the Ghost River.

The State of Tennessee describes the area like this:

The Ghost River is a 2,220-acre section of the Wolf River in Fayette County located within the Coastal Plain Physiographic Province of Tennessee. The natural area includes approximately 14 miles of the Wolf River beginning from the parking area near La Grange to just west of Bateman Road Bridge. The Ghost River section of the Wolf is an unchannelized river section that meanders through bottomland hardwood forests, cypress-tupelo swamps, and open marshes. Some of the most impressive trees that occur here are large oaks that include cherrybark, water, willow, and swamp chestnut. The low ridges above the river bottoms support tulip poplar, beech, and white oak with northern red oak infrequently occurring. The natural area also includes other ecologically significant uplands and sandy hills adjacent to the floodplain.

The braided channels and backwater sloughs of the Ghost River provide excellent habitat for rare aquatic organisms including endangered freshwater mussels and fish such as the fat mucket (Lampsilis siliquidea), southern rainbow (Villosa vibex), southern hickorynut (Obovaria jacksoniana) and northern madtom (Noturus stigmosus). There are over 22 species of freshwater mussels found in the Wolf River. A variety of aquatic and terrestrial habitats also offer unique opportunities for observing birds and other wildlife.

The Ghost River section of the Wolf River received its name from the loss of river current as the water “flows” through open marshes and bald cypress-water tupelo swamps. Blue trail markers show the way for paddlers through the disorienting maze of willow, cypress, tupelos, and stunted pumpkin ash. The marked canoe trail follows the river from Yager road in LaGrange to Bateman Road Bridge. A loop trail and 600 ft. boardwalk was constructed crossing Mineral (Minnow) Slough in 2003 and 2004.

More from the press release:

Ghost River beers will soon be available in area bars and restaurants, as the new brewing company prepares to launch three new, locally-brewed, craft beers and one seasonal beer into the Memphis market.

Beginning in late July, Ghost River Brewing, the only local brewery using water from the Memphis Sands Aquifer, will begin selling their Ghost River Golden, Glacial Pale Ale, Brown Ale, and Hefeweizen (seasonal) beers through Southwestern Distributing Co.

“We believe the efforts of Steve and Gene Barzizza at Southwestern Distributing have helped expose the community to fresh, flavorful beer. This interest has expanded the market’s potential to support a local, craft-brewed beer,” says Chuck Skypeck, head brewer and co-owner of Ghost River Brewing.

The Ghost River brand, created by Skypeck and local design firm Communication Associates, includes a new logo, web site, easy to recognize tap handles shaped like canoe paddles, and several local events planned for August.

“Great water makes great beer. Brewing locally guarantees that every handcrafted, full-flavored Ghost River Ale is the freshest beer available . . . and when it comes to flavor, freshness means everything!” says Skypeck.

There’s also more information about Ghost River Brewing in a recent Memphis Business Journal article.

Jim over at Lootcorp 3.0 has announced the next Session topic: German Beer. The next Session will take place September 5.

In honor of the start of Oktoberfest, I’ve decided to make September’s topic Deutsches Bier — German beer. I want you all to focus on the wonderful contributions our German neighbors have made to the beer world. You can write about a particular German style you really enjoy, a facet of German beer culture which tickles your fancy, or any other way in which Germany and beer have become intertwined in your life. Bonus points for Bavarian-themed posts.

I guess it’s time to finally post the rest of my photos from my trip to Bavaria last winter. And if you were thinking how easy it would be to just talk about your trip to Oktoberfest, forget it. Here’s why.

I’m going to ask that no one submit an actual Oktoberfest trip report unless it really had some profound impact on you — the goal is to dig a little deeper and write about how German beers and beer culture have worked their way into your life (and hearts). Oh, and if you absolutely hate all beers German, that’s fair game, too — tell us why!

I applaud that exception, it’s been done to death. I think we can all do better than Oktoberfest. Perhaps when we all run out of ideas, say for Session #1,083, then we can have Oktoberfest as the topic. Until then, Germany has so much more to offer.

On the last day of the Oregon Brewers Festival, I attended the Recovery Brunch at Hopworks Urban Brewery, which included special dishes and special mixed beer drinks.

Hosts for the brunch: Assistant brewery Jeremy, brewmaster Christian Ettinger and brewer Ben Love, all from Hopworks.

The very delicious HUBmosa, orange juice with HUB’s Kolsch.

For more photos from the HUB Brunch, visit the photo gallery.
 

Wow, it’s been a week since the Oregon Brewers Festival in Portland and I still haven’t posted all the pictures from the festival. Take Saturday, for example, which is traditionally the crazy day at OBF, where it becomes so crowded that it’s even hard to get a beer. This year, though, crazy isn’t strong enough to describe how crowded it was. Lines were record length, especially for popular beers like 21A’s Watermelon Wheat and Pliny the Elder. In all, there were 73 different craft beers from 18 states served at the festival.

Here’s how the festival went this year, as summarized in a press release:

The nation’s largest outdoor craft beer festival witnessed record attendance with 70,000 people, a 15 percent increase over last year’s all time high. Beer sales followed suit, also showing a 15 percent increase. The four-day event concluded on July 27th at Tom McCall Waterfront Park.

“We weren’t sure what to expect for attendance and sales given the economic situation, but we were prepared to take a hit,” explained festival director and founder Art Larrance. “Instead, rising gas prices seemed to have helped us. People are staying home this summer, and many chose to partake of our city’s mass transit and explore festivals taking place in their own backyard.”

The event kicked off on July 24th with a one-mile parade by brewers and beer lovers on the city’s sidewalks, led by Portland Mayor Tom Potter and accompanied by a small marching band. Upon arrival at the venue, Mayor Potter swung a wooden mallet to drive the brass tap into the official first keg of the festival, presented by Widmer Brothers Brewing Co.

Inside the tents at OBF, merriment reigned supreme.
 

For more photos from Saturday during this year’s OBF, visit the photo gallery.
 

The Wall Street Journal had an interesting profile a couple of days ago about Beerlao, a beer made in Laos. (Thanks, Doug, for sending me the link.) Partially owned by Carlsberg (it’s three of their 255 brands), the Lao Brewery makes a lager, a low-calorie Light and a Dark lager.

The science news outlets on the web were all abuzz with an odd discovery yesterday involving the symbiotic relationship between the Pentail Tree Shrew and the Bertram Palm, whose flower acts essentially as a natural brewery, creating a 3.8% abv concoction that’s closest to beer in strength and is fermented using wild yeast. My friend and colleague Rick initially sent me the NPR version of the story (thanks Rick) but it seems every science website has a version of it.

There’s also a description in Germany’s idw:

‘This palm is brewing its own beer with the help of a team of yeast species, several of them new to science,’ explains Wiens. The highest alcohol percentage the scientists could measure in the nectar was an impressive 3.8 %. ‘It reaches among the highest alcohol contents ever reported in natural food.’ The palm tree keeps its nectar beer flowing from specialised smelly flower buds for a month and a half before the pollen is ripe, probably to keep a guaranteed clientele of potential pollinators visiting. In contrast to most plants the bertam palm flowers almost year-round.

And here’s yet another version of how the tree makes beer, from Science News:

Bertam palms (Eugeissona tristis) don’t observe a strict season, so at any given time plants will be flowering somewhere in the forest. The stemless palms send up a tall spike with more than 1,000 flowers, some with just male sexual organs and the others hermaphroditic. For weeks before a particular sexual phase, the flower buds dribble nectar. Yeasts inside the buds typically raise the nectar’s alcohol content mildly, to around 0.06 percent, but can punch it up to as high as 3.8 percent.

“This is an astonishing story,” says John Dransfield, a palm specialist at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew in Richmond, England. He says he doesn’t know of another palm offering such a beer bash, but perhaps the other species secreting abundant nectar just haven’t been studied yet.

Since the Pentail Tree Shrew has been drinking beer daily for millions of years, a German science website declared that “Boozing Is Older Than Mankind.” They continue.

A wild mammal closely resembling the earliest primates is drinking palm beer on a daily basis since maybe millions of years. Nevertheless, this Malaysian treeshrew is never drunk. This suggests a beneficial effect, and sheds a whole new light on the evolution of human alcoholism.

From the New Scientist account:

“It’s a beautiful example of the natural biology of alcohol consumption, which people have totally neglected in alcohol research,” says Robert Dudley of the University of California at Berkeley.

Dudley has previously suggested that our taste for alcohol may be an “evolutionary hangover” from our fruit-eating primate ancestors, who developed a taste for fermented fruit.

And idw also tackles this contradiction:

Alcohol use and abuse can no longer be blamed on the inventors of brewing of about 9,000 years ago. So far, the current theories on alcoholism have stated that mankind and its ancestors were either used to take no alcohol at all or maybe only low doses via fruits – before the onset of beer brewing. As brewing is such a recent event on the evolutionary time scale, we were not able to develop an adequate defence against the adverse effects of alcohol and the partly hereditary addiction. Mankind is suffering from an evolutionary hangover, as they say. Contrary to this belief, chronic high consumption of alcohol already occurred early on in primate evolution, [according to this new study].

Yet, the flower-visiting mammals showed no signs of intoxication. Analysis of an alcohol metabolite (ethyl glucuronide) in their hair yielded concentrations higher than those in humans with similarly high alcohol intake. The pentailed treeshrew is considered a living model for extinct mammals representing the stock from which all extinct and living treeshrews and primates radiated. Therefore, we hypothesize that moderate to high alcohol intake was present early on in the evolution of these closely related lineages. It is yet unclear to what extent treeshrews benefit from ingested alcohol per se and how they mitigate the risk of continuous high blood alcohol concentrations.

Fascinating stuff, and yet more evidence that alcohol is far more natural than the neo-prohibitionists would like. It will be interesting to see what further study reveals.

Whoops, I forgot about Thursday evening and posted Friday first. After the parade and ceremony was over, the Oregon Brewers Festival officially began.

The Beer Tent North just after the festival started.
 

For more photos from Thursday during this year’s OBF, visit the photo gallery.