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The Ethical Blogging Debate

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WARNING: This whole post is not really about beer at all, but instead is about blogging about beer and the ethics surrounding what beer bloggers write about. If that sounds dead boring, you can safely ignore reading this one. This is a very, very long post so I wanted to give everyone fair warning before investing a lot of time in reading it only to find out there was no light (beer) at the end of the tunnel.

At the beginning of the month I got an e-mail from Jack of the Stella Artois Blog inviting me to an “exclusive online premiere of the new Stella Artois cinematic website on 15th September, 3 days before it screens to the rest of the world.” The e-mail was personal enough to suggest he’d actually visited the Bulletin but otherwise seemed somewhat canned. I didn’t give it much thought as I was on some deadlines and didn’t reply. Less than a week later I got another e-mail that sounded much less personal and gave me a gentle nudging for having not RSVP’d despite the fact that the original e-mail made no such mention. It did, however, hold out the proverbial carrot that the promotional packets were “dwindling.” A few days later I got a similar introductory e-mail from a Matt, also from Stella Artois, asking me again if I’d watch and write about the new website. All told, I received six e-mails about this promotion. At any rate I did get the promo packet which included a poster, some coasters and the password. In the end I never did get a chance to actually go to the new web launch and watch the movie because I was just too busy with assignments.

In the meantime, every other beer blogger got a similar invitation. Some probably went to the new website and watched the movie, some didn’t. While I was working, Stonch, across the pond, was thinking about this and what it means for bloggers and the beer blogging community. Last week, he wrote a message to all of us. Here’s a part of that message:

The object, of course, is to start a “viral campaign” on the internet. Having recognised that between us we have many thousands of readers, they’re expecting beer bloggers to give free promotion to their product. The Stella Artois Blog lists and thanks those who have so far fallen into the trap. I’d ask those of my peers who have provided a link to or posted about the Stella site to reconsider. If this latest campaign to grab further market share for Stella Artois succeeds – at the expense of products we do like — let’s at least be able to say we weren’t part of it.

Remember what makes blogs unique, and what makes them popular. I’m not implacably against InBev or any other company (although sometimes I think I should be). Just remember that people don’t visit our websites to read press releases from macrobrewers — the trade press covers that nicely. I didn’t start a blog to provide a free service to InBev, and I suspect you didn’t either. Don’t get taken for a ride.

In deference to Stonch’s opinion and my own unsettled mind, I will not provide a link in this post, as I might normally have otherwise done.

What’s really interesting has been the response to Stonch’s post. He’s really sparked an interesting debate about ethics and beer blogging. Alan over at A Good Beer Blog added his take, which he titled Stonch’s New Campaign: Don’t Sell Out Beer Bloggers. Between the two posts, there have been at least 44 comments made, many of them running to several paragraphs, with a back and forth vibe and Stonch at the center defending and clarifying his opinion, as necessary. There were people who agreed wholeheartedly and some who did not. Clearly this issue is on our collective minds.

I started to add my own comments to Stonch’s post and Alan’s follow-up, but my typical verbosity started to run longer than usual so I gave up and started over here instead. If you want to read the originals instead of my cliff notes version, go ahead. I’ll wait right here until you get back. Otherwise, what follows here are the relevant bits of the discussion, at least for my purposes, along with my own take, following each comment, in italics.

Alan at A Good Beer Blog responded first:

How masterful of you and quite right. It is odd when these things come by in the emails — people expecting that their product and your hard won bandwidth/readership have a relationship. A while ago the makers of a movie with beer in the title which likely had a multi-million dollar ad campaign fund, wanted to trade the reputation of beer bloggers for free word of mouth. Backfired.

Bob Woodshed at [BW] Beer Blog disagreed, saying:

While I agree with you that their campaign is obviously viral marketing, the reason I accepted their invitation is because their idea of a cinematic website intrigued me. Stella Artois decided to take a chance by spending every cent on their obviously very expensive site, so why not give them a hand?

Bob’s notion that we should “give them a hand” because they spent a lot of money seems odd, at the very least, to me. Of all the reasons I’ve personally ever reviewed something, cost has never been a factor. Stella Artois is not, of course, much of an underdog with limited resources needing championing. Between their affiliation with Anheuser-Busch and their previous master, InBev, they haven’t exactly been hurting for marketing dollars such that they would have to reach out to the beer blogging community guerrilla-style as their only option to reach potential consumers. So that suggests to me it was a conscious decision to launch a grassroots-like campaign by contacting beer bloggers.

But let me suggest a different way of thinking about this. I don’t see anything inherently wrong with Stella Artois sending us invitations or press releases. I rely on press releases quite a bit to know what’s happening in the industry. I probably get at least a dozen each day. Some I discard immediately and some I write about immediately, with most falling somewhere in between. The only thing different about Stella Artois’ communication with us was that they tried to personalize the messages, which I assume must have taken considerably longer than a gang e-mail exactly the same to everyone on their list. They also perhaps tried to make us feel special by personalizing the e-mails and being invited in to take a peek at the new website early. I hope this doesn’t sound patronizing — it’s not intended to — but most beer bloggers who don’t also work for more traditional media perhaps aren’t used to getting freebies or something early before it’s available to the general public. But really, that’s exactly how regular marketing works. Book reviewers get books before they’re published. Movie reviewers see films before they’re released. That’s how the movie review is in the paper the same day the movie comes out and the book review is a magazine the same week or month it’s published.

Press releases are exactly what Stonch is complaining about, an attempt to get the media to write about whatever is the subject of the press release, no more, no less. Ideally, Stella Artois gave us three days to visit the new website in the hopes that many of us would write about it on the day they launched it thus creating a buzz over its launch. The same thing is happening a million times every day for every product you can imagine and even some you can’t. Check out any of the PR websites where businesses post their press releases. The sheer volume of them is quite amazing. There isn’t a company doing business today that doesn’t use press releases. Some even call them news releases so they don’t sound quite so commercial. But the fact is news organizations do rely on them to some extent for news they write about. It’s one of the ways they gather the news that ends up in their paper, on their television station, or wherever each and every day. So yes, Stella Artois was trying to get something for nothing, but no more so than every other single business in the world. We’re all on the same ride, and we can’t really be taken on one we don’t want to get on.

Mike from the Stella Artois Blog also chimed in, insisting Stella was not trying to seed a viral campaign.

I am part of the team undertaking the Stella Artois campaign and I would just like to correct a couple of things. Nobody is asking you to use a press release. We invited bloggers who we believed were interested in Stella Artois, having read their blogs, to see a preview of the new website. If you don’t like it say so. If you want to say nothing, say nothing. This is not about a ‘viral’ campaign however you define it, this is about respecting your opinion if you wish to give it.

Mike is, I think, partly correct. It was simply an invitation with no real way Stella Artois could or would expect that everyone would write about their new website. With press releases, if you get a 10% return you’re probably doing pretty good. He is, however, I think a little disingenuous when he asserts it wasn’t “about a ‘viral’ campaign however you define it.” Whether he’ll admit it or not, they did want people to write about it. One of the e-mails I received specifically asked me to write about them and said so in no uncertain terms, asking if I’d “be interested in checking out and writing about this new campaign for Stella Artois.” They certainly wouldn’t have spent all that time and resources sending all the beer bloggers an individual e-mail and the packets if they weren’t at least hoping that they’d get a good response and people would write favorably about them. They wanted buzz, to say otherwise seems like spin.

A little later on, Dumbledore remarked:

Alan, what I am trying to say is that it is not the responsibility of the Stella marketing department to maintain the purity of beer blogs. It’s their job to sell Stella. And I think, given that most beer bloggers are open to contact and approaches from sponsors, they have every right to send the emails they have.

It is the responsibility of the beer bloggers to maintain their standards.Which I think is what Stonch is saying when he says “I think it’s clear that I didn’t mean you’re literally asking people to reproduce a press release. However, I’d argue that bloggers uncritically publicising a campaign for InBev amounts to the same thing.” Who’s to blame if bloggers uncritically publicise a campaign? The bloggers, of course.

If you don’t like the product, ignore these emails like we all ignore all the other spam we get daily in our inboxes.

Exactly. We should all critically look at every communique we get and decide if we want to use it or not.

Shawn, the Beer Philosopher, added:

This may be a fundamental philosophical difference between you and I [Stonch], but I don’t tend to, de facto, reject commenting on happenings in the worldwide beer industry because they’re from a macro beer maker. In my opinion, if they do something that’s interesting enough to comment on, I’ll post it … all the while making sure I note to my readers that I in no way endorse or recommend their product.

I agree with Shawn. One should never make a policy decision absolute. Never (pun intended). If nothing else, keeping tabs on macro brewers is a way to keep them honest, too. If they know bloggers might be critical of something they do, it’s possible they won’t do it. Doubtful, perhaps, but possible. But really, most macros have the knowledge, sophisticated equipment and expertise to make fantastic beers, but for business reasons choose to make beers with very broad appeal, inoffensive to almost everyone except us beer geeks. Why do you think they have 95% market share? They have shareholders to appease and are so large that to keep the share price up they must keep up growth. That’s the corporate system. I personally hate that system and believe it’s done and is doing our society great harm, but I understand it. The way to sell more beer is not to suddenly double your costs to go all-malt with three times the hops and then have to spend millions of advertising and marketing dollars to re-train the majority of your consumers that what you’ve been selling up until this point is not really what beer is after all. I love that fantasy, but it will, of course, never ever come to pass. Any big company that tries it would be bankrupt within a year.

Alan, again from A Good Beer Blog:

What Stonch (and I) might be suggesting is that beer bloggers should have a confidence that is not always seen, the confidence to have if not “higher standards” then at least some respect for themselves as media outlets many people now read. Obviously the InBev PR people thought enough about the power of beer blogging to reach out as they did. That they chose this route rather than advertising bloggers or webtech bloggers speaks to the intention of the happening. In significant part, it was to get the product mentioned on beer blogs. In response, beer bloggers should be considering seriously what that means as that, for me, is the real event.

Lew Bryson, at his Seen From a Glass, liking what Alan wrote, added with his usual aplomb:

Very well put. I was feeling nervous about my livelihood a couple years ago; why should people buy my stuff when they could get beer writing for free on the Web? Then some brewer yelled at me for what I said about his beer, and I said it was nothing more than what was being said on the rating sites. Am I to be held to a higher standard, I asked. Well, yeah, he replied, as if I were stupid. You’re an established beer writer. You have a responsibility to your readers and to the brewers. I guess I’d always known that, I was just getting nervous and a bit sloppy. I shaped up, and my work’s actually gotten better and I’ve got more of it.

Bloggers who are consistent, who write good stuff, who take this seriously, whether they are paid for it or not, fall into that same category. You become “serious” and “responsible” by virtue of being there every day, or week, or whatever, and not just writing willy-nilly, but thinking, and asking, and backing up your opinions. And just like with political bloggers getting “real” press credentials, beer bloggers get invites to press trips, samples, press releases, and…invites to website launches. Stonch obviously already has assimilated the flipside of that: the responsibility to write about that with full objective perspective. You have that responsibility to your readers, and as I just exercised, to the brewers — got a press release from a major brewer’s PR firm, and sent it back, noting a somewhat glaring error. Part of the business.

Stonch is quite correct, however, when he says that “what makes blogs unique, and what makes them popular” is their honesty, their voice, along with Alan and Lew’s confidence. It’s that consistency of voice and opinion that I think is at the heart of any good beer bloggers can do. We have to be true to ourselves first. If we can do that, our own voice will emerge. People will know when we’re not being true, especially if they’re following what we’re writing on a regular basis. So personally I don’t want to write about things I don’t believe in or want to support for some reason, because not only will people feel I’ve compromised myself but, more importantly, I’d feel the same way. Maybe that’s overly pretentious, but it is right I think. The only people I read regularly are the ones that I also respect because I know I’m getting their unadulterated true selves in their opinions. I may not always agree with them — and frankly I’d hate it if I did — but an honest exchange of differing viewpoints is what makes change possible. How many times has one of us read something another beer blogger wrote and either commented on it or did their own take in their own post. That’s exactly what sparked this very debate in the first place. This is what makes the beer blogosphere such a healthy and important medium. The exchange of ideas and opinions is perhaps our most important contribution to the beer world. Frankly, I don’t really care that much how many people agree with me so long as I made them think. (Oh, sure, it would be nice if people did agree with me all the time, but it’s not the most important thing. I’ve grown used to being out of step with the world.)

Stan Hieronymus, from Appellation Beer (and others) weighed in:

There is a level of Internet logistics and marketing not being mentioned here.

First, the PR folks are reaching out to many more people than beer bloggers. Think of it like launching an independent film in theaters. Buzz is their business.

Second, there are the logistics of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). A topic I care nothing about and pay no attention to, but I do know that incoming links help move a site up the search engine ladder and get it more attention.

Third, in every study about why consumers will buy a beer (in this case substitute “visit a web site about beer”) you’ll see that people say a recommendation from a friend is more important than advertising.

So it’s not necessarily a matter of seeking a link without paying, but that the placement within editorial copy is more valuable.

Stan is also correct here and I think this is at least part of the motivation of not just Stella Artois, but every company who sends out press releases.

Alan, at A Good Beer Blog, also did his own post about this issue, which itself sparked several thoughtful comments. Here’s part of what Alan had to say:

We who have worked hard, who are sifting as we are sipping, picking the good from the bad should be confident in the nobility of the thoughtful drinker — and the value of talking it up. Fine beer, like any serious food or drink, fulfills itself in the theatre of its consumption. So whatever is it we are, we are something related to that and it’s definitely something worthwhile. Let’s give it respect.

Don’t get me wrong. There is nothing wrong with a parcel full of swag and, to be sure, the day is not yet here when the embrace offered by beer bloggers has been universally reciprocated by the brewers, the shops, the pubs. So, if I was to add anything and as was the case when the PR folk for the movie BeerFest came around, when a product placement is offered and if you are even interested, maybe think to ask what they are willing to pay. You are spending a lot to promote the good in beer. A lot. Beer should at least pay for itself if you are going to play the role of spreading the good news. If the product or the price is not right, shouldn’t the answer be “no thanks”?

Then Stan from Appellation Beer piped in about a question Stonch had asked in a previous post, “can marketing campaigns, backing homogenised products from big brewers, do anything to help the cause of quality beer?”

Alan then clarified his position:

I don’t think I can say what a beer blog should be. But I do think it is important to acknowledge what they can be and might be already — which I think is a big part of Stonch’s point. Collectively, they represent a huge readership. Bigger than most trade magazines and more immediately responsive. If we come back to the core element in the entire process, press releases or websites or ads are sideshows to what is in the glass. Heck, even a lot of what is “beer culture” is a bit of a sideshow for me.

I think there is no one thing we could ever agree on about what a beer blog should be. There can never be a right answer to that question. A blog can only be whatever the person writing it wants it to be. Blogs that touch people, challenge them to think in new ways or entertain them with a uniquely singular voice will always have more readers than blogs by a company or committee or ones that compromise themselves for a few doubloons.

I get requests to advertise, promote, and write about all manner of things that I find don’t fit with my personal ethos every single day. Some are quite obvious and I’m often astonished that people think I might be willing to write about these things. A particularly odd one was a so-called humor blogger sent me his tale of sending the Boston Beer Co. fake (and ridiculous) letters of complaint which they of course had to respond to in all seriousness, taking up their time and resources just so these yahoos could have a cheap laugh at their expense. It’s a type of humor, often employed on morning radio shows, that I just don’t get. There’s nothing witty, clever or even funny about trying to demean an unsuspecting mark. But they thought I’d find this hilarious and would want to write about their cruel prank. As I know the person who was stuck writing the responses, I promptly forwarded it to her and hopefully they put a stop to it. But I get these kinds of things all the time, people wanting me to hawk beer pong t-shirts or beer goggles or some other god-awful thing that appeals to the frat boy mentality so many of us are fighting against. It’s as if they don’t bother to read my content and just assume if it’s a beer blog, they’ll just love this.

So I either simply ignore them or politely decline. But that’s the price of being out there in the public arena. I want to get communications from as many sources as possible and pick and choose what fits my purposes or what I think people might be interested in reading about. The fact that I have to sift through offers I don’t want is just part and parcel of the job.

Travis from CNYBrew chimed in with his take from the tech world’s idea of a blog:

Regarding what a beer blog should or shouldn’t be, I would offer that a blog that exists only to promote a product or the blogs sponsors will find itself without any real traffic. People read blogs for a unique and personal perspective outside of the advertising world. Corporate sponsors want to tap into the legitimacy that blogs have earned by good posting.

To me, that’s why Stonch’s stance on this is completely correct. Bloggers who choose to take part in things like this for an obvious pay off and pimp products for money, will quickly lose readership and find themselves looking in from the outside in. I read a lot of tech blogs and I have seen blogs get pegged for this type of activity. The readership lights the bloggers up for selling out.

I’m not convinced that writing about Stella Artois’ new website automatically becomes “selling out.” I think it would depend on what was written, wouldn’t it? I can’t see how reviewing it would be “pimp[ing] products for money” or that there is an “obvious pay off.” First of all, no money changed hands. Secondly, nobody thinks twice about reviewing a beer someone sends them, so why should a website critique be any different? Personally I think the larger beer companies spend far too much money and resources on the look of their websites (and I absolutely loathe the overuse of flash technology) and almost nothing on the content or usefulness of them. But that’s just one opinion. But since beer lovers visit them, why would they be outside the realm of a beer blogger’s milieu? While a lot of people think it’s only about the beer, there is so much more to the beer industry than just the product. And while I do think it’s perfectly fine for someone to restrict themselves to writing just about the beer itself, it therefore follows that it’s equally acceptable to go beyond that narrow definition of the world of beer to include the business, the people, the advertising, and so on. No one can really tell anyone else what to write about. We all have to decide for ourselves and as long as you can defend your decision, at the very least to yourself, and you stay true to yourself, then I can’t see how there are any wrong ways to be a beer blogger.

Stan then added:

I think the blogger should have free choice. And writing about advertising is writing about beer culture. For one thing, if you are assuming something of a watchdog role — which many bloggers do — then there is the matter of calling companies on advertising that doesn’t reflect what’s in the glass.

And he later finished with what for my purposes will be the last word:

I don’t see the point in a blog (beer or otherwise) that apes anything (print, etc.) [basically agreeing with a point Stonch made].

Again, this is what works for me and I’m all for all bloggers to choose their own course, but what Ron Pattinson wrote a little while back makes a perfect mission statement:

“Honest beer is what I want. Beer that can look me straight in the eye and not flinch. Beer with heart. Beer that’s like an old friend. Beer you can sit and drink by the pint in a pub with your mates.”

Just insert “to write about” after “what I want.”

That’s another way of saying be true to yourself and find your own voice, which is my overriding point of all this. But I will go so far as to suggest that it can even be okay to “ape” (though that’s obviously meant derogatorily) a press release. I often reprint press releases for things like beer dinners, festivals or other events to help spread the word about them, especially if I’m attending or know and like the people putting on the event. I usually add my own take or comments about it but will then just quote liberally from the press release, in some cases reprinting almost all of it. Usually I also do this for small breweries who won’t get picked up in the national press and using portions of a press release is an expedient method of getting the information out. Why shouldn’t I help people and events I believe in? Have I sold out because I try to help small brewers get their message out? When I got a press release from Sierra Nevada announcing that they were bottling their anniversary ale for the first time, should I have tossed it out because it was just an attempt to get free publicity and I shouldn’t have fallen into their trap? Of course not, because I believed then — as I still do — that people would want to know that information. It’s all about context and making choices. I don’t think you can make generalizations about almost anything we’re sent as a press release or similar communications.

I know it sounds like I strongly disagree with Stonch, but the truth is I’m glad he posted his thoughts because he prompted this lovely debate and made a lot of us think about what and why we do what we do. I think it’s important for all of us to think about these issues. Honestly, my first reaction to Stonch’s post was one of agreement. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I didn’t. I think it’s the spirit of his message which is so attractive, which is that we should follow our passion and not have it dictated to us. And that’s correct, I think, it’s just that it’s much more complicated than just saying no to big companies. So thanks Stonch. I’m thirsty. Let’s have a beer.

 

Legendary Drinkers

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The online version Ask Men magazine does a weekly top 10 list on a wide variety of subjects, such as “Chill Out Movies” and “Father-Daughter Activities.” This week the list is the Top 10 “Legendary Drinkers.” It’s an interesting list and they at least explain why they chose each person.

Here’s who made the list.

  1. John Barrymore
  2. Hank Williams
  3. Andre the Giant
  4. Dylan Thomas
  5. Winston Churchill
  6. Ernest Hemingway
  7. Richard Harris
  8. Edgar Allen Poe
  9. Benjamin Franklin
  10. Dean Martin
  • Honorable Mention: Judy Garland

 

It’s a fine list and I don’t really want to quibble with it too much. Dylan Thomas, a great poet, is responsible for one of my favorite quotes. “An alcoholic is someone you don’t like who drinks just as much as you do.” But I do think there are some glaring omissions. Chief among them has to be “W.C. Fields.” But other famous drunks that come to mind are Charles Bukowski, Charles McCabe, Dorothy Parker and Hunter Thompson.

Who would you put on the list?

 

Let’s Go, Cicerone

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cicerone-logo “It is a great thing to know our vices.”
 
     — Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BCE)

Nobody I’ve discussed the issue of the title “beer sommelier” with thinks that the term is an appropriate one, because wine is intrinsically embedded into the definition. Over a hearty brew or two, many of us who think about words far too much have been trying to come up with a new word that’s the equivalent of sommelier but for the world of beer. Don Russell in his Joe Sixpack column suggested “Cellarman” Others have tossed out “Beermaster,” “Zymurgier” and even “Ale Consumption Engineer” for discussion. For me, none quite hit the right note.

Ray Daniels has dug deep and found a word that’s fallen out of use: Cicerone, which is pronounced “sis-uh-rohn.” He’s setting up a program where people can be certified in one of three levels of expertise by studying and taking exams based on syllabuses being created as we speak. So far, a draft of the novice syllabus is ready, which is to attain the first level, called a “Certified Beer Server,” along with the master syllabus for both “Certified Cicerone” and “Master Cicerone.”

From the website:

The word Cicerone (pronounced sis-uh-rohn) has been chosen to designate those with proven expertise in selecting, acquiring and serving today’s wide range of beers. The titles “Certified Cicerone” and “Master Cicerone” are protected certification trademarks. Only those who have passed the requisite test of knowledge and tasting skill can call themselves a Cicerone.

I confess that my initial reaction to the word wasn’t entirely positive, probably just because it is an unfamiliar word with no intuitive meaning. But by letting it marinate for a few days, it is beginning to grow on me. I certainly love the idea of having our own word. By using a word currently unknown to all but the most accomplished crossword puzzler, we can take it and make it our own. There are already rumblings and grumblings by people who don’t like the word because it isn’t beer-y enough or wasn’t decided upon by a committee of industry leaders. I say let’s just move past that and work on the more important task of creating a world where every fine restaurant has its own sommelier and cicerone. We could spend months and years debating the right word to use, and I for one probably have, but I’d rather keep my eye on the prize. I say kudos to Ray for hanging it out there and just going for it. The real trick for him is gaining acceptance on the front lines, at bars, brewpubs and restaurants. It’s in the beer industry’s best interests for an idea like this to take root, so I believe we should all support this idea and stop quibbling over the name. I, for one, am relieved to set aside that question. The sooner we’re united as an industry in using “cicerone,” the sooner it will gain broader acceptance, not only at eating and drinking establishments, but also with the general public, the civilian population. And when that happens we’ll have accomplished a grand leap forward toward our collective goal of getting beer the respect we all believe it deserves.

For my fellow word nerds, here’s some more information about the word “cicerone.” The website explains the origin of the word thusly:

Cicerone is an English word referring to “one who conducts visitors and sightseers to museums and explains matters of archaeological, antiquarian, historic or artistic interest.” For beer, a Cicerone will possess the knowledge and skills to guide those interested in beer culture, including its historic and artistic aspects. “Cicerone” now designates a person with demonstrated expertise in beer who can guide consumers to enjoyable and high-quality experiences with great beer.

According to my O.E.D., the word is taken from the name of the Roman orator and statesman, Marcus Tullius Cicero, and is “supposed [to be] referring to his learning or eloquence,” similar to the word mentor, which seems to fit. The OED definition is:

A guide who shows and explains the antiquities and curiosities of a place to strangers.

It was first used in print in 1726 and by the end of that century began to be used more in the general sense of a guide, before falling out of general usage in the mid-1800s. The OED suggests Ciceronage, Ciceroneship and Ciceronism to denote “the function or action of a Cicerone.” Also, according to the OED, it’s actual historical origin remains unknown and curiously was used in English before it ever shows up in Italian dictionaries.

Personally, I can’t wait to have my first restaurant experience where after the waiter hands me my menu, a man or woman standing behind the server walks up to the table, saying. “Good evening, I’ll be your Cicerone tonight.” That will be a wonderful day.

cicerone-banner-460

Brookston Beer Bulletin Fantasy Football Season 2007

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NFL Football is pretty much the only major sport I pay much attention to these days. Of the arguably four major sports (baseball, football, basketball and ice hockey) it’s the only one I think that goes well with craft beer. Hear me out. I know you can get decent beer at most sporting events if you’re willing to pay a premium price and do some extensive searching around the park, stadium or whatever. But baseball is played in the summer months and both basketball and hockey are indoor sports so all three tend to favor warm weather light beers, the kind made in vats the size of Montana. Football, on the other hand, is usually played outdoors in the dead of fall or winter, in rain, sleet or snow, with the wind whipping through the frozen tundra turning everyone into human Popsicles. That’s the perfect time for a nice warming barleywine, doppelbock or Belgian tripel. Or perhaps a thick Imperial Russian Stout, an über hoppy Double IPA or even a nice Wee Heavy. Now those are football beers. Yum.

Despite having grown up in Pennsylvania, I’ve been a Green Bay fan my entire life. But after the Lombardi years, the Packers went through a twenty year drought that made my enthusiasm for the game pretty hard to sustain. It’s hard to keep rooting for a team that never wins, especially when all your friends are 49ers fans, it’s the Montana/Young era and they rub it in your face at every opportunity. But finally in the early nineties, Brett Favre joined the team and they finally started winning again. And ever since it’s been fun again to follow football.

So I’ve set up two free Yahoo fantasy football games, one a simple pick ’em game and the other a survival pool, and you’re invited to play along. Up to 50 people can play each game, so if you’re a regular Bulletin reader feel free to sign up. It’s free to play, all you need is a Yahoo ID, which is also free. Below is a description of each game and the details on how to play.

Pro Football Pick’em

In this Pick’em game, just pick the winner for every game each week, with no spread, and let’s see who gets the most correct throughout the season. All that’s at stake is bragging rights, but it’s fun.

In order to join the group, just go to Pro Football Pick’em, click the “Sign Up” button (or “Create or Join Group” if you are a returning user). From there, follow the path to join an existing private group and when prompted, enter the following information…

Group ID#: 32392
Password: bulletin

Survival Football

If picking all sixteen football game every week seems like too much, then Survival Football is for you. In Survival Football, you only have to pick one game each week. The only catch is you can’t pick the same team to win more than once all season. And you better be sure about each game you pick because if you’re wrong, you’re out for the season. Last man standing wins.

In order to join the group, just go to Survival Football, click the “Sign Up” button and choose to “Join an Existing Group”, then “Join a Private Group”. Then, when prompted, enter the following information…

Group ID#: 10094
Password: bulletin

 

Hard Drive Crash

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My computer crashed two days ago while running a routine update. The culprit was the hard drive, which has now been replaced. I’ve got my computer back now but I’m still waiting to see if I can get all the data off the old drive. Until then, I’m missing some files that make it possible for new posts to be created. Hopefully, posting will continue again by this afternoon or tomorrow. Thanks for your patience.

John White’s Final Trip

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I was at the Celebrator offices Monday night, doing a tasting of wheat beers for the next issue, when the sad news came in that John White, the tireless supporter of great beer passed away at 62. I never met the man, but know plenty of people who have and sang his praises. He ran the White Beer Travels website, a terrific resource for beer travelers and also beer-themed travel adventures known as “White Beer Travels Beer Hunts.” According to the website, White passed away on July 2 and a service celebrating his life was held on the 9th in his hometown of Grimsby, England.

Carolyn Smagalski has a moving tribute on her website, Bella Online, entitled “Tribute to a White Knight.”

John White with Michael Jackson in 2004.
 

Session #5: Atmosphere

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Today is our fifth Beer Blogging Friday “Session” and the topic is decidedly cerebral. Ron and Al, who run Hop Talk have chosen a topic near and dear to their hearts: atmosphere. Ron at Hop Talk wrote about atmosphere when they first started their blog almost a year ago. In that first atmospheric post, he wrote: “It might be a place, it might be a time, and it might be the company you are with; but, there’s no two ways about it, a beer will taste better if enjoyed in the right atmosphere.”

Fast forward to this June and the set-up for today’s session, which Ron and Al describe thusly:

Beer is about more than flavor, IBUs, and the debate over what is a craft beer and what isn’t. It’s about Life. It’s the proverbial icing on the cake.

So, we want to know about the “Atmosphere” in which you enjoy beer. Where is your favorite place to have a beer? When? With whom? Most importantly:

Why?

Because while life isn’t all about beer, beer is all about life.

I like this topic because it appeals to my philosophical nature and my tendency to over-analyze everything. I can’t really decide what is the right beer to have for such a discussion, though something atmospheric should do the trick. I suspect one isn’t really even necessary but I want to keep the tradition of including a beer as part of each Session. After all, what’s a Session without a beer?

After rummaging through the beer refrigerator I settle on a small 375 ml bottle of Russian River Temptation (batch 002) that’s been in there for several months, at least. As this is an out-of-this-world topic I give in to temptation and pick an out-of-this-world beer. So beer in hand, let’s tackle this sucker. High in the upper atmosphere — the exosphere — where the air is thinnest, is a good place to start. Metaphorically, I’d like to peel back the layers as we get closer and closer to the surface of things, where the air is thicker and richer. Will the heat shield hold? It’s been hotter than hades in the Bay Area this week. I hope I chose my beer wisely.

This far from home, your favorite place to have a beer is undoubtedly home. No matter how far you roam, no matter how many places you adopt as new homes, no matter how much time has passed, you only have one original home, the place you were born. I spent the first eighteen years of my life in one place and only three houses, two of which belonged to my grandmothers and the third one was purchased by my mother when she married my alcoholic stepfather when I was five. That one was in downtown Shillington. After high school, I left and came back more times than I care to remember, always drawn home like the proverbial moth to the flame, perhaps for the warmth of familiarity.

I was amazed to see Stan over at Appellation Beer chose the Northeast Taproom in Reading, Pennsylvania and included a piece he wrote ten years before when owner Pete Cammarano still had the place. What’s amazing about that is that Reading is my hometown — or near enough, I grew up just outside Reading in a little suburb called Shillington. So every visit home also included stopping in at the Northeast Taproom to spend time with friends who weren’t fortunate enough to escape the slow death of Reading from a mid-size industrial, manufacturing hub into the “Outlet Capital of the World” where busloads of shoppers from all over the east coast flock to buy cheap goods and take advantage of Pennsylvania having no sales tax on clothing.

After a stint in the Army Band, I was back living in the Commonwealth when I turned 21. I was also married (to my first wife) and putting myself through college and working full-time running a record store in the mall. So my best bar days were behind me, at least in Reading. I learned about most of the good ones while still underage as my stepfather had an uncanny knack of knowing all the best taverns, especially which ones had the best food. So by the time I was 21, I already knew the best ones to go to and so spent little time on experimentation. I already knew which ones felt comfortable to me, though it would take considerably longer to understand why that was so. Two teachers at Wilson High School — where by father-in-law was superintendent — wrote a book called “The Bars of Reading” and were invited to be on the Tonight Show. (My prick of a father-in-law told them they couldn’t go, but they managed it without his blessing, but that’s another story). I still have my copy and it’s still remarkable just how many corner bars there were in such a small town. At some of them, even today, you can still buy a 7 oz. glass of draft beer for under a buck. But the Northeast Taproom was by far the best in modern times. It was a great combination of good selection, quirky weirdness yet with that neighborhood bar feel to it. I haven’t been back since Pete sold the place and in a way I’m almost scared to go. I just don’t want to prove Tom Wolfe right, even though in this case he probably is correct.

So there is something about a drink at home in places dripping with nostalgia and memories. I often glance about such places furtively, forgetting for a second that I’m old enough to legally be drinking inside, not just stealing sips from my stepfather’s glass when no one is looking. But as comfortable as I feel in such places, having grown up in them, and despite such wonderful atmosphere they are more a piece of history and the past than my favorite places right now. For that, we have to descend farther into the atmosphere to the Thermosphere, where the Space Shuttle happily tests yeast and the Aurora Borealis straddles the Karman Line (at 100 km — the international definition of where space begins).

Below that is the Mesosphere, which is where most of the meters that shower the Earth burn up in the atmosphere. They’re just too hot to drink with, despite there being a French beer called Meteor. As we close in on Earth, we next descend into the Stratosphere, which is where what’s left of the ozone layer resides. It’s also where we send weather balloons to track the patterns in the atmosphere used by meteorologists to incorrectly predict the weather so maddeningly often. Just a little farther along we reach the final layer, known as the Troposphere. This where the airplanes fly, at its thickest a mere 23,000 feet (4 1/3 mi.) at the poles and 60,000 feet (10 1/2 mi.) at the equator. We sit at the very bottom of this airy fishbowl, on our barstools, talking about the weather and quenching out thirst with another beer. That’s our own atmosphere. Of course, it doesn’t answer the question of our favorite drinking atmosphere.

So let’s break the question down:

  1. Where
  2. When
  3. With Whom
  4. Why

1. Where

Where is probably the first aspect you think of when the question of atmosphere is posed. Location, location, location. The other W’s are merely window dressing to place and merely modify your experience of that place whether temporally, by its fellowship or the reason you’re there in the first place. So without question “where” is what atmosphere is all about. It’s the hokey pokey. Everything else that may or may not enhance it doesn’t stand a chance unless you’ve chosen the right place to begin with. So where are the best places? That’s undoubtedly a personal decision, but there is, I think, some universal criteria that we’d all more or less agree with.
 

  • Comfort: In my opinion, the best places are the ones where I feel the most comfortable, however you define that. I don’t necessarily mean safe, some of my favorite places are often described as dive bars. But you have to feel in place, not out of it. Often, that requires other people, but not always. There are plenty places of solitude that would qualify for me.

    •  

  • Beauty: It’s hard to admit, but looks do matter. Who wouldn’t prefer the stunning vista of mountains or a lake to a brick wall? There’s something universally calming about the idylls of nature. Why fight it?

    •  

  • The Source: It’s hard to imagine a better place than the source of something as the best place to enjoy it. I can’t imagine the unfiltered Radeberger Zwickel tastes sweeter outside of its native Dresden. Isn’t that why barrel tasting is so wonderful? You just can’t get closer to the source than that. I’m sure that’s why I like drinking in breweries so much.

 

2. The Rest

To me, when is less about time than season. Even here in California, where the seasons don’t make themselves individually known as forcefully as more temperate climates, there is a rhythm to the year. Some of it is imposed artificially by the calendar but much of it is still managed by nature herself. The time of year often makes the decision of a beer or range of beers for you. The blonde ale I’m enjoying right now is ideal for the warmth of this July day. If it were cooler, I’d be craving something heartier.

The people you drink with to my mind does more to change the experience than any other single factor, except for place. Simpatico drinking buddies are worth their weight in gold. They take a good situation — great place, great beer — and turn it into an experience worth remembering. Oftentimes, you can’t even remember what was discussed, just that it was an enjoyable experience. And in the end, that’s really all that matters.

And that brings us to why, which our hosts Ron and Al regard as being of the utmost importance. I’m not sure I place as much stock in the why as they do, though it’s undoubtedly important. I think, more often than not, the why of what makes a particular atmosphere comes out of the other factors, is in effect created by the place, the beer, the camaraderie, etcetera. It’s the synergy of all of the other factors coming together in such a way as makes them all fit together. I’m sure you can create those conditions artificially, but I’m willing to bet that it’s the ones that come together of their own accord that are the best. You can choose a great place. You can order a great beer. You can invite terrific friends to join you. But that’s still no guarantee of a great time. Oh, I’ll grant you it’s a good start and will probably work more often than not. Still, you could also go to the same place with the same people and drink the same beer night after night and not recreate a magical evening. It’s that indefinable synergy that provide the final ingredient and makes a pleasant evening into a truly memorable one.

Of course, like the best philosophy (not that I really have one), all of the preceding says quite a lot yet fails to answer the simple question of where is my favorite place to enjoy a beer. So here goes. During the day, my favorite location is where I spend most of my time — my house. In any comfy chair — comfort is king! — whether on the back deck, my office or the snuggle chair in the living room surrounded by my wife and friends is the ideal spot. At night, I fancy being out in the middle of nowhere with the bright stars twinkling overhead and a roaring campfire in front of me. Again, in a — what else? — comfy folding camp chair surrounded by my wife and friends.

Notice that regardless of the place, friends are an indispensable component of a favorite place to drink. Even though I continue to feel that location is of the utmost importance, it all falls apart if the experience can’t be enjoyed with the right people. Beer isn’t called a social lubricant for nothing. I haven’t read many other Session pieces yet, but I’m willing to bet sight unseen that for almost every single one, drinking with the right people is what it’s all about. I think that’s going to be near universal. Because while “place” makes the experience, “people” makes the experience worthwhile.

We started out, perhaps reluctantly, admitting “life isn’t all about beer” instead championing that “beer is all about life.” For those of us who think about beer so much more than the rest of the population — whatever we call ourselves — we do so because we’ve convinced ourselves that we’re in on a secret that enhances our very lives. It’s not necessarily a secret we want to keep, but instead is one we want to shout about to anybody willing to listen.

I imagine it’s like seeing color in a black and white world. How would you describe red or blue or yellow to someone who’s never seen color? And once you’ve seen the world in all it’s rich hues, the black and white world seems all gray and lifeless by comparison. It’s such a rich experience that you can’t help but want other people to see it, too. It’s too magnificent to keep it to yourself. It’s frankly a little frustrating when so many people seem to say, “nah, I like my world in black and white, thank you very much” because you know how much they’re missing. Sometimes I feel a little sorry for them, even though I know how patronizing and condescending that sounds. I see people I’ve known for years, still drinking industrial light lagers without a moment’s pause, and I just shake my head thinking of all of life’s pleasures they’re denying themselves. Because how could someone who thinks all beer is the same possibly even consider a question like atmosphere? It’s all the same, right? So what can it matter? I always imagine such people — trying to give them the benefit of the doubt — just feel they have more important things to think about. Truthfully, that never actually seems to be the case, and in fact many just seem to be sleepwalking through life not giving too much thought to any of the choices they make, beer or otherwise. If that really is the case, how many simple pleasures that you and I take for granted do they miss over and over again? If nothing else, loving beer is about enjoying life to the fullest, because it never stops with the beer. I guess beer is a gateway pleasure, because it leads to single malt scotch, cider, pairing with food, purposeful travel, fantastic cheese, port, cooking, and all manner of decadence that leads to a richer, fuller life. It also leads to an intuitive understanding that the very idea of “atmosphere” is important to the true enjoyment of life. That there is a healthy percentage of the world that can’t see that is very sad, indeed. Maybe that’s why there’s so much misery in the world today. Perhaps better beer really could save the world. Okay, I’ve changed my mind again. My favorite place to have a beer is that future world where everybody drinks good beer, war is an unknown concept and everybody understands that a life half-lived is a life wasted.

Hey, I can dream, can’t I? I’ll hold out until everybody understands the following poem, Lines on Ale (1848), by Edgar Allen Poe (1809-1849):

Fill with mingled cream and amber,
I will drain that glass again.
Such hilarious visions clamber
Through the chamber of my brain.
Quaintest thoughts, queerest fancies
Come to life and fade away.
What care I how time advances;
I am drinking ale today.

Amen, brother.

 

Announcing The Brookston Beer Pix Photoblog

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It’s been a busy week. I just got back from almost a week in Colorado for my cousin’s wedding. Of course, I did a little sightseeing and was fortunate enough to sample the special edition of La Folie that New Belgium did for the Falling Rock‘s 10th anniversary. Chris Black, along with New Belgium brewer, Eric Salazar, blended beer from 10 foders (four 60- and six 130-hectoliter wood tuns) into one pretty spectacular beer. I missed seeing Chris while I was there, which meant I didn’t get to hear his version of what will undoubtedly be come to be known as the Twisted Pine Debacle, which culminated in the wooden sign that hangs above the center booths being sawed in half diagonally. The second-hand story I was regaled with was pretty good but I can only imagine it coming from the horse’s mouth. More reports from Colorado will follow this week.

All of which has nothing to do with this post’s title, except by way of explanation of the two reasons there haven’t been as many posts or rants lately. The second reason is I’ve been working on something new. I’m pleased to announce the launch of The Brookston Beer Pix, a beer-themed photoblog. For no better reason than I thought it would be fun for me, each day I’ll post a new photo that I’ve taken over the years that has something to do with beer. To be sure there will be gleaming stainless steel and glowing copper along with lush green hops, but also some other fun and more unusual shots as well. The hope is to showcase beer, brewing and the brewing community in a more artistic way and feed my own creative side. Plus, it gives me something to do with all those photographs that I can’t sell. Who knows, perhaps it will make me a better photographer. Take a look and let me know which pictures you like and which you don’t, and, of course, why.

 

 

On the Road Again

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Sorry once again for the dearth of news over the last several days, I was in San Diego from Sunday through Tuesday and at a beer festival in the Bay Area Saturday. But what took even more time out of my last few days was preparing a power point presentation for a talk I gave Monday at a California Small Brewers Association meeting in San Diego. I’m on the marketing committee and was going to the session anyway, but was asked at the last minute to give a presentation, which meant I had to scramble to get ready for it. I literally was working on it until an hour before showtime but I think it went off fairly well, if a little less polished and organized than I might have liked. Anyway, I’ve got a bunch of photos to post and much news to digest and chew over that passed me by while I was away. As a result, look for even more than the usual number of posts over the next few days. Cheers.

Against the Ropes

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Part of me breathes a sigh of relief when someone else I respect reacts the same way I do to something, case in point being the recent Slate beer slam that I wrote about yesterday. Not only did Food & Wine editor Nick Fauchald take offense, but so did fellow beer writers Stan Hieronymous and Jess Sand. On one hand there’s a certain comfort to know I’m not off the deep end, which is a place I often find myself, but on the other hand these sort of attacks on beer seem to be coming with an alarming frequency here of late. Increasingly, they seem calculated to cause offense in order to increase web traffic, ratings, exposure, etc. It’s what I’ve called the Coulter-effect since incendiary pundit Ann Coulter is a master at the ridiculously offensive statement that’s crafted just for that purpose of keeping herself in the public eye as an object of media attention without which presumably she’d whither and die (figuratively, I mean). There have been quite a few of these lately against beer that have caused quite a stir, but I won’t mention them by name so as not to give them more of what they crave — attention.

This latest one on Slate is heating up again, thanks to a Q&A with author Field Maloney that the Washington Post hosted yesterday at 10:00 a.m. I’m sorry I missed the live version, but there is a transcript, thoughtfully sent to me by a Bulletin reader (thanks Sean). Maloney answered a baker’s dozen of questions, most of which were asking for advice on what to drink, but a few were more illuminating, both for the questions themselves and Maloney’s answers.

Question #4 was from a wine blogger in the D.C. area, Winesmith, and he displays a great deal of ignorance (I don’t mean that derisively BTW, just that he doesn’t seem to be aware) about how well food and beer work together when he writes the following in his query. “More people are beginning to realize (consciously or not) that wine and food enhance each other, but beer is a refresher that washes food down.” To his credit, Maloney disagrees with this, and says he “think[s] [beer’s] flavors can play off the flavors of food nicely.” But the wholesale statement that wine is so self-evidently better with food than beer is remarkable in what it says about perception and how the self-avowed wine lover can become myopic in pursuit of a narrow range of tastes. Wine goes quite poorly with a wide range of foods, such as Barbecue, Cajun, Chinese, Indian, Japanese and Mexican, to name a few. As Garrett Oliver put it in his wonderful book, The Brewmaster’s Table, “spices distort wine flavors, turning white wines hot and red wines bitter.” And the caramelized flavors from roasted grains work perfectly with the similar caramelized flavors you get when you cook meat. I could go on and on, but the point is simply that I’m always surprised at what people don’t know and so surmise or presume to be true based on propaganda. It’s understandable but deeply troubling.

Question #7 concerns the much-discussed 2005 Gallup poll that was the basis for some of Maloney’s conclusions. The question, from Philadelphia, was that “despite the Gallup Poll in 2005 (the 2006 poll put beer back on top, by the way, but it didn’t get anywhere near the press attention the 2005 one did — more evidence of a wine-wing media bias…) beer continues to handily outsell wine, both in volume and dollar sales. What’s that indicate?” Maloney responds with these gems.

Some of the beer people pointed this out in 2005. Even though more Americans said they preferred wine in that pool, beer still outsold wine 6 to 1. So either a very few people drink a whole lot of beer, or people are more stuck on beer than they let on. I think because wine has become more of a “lifestyle” drink, people might be more likely to say they “prefer” wine in a poll, even though they actually drink more beer. But who knows? The unpredictable psychology of polling behavior is fascinating to me.

Also, I think the American media loves stories that indicate a shift in the status quo. In this case, with wine vs. beer, it was a shift in the status quo that seemed to reinforce some larger cultural trends. That kind of stuff is catnip to journalists.

Now this is just plain odd. Maloney actually admits “beer still outsold wine 6 to 1” along with his fascination with the “unpredictable psychology of polling behavior.” He then went on to explain why so much of the media pounced on the 2005 poll. So not only did he know that the poll was bogus and not indicative of a real trend, he even speculated on why it was so over-reported. So maybe this is just too obvious a question, but then why on Earth did he use the poll as support for his theory that suddenly wine is ascendant and beer is in a nosedive. Acknowledging that here is a bit like getting away with murder and then later saying offhandedly, “oh sure, I knew I killed her, but ….” To me, this makes Maloney a first class wanker, because it means everything that flowed from this first incorrect statistic (in paragraph two of his article) that he knew was incorrect is all malarkey. It makes the whole hatchet job more malicious somehow. I could more easily forgive using a faulty statistic if I thought it was an innocent mistake or that he genuinely believed it to be true. But writing falsehoods that you know to be false to support an already questionable conclusion is really hitting below the belt.

Finally, in Question #10, a person from Cleveland asked him to justify his position given the terrific growth that craft beer has experienced lately. Maloney’s answer was the same as in the sidebar of the original piece, and points out what I suspected, which is that many people who read the article didn’t even know there was a sidebar since to view it you had to click on a link in the middle of the story. Basically, Maloney dismisses the entire craft beer industry with a wave of his hand because it doesn’t represent a big enough piece of the pie. It’s a stunning piece of logic which in my opinion requires balls the size of kegs to even say out loud. It’s just so condescendingly insulting. It reminds me of the way some people treat children, the ones that refuse to take seriously anything they say until they reach a certain age. But 100 million cases of beer seems like a plenty big enough kid. To keep the analogy going, craft beer is in its mid-twenties, and has been showing signs of maturing for several years now. Pretending we don’t exist or that we don’t matter seems necessary only because our continued existence and health makes impossible the notion that beer is dead and wine victorious. It’s irresponsible journalism, in my opinion, to so nakedly ignore facts that do not support your conclusion.

Of course, Coultering doesn’t require facts, only that you be as outrageous as possible. Here Maloney excels. As he correctly points out in the beginning of his answer to Question #2, he states “I’m not a beer authority.” He just plays one in the press. Slate should have been wary of letting someone whose only apparent beer expertise is that he drinks the stuff declare an entire industry to be in its death throes and the healthiest portion of it irrelevant. Then again, maybe Slate was in on the Coultering. “But who knows?” Like Maloney, I too am nostalgic for a pastoral bygone era, but mine is for a time when journalists and the news media had standards and ethics. Maybe such a time never really existed, who knows? But I’ve decided that I won’t let facts get in my way, either. Apparently that’s not how it’s done anymore.