Craft beer bollocks, part whatever
Oh Americans, will you never learn?
"The oldest persisting food purity law in the world is the German Reinheitsgebot. In April 1516, Duke Wilhelm IV and Duke Ludwig X of Bavaria decreed that the only ingredients to be used in making lager were water, barley, and hops. (It wouldn’t be until the 19th century that Louis Pasteur discovered the crucial role of yeast in fermenting sugars into ethanol).[dd notes - this bit isn't really true. Pasteur discovered the means by which fermentation worked, but it is not like medieval brewers didn't know about yeast.]
While this law ensured the quality, tradition, and purity of beer in Germany, it also stifled experimentation and innovation by prohibiting brewers from testing other ingredients. The Belgian monks, by contrast, were free to develop complex and innovative beer styles during the last few centuries by adding fruits, spices, wild yeast and bacteria, and other cereal grains, like wheat, to their ales. This experimental spirit has been embraced by today’s do-it-yourself home brewers and craft brewers in the United States, which is currently regarded as the most innovative and exciting country for craft beer.
Well, the history is a bit all over the place here (to start with, he's anticipated Bismarck by three hundred years in order to enforce a Bavarian law all over Germany). But the real issue is once more the "we have more and more different varieties of basically identical syrupy hoppy IPA, therefore our beer is best, and you can buy it in bottles in supermarkets" line that American beer bores always try to push on you. If one considers the implications of this, one ends up concluding that Prague isn't much of a beer-drinker's town (only three breweries, mostly producing ordinary pilsner!) and that people who want to drink stout should steer clear of that godawful one-brewery town they call Dublin.
"Oh, but we're interested in the variety of flavours and all the different expressions of blah blah blah". Nah. Do you know what has a variety of flavours and subtle culinary experiences? Food. Try some of that. Hard to get away from the impression with some of these people that the fact that beer gets you drunk is an unfortunate inconvenience.
As a hobby, there's nothing wrong with beer fandom. The Yanks do actually make some quite nice beers from time to time, although they do not tend to be very good at innkeeping. But it's trainspotting, fellers. And as a form of trainspotting, part of the price one pays for the satisfaction of the collector's urge is a healthy slab of ridicule from those outside the hobby.
It's what happens when all of the competitive wankiness of home-brewing turns commercial.
ReplyDeleteI'd like to think that the days of 'triple imperial hopocalypse' are on the decline, and the um, nine local breweries near me tend to focus away from that stuff -- though nothing under 4.5% ABV. However, the local beer shop sold out twenty cases of Hopslam recently, so perhaps not.
On the 'getting drunk' thing -- if you're an American beer bore, you're probably driving to your preferred bar and sipping 8%+ beer sold at inflated prices, so the brewers' aim is to slap you around the face while keeping you under the limit.
Anyway: did you see the paper that came out recently, covering the other statistical stuff that Student/Gosset did at Guinness aside from the t-test? A decent read, especially on the different motivations in practical and academic statistics.
Oops. That was me previous. New comment form threw me.
ReplyDeleteA bit odd that this came about in the twilight of The American Century. We used to be just like every other country: on one end we had wine snobs, and on the other we had drunks.
ReplyDeleteOh well. At least the beer snobs are better than the Tequila snobs.
That Guiness paper is fantastic, thanks Nick.
ReplyDeleteDid you see this discussion?
ReplyDeleteI think it's the American Dream, or something in the water, or something. I was in Denver about 15 years ago - before 'craft beer' really got going, and certainly before the IPA madness took off - and it struck me then that the styleguide the local brewpubs were using was basically The Entire History Of Beer Everywhere. The idea that you couldn't just get up one morning and brew your own Weissbier / abbey ale / porter / 80/- heavy - or all four if you had the whole day and were feeling energetic - didn't seem to have occurred to anyone. It was like one of those resorts where they show you The World In Miniature - if you liked our Stonehenge, why not try our Taj Mahal? - except that the people involved seemed convinced that the copy was just as good as the original, if not better. (Which in some cases it probably is, to be fair - it's a long way from Chimay to Colorado.)
Besides, those Belgian monks aren't exactly a model of freewheeling experimentation: as far as I'm aware the most beers any of the abbeys traditionally brewed is four (strong, stronger and strongest, plus a weakish one for the monks to have with dinner).
Oops - lost my link. That'll be this discussion.
ReplyDeleteUnrelatedly: me in the LRB (almost).
It was like one of those resorts where they show you The World In Miniature - if you liked our Stonehenge, why not try our Taj Mahal?
ReplyDeleteBrilliant. Reading that discussion, it struck me that quite a bit of the issue is that people are in denial about the fact that spotterism is actually a pleasure in its own right - not quite the same as gastronomy or intellectualism, but closer to the latter than people might admit and certainly on occasion powerful enough to act as a substitute for a sex drive. I collect old business histories and try to ride on as many light rail systems as I can, for example.
And you can see in that thread that people want to say that "liking beer" and "liking beer trainspotting" are one and the same thing called "being a beer geek". The trouble is that people are a bit in denial about the fact that spotting is a big part of the pleasure in a way in which, say, philatelists would never think to claim that they were only interested in the sheer beauty of postage. Birdwatchers seem to have got the balance about right in terms of admitting the element of spotterism while not letting it take over the whole thing.
It would be interesting to see if one could establish a beer blog identity as a "Purist" - ie, to have your entire blog about the output of one brewery, or even better about one particular product line, and to have bitter and violent arguments about whether a given "seasonal" version was part of the canon or not. I think I might have a go at it, particularly as the Anheuser-Busch corporation has (as you know Bob) a long and quite distinguished history.
I eagerly await the debate over the Chelada.
ReplyDeleteI'll be in the "pro" camp, of course.
Never heard of it, never want to again. Having said that, I think it's effectively tested BeerAdvocate to destruction - most of the posters on this thread are trying to combine looking cool by writing a sub-Douglas Adams polemical rant, with looking like a proper expert by making carefully qualified judgments. And failing.
ReplyDelete"I would like to have it if I were ever in the mood for Budweiser, tomato juice, lime flavor, and clam broth. I doubt that I will ever be in the mood for that, however. But, one never knows."
I also liked this:
"I've had the chelada light, and it's much better. However, they're both still bad"
Once you take something like Chelada seriously you have pretty much already lost. I spent a stag weekend drinking this once -http://www.thedrinkshop.com/products/nlpdetail.php?prodid=4398 - and it was dire, but no-one thought it would be otherwise or started making tasting notes.
ReplyDeleteFWIW, being an IPA fan, I quite like the US versions, though if just one brewery could see its way clear to producing one that wasn't carbonated to fuck in bottles and both carbonated and refrigerated to fuck in bars, that would be great, thanks.
By "lost" I think you either mean "utterly abandoned self-awareness" or perhaps "begun to ask some obvious questions about the culture of contemporary beer appreciation."
ReplyDeleteThere is a serious discussion to be had about the Chelada, I think.
We start with the fact that it's a version of the Michelada, a Mexican working class beer cocktail (and folk hangover remedy) with all sorts of local variation from one region or city or town to the next.
This alone will be enough for many an Anglo beer aficionado to instinctively reject the Anheuser-Busch rendition with the sneeriest of sneers.
But there is a social benefit to a ubiquitous, consistent product marketed nationally: it makes it easy to share the beverage with diverse people accustomed to particular local products, without reflecting any provincial bias. It is, in other words, egalitarian.
This is exactly what you want to have in the fridge when you're part of a wave of immigrants trying to shake off petty prejudices from the old country, and work together to build a new unified culture.
And that, not incidentally, is the context in which the national American premium lagers grew up, too. A stranger could walk into most any bar in America and order a Budweiser without fear of getting the cold shoulder, or a broken nose, over asking for the wrong label on the alcohol delivery system.
Bitch all you want about these kinds of products being bland and soulless; these very qualities are an important part of what makes them polite, and progressive.
ooh, yum, micheladas - I was just wondering to do with that bottle of Tyskie left over in the fridge from when we had visitors. I'm off to buy some tomato juice.
ReplyDeleteThe "social harmony through reduced beer quality" approach sounds interesting, but I think I prefer the crude British approach of having laws against punching people because you don't like their choice of drink. It has the advantage of being easily generalised to clothes, music, religion, skin colour etc.
ReplyDeleteBritain did have a fairly similar problem which it solved in a similar way. My own neck of the woods had four pubs - the Edinboro [sic] Castle, the Dublin Castle, the Windsor Castle and the Caernarvon [sic] Castle, the last two no longer trading under those names and the last one burned down - precisely because the different ethnicities of labourers on the Regent's Canal and the railways could not be persuaded to drink with each other without punching, and the relevant laws did less good than you'd have thought.
ReplyDelete"A stranger could walk into most any bar in America and order a Budweiser without fear of getting the cold shoulder, or a broken nose, over asking for the wrong label on the alcohol delivery system."
ReplyDeleteIn the UK, "pint of bitter, mate" or "pint of lager, mate" has served the same purpose for decades. You don't need a tasteless national beer to achieve that end. As BB points out, there have traditionally been plenty of reasons (accent, appearance, wearing wrong football shirt) to get your head kicked in by going into the wrong pub, but choice of beer really doesn't have to be one of them.
Britain did have a fairly similar problem which it solved in a similar way.
ReplyDeleteAnd in towns with more stable immigrant communities, it did so through the working man's club, or more esoteric variants like the Buffs or the Knights of St Columba.
Over the weekend, I was actually reading about the opposite phenomenon to RobotSlave described -- the long history of big British brewers producing darker and stronger versions of their bitters for one relatively small (but hard-drinking) region, because the locals wouldn't drink the standard one.
in the UK, "pint of bitter, mate" or "pint of lager, mate" has served the same purpose for decades.
ReplyDeletein fairness "pint of lager mate" could have been considered a punch-worthy offence in quite a lot of England for quite a long time.
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ReplyDelete