Month: September 2012

Is Good and Craft Beer Really A Form Of Temperance?

Yesterday, Jeff reviewed the stated purposes of Oregon’s Liquor Control Act of 1934 as part of an exploration of the regulation of strong drink in his state. Lew has been writing along a similar line for some time on his separate blog Why The PLCB Should Be Abolished. Cass has been running a similar campaign here in Ontario at FreeOurBeer.ca. I like these campaigns as anyone should who lives in a jurisdiction with a sensory lab. It is, after all, just beer.

But one of the odder things about the good beer discussion is sometimes a bit of pressure to sing of the same song sheet. When I posed a category titled “Beer Bloggers Against Drunk Driving” there is a bit of a chilly response, the idea that one ought not to introduce anything negative into the conversation. One should not have a strong opposite view that asks why good beer might be a wee bit obsessively too central to the world view of those who write about it. It is, after all, a drug.

All that comes to mind for me when I look at the values Oregonianites captured in that law of 1934, we see words that sit in a middle ground, that challenge me to ask how I think about them now almost 80 years later:

(a) To prevent the recurrence of abuses associated with saloons or resorts for the consumption of alcoholic beverages.
(b) To eliminate the evils of unlicensed and unlawful manufacture, selling and disposing of such beverages and to promote temperance in the use and consumption of alcoholic beverages.
(c) To protect the safety, welfare, health, peace and morals of the people of the state.

I have been thinking about words like these a bit lately. They don’t seem to me as bad as the discussion might have led us to believe. In the comments following his post, Jeff raised the spectre of that darling of pre-WWI American prohibitionists, Carrie Nation. I noted that Carrie Nation was not a proponent of temperance but of abstinence. See, my point is that preventing abuse, promoting temperance as well as protecting peace and morals is pretty much what much of western culture wants when it goes to work or mows the front lawn or sends the kids to school. Which may mean we have to consider that in the end maybe temperance won and much of western culture is the better for it. None one advocates for abuse, intemperance, peacelessness and immorality. Of course not, no more than you would support other scourges of 1800s life like child labour or lack of public health. We underestimate or dismiss how more widespread and heavier drinking was then compared to now and how it may have come smashing into conflict with industrialized urban life.

So, is good beer the natural descendant of the temperance movement? Just as lower alcohol lager was presented as a temperance drink in the latter 1800s, is tastier beer now conveying the notion that mass produced beer need not be mass consumed? This is not to say that the liquor control boards should not be undone. I want to buy my beer in cornerstores and gas stations in Ontario like I can in nearby Quebec and New York. But should we reject all? What values can you not support? What regulations would you keep?

Blogging About Blogging As Boak and Bailey Disclose

Books, beer and awkward branded clothing. And those products that supposedly make you experience of beer more convenient but do not. Emails offering come to me a number of times a week and, unless it is a really unappealing concept from the get go, I writing in reply that wee treat in the mail would be fine. Honestly, over half truly fundamentally disappoint one way or another. Sometimes, however, there are great surprises. Last week or the week before, I received a courier notice for an unexpected delivery. I hauled myself to the edge of town where the courier trucks live and was handed a box with a sample six pack of Rickard’s Cardigan, a spiced amber sort of beer – and really liked it. I didn’t expect to but with the shift in weather from stinking hot and 107% humidity to 65F and dry, Cardigan filled a need nicely. Rickard’s Blonde surprised me the same way last year as a good value brew. But I didn’t need the actual cardigan that came with it and the matching glassware will become a gift for some Christmas photo contest prize winner.

So, is there an ethical level to this? I have had an 18 wheeler stop at our suburban home to drop off a six pack and also had two UPS trucks stop at the same time down the lane a few years back on Christmas Eve, each with boxes of importers samples. The delivery guys shared looks of envy. These things happen, not often enough frankly, but overall writing about beer is a zero net affair for me. There are things I don’t get. The nutty LCBO system only offers samples at its “sensory lab” deep in the heart of its basement concrete bunker (I am told) which means I would have to travel for five hours return to participate. As if most people will interact with beer in that context. Shame on those who bow to these demands of the monopolist. Others, including certain well known US craft brewers, are notorious with being cheap with samples while others are quite keen to make it easy for you to try what they make – to, you know, spread the word. Do I like those who make it convenient more than those who don’t? I wonder.

Well, you don’t have to wonder anymore with Boak and Bailey as they are telling all by way of a disclosure page. My first reaction truly was brewers need to send them more samples. But the second was that they describe these samples as “gifts”! Gifts?¹These are inducements to help the brewer, the author or the maker of that stupid beer opener ring that rips your flesh. They are search engine optimization strategies. They are part of the trade. Marketing.

I have to run to work but would be interested in your thoughts. Given the absence of a real revenue stream, I would suggest that these things are the least one should expect, the very least.² But you tell me.

¹ See comments. I was in haste so over reacted a tiny bit. But, if I am honest, a sample from someone you like is still not a gift. This is a real issue with beer writing. We really like many many people involved with beer half the time (keeping in mind there are arses as well as in any part of life) which makes samples feel like gifts. Yet, one does also give back. How is that to be described?

² Note, too, how the juxtaposition of pleasure in beer and thought about beer can get tricky.

What Was On The Drinks Menu In 1378 Or So?

piers1

It is not often that I get to write that I was flipping the pages of Piers The Ploughman the other day but in fact… I was flipping the pages of Piers The Ploughman the other day and noticed a lot of references to drinking in Book 6. I pulled it from the back corner of the bookshelf after watching the episode of The Story of England from the BBC on life in the 14th century. This era of the plague following on the heels of a great famine saw societal disruption and population crashes. The poughman, it is explained unexpectedly only for a 21st century man like myself, was the hero of the community, the bringer of food. A morality tale, Piers joins a pilgrimage after getting his spring planting done:

…for so commands Truth. I shall get them livelihood unless the land fails, Flesh and bread both to rich and to poor, As long as I live for the Lord’s love of Heaven. And all manner of men that by meat and drink live, Help ye them to work well that win you your food.’

Notice that the winning of food by working the land earns you drink? Because the drink is ale. Made of the grain that grows in the field. So, being curious, idle and tangential – all likely sins in Pier’s worldview – I wondered what the hierarchy of drink might have been to a someone six and a half centuries back. Because what’s good about a morality play that does not list everything one way or another in hierarchies.

♦ Water. Lowest of all. The text reads at line 6.134 that “…Truthe shal teche yow his teme to dryve, Or ye shul eten barly breed and of the broke drynke…” Drag. Learn to drive the plough’s team or drink out of the brook.
♦ Thin ale is next. Wasters who will not work are punished by the reality of famine and then Piers bargains with Hunger to save them:

`Suffer them to live,’ he said `let them eat with the hogs
Or else beans and bran baked up together,
Or else milk and mean ale’ thus prayed Piers for them.

♦ Good ale. Before the character of Hunger takes his leave when the crop is in, the last year’s supplies are consumed at around line 6.300: “…Thanne was folk fayn, and fedde Hunger with the beste / With good ale, as Gloton taghte–and garte Hunger to slepe…”
♦ Best brown ale. Soon, good is not good enough as the lazy shirk again and goes off looking for something better, now available after the harvest is in and the risk of hunger has moved on as “no penny ale please them”:

Nor none halfpenny ale in no wise would drink,
But of the best and the brownest for sale in the borough.

So, not quite a style guide but clear evidence of standards, the idea that there is something worse, something good and something so much better available in town at some sort of specialty shop that you may not really need. Sound familiar?

Albany Ale: Bringing Together Different Perspectives

One of my favorite things about thinking about beer is realizing that it is actually a hugely diversified discussion even if there are significant forces trying to homogenize and standardize and prioritize the discourse. The upcoming beer school at Beau’s Oktoberfest is framing this varieties of views neatly for me. Craig has been out hunting for early central NY hops and was contacted by a home brewer who has made an attempt at one possible take of Albany Ale. Ron has been discussing the early 1800s Hudson Valley brewing logs from Vassar’s brewery and connected with alumni from the college that the brewery helped found.

Me? Me I am most interested in tracking the cultural aspects and how they fix into the context of history. I wrote Stan an email yesterday to see if he had considered the tracking of the name of CNY hops in the 1800s and had to confirm that it was not, unlike one aspect of his focus, the DNA of the varieties that I was interested in but the names given over time to the varieties. I summarized the changes and the reasons for the changes that I have been seeing in an email back this way:

♦ Post-Revolution – economic crisis that sets CNY back for best part of three decades 1775-1805. Hessian fly affects crops during this time moving beer production from wheat to hardier barley. Dutch wheat beers in Albany becomes “Bostonian” or New England style as majority of population shifts culturally. Hardscrabble farming becomes stablized farming.
♦ Post-1812 – agricultural societies, fall fairs and some scientific farming journals start. New England “improvement” moving west. Erie canal helps this take off.
♦ 1822: some sort of crisis in hop crop in UK requires reaching out for more sources, including CNY.
♦ 1830s – Robust export ale trade well underway. CNY brewers not referring to hops according to species but local supplier / grower. Exporting via ship.
♦ 1848 – UK brewers note “American hops” in their brewing log. Not by variety. [Ron has a post on this.]
♦ 1840s-60s: large and small cluster described in CNY. Geographical named hops also being referenced like “Pompey” and “Canada”. Pompey is a town. Canada is a variety that moves south, faces a false imposter and becomes “True Canada” soon after Civil War – the arse is out of all of it and mad breeding and diversification underway. Science meets money.

Keep in mind “Albany Ale” in this sense is all about the barley beer that ruled before lager takes over in around 1875 after four or so decades of expansion. Before 1775 and likely for a bit after, it remains my belief that the Dutch wheat farming of the colonial era was logically – and in accordance with the evidence – also the source of indigenous wheat beer brewing that relied on hops that were a hybrid of local wild hops and Dutch introductions. Others may have a greater interest in the industrial era when Albany was king. Or with the actual techniques of brewing. Or discovery of the actual ingredients of the beers.

Which is great. Because that is what makes the discussion complex and interesting. No one person has it right or framed the discussion.