Commentary – Page 8 – A Good Beer Blog

“I Am Less Free Today Than I Was 30 Years Ago…”

That is a shocking sentence to read. Gets the brain going. Here is the nub of an excellent post over at the always excellent The Last Exile:

Globalization was suppose to make us all free and rich. Although, it has not worked out that way for most of us. I am not any richer and my wages face a constant erosion from the rising rates of taxes and the general cost of just about everything while the corporate tax rate continues to slide ever downward. I know for a fact; I am less free today than I was 30 years ago. Canadians generally do not have any babies anymore; mostly because they cannot afford to when it takes a 2 person income just to raise a small family with ordinary expectations. We never really discuss that in this country, and if the topic does manage to come up in public dialogue, somehow the dominate ethos manages to give the impression that a woman who works outside the home rather than rising her children at home does so for selfish avaricious reasons rather than the fact that taxation, housing and transportation costs now claim a much larger percentage of family income than they did 30 years ago.

Add to that list communications device fees. I pay over $250 a month for home phone, internet, cell phone and cable TV. I could cut it but with the range of ages in the house it’s not a practical solution. I am a bit shocked at electricity hikes added to natural gas bill, too. Again over $250 a month combined. If I ever created that stand alone blog dedicated to complaining about society’s broken promises called Where the Hell is my Jet Pack??, I might write about these things or think about them more.

Why don’t I? We are fortunate and a bit unconventional as fosterers and for other reasons, I suppose, but if I thought about it, I might have expected the sort of financial status we have now to have been the lifestyle in my late 30s rather than my late 40s. But maybe I don’t care. Maybe the money or other resources go to intangibles and non-investments. Like better cheese. Like tanks of gas for wandering weekend road trips. I think I am better off. But who knows. I don’t think I think about it all that much.

A Commentary On The Oxford Companion To Beer

3014 You may recall that I had a first look at The Oxford Companion to Beer a few weeks ago. Comments have flown here and elsewhere. I am convinced that the book will be a great focal point for discussion for years. I am also convinced that by definition is it not definitive. Why? Well, it is a collection of very short essays, that’s why. Which also means there should be lively discussion building upon each essay as well as the cross-referencing between them.

So, I have created a wiki called “OCBeerCommentary” in which I hope to create a commentary upon, a concordance of this great book. It is a group project hopefully but the rules are fairly strict or at least focused:

The purpose of this wiki is to collectively make comments, add annotation, identify errata and suggest further sources to the text of The Oxford Companion to Beer. Members are asked to avoid comment about the authors, the structure of the text or other extraneous matters. This wiki is a not for profit project that reviews the text pursuant under the concept of “fair dealing for the purpose of criticism or review” under Canadian copyright law.

The wiki is available to be read publicly but is only open for participation by approved members. There is not much in there yet so bear with us. Let me know in the comments if you are interested in adding errata, elaborations and commentary. Or email me at beerblog@gmail.com. There should be links to your existing blog posts, an interview your have come across or whatever else helps expand understanding of this work. I expect this to be a slow project but one that aggregates commentary to make it more readily accessible. Who know? Some comments might interest the editors enough for inclusion in the inevitable second edition.

The Oxford Companion To Beer Wiki Still Grows

I haven’t mentioned it since May, but the wiki grows. It’s alive. This observation in the section on the letter “C” is my favorite correction in the OCB wiki so far:

“cask” this entry states that “After filing, a plastic or wooden stopper called a shive is driven into the large bunghole on the belly, and a smaller one called a keystone is driven into the tap hole.” In fact the keystone is driven into the tap hole before filling as the cask would leak otherwise.

Brilliant!! Ed Wray picked out that one. Don’t know how I missed it. Ed’s been doing a wonderful job working away at correcting, amending and adding to the thousands of pages of entries. This, I understand, is Ed. He’s only up to D so far. Many have given up before that. Be strong, Ed. Martyn has been adding to the wiki today, too. W, P and S so far. And did you know the OCB has no entry for the worlds greatest selling beer? You do now.

Good work. 202 or 18.36% of the book’s entries have now been corrected. Is the burst of entries because it is the Canadian Thanksgiving long weekend? Me, I am eating cold mac + cheese and watching Canadian three-down football myself. Because I am thankful for cold mac + cheese and Canadian three-down football. And Ed and Martyn.

Book Review: The Oxford Companion To Beer

Well, I opened the package from Amazon about two hours ago, so I must be ready for a review, right? What the heck. That is what I say. First impressions are what they are so let’s have a look.

Some irritations first. There are a large number of empty cross references like this on page 557:

magazines See BEER WRITING

Exactly the same information appears in the index at page 910. There are enough of these, like three in a row on page 712, that it creates an impression that I am reading a late draft.¹ The same is true for some of the citations at the end of entries. What’s the logic? Not all entries have them. Where they do, especially where the citation relates to information on the internets, they are a mess and ripe for link rot. Hint: we have not had to have the “http://” included in a web reference for well over a decade.

Some of the entries are looser or less authoritative than others. The entry under “health” is an unbalanced argument that beer is some sort of wonder drug, offering any manner of health benefits. The one for “Franklin, Benjamin” mentions that he published a book by someone else that mentioned descriptions of barley, mentions that he did not say that saying he is often said to have said and also references that he likely liked beer. Not particularly vital information. There is something of a feel like people were told to send in entries they thought were important rather than being selected by a watchful editorial eye.

Which leads to the game a book like this leads to. As this is not “The Encyclopedia of Beer” or “The Dictionary of Beer” but only a companion, you start to argue with it. I ran upstairs just now to check one of Jay‘s facts in the Franklin entry. Phillie in 1787 was hot. So he probably did drink beer. And reading Josh Rubin‘s entry on “Canada” – an easy starting point I thought – I get chippy with page 212. Lagers did not come to Canada, as is stated, with the settling of the Canadian prairies by immigrants from central Europe. It came to what was known as Canada West, now Ontario, with German settlers as early as the 1860s if not earlier. The construction of the railway that led to the settlement of the west didn’t start until the 1880s.

GOTCHA! Gotcha? Really?? Is that how you would treat a companion? Hardly. The problem is not one of accuracy so much as the level of abstraction. With pages and pages of brief dense entries, there will inevitably be the sorts of condensations which should led you, if interested, to take on your own further and more detailed research. Sure, there are which could be cleaned up in a second edition like the odd use of both “Nouvelle-France” and “Nouvelle France” for what English speaking Canada refer to as New France, that former imperial presence that is not what is now Quebec but which stretched in an arc up from New Orleans through the Great Lakes to Cape Breton.

But that is just a quibble. The real news with the publication of The Oxford Companion to Beeris we now have 920 pages of serious beer writing each page of which alone will trigger any number of arguments, plenty of scurrying for further sources and the occasional drifting of the book across the room, hopefully missing the lamp. This is a very good thing.

¹Though the sad little empty entry for “Calagione, Sam” is just sweet.

Inventing New Words To Describe Beer And Things Beery

The other day I noticed I have been making up a few more words and phrases to describe what I have been observing in the beer world. Not expecting Websters to give me a call anytime soon but they are useful tools for discussion. Here are a few:

“fan pub” – a pub, tavern, bar that caters primarily to beer nerds. Judgement neutral term at least. Words of affection for best such as Bar Volo.
“scene” – what happens at a good fan pub or pubs. Can be part of a larger healthy diverse interesting community. Too focused to be community in itself.
“national craft” – makers of good beer who sell across USA or Canada and maybe UK. Rogue or Stone or Sam Adams in USA. Question of shark jumping and morph to kraphtt a continuing concern.
“regional craft” – makers of good beer who sell within a US region or Canadian province / region. Bell’s from Michigan or Creemore of Ontario. No requirement for the PR of personality that haunts national craft.
“local craft” – good beer of limited distribution. New Glarus from Wisconsin.
“kraphtt” – non-craft that looks like craft. Long standing new-ism and more and more triggered by beers like Shock Top and Blue Moon.

Do these help? Any more of yours you could add?

Does Brewing History Really Matter To You?

There is an excellent post over at Des de Moor’s blog this morning entitled “Brewing’s Disputed Histories” in which he discusses an accepted inaccuracy about a point in the history of the Belgian brewers Lindemans around 200 years ago. He goes on to ask some questions including this one:

…does it matter? Are the details of brewery inheritance in an obscure part of the Low Countries at the turn of the 19th century, before today’s Kingdom of Belgium had even been created, really that important compared to, say, understanding the reasons why Lindemans abandoned traditional lambic production in favour of sweetened fruit beers in the more recent past? In my view, yes, it does very much matter. Heritage is a valuable asset in the world of brewing, and most breweries dating from before the resurgence of craft brewing are quick to boast of their lengthy pedigree. The authenticity thus sought is admittedly limited as a brewery’s history does not necessarily reflect on the way it operates today — many a family business has ruthlessly torn up the rule book — but history does help provide the context in which specific beers are appreciated, particularly if they come in a style as ancient and rare as lambic.

I am not quite sure what to make of this. I am a significant consumer of history both personally and professionally. I study the implications of the American Revolution on the settlement of Upper Canada so that I can understand and can help shape a growing narrative about our community. You may have guessed that something was up when I posted these sorts of things. For me, it is an important and interesting task.

So, it is not history that I question but its place. Des states “history does help provide the context in which specific beers are appreciated.” I have to slightly disagree with respect. I would prefer to say “history can help provide the context in which specific beers may be appreciated.” Not to be overly clever with the subjunctive, but it seems to me that brewing history can be a tool or route to understanding for some but is ultimately unimportant if you do not need to tap into it. And I am going to suggest that about 98% of beer drinkers do not.

First, consider this analysis of the meaning of saison from B+B today which does not really rely on history so much as experience. Then consider this post by Martyn this morning by way of illustration, a piece called “The gastropub is dead – official” which I actually might have preferred was headlined “The ‘gastropub’ is dead: Official” for no other reason than my slightly priggy concern (shared by Martyn in the footnote) for what makes something official (…or even historically true for that matter.) On the topic of the arc of this sort of establishment sunrise and sunset, Martyn traces the beginning of the idea in the 1990s to the banning of the term in the 2012 Good Food Guide. I am fairly sure I have never been to a gastropub but am more certain that I have been influenced by the idea. And, whatever CAMRA its authors suggest in the guide, I expect it to continue to do so as the tide of good food into beer drinking establishments will not recede any more than it will in the grocery store. The “gastropub” as an expression of good food and good beer is part of a general omnivoristic trajectory of in the pop culture of the UK as well as in North American. It ultimately matters not that the term came into being, has jumped the shark or even that relates to something. The 2012 Good Food Guide does not alter anything other than points out questions about what the editors were thinking when putting together previous editions. If the word was good then, it is good now.

Note: brewing history does not matter but it may interest some and interest a few deeply. But for me just as I really can’t get that excited about experimental hop variety note identification with my supping a pale ale – being satisfied as to the question of whether the beer is tasty – so, too, do I find brewing history nice to know but seldom as vital when compared to other practical applications of history. It’s like being good at table hockey. For me, it’s a fun skill that leads, well, somewhat close to nowhere. Brewing history is also unlike the analysis of Boak and Bailey above that confidently places personal experience in the center of their understanding. You may disagree and can illuminate me on aspects of brewing history that make the beer tastier for you. Let me know how that might work.

Now I Know I Need To Move Into Innovative White Space

Pete has written a great article on the abuse and misuse of English in beery PR-ish marketing circles:

I was reminded of this lesson earlier this month, when I went to the press launch of some new beers. We were told about the strong “head winds” in the market, and how this necessitated moving into”‘innovation white space” that would help people “navigate and explore” the “beer category”, making full use of “fixturisation”. We were then introduced to a “serious trilogy play” that would hopefully “disrupt” both the core market and its “adjacencies”.

I once made full use of fixturisation. I’d be careful of ever doing that again.

Pete reviews the causes: comfort with jargon, simple laziness as well as what he calls credibility but what I take to mean the need to project the appearance of credibility. I worked once with someone hired as a supposed expert who laced every sentence with acronyms. Once I started asking what each one meant as we moved along through meetings, it because pretty clear that there may have been something of a fraud being perpetuated.

But there is something else at play, too, that is more about language than the beer. Look at every word or phrase in his paragraph and you can see the migration of a concept from another field. Adjacencies, I have learned, is a concept in workplace layout that architects might use. The right people need desks near their logical peers. Head wind and navigateclearly come from sailing. White space? Is that the tabula rasa? Could be but it also could just be a muddled phony-ness, too.

Such migrations are a total waste of effort. There are too many great beer words, simple but specific. Words like malt and wort, firkin and kilderkin. They just don’t harken to a earlier day or speak to the fan boy technician. They roll off the tongue, confident in the inherent loveliness of their own sound. Find me a branding writer who can capture these sounds and I might even forget that it’s marketing. I once was presented with a group of uni-lingual unannounced Swedes in my own living room, in-laws of in-laws on a tour. One word was all it took to achieve understanding: øl. All the languid welcoming pleasures of beer were there in that one soft, leisurely syllable and the smiles that accompanied its being spoken.

Your Friday Bullets For The Cat Staring Contest

Me and the cat. Happens every year as the family packs up to go a visiting as I stay home and work. First task on my bachelor week was apparently to put a paring knife in my thumb so I shelved all other tasks I had half-assigned myself for the week. The cat didn’t. The cat complains. It stands ten feet from me and yowls a list of complaints and demands at me. It did it again just now. Food, water? Check, place to pee, place to sleep? Check. What exactly are you on about? You want a wrist watch or something?

It is always funny watching tech nerds debate the law. Answer? No one. If a dog has a ball in its mouth it does not legally possess it either.
A very quiet way to end combat operations. You would think there should be some sort of civic event marking the day.
“…there were six people and two cats at their own ceremony, one dressed up in a bow tie and the other in a lace collar.” Freakish. I knew there was something freakish going on.
“…Coulson, Cameron’s former communications chief, arrived at a police station to face questioning about alleged phone hacking…” Surely crimes were committed, even under English law.
Why shouldn’t the Grits arise again? The Tories did. I don’t care that much for binary politics for no other reason that it places ideology over policy let alone administration. As the US debt debate illustrates, dislocated desire for ideological “change” is about as stupid as stupid gets. Third, fourth and fifth parties by necessity mean that there is no toggle switch.

Too quiet around here to be running. Except for that damn cat.

Two Cautionary Tales Of Good Beer Bad Behaviour

We like to ascribe so many positive things to good beer and those who love it we often forget that we make most of it up. We pretend brewers are rock stars. We pretend thinking about beer began (and sorta stopped) in the 1970s. But most of all we pretend people who make and enjoy craft beer are the sort of people we would like to hang out with. Really? Two morality plays for your consideration. First, Zak points out the tedium that one craft beer boor has put him through recently:

This post isn’t really about Chad, it’s about the idea that you have to reach a level of ‘beerdom’ in order to be allowed to drink certain types of beers. Sure, there are some beers that benefit from a little explanation, most sour beers and rauchbiers being the primary examples. But surely beer is a democratic, egalitarian drink that can be shared by everyone? Or do you disagree?

A great point that has attracted some comments but my point is not to highjack his discussion but to compare and contrast that situation to a second one that has been reported on by Jeff:

Don McIntosh of the NW Labor Press–a worker’s rights publication that’s not exactly neutral–has a devastating article about how Rogue Brewery treats its workers. The main issue is an effort to unionize Rogue that the management has aggressively fought. They have deployed tactics familiar to anyone who has followed labor relations in the US over the last 20 years–all legal by today’s laws. But worse than that, McIntosh paints the picture of a hostile work environment where management acts capriciously to ensure full compliance.

As Jeff points out, the tactics of Rogues he points out are likely within the law and the accuser is a labour publication – but the story is still pretty distasteful. So much so that I took the opportunity to not buy Rogue beer after work today, part of the LCBO’s summer brewery feature. I would ask you to consider making the same consideration – however you decide to act afterwards.

But, really, I would ask you to consider how craft beer may sometimes brings out the bully and why. For me, it boils down to one word: passion. Jeff points out the motto “Rogue is not for everyone” but we can take that a few ways. Either it can mean many can not handle their beer or, my preferred reading, the brewery is not egalitarian, is not for all people and, apparently, not for that part of its workers who don’t fall into lock step. “Passion” has that problem of being ultimately fairly meaningless and too often code word for my way or the highway. We’ve seen this sort of “passion” at work before with the bland “hooray for everything” attitude of trade associations, defensive niche hugging consumer group executives or senior brewery buffoons who believe good marketing include condescension. Spare me the passion.

And isn’t that really what Zak has had to deal with as well? Somehow, yet another self appointed craft beer person of importance awards himself the right to denigrate others, to be not for them. We’ve seen the self-appointed boor in action before. How many of them are there? How many bad boss craft brewers? Lord, how many? Certainly not anywhere near a majority. But is there any part of the beer culture that makes us celebrate the illusionary community without point out the individual arseholes amongst us in the crowd?

Wouldn’t it be nice if beer rating sites included a way to factor in how happy the workers are as part of the over all scoring? Wouldn’t it be nice in beer rating sites punished boors with pomposity points reminding us all to take their opinions with a very large grain of salt?

Is CAMRA Run By Puristans Or Precisionists?

That is surely an unkind thing to say but recently I read a fascinating book about the first leader of the good if extreme folk who settled Boston, Massachusetts in the early 1600s. In that book, I came upon the distinction between “puritanism” and “precisionism” which boiled down to the distinction between the passionate approach or a technical approach to matters of correctness in faith… and the precisionist’s need to be correcter than the next guy. I was reminded of the distinction when I read Martyn’s strongly worded post this morning about some unfortunate things said by Colin Valentine, the chairman of the UK’s Campaign for Real Ale:

Excuse my intemperate language, but I’ve just been reading some total lying crap by the chairman of the Campaign for Real Ale about beer bloggers. Apparently we’re the “bloggerati” (eh?), and we’re “only interested in new things”, and for beer bloggers, Camra’s “40 years of achievement means nothing, as the best beer they have ever had is the next.”

Sitting at a distance across an ocean and up a rather large river, I have wondered about the point of CAMRA’s pronouncements from time to time. At one level, it’s really just like an automobile club offering discounts to members and lobbies for sensible things like pouring full measures. But the organization is also argumentative and seems to lack its senses of humour and perspective. For example, CAMRA is as much anti-keg as pro-cask. And now it appears to be anti-beer-blogger.

To be honest, I couldn’t care less what Colin Valentine thinks, says or has for breakfast as he represents a financial interest in the brewing trade that is as established and self-serving as any brewery or pub chain or industry publication. He also no doubt has an abiding faith in the correctness of doing so. But, regardless of correctness, Valentine has a huge stake in making sure CAMRA continues to be considered the authoritative voice on things beery within the marketplace of ideas. And if Dredgie is correct – and I am not quite sure he is – beer bloggers are the new vanguard of modern beer media. Which means a threat to CAMRA.

Which brings me back to those first Bostonians. Who in the beery discussion are the puritans and who are the precisionists? And who are neither?