What Is My Methodology? Perchance Schmethodology?

I have found myself wondering what the heck I am doing with all this Albany Ale stuff but I’m not too concerned. It is interesting in itself and I think it is informing me on a pretty interesting big picture question – what makes the Albany and the Hudson River so different from the St. Lawrence Valley, my river. You will recall that during Ontario Craft Beer week this past June, I wrote a number of posts on the development of Ontario after the American Revolution but it is important to remember that, like the Dutch in the Hudson, the upper St. Lawrence also had a 1600s existence when it was all New France.

The big question I have is why did Albany create this export trade while my city did not? There are some basic answers around the odd semi-autonomous existence of early Albany while Kingston has been firmly tied to its Empires. Also, there is simple geography with Albany being a deep water seaport while Kingston has always sat behind rapids and locks. Difference makes sense. But is that it? Looking more closely, there are the details. And details can get obsessive with a range of ways to get at them:

  • Who is doing what? You can find this information in newspaper ads, business directories and gazetteers. People have always been obsessed with what others are doing and putting it in a central place so thoers can see it. Google is making this information available to all for free without travel.
  • How is it being taxed? Beer has attracted excise and sales taxes for centuries. This is Professor Unger’s approach. I have not really gotten into this level – yet.
  • What is being brewed? Ron Pattinson’s obsession with day to day brewing logs is a less to us all in detail. And he is getting some of the brewing replicated as his trip to Boston this weekend shows.
  • Who is allowed to deal with beer? Beer is also regulated along with all booze. Tavern and brewery license records exist as do the court records of applications and charges for violations. Taverns and Drinking in Early America by Salinger is largely built on this sort of analysis.
  • Where does the beer go? Pete Brown has taught us a lot about that. Mapping trade routes is another avenue to this stuff. I have asked about Dutch East India ale as well as Bristol’s Taunton ale. What made for the demand for these beers and what made them eoungh good value to the other end of the world to buy them?
  • Beyond all this, there is Martyn. The funny thing about Martyn’s work for me is that I can’t understand where he gets his data – his focus on words amazes me. I don’t know if I could be so elemental and authoritative. But West Country White Ale inspires.

So, there is a lot there – a lot for anyone in any town to use to figure out the path of their local brewing trade. And there are a lot of other people hunting as well. Me, I have no idea what I will learn about Albany or Kingston or beer or anything else. But it is worth the hunt. And why not? Weren’t we all supposed to be citizen journalists, historians and novelists? Isn’t that the promise of the internet or is it really more like that personal jet pack we were all supposed to have by now? I think you might all want to get all be scratching around a bit – even if not as obsessively as others.

Scotland: Paradox Islay #004, BrewDog, Aberdeenshire

bdpi1What a mess. I hadn’t realized the label was made of hard card stock stuck on with two-sided sticky tape. I might take it down to the lab and get James’ near teen DNA off of it. Bottle 131 of 200. By opening it, I probably just threw away the 100 bucks I could get from some guy in Kansas on eBay. Sent as a sample by the brewery when they were but boys a few years back. I decided to open it after watching a little Horatio Hornblower that was accompanied by a Bourbn County stout. No doubt you have known that moment, too.

As promised, it is all Islay on the nose, the beloved smoky low Islands Scots whisky. Land of my fathers. Because the stout sat in a barrel of the 1968. My mother’s cousin-in-law was a canny and, for the Clyde, stylish post-war whisky broker in the southwest so I am sure he would approve. He certainly would recognize it. Deep deep mahogany under mocha rim and froth. Aroma of the malt but in the mouth it is sharp. At first, a hammer of old Dutch man’s licorice with all the salt that goes along with seaweedy Islay – then something like a stout with something like a whisky. It isn’t really anything like “balanced” and I wonder, honestly, if it is more of an artifact than a beer. Dry and a little like something I would call harsh but on the lovely side of harsh. Descriptors like “whopping”, “foolish” and “two by four to the head” come to mind. Planky. Sae halp ma bob. That is all I can say.

One sole BAer went mad for this early Holy Grail like example of experimental 21st century UK brewing.

Are These Short Run Beers Actually “Rare”?

A pretty good story in the The Patriot News of the efforts some go to to get one time release beers and the lengths people go to get them… or even to be left disappointed.

The brewery planned to sell only 400 bottles to the public. Cochran, who came from Farmington, N.M., after hearing about Splinter Blue on the “Beer Advocate” website, got No. 401, a bottle originally reserved for one of the brewery’s sales representatives, who gave it up after hearing how far Cochran had come. Beer lovers began lining up outside the Paxton Street brewery shortly after midnight. By 5 a.m., there were close to 50 people in line. Sales were limited to two bottles per person. The brewery handed out bottle caps to the first 200 in line, similar to the wristbands used when concert tickets go on sale.

Quibble? Just that the newspaper chose to use the word “rare” to describe the 400 bottle release in question. I have no problem with special but shouldn’t “rare” be reserved for the uncommon? There are so many of these short run beers going around its well beyond hard to keep up with them – it’s hard not to run into them, trip over them, be pushed around by them. Frankly, there is so much brettanyomyces going around, I hear that Gold Bond is looking at putting out a new product.

“Rare” can’t really mean something that happens as often as short run brews any more than self-assigned connaisseur should be implied to be up there with completing a doctoral program. We all like our hobby. It’s nice to have a hobby – and this is a fun one – but just because you have the postage stamp the kid on the next block doesn’t, well, it doesn’t make it news.

I Am A Craft Beer Marketing Consultant…

The wonderful and ever posting Jay Brooks has posted the latest version of this odd video meme (pronounced “me-me” for obvious reasons) and it has me scratching my head as much as that Craft Brewer video of a year ago. Here it is:

As I noted at Jay’s, how many of these drinkers are really marketers in their day to day life? Can they not actually find 12 or 23 real, honest to goodness average Joes who like craft beer? And what the hell is it about the soundtracks of these things? Does anyone actually associate classical string quartets or whatever the hell that stuff is with craft beer? Would a little heavy metal or bluegrass not send the right marketing message? It makes me want to fall asleep about half way through.

It’s a form of denial, we know that. And a form of spin. But wouldn’t it be interesting to have one of these promotional video thingies based on the following:

  • I am a craft beer drinker. I am a fan of good beer. I buy good craft beer.
  • I earn my money through hard work and expect craft brewers to earn it from me.
  • I have no time for the floaters, the makers of dull amber ale, the brewers who are there for the government grants.
  • Me and people like me reject badly made craft beer or beer stores that pass on soaking costs for trendy unbalanced crap.
  • We have the conviction of our own ability to determine what tastes good. And know a great craft beer goes with a bag of chips.
  • We know when it is stinking hot nothing goes down like a Miller High Life and respect our friends who like that stuff just fine.
  • But we also know that when the BBQ smoker in the backyard is pissing off the neighbours, when we are sick and tired another mouthful of steamed corn gak, when there is extra money in the wallet and when our mouths demand something that has extraordinary taste…
  • …that is when we buy good craft beer.

Background music? Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” morphing into a little early Johnny Cash ending in a crescendo of grunge. “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” perhaps?

Book Review: In Mixed Company, Julia Roberts

imc1Anyone interested in beer in Canada – or even colonial North America – really ought to have this book on the shelf. 2009’s In Mixed Company: Taverns and Public Life in Upper Canada is a series of essays on topics related to the structure, regulation and use of taverns in what later became Ontario but what was called Upper Canada during the era in question. Covering roughly 1790 to 1860, Roberts describes a certain sort of drinking and socializing experience, showing where the lines of class, race and gender existed and also showing how some of those lines were far fuzzier than we might presume.

Be warned: this is an academic text. There are 169 pages of essay and 48 pages of endnotes and bibliography. But like Hornsey or, say, Xhosa Beer Drinking Rituals, it would really do you all a bit of good to get some proper reading in. You’d learn things like the first wave of taverns built after the creation of the colony in 1791 were owned by the government, run by tenants as part of the necessary roads and communications infrastructure. Until the development of more exclusive principle taverns and then hotels in the larger centres, taverns provided space where different backgrounds met and interacted, where people in transit or transistion lived, where business and political debate was conducted. You’ll see how Upper Canadians saw themselves as different from what they called Yankees and, as the late Georgian became the early Victorian, how they developed internal divisions to distinguish themselves one from another

I have been fumbling around unsuccessfully for a reference from Nova Scotia confirming the meaning of “tavern” as a late 18th century offering wine, tea and other proper fare – a great change from my late 1900s use as a beer hall. As the author points out, during this era and in this place, the tavern was a licensed facility, regulated by law, providing civic purpose. It was subject to social and legal rules but offered a location for every thing from the holding of court to the holding of cockfighting. And, while there is no real focus on the drinks consumed, there is interesting information including how hard spirits appear to be quite popular including punches and what we would now see as simple cocktails, including gin slings.

Robert’s style is precise and dense but quite enjoyable – especially given the fairly brief length of the interrelated essays forming the seven chapters of the book. Her observations and conclusions are interesting and well supported both in terms of argument and endnote. The most interesting portions for me were the chapters focusing on diaries, one kept by a tavern keeper in what was then York around 1801 and another on excerpts from one kept a regular tavern goer in my city of Kingston in the early 1840s. The comparison of the earlier period when the colony had a population of 34,600 and 108 licensed taverns to the 1840s when there were over 400,000 more Upper Canadians and 1,446 taverns provides illustration of the growing complexity as well as development of peace in a colony that was born of and suffered threat of war from the south regularly until the mid-century.

This era covered in this book is largely just after the era I wrote about in my Ontario Craft week posts on Kingston and its roots in New York state. It is an important era given that it is when this newly formed part of than British North America distinguishes itself in its controlled settlement patterns from the rougher experience in the United States. By placing us in that era, illustrating its social and civic centres, Roberts provides us with a useful context for understanding even at this distance of years.

Pennsylvania, Flying Mouflan, Troegs, Harrisburg

Bought this at Kappy’s last week for $6.99 for the bomber. There was some statement that this beer blew away last year’s Nugget Nectar in terms of hops and lavished the discerning palate with a face filling bunch of other flavours. I was sold at the $6.99 myself given the sad lack of Troegs beer in my life.

Pretty nice stuff. It pours a swell chestnut with a mocha froth and rim. The aroma is booze, date and brown bread. A pretty thick beer on the swally with a lot of pine and white grapefruit hops going shoulder to shoulder with date, cocoa, milk chocolate, hazelnut. The brewer’s notes recommend the very four months this bottle waited from production to pour. Probably could be classified as a Dauphin County Brown Double IPA. That’s it. A DCBDIPA. Maybe the best I have ever had.

BAers have the love.

Why Do Names For This New Beer Style Kinda Suck?

Forget the question of whether styles are real and essential. Forget the question of whether beer styles have been accurately described and traced historically. The real issue is that the names of beer styles are a mess and cause consumer confusion. Andy raises the question of the name of one black hoppy brew and seeks resolution for this very good reason:

Well, I believe that styles are important, if for no other reason than consumers can have some reasonable understanding of what they might be getting when they select a certain beer. It is in the hopes of creating some logical détente that I humbly offer the following suggestions for resolving this seemingly intractable debate.

He then goes on to ask us to choose from a number of choices that have been bouncing around beer nerd circles like Black IPA, India Black Ale, and Cascadian Dark Ale. There is only one problem. They all suck as names. Let’s be clear. They aren’t related to India and they aren’t pale, as Andy notes, but also no one outside of the Pacific NW actually knows what “Cascadian” really means. Plus, while the picture of me from 1992 shows I have a great long love of the Vermont Pub and Brewery and the work of the late Greg Noonan, the idea of calling it “Noonan Black Ale” suffers from the same problem, needing to know some sort of back story. Also, there is a minor sort of beer – perhaps not a style at all – that you see from time to time called Dark Ale. What’s it taste like? Dark? That’s like something tasting ice cold.

We can do better. We can make sense. If the point of the name of the style is to inform let’s get to the point. The beer is black and it is bitter. Keep it simple. So call it Black Bitter. I might even try the stuff if it was called a name as swell as that.¹

¹Plus it already comes with its own 70s rock tune for the ad campaign. Just have to change the words a bit: “Whoa-oh Black Bitter! Bam-a-lam!!!” And, yes, I want credit.

Albany Ale: When Did They Stop Using Wheat Malt?

I came across this reference to the malting of wheat in a 1869 series of essays and reports called The Annals of Albany. Apparently one Peter Kalm, a professor from a Swedish university, visited North America from 1748 to 1750 making some sort of economic and natural resources survey. He made these notes on 15 June 1749:

They sow wheat in the neighborhood of Albany, with great advantage. From one bushel they get twelve sometimes : if the soil be good, they get twenty bushels. If their crop amounts only to ten bushels from one, they think it very trifling. The inhabitants of the country round Albany are Dutch and Germans. The Germans live in several great villages, and sow great quantities of wheat, which is brought to Albany : and from thence they send many yachts laden with flour to New York. The wheat flour from Albany is reckoned the best in all North America, except that from Sopus or Kingston, a place between Albany and New York. All the bread in Albany is made of wheat. At New York they pay the Albany flour with several shillings more per hundred weight, than that from other places. Rye is likewise sown here, but not so generally as wheat. They do not sow much barley here, because they do not reckon the profits very great. Wheat is so plentiful that they make malt of it. In the neighborhood of New York, I saw great fields sown with barley. They do not sow more oats than are necessary for their horses.

This passage was referenced in an earlier quotation I included in an Albany ale post back in April and cropped in June but it has me thinking. If they aren’t even growing barley and are malting wheat in 1749, then it is likely the strong ale that Sir William Johnson of the Mohawk Valley, west of Albany, was drinking from 1750 maybe to his death in 1774 was a wheat beer. But by 1835, the brewers of the area responding to a set of questions posed by the New York State Senate all respond by saying that they use pure ingredients including barley malt. I don’t catch any reference to wheat malt. The use of barley by this point is corroborated by this quotation from 1827.

So – am I slowly, clumsily chasing two Albany Ales? A strong wheat ale made by the Dutch up to the latter 1700s and then a strong barley ale in the early 1800s?