Vermont: Craft Brewer Greg Noonan Passes Away

Very sad news this morning of the passing of Greg Noonan, founder of the Vermont Pub and Brewery as well as author of a number of important books on brewing. There is a thread of condolences over at BeerAdvocate with many sharing their memories of him.

Seven Barrel Brewery Brewer’s Handbook constantly during my former glory-ish days of home brewing. The idea of having one book showing the same recipe for extract, part mash and full mash implied a lot. It said that it was worth getting started and trying to excel. It also told me that it was a very reasonable goal to try and brew dozens and dozens of beer on your path. There was something of the tone of a patient teacher in that book as well as in his other book on my shelf, Scotch Ale, that set them apart and fit right in with the memories people are sharing today.

But it were my trips to the Vermont Pub and Brewery that I immediately recalled on hearing of his death. Almost two decades ago now, a pal of mine and I went on a tear of a road trip starting out in Ottawa, looping into NY state and ending up at the VPB on a Saturday night, trying whatever they had on tap. It was the summer of 1990 back when the beard was still red, the shirts not so tight. We were blown away by the way his place showed the range of possibilities after years of accepting what the Canadian market gave you – not to mention the realization that you could just have a small palace to the honour of good beer, good pub food and enjoying company in the corner of any town… your town, too. For the years since, it’s been a regular stop on the family’s trips from Ontario back to the east Coast. Think I will pull out that old VPB crow t-shirt today (if it still fits) and find me a Vermont beer no doubt born out of his great example and inspiration.

Friday Bullets For The Feast Of The Big Bird

Not Big Bird just a big bird.

I am having a little difficulty coming to terms with the fact that Jay… Jay who has commented on this blog for yoinks, actual yoinks… did not know I have a logo. Made it myself when I was 41. So this is it. Jay: ‘Hello, Mr. Logo.” Mr. Logo (with a deeper voice): “Hello, Jay”. There. That’s done.

  • The “They Were After My Town” Update: “And the third bomb would go off at a military base somewhere along Highway 401, between Toronto and Ottawa.” Where else is a military base along the 401? Well, Trenton I suppose.
  • “What Country!” Update: unemployment dropping. Said it before – amazing economy we have… mainly by the luck of geography and importing the most ‘fraidy cat of business cultures through 300 plus years of immigration.
  • It started when I was in high school and was called “the yuppie flu” as it sapped the will of baby boomers. Now they figured it out.
  • I had no idea that I could pick up high school radio at work until the other day. Plenty of hits of the 80s. Teacher’s oversight committees are gold.
  • Just in time for Gourmet magazine’s demise, I learn that not reusing the paper coffee filter is a crime against nature. Who knew these things were more J-cloth than Kleenex?
  • Did you know algae only took a few years to rebound after the comet slammed into the Earth? It’s all about stunning and amazing facts this week.
  • Less charming is the fact that we are governed by consultants whose salaries flow from who knows where: “Asked Monday if he ever worked at the hospital network, which includes Toronto General, MacLeod replied, “No.”” Excellent. Note the extra “a” in MacLeod.
  • I don’t know what to make of this. I am not of the “Obama = Satan” school that is out there but I still don’t know where he is heading. Peace prize? For just not being in a telephone pals relationship with Dick Cheney? Maybe.

Friday beckons. A three day weekend beckons. Plans for the weekend? Dump run. Wooooooot!

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Our Collective Family Record Of Slavery

I have the TV on in the mornings. It drones on and if I am lucky and the kids sleep in past 4:45 am, I get to pay half-attention to the CBS Morning Show to learn about all the real news. And this morning there was a short piece about the genealogy of Michelle Obama which told about the five generations from slavery to the White House:

She began working on Michelle Obama’s roots at the behest of the Times before President Barack Obama’s inauguration. Smolenyak said her mother, like Michelle Obama’s mother, Marian Robinson, carried the surname Shields, and an “instant affinity” pushed her interest. The first lady’s ancestors lived across the South and Midwest, and many were part of the Great Migration that saw blacks leave the South for the industrialized North. It was the 6-year-old slave Melvinia Shields, bequeathed in her master’s will and later sold for $475, who tugged at the genealogist’s heartstrings. “It’s still jarring to see dollar signs associated with human beings,” said Smolenyak.

In my work I am bumping into history more and more and find the specifics of personal history and who was related to who the most interesting stuff. A few months ago, I asked myself who was the last slave in my town. I didn’t really answer the question but found some information – especially the story of the man who seemingly incongruously fought at Sackets in red during the War of 1812 even as had also been brought to Ontario at the end of the American Revolution as a slave to Loyalists. Makes me wonder if any were on the ships from New York City in 1783-84. There were plenty of possibilities in those days… possibly. I still need to find the 1812 soldier’s name but it also reminded me of the prof who taught slavery in first year property class to illustrate the principles in a way that stuck in the mind. Nothing like a children listed in a slave sale advertisement to bring a point home. Now I wonder who the last slave sold in my town might have been. And where was the sale held? I had no idea they were curious about the same questions in Largs.

Warning: Your Freebie Beer Blogging Ways Are Over!

A few weeks ago, a wiggling waggy hand rose above the crowd pointing out that there was uncertainty as to who was dabbling in beer blogging in relation to matters in which the blogger had a financial interest. Melissa Cole admitted that there were doubts even about her own writing and that it was all not quite on. It has all devolved into a well deserved bout of slappy heed [Ed.: in the comments] over calling out but not calling out yet the point is still a reasonable one… as is Jeff’s counterpoint… but not Pete’s… Pete’s contribution is not helping things at all.

Well, as the New York Times tells us things are now more serious than whether one or another or all of us are cool with… or is it cool towards… such practices. Bigger than even Pete Brown (as sophomorically illustrated¹) himself, the UK’s – if not the language’s – real top beer writer. See, the law is now involved as the United States Federal Trade Commission has issued a revision to its “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising” (warning: big honking burly .pdf) which states in a number of ways that blogging has now gone big time and we know so because the line between comment and endorsement, opinion and advertising has gotten blurred. For instance, the FTC states at page 14 and 15:

The Commission recognizes that because the advertiser does not disseminate the endorsements made using these new consumer-generated media, it does not have complete control over the contents of those statements. Nonetheless, if the advertiser initiated the process that led to these endorsements being made – e.g., by providing products to well-known bloggers or to endorsers enrolled in word of mouth marketing programs – it potentially is liable for misleading statements made by those consumers.

… and further at 47 to 48:

The Commission acknowledges that bloggers may be subject to different disclosure requirements than reviewers in traditional media. In general, under usual circumstances, the Commission does not consider reviews published in traditional media (i.e., where a newspaper, magazine, or television or radio station with independent editorial responsibility assigns an employee to review various products or services as part of his or her official duties, and then publishes those reviews) to be sponsored advertising messages. Accordingly, such reviews are not “endorsements” within the meaning of the Guides. Under these circumstances, the Commission believes, knowing whether the media entity that published the review paid for the item in question would not affect the weight consumers give to the reviewer’s statements. Of course, this view could be different if the reviewer were receiving a benefit directly from the manufacturer (or its agent). In contrast, if a blogger’s statement on his personal blog or elsewhere (e.g., the site of an online retailer of electronic products) qualifies as an “endorsement” – i.e., as a sponsored
message – due to the blogger’s relationship with the advertiser or the value of the merchandise he has received and has been asked to review by that advertiser, knowing these facts might affect the weight consumers give to his review.

So, while the FTC indicates that it will not go after the bloggers directly, it will go after the advertisers who use new media to get their message out. What will this mean? It may put a chill on ads, samples and…frankly… the goodies. And what the hell point is there blogging if one never gets the goodies??? Well, for those quasi-bloggers who are really professional writers (you know, the book writers) slumming with the cool kids, it will mean absolutely nothing because their revenue is through indirect advertising not the entirely more wholesome and less problematic direct moo-lah stream. Me, I actually get very few samples through the maple wall that is the US-Canadian border and the cash ads mostly come (however oddly) from other nations. But for the poor US based semi-pro beer blogger just looking for a little reason to go on, well, this may be the kick in the pants they don’t really need. So share a silent moment, if you would, for the blogger looking for that one little break, that something in return. It may just have become that bit less likely to arrive in the mail.

One last thing. I do think it’s great that the law is actually addressing new media (even if blogging was cool seven years ago and starting going lame about three years ago) but is this at all a likely outcome in an advertising model where a scurrying pack of small operators get paid peanuts to send out a viral message?

In order to limit its potential liability, the advertiser should ensure that the advertising service provides guidance and training to its bloggers concerning the need to ensure that statements they make are truthful and substantiated. The advertiser should also monitor bloggers who are being paid to promote its products and take steps necessary to halt the continued publication of deceptive representations when they are discovered.

No, me neither. Ain’t going to happen.

¹[Ed.: lesson – don’t blog with an eleven year old goading you on to make the cartoon look sillier. Sorry Pete. Really. Sorry. Just think how boring this post would be without your input… err… participation… umm… objectification.]

Listening To The Doctor Who Radio Hour

Actually an hour and eleven minutes. My newest obsession has moved into a new medium with release of the first CD of Hornet’s Nest entitled “The Stuff of Nightmares“. The BBC has found a way to get Tom Baker, the fourth Doctor, to record audio plays 28 years after his last appearance on the TV show. I read about it in the last DWM, one of the more successful spin-offs itself.

I used to like radio plays quite a bit – especially rebroadcasts of BBC whodunnits. That was until the CBC started trying to make them and sapped my will to go on. Every broadcast out of Toronto seemed to require overdone ray guns or minutes long sweaty orgasms. No one told the CBC apparently that porn has never worked on the radio. With some hope of a better outcome, I bought an earlier Who audio play CD a few months ago about Leela on Gallifrey but it didn’t catch me either. Too much of an in-joke. Needing a web concordance to figure out what was going on.

None of that in this case. Baker’s fourth Doctor leans heavily on Sherlock Holmes and works in a familiar way, a way that works on radio. Baker keep his Who in a certain scope that is quite unlike the recent Messianic versions. He once questioned whether he had the right to kill off the Daleks – something the Ninth and Tenth would not so much as blink at… perhaps with good reason.

Maybe it’s just the tone of voice that works in this one for me. I watched one of the special extras on the Key To Time last night after the kids were all asleep. It was one of a number of episode of Late Night Story with Baker back in 1978 sitting at a desk in a study at night reading a nightmarish tale of a boy about to die. Grim and creepy. “The Stuff of Nightmares” has that, too.

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The Last Friday Bullets Of This Summer

I wore a sweater to work yesterday. I should have stung like it was rinsed in acid but I settled into place. I used to not like summer so much. But that was when it meant summer job labour camps and the days before controlling my own air conditioning unit. Say what you like about the miseries of owning a house, not owning one was not as good. But now it’s the cold that gets to you. I used to aspire to being outdoorsy but I realize now that I am destined to be indoorsy. Climate controlled.

  • So when do we actually get tax and duty free border crossing?
  • “Diplomatic celebrity“? How can that be anything but an oxymoron. Telling that both parties wanted him. It’s a lot like living in a disfunctional one party state.
  • Do they have body bags in storage for you, too?
  • Like others, I have watched Leno. I have enjoyed watching Leno. The comedy is 75% on which is better than usual and the musical guests are OK, though last night’s Clapton and Hornsby combo was a bit weird, many due to the free form jazz selection.
  • Morton still awful.
  • Three-billion-to-one? Add in the fact that a 34 year old can golf three times in a week on weekdays when not on an annual holiday and make it more like an ad for Canada’s regional development subsidization policies.
  • So Brian has been the only Tory majority leader in 50 years. And he left the party with 2 seats and two decades in the wilderness.
  • Think I will write a book on the 4375 beers to drink before you die. Inflation is affecting beer books. Time was 50 was enough. Or maybe 300 was the required number.

The gaping maw of the weekend stands before us. Have I mowed may last mow already? Will I find a way to get off the sofa?

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Isn’t It Sad When The Advertising Money Tightens?

Macro beer ads are so weird. There is so little connection to beer involved in them that it is quite the thing to read them being discussed seriously as in this St. Louis Business Journal article:

“The free-wheeling, let’s-give-it-a-try attitude is changing,” said Jeff Goodby, co-chairman and creative director at San Francisco-based Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, the agency responsible for Budweiser’s commercials featuring Louie the Lizard. “I think things are scrutinized and calculated a lot more now.”

Louie the Lizard. Now that just screams of quality, no? No doubt Gary the Goat was an idea dropped in an earlier round of free-wheeling, let’s-give-it-a-try thinking-outside-the-box. Apparently ad agencies are shocked that big big brewers want ads that sell beer. Problem is I can’t think of a single quality in an ad an agency could make that would “incentivize” this consumer to pick up that sort of product. A crazy idea – but maybe tell me about its actual characteristic? That it is good value? That I might, you know, like the taste?

Group Project: Now Eight Years Have Passed

No glib snark today. No bullet points. Where are you eight years later? I wrote this in 2003. Five years ago, I posted my comments from three years earlier made at my pal Steve’s blog, Acts of Volition. Here they are again:

Alan McLeod
[7:48 AM September 17, 2001]
elal@pei.sympatico.ca

I have found myself, like everyone else, having been staring at the TV in a daze for days. I was in the middle of a presentation at the curling rink in Summerside last Tuesday when someone came into the room to tell what was going on. I drove home at lunch and the TV has seemingly been on ever since. One thing that has happened here in New Glasgow, PEI is that there are no passenger jets overhead flying between Europe and the US east coast. Usually there are 5 to 10 in the sky at any one time. You notice the silence. I have seen two con-trails but am reliably told that it is likely a US military refueling tanker. Moncton airport apparently has about 5 US jets operating out of it now, according to a PEI air traffic controller.

I flew the flag at half mast. Most people did around here. I have thought alot about the bit of business I have done in the US on four trips in the last year and the people I have met. I thought about the road in Connecticut I drove down with Dan and Nathan after getting a bit lost one evening trying to find the sea from a place near Hartford. The road was parallel to the one we wanted as it turned out. It was fifty miles of large homes on forested lots – multi-car garages, guest houses. As we drove south cars passed us going north, going home for the night. When we hit the coast road, the commuter train station was full of people heading for what looked to us Maritimers as luxery cars, coming home from a workday in the City, in Manhattan. The next day, I bought a big Connecticut flag – like I like to wherever I travel. I flew it at half mast Sunday.

Alan McLeod
[7:56 AM September 19, 2001]
elal@pei.sympatico.ca

I was interested in reading Peter’s comments as a first crisis as a Dad. The same is true for me. I have these echoes of war in the past that the 1990’s had silenced. When I was a child in suburban Ontario in the late 60’s I remember asking my mom if we were at war. We were watching Vietnam on TV. I remember having bombing dreams after Dad told me for the millionth time that when he was my age, Hitler carpet bombed his grannies house along with their whole town – Greenock, Scotland – for three days. I remember heading about the fall of Saigon on the school bus heading to junior high. I remember the fear in high school and undergrad that Ronnie R. and Leonid B. would vaporize us all. I remember in law school wondering with the rest of the team if the intermural basketball game should go on given that the US had just started bombing Bagdad. And Rwanda and Bosnia…and then nothing… No big events for eight years. Relatively speaking peace was breaking out, the UN acted in Cambodia, Bosnia, Kosovo. Things were being handled. I moved into a good career, got married, got a mortgage and a couple of kids. Then the buildings fell down…Driving to work the other day I actually got a start when I saw, coming down the Brackley Road, low on the horizon a Dash Eight coming into land at the airport. I saw in my mind that building. One one hand, we gen’ x’ers have some experience of this stuff. On the other hand, we gen’ x’ers have some experience of this stuff…

Alan McLeod
[10:38 AM September 19, 2001]

A good reference but, for me, at 38, having lived my first 28 or so during the Cold war, the presence of war and the potential to be sucked into one personally was never “violence unthinkable” despite how the life of a Canadian 20-something gen’ x’er in Nova Scotia was so peaceful and fun. On top of the fears, I wrote about above, my folks moved in ’56 to avoid the Third World War believed coming due to Hungary, French-Indochina and the Suez. When I got my UK Right of Abode in 1981, my mother thought Maggie T. might draft me for the Falkins. The fear of the bomb. We were living in our own minds on borrowed time and as a result were in no rush to prepare for kids, mortgages and careers. My 20’s were different from your – perhaps until now. From the fall of the Wall until the falling of the WTC there was a period of freedom from “the bomb” that I think I will not experience for a while.

Alan McLeod [7:33 AM September 24, 2001]
elal@pei.sympatico.ca

Like everyone, I am still thinking about what has happened and how things have changed since 11 September. One thing I think has changed is that irony and cynicism as a guiding principle for one’s life has been severely undermined. In North American popular culture for 20 years or so, the ability to comment upon any proposition with a tongue in cheek reort has been acceptable, almost expected and often a winning point in a conversation. David Letterman was an early adherent. We were so witty that we could turn any philosophical proposition or political stance around to show its paradoxical components and therefore its lack of integrity. Few principles could sustain the probe – wealth was bad but being a bleeding heart helping the poor is pointless emotionality; liking art was lightheaded but disliking art was neanderthalic; being involved with politics was self-interested, not being involved…well that was OK because that serves irony. The dominance of irony seems to have been swept away this month. Friends, beauty, nature, reflection are all assets we are being told to lean upon to understand the world now. Causes are largely just, protests are mute and people have gotten nicer on the highways. Will it last? Will street people have enough coin to get things to eat? Will we like our new neighbours and ask to try their strange foods? Will we stop thinking about our own inadequacies at work or home and enjoy the day?

What has changed in my life since the attacks? I have made a point of being in the USA often, mostly across in New York. It started out in part because we are so near but also to make sure the kids see US soldiers in normal life like they see members of the Canadian military in our streets in Kingston in uniform… even in my living room and on our vintage baseball team and at the Royal Military College games. When you see a young family in a mall, the Mom or Dad or both with the cut or even uniform of the 10th Mountain division from nearby Fort Drum, NY they know who they are also seeing on the news. It also makes you feel old, knowing that people half you age are pulling your weigh. I constantly listen to, am slightly obsessed with and am an active member of a NPR station that even runs the feed of this blog on their website as part of figuring out what “regional” means.

And I also remember.

Vermont: Odd Notion Fall ’09, Magic Hat, SoBurl

If Google is anything to go by – and it might well turn out to be – then I have clearly had a fair number of beers by Magic Hat. Like the buttery goodness. Like the quirky branding. Like the experimentations. This beer is one of there recent Odd Notions and I am told it is a stout, which it is, but was not told to expect smoked malt. It’s like a black thick stout with about 10% rauchbier added. Quite yummy stuff. Pours deep dark with a thin deep brown rim. Fine mocha foam verging on the burgundy tinged. It gives scents of cream, dark plum as well as a little roastiness. These continue in the swish with cocoa, earthiness, smoke, date, and a whack of other dark favours all in a reasonably big body which is also moreish. Quite the nicest stout I have had in a while.

Three bottles in each mixed 12-pack this autumnal season. Best of their special brews which I have had yet. Plenty of BAer love though they call it a Belgian dark unlike the brewery.

Group Project: So If Doom ’09 Is Really Over…

… Did the stimulus work? Here’s what you need to think… because that’s my job. Telling you what to think:

  • Why not say so? Why can’t we take a little pride in the fact that a little government intervention did the trick? Tax dollars in action.
  • What was the alternative? Did you really fall in with those dopes on the far right who wanted stimlus to fail? What would that do? Hurt your neighbour, your town, yourself? How far does the smug satisfaction of ideological purity get us all?
  • I want to look forward to the next new bubble economy. I want green cars and windmills not so much for what they do as what they provide – an active economy. If it were up to me, gas lawn mowers would be outlawed and everyone (else) would go buy a push mower. Open the push mower factory doors wide!
  • Do you really want a Federal election based on doubt and fear? Frankly, I am happy as all get out without a bunch of newbies getting into office for the next year or so. Sure lets have a fall 2010 election but that’s only two years for the Tories in office in Ottawa. They’ve even finally got the hang of playing a bit nice with Ontario. Look – they may be goofy and tick off Jay but they also seem harmless, right??
  • Best of all, we get to call out the naysayers and tell them that the economy works, that we are not facing the collapse of market based mixed socialist capitalism and that they are ‘fraidy cats. Nothing worse that economic friady cats.

We need post-recession street parties. Jingles about whipping the nation back into shape. Just like we live in a post-post 9/11 world, we also may be living in a post recession one, too, now. Bring back the happy songs. Bring back cake on Tuesdays at lunch.

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