Tales From The Crypt Of Early Micro

I am working on a relatively new database to me, a newspaper and magazine archive covering a little over the last thirty years. Grinding common beer words through the search engine of any new database is always fun but in the shadowy world of the recent past it can also be surprising. I don’t actually write all that much about the origins of of the micro brewing industry but, as we know, the shifting sands and rearguard revisionist retelling of all the genesis stories should be enough motivation for anyone. And it turns out there are interesting tales to be told from the point in time when “micro” was battling with “mini” and recently deceased “craft” was just a gleam in some PR committee’s eye.

First, set the scene. In Albany, New York’s Times Union of 16 July 1986 we have the staff byline story “Abrams Sues Big Breweries” – this particular Abrams being New York State Attorney General Robert Abrams:

The state attorney general filed an anti-trust suit in federal court Tuesday charging the four major beer breweries and their distributors have virtually suffocated competition and created unnaturally high 6-pack prices. The suit filed in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn names Anheuser-Busch Inc., Miller Brewing Co., G. Heileman Brewing Co. Inc. and the Stroh Brewery Co. breweries and the New York State Beer Wholesalers Association, which he charged control 80 percent of the New York state beer market. The four companies distribute almost every big-name beer in New York, including Budweiser, Michelob, Miller, Schlitz, Schaefer, Colt 45 and Schmidt.

The story states that the lawsuit, which charged distributor and breweries were engaged in an actual conspiracy to control the beer market prices. The interesting thing is that this is the sort of thing that big craft suggests it triggered but this story is effectively pre-micro.

In another tale from that same month we read, again in the Times Union, a story of accusation. In the 7 July 1986 edition, we can find the headline “Boston Beer Seller Claims 3 European Imports Impure” which is pretty funny given there have been false and well proven accusations about competition in the brewing industry since, well, pretty much since beer was invented. The story by Bart Ziefler of the Associated Press starts in this way:

A tiny Boston beer company is taking on two giant international brewers, claiming the top European imported beers couldn’t be sold in West Germany because they don’t meet that nation’s beer purity law. In a series of radio and newspaper ads, Boston Beer Co. has challenged the the quality of the Beck’s, St. Pauli Girl and Heineken beers sold in this country. Beck and Co. of Bremen, West Germany, which brews Beck’s and export- only St. Pauli Girl, denies the claim. Netherlands-based Heineken, brewer of the No. 1 import, acknowledged that its contains corn and they don’t try to sell it in West Germany, according to the Boston Business Journal. “It’s sort of common knowledge among brewers that the beers are doctored,” said James Koch, whose company began selling Samuel Adams beer a little more than a year ago. “If you’re going to bring beer from that far away and have it drinkable, you’ve got to do something to stabilize it.”

Really? Corn as the crisis in craft? Excellent. Can’t we just admit we like corn sometimes? Is this PR campaign where the phobia related to the one ingredient “whose name may not be spake” came from? Sweet last line in which Koch states that he said he hoped to make Sam Adams truly a Boston beer next year by opening his own brewery. Correct me if I am wrong but, according to wiki wisdom, the brewery wasn’t bought for another eleven years and it was located in Cincinnati.

The Buffalo News of 8 November 1991 included a particularly excellent “state of the nation” report by Dale Anderson from the 1991 Microbrewers & Pubbrewers Conference at the Hyatt Regency in that fair City… two months before, in September. Under the lengthy headline “A Little Beer – Microbreweries, Producing Specialty Beers in Small Quantities Are The Talk Of The Industry” we learn a lot of things… and not just that there was the term “pubbbrewers”:

1. “Two American breweries — Sierra Nevada in California and Red Hook in Washington — actually have outgrown the “micro” designation.”
2. “The biggest concentration of brew-pubs on the continent, meanwhile, is in nearby Ontario, where there are about two dozen in the Toronto area alone.”
3. “These small-scale operations have little effect on the big brewers… Instead, they have moved in on the imported specialty brands.”
4. “One reason Queen City chose to brew at Lion is that it could put foil wrapping on the necks of the bottles and other breweries couldn’t. “We sat back and said we didn’t want to run a microbrewery with a pub attached,” Smith says, “so we followed the path of Jim Koch with Samuel Adams in Boston. The tough part is predicting four or five weeks ahead of time what we’re going to need.”

You can click on the article for more but it is interesting that the acknowledgement of out-growing the category as well as contract brewing was so openly stated and presented simply as a sign of success.

Less familiar perhaps than the other stories is the weird 2002 tale of the “Sex For Sam” sponsored by Samuel Adams Beer in which “prizes were awarded to people who had sex in unlikely public places.” Unlike the many references to Mr. Koch the Ascendant in the media of the time, this is not one that weathers the passage of time so well. In the New York Post of 7 November 2003,  William J. Gorta and Bill Hoffmann reported the story a year later after events in question – when the resulting criminal processes were concluded:

The Virginia woman who scandalized St. Patrick’s Cathedral by having sex in the pews as part of a sleazy radio stunt that revolted the city will not go to jail. Loretta Lynn Harper, 36, was sentenced to 40 hours of community service as part of a plea deal in which she admitted to disorderly conduct. Prosecutors took pity on Harper because her boyfriend, 38-year-old Brian Florence – her sex partner in the church tryst – died suddenly of heart failure last month.

Turns out the great idea was a joint project between Boston Beer and the soon to be fired WNEW-FM shock jocks Opie and Anthony. An FCC fine of $357,000 was levied against the radio station. The final two lines of the story is classic:

WNEW had no comment on the sentencing. A rep for Opie and Anthony and Sam Adams President Jim Koch did not return calls.

Wise. But a little more detail is provided in a gossip column in the New York Daily News of 29 August 29, 2002 which I provide in full for reasons of review of the delightful manner in which the gossipy tidbit was framed:

Opie and Anthony had a beer buddy rooting them on in the studio while they encouraged the St. Patrick’s Cathedral sex stunt that got them canned. Jim Koch, the head of Boston Beer Co., admitted he was on hand during the taping and issued an apology on the company’s Web site Monday. “We at the Boston Beer Co. formally apologize to all those upset or offended by the incident on the Opie and Anthony show and by our association with it,” wrote Koch. His company backed the show’s “Sex for Sam” contest, which promoted a trip to Boston to the company’s annual festival for couples who had public sex. The Samuel Adams brewer even called Lou Giovino, the Catholic League’s director of communications, to apologize. “I spoke with him twice since Monday,” Giovino told us, “And we’re satisfied with his apology.” But Giovino didn’t seem content when we told him he could listen to Koch’s studio hooting on the Smoking Gun’s Web site. “Oh, boy,” he sighed.

The past is a foreign country – they do things differently there. “Oh boy,” indeed.

One last tale. A little less… ripe and perhaps more in tune with where the future was actually going. In the 2 November 1996 issue of Newsweek magazine, there was a short piece headlined “Hobbies – It’s Beer O’Clock” in the regular Cyberscope column authored by Brad Stone and Jennifer Tanaka.

Seems like it’s hardly ever Miller time anymore. Now that America has developed a taste for microbrewed beer, The Real Beer Page (http:realbeer.com) should find a natural audience. It’s a one-stop destination for dozens of links to microbrewery home pages, beer Web zines and a database of brew pubs with a search engine to help you find one in your neighborhood. Cheers.

Dozens! Imagine. Particularly sweet is the note that the caption to an accompanying image was “Suds on the Menu” because no one loves an early web pun more than me. I also like the reference to “beer Web zines” which what I really should have called this place – A Good Beer Web Zine. Where are my Hammer Pants?

Al and Max and the Strange Blue Light

I have been playing with this addition to the adventures of Al and Max first shared with the world in 2014’s cult classic, The Unbearable Nonsense of Craft Beer.  The five whole reviews of that first book left at Amazon have meant the world to me since that time. It is still available at a very reasonable $12.95 at Lulu and I assure you Max keeps every penny. He’s worth it.

I have played with the character of Al in a few posts a few years back but this larger piece has sat building itself in draft almost since the book came out. It is still in unfinished shape but I am not sure I will get back to is so… here it is. Oh, and you didn’t miss this post. I published it on 6 January but dated it to August 2017 when I last played with the draft.

+++++++++

1. The Shed

Alan was standing out in the backyard. He stood about ten feet from his shed, staring at it. He had gone out to put in a few more hours getting the garden ready for this spring’s seeds but for while now he had been staring at his shed. Again. His youngest child was staring at him from her bedroom window.

“Mommy!” she shouted downstairs, “Daddy’s staring at the shed again!”

He was. It’s true. He was just staring at the shed. He couldn’t get over it. It changed his life. How had Max and Ron materialized through the back of the shed all those times and now nothing? Then, what made that door to other places and other times close itself to him? He got mad for a while. Then a bit glum. Then, when winter passed, he found himself just staring. He had tried to find the invisible button, ran his head over every inch of the damn thing, kicked every half rotten board trying to figure it out. It was becoming clear that his portal was now just an outside closet full of little used tools and broken bikes.

“Come on in for supper, Dad,” the boy called, leaning out the back door.

“OK. I’ll be right in.” He didn’t move.

“Mommy! Daddy’s still staring at the shed!” his youngest shouted again a few minutes later.

_

He thought he had moved on. He was going to work. Keeping up with the laundry. You are never prepared for when a project is done, he said to himself. The porch gets painted. The manuscript goes in. The co-worker gets assigned to another job. Snow comes. Six months later you are so deep into the next job you’ve pretty much forgotten about the day to day crap the last one – and the one before that – stuck you with.

But then one night he had a dream. In the dream he was staring at the shed. That was nothing new. Shed staring dreams were common. They competed with that dream about the boss springing the grade 11 math exam on him without warning. But on this night the shed door was open. And there was something glowing at the back.

Al awoke. He couldn’t shake the idea that the dream meant something. He tweeted Max who, with the time change east, was already in the pub over in Prague.

@pivnofilosof: You had a dream about your shed? Again?

@agoodbeerblog: Yes… but it was more like the shed was talking to me in my dream.

@pivnofilosof: Have you been drinking?

@agoodbeerblog: No. Just put on coffee, why?

@pivnofilosof: I dunno. Maybe because you are tweeting me about your goddamn shed again?

@agoodbeerblog:Oh, OK. I suppose. But this time it was different.

Max read the messages from Al patiently. It had been weird. But he was Argentinian and understood weird. Al he went on and on, again, about the meaning of the dream. Well, Max really just sent tweets like “@pivnofilosof: oh yes?” and “@pivnofilosof: that’s interesting” as Al tweeted on and on for the best part of ten minutes. Max was in a pub on a sunny spring Saturday afternoon reading the paper and was enjoying himself too much to think all that much about a shed in Canada. Until that is Al got to the point.

@agoodbeerblog: It’s like the shed had a voice or at least wanted to tell us something.

@pivnofilosof: Us? It was your dream.

@agoodbeerblog: Us. You need to come over.

@pivnofilosof: No way. I am not starting this again.

@agoodbeerblog: I am not sure we really have all that much choice.

@pivnofilosof: What?

@pivnofilosof: WHAT?!??!

Alan was gone. Must have closed his computer. Screw that, thought Max. He was sick of the beer rant stuff. And a bit tired of Al. Nice guy but he hauled him though space and time and for what? The nonsense is still the nonsense and nothing is change. He read his paper a bit more, had another Únětická 10°.

Time to start thinking of supper. Before leaving for home, Max headed to the men’s room and, opening the door, he reached around for the light switch. Funny, he thought, it should be right there. He hand rested on a mop handle. No, it was a shovel. What the hell was a shovel doing here? He kicked something and tripped. “Why’s there all this crap in here?” he asked himself as he sat on his ass surrounded by junk in the dark. Max heard a voice calling.

“Hello?” Then the far end of the washroom the bright beam of a flashlight and a voice speaking in English. “Hello? Oh dear. Not a racoon at all. It looks like… Max?” It wasn’t the washroom. He was in Al’s shed.

“Fuck,” Max said. “Fucking fuck shit fuck.”

2. The Blue Glow That Spoke

Max was steaming. And bored. Hours had passed since he left Prague beer taproom. It was already midnight in Canada. He’d called home. Shouting and pleading in at least three languages Al didn’t understand. Arrangements could be made he supposed but until then here he was stuck with Al and that goddamn shed. They had been now staring at it for a few hours sitting on lawn chairs with Al going on and on about the shed. Max would be more than steaming and bored, however, if the shed in the corner of Al’s backyard wasn’t glowing a light neon blue. That was interesting. Weird even. Plus he has no idea how to get home.

“Maybe you should just walk into the light and let it envelop you,” said Alan trying to be helpful..

“Are you fucking joking? Walk into the light?” Max complained. “Let’s review how many times you get to do that in life. Once… and… oh, only the once.”

“Sorry,” Alan said, now remembering he had mentioned that idea about an hour ago. He looked at his beer. And the empty bottles by his chair. He now remembered he had mentioned it already a number of times. And everything else he could think of. He didn’t know what to say. He didn’t ask for Max to show up like this… not really.

“I have to get home, Al,” Max said for the seventeenth time. “I really can’t be here!” Max swung around and knocked his beer over. He looked down, his disgust with the situation moving up another notch watching the excellent ale seeping into the ground. He stared. He stared at it some more. It was night. He was in Canada. He didn’t wanted any of this.

“I can get you another, Max,” Al said. “There’s plenty. What do you want?” Max didn’t respond. Al was worried. Al had been getting a little worried for a couple hours now. He thought Max was really going to lose it soon. And he was trying to figure out how to keep his neighbours from calling the cops if Max let loose with another string of his startlingly diverse multi-lingual foul mouthed language. But Max didn’t. Not now. He was just staring at the shed.

“Look,” Max said quietly. He was pointing. Alan looked. The shed glow was stronger all of a sudden. And the spot where the beer had spilled was now glowing blue as well. The light was moving, growing. A figure in blue neon had formed in the shed door. A big shaggy topped bearded guy with glasses, half see-through, half… half a blue glowing tweed jacketed, a very familiar figure. He moved towards them. Max decided he was reaching even his maximum weirdness capacity.

Alan and Max looked at each other, at the figure in the door and at each other again.

“OK… this is weird,” Max quietly whispered to Al.

“Holy shit,” said Alan not at anyone in particular. Then the scene went quiet as all three looked at each other not moving. The man in blue moved over to the chair that Max had been sitting on, grabbed the back and pulled a blue glowing ghost clone of it towards him. He sat down with a smile.

“Jackson. Jackson’s the name. I think. Or was. Or might be. Not quite sure,” the figure said rubbing his chin, brows a bit furrowed. “Any chance of a beer?” said Jackson’s figure with an almost fatherly smile as he looked around. Alan put a beer on the table and the ghost’s blue hand reached over and pulled back with a blue neon replica of the beer in his hand. He drank deeply, downing half the bottle in one long draw.

“So… why am I here… and, umm, why is… where is here?” Jackson asked.

“We have no idea… Micha… Mr. Jacks…” Alan said as he was cut off by the blue figure.

“Look… one thing you need… I need to… to understand. I am not sure…. I am not Michael Jackson. Not really. I am something like him but not him. I’ve been dead for a while now and, you know, what with that whole merging with the singularity thing… it’s really hard to keep track of how much of what I was is still what I am.”

Neither Alan or Max knew what to say. So they just stared.

“Plus you are projecting your expectations all over me. That’s a little disconcerting.” He rubbed at his chest as if he was getting itchy.

“Sorry. err, Michael…?” Alan said confused looking at Max. Max was just staring at the ghost in blue now. But he looked like he was getting into this.

“So…” Max was gearing himself up to ask, “so, you are a bit of Jackson, a bit of the universal and a whole bunch of what we think of you?”

“Maybe… Exactly! Couldn’t have put it better… I think..” The blue figure said. He congratulated himself with the rest of the bottle of beer. He waived the empty at all, obviously seeking another.

Suddenly, music was coming from the shed. A falsetto singing “we-hee-hee” to a 1980s familiar beat.

“Is that…?” Max asked.

“Yes, we are all filed alphabetically in there,” the blue ghost said. “I have to listen to that all day and night. The King of Pop. Not what I expected in the world to come. If he hadn’t died so young I wouldn’t have had to put up with him yet.” He made a motion as if to grab at his crotch and then rolled his eyes. Al passed him another beer which again was left in his hand as Jackson drew away the blue clone. As Jackson drank, Al could feel the real beer in his hand lighten as the contents disappeared.

“… the way-eh you make-a me feel…” drifted out of the shed quietly, echoing.

“So, if you aren’t Jackson… what should we call you?” Al asked as he handed the form another beer, not noticing he was now tapping his toe to the ethereal beat. Another clone of the beer came into being.

The Jackson-like form paused. “Hadn’t thought of that… need another name to describe this state of being, don’t I. Of non-being… I suppose you could call me Hunter. I recall something about that…” He drew on the beer, nodding approvingly.

“OK, how about we don’t, Mike,” said Max, clearly now exploring some limits. If he was going to be stuck here, he thought, might as well set some rules, enjoy himself.

Jackson didn’t take offense. “Sure thing. I am open to suggestions. How about Fred. I always liked Freds. You can call me Fred. Freddie Mercury. Always had a soft spot for him. Once in a while, I can hear a few notes from his direction when the crotch man gives it a rest for a bit. Fred Hill. Fred Flintstone. Yes, Fred will do nicely,” said the figure in blue with a smile.

“Fred the beer by Hair of the Dog… Fred  Eckhardt…” Alan continued listing out loud, still trying to be helpful despite the weirdness.

“Oh. OK, fine. I can’t be Fred,” said the figure as if he had remembered something quite important he had not recalled for some time. “Not Fred… he’s Fred… who am I?” he said trailing off. Looking around he added “… and where am I?”

“How the hell knows or cares… it’s not like I want to be here either,” Max snapped having gotten all a bit impatient as he stood to go get another beer. “Maybe we’ll just call you ‘you’ for now, if that’s OK. Let’s see how that goes.” He took a couple of steps towards the shed. “This is too goddamn freaky. I need to figure out how all this is going to get me back to Prague.”

“Prague?” The blue form asked? Alan made a quick face at the blue figure as if to say that was Max being Max, not to worry. He got a shrug in reply.“Prague is nice. I like Prague.”

“Me too.” Alan then realized he had never been to Prague, that he was making inane small talk with the semi-undead on one hand and, on the other, a magically transported Argentine wanting to be back in Prague. He got all weirded out again.

“So,” Max said rounding on the two seated figures, “my can you tell me a little about what brings you here this fine midnight?”

“Me?” the blue form asked, pointing at his own chest.

“Yes, you, for fuck’s sake. You!” Max said getting all pointy, raising his voice to match his irritation.

“Well,” he said, “it’s that anger of yours – it’s about that rant of yours. Your trips through time and space and the diary you published. It’s all come to our attention.”

“Your attention?” Max asked, “who’s that you, You? Are there other “yous” back in the shed?”

Al thought this “You” thing was already falling apart a bit. And he was worrying about the neighbours. Max was getting emphatic. He didn’t want to trigger that other sort of “Max being Max” thing.

“I was asked to pop by. I think. Yes, that’s it. I was asked to pop over and have a word. We just wanted to make sure that you two were not missing the point, losing your focus on what matter. You sounded so unhappy there for a bit,” he said. “It’s just beer, you know.” Jackson had another long approving draw on his beer.

Al could not believe his ears. Here he was. Looking at… the residue of what once was Michael Jackson… maybe, the spirit of the man who created the whole style nonsense, the one being on Earth who did more than any other to aggrandize the humble glass of ale – and he’s the guy who tells him that it’s just beer? Al’s mind raced, not knowing what to say.

“Oh, by the way… I can read some of your thoughts, too,” said the glowing blue man. “part of the whole other-sidey stuff. Sorry. Supposed to mention that. Quite interesting. Max, you have an absolutely filthy mind.” Turning to Al, he said ,”You can’t imagine…” .

“Oh, yes. Oh, yes I can,” Al replied, slapped again with the scarring experience of his travels with Max. So many new words. So many new bad bad words.

“Anyway,” the undead in blue said turning back to Max, “the general consensus back there,” he said pointing at the shed, ”is that your ranting ways have left you in a bit of a bind. You’ve snookered yourselves. You’ve come to dislike the thing you like, haven’t you? What’s the point of that?”

Max looked at Al and back at the speaker. “But you are… or, fair enough, were… the guy who started it all. Who got us into the predicament in the first place. Beer styles. Beer pairing. Beer expertise. You aren’t suggesting that’s all made up,” Max said, waving his hands around.

“No… no… well, yes… and no. I did have quite an interest in all that, I guess…” he replied a bit sheepishly. “But it was because beer was so underappreciated. You have no idea what it was like in the 1970s. I hardly have any idea. I can hardly remember it but what I do recall is that it was bad. Watney’s Red Barrel. You have no idea.”

“Yes, we get that, but how does that translate into what has happened to good beer? All the posing, the weirdo adjuncts, the overpricing… the communicators?” Al asked, wincing at the last word. “Surely, you have something to say about that?”

Max jumped in. “Let’s get to the point. How do you feel when people hold meetings and praise you ‘with many hosannas’ claiming there will never be another like you?”

“Didn’t work out too well for the last guy, all that hosanna stuff, did it?” he replied with a smile, turning to Max. “Honestly? It’s all a bit depressing, actually. I mean if I could be depressed. Which I can’t. Because I died. Or he died. Hmm… lets just say deadness resolves all that. It’s quite handy in a way…” He paused. “Don’t get me wrong. I spent my whole professional life looking for the next drink, the better drink –  and I made it… here… or at least not down there. That must stand for something. I clearly was not all wrong, lads,” he said.

“Yes, there is that,” Max agreed. Alan nodded.

“So,” he continued, “while I am not going to agree with you on everything you wrote, I do see that it’s a bit like the person who loses a loved one and then drops all interest in life. I mean, if I was such an example of someone who went out and made my personal curiosity about beer into my rich life’s work, then why is the proper response to my early and untimely passing everyone putting one’s feet up? Saying there won’t be another like that Jackson guy? Surely to G… sorry… surely, my example itself ought to serve as reason to go out in the world, follow curiosity and find new things that I never saw. You’d think that’d be some sort of legacy.”

“Not passion?” asked Max.

“Ha! I don’t see too many of those “passion” people up where I ended,” Jackson replied laughing, waving his blue empty bottle again. Al handed him another of his shrinking stash. “Well, no, that’s not true. Plenty of good folk like Robert Langridge. You see them.”*

Alan rubbed his chin, thrown a bit. “I guess I see what you mean. But isn’t there another problem with your legacy? Is there enough elbow room for the gang following your footsteps? I mean you were one of the few who has made a decent buck, made a decent contribution from just beer writing. Is there enough beer money flowing from the brewers to the thinkers and writers?”

“Thinkers? Really? Look, grow up at bit, would you?” the glowing blue figure snapped. “You don’t have to die and sit for a semi-infinity in a place where time has no meaning mulling over stuff to know no one has a right to an income from an interest in good beer any more than you have a right to cash because you want to write. It has to be good writing to even be considered worth payment. Same goes for beer.”

“Exactly!” said Max exclaimed, “that’s my point!”

“Steady on, Max – it’s not all that profound,” The ghost paused and looked around. “By the way, any chance I could get a proper glass? Something of a goblet?” Jackson pulled a translucent litre can out from under his tweedy jacket and poured. “Your stash is fine, Al, but I brought my own just in case.” His translucent hand reached for the glass, poured and lifted a faint copy of the glass to his lips as the earthly one sat still empty before him.

“Does that really say ‘Westy 12’ on the can?” Max asked incredulously.

“And ‘Big Gulp’ and ‘As Seen on TV?’” asked Alan.

“It’s called heaven for a reason, boys…” the apparition said with a wink.

3. The Stars Still Stood Still

They talked. They drank. If time had had any meaning that night, hours might have passed. But as long as the blue figure was there, the mid-point of that night seemed to carry on, the stars holding their position in space even as the occasional comet raced by. The conversation carried on, Max showing less and less irritation and much more interest in what the blue ghost was saying.

“I remember realizing after enough folk I knew had died that they switched from being a subject to an object. Sometimes it happened immediately,” the visitor said. “One minute you imagine the next editorial meeting, based on the last one and the one before that. You don’t notice the guy in the chair next to you half the time but he’s a someone. Then you hear the guy’s kicked it and, just like that, he’s a character in your life. Locked in.”

“So,” Max asked trying to understand, “what you are saying is that not only are you not really you because you were something that is different than you are. And that on top of that you are locked in because what you are is pretty much all you can be?”

“Yup. That’s about it. Plus all that projecting. You have no idea. Folk project their expectations all over you after you bite it. It saps away the what you were bit by bit. The process of objectification I suppose. You guys aren’t too bad. You’re hardly draining me away at all now.”

“Yeah, I never read you that much – sorry about that,,” Alan said. “Nothing personal but I came so late to your books that I pretty much had framed my own ideas by that point. I am not sure what you stand for… stood for. I mean it’s all very fine to be the first at something but there’s not a lot that is mastered on the first go, right? Plus I came to good beer through Dave Line…”

“And I’m Argentinian,” Max said.

The other two looked at Max and then each other.

“OK… shut up… it’s complicated,” Max said.

Alan took another gulp of whatever was in his glass, looked up into the dark. And then asked “do you mind?”

“Mind? Mind being… blue? Dead and blue? No, not at all” he said as his blue hand waved away the notion in a glowing slash. “From this side of things you also have a good sense of what matters and what you ended up achieving. If you are lucky, it was something a bit useful. It’s a privilege and maybe even an obligation to do something a bit worthwhile. You know, I did get to teach a lot of people a good bit about something I really liked in life. Nothing wrong with that.”

“Nothing at all,” said Max. Alan just swallowed, then raising his glass to tap his neighbour’s. The blue outlined one just passed through, even as there was a quiet “clink” in the night.  They all sat and thought there own thoughts for a while under the unmoving heavens.

“OK,” said Al, “if we accept that it is good to be useful and share your skills, are there still opportunities and different views being excluded?”

“Never my aim,” the blue form said, “though the weight of the expectation to do so projects upon me terribly. Hardest stuff to bear. But, regardless of what people think, there is one single point that needed to be made which might seem like exclusion – beer was and remains disrespected compared to wine. You can repeat after me if you need to. Wine is more expensive than beer and is always been more profitable than beer. Wine is still held in high regard. Beer is taken for granted – dismissed. It may be because beer aim for consistency that they are considered a bit boring. Shifting the reputation of good beer was and remains critical. Folk like you two do nothing for the cause when you go on about the unbearable nonsense of it all.”*

Max and Al both visibly unimpressed at the idea of a “cause” but their companion was not to be deterred. “I have said it before and it remains as true today. Wine is never blamed for deaths on the road, family breakdowns or other social ills. It’s all caused by beer. So beer needs to be taxed to stifle demand, its advertising needs banned, its points of sale limited. These views are held by a surprising number of people with influence or power in bodies like the European Union. If I am going to find myself facing that sort of reality, I need to stand against it.”

“But isn’t that a bit done by now?” Alan asked. “Isn’t the day long passed where the cause needs boosters? We’re in the 5,000 brewery universe now. Every town of any size has a nano-brewing hipster or a good beer bar. Isn’t it long past time where we need to prop up the one-sided communicators with their identical blog posts about the same one junket? Good local beer stands alongside the good local wines made within an hour’s drive from here. The brewers and wineries even support each other. The wine is great. Oz Clarke’s writing about it, one of the up and coming underdogs in wine.”

“They make good wine around here? Really?” Max said. “Why didn’t you tell me? I like wine. You think I don’t like wine? Do you have some of this wine? How come you never told me about these wines? You thick headed freckled idiot.”

Al looked at Max, a bit surprised by his lack of hospitality. “You want some wine?” Alan asked Max, then looking at Not Fully Jackson. Seeing them both nod – and agree he was in fact an idiot – he went off to grab a bottle of local Riesling and a Pinot Noir from his stash. A few minutes later, he was filling his guests eagerly upheld glasses.

“Wow!” said the blue man holding up his glass of Devils Wishbone white. “That’s fabulous. Crisp acids, light fruit, creamy minerals.”

“Nothing wrong with that at all,” Max said, holding his glass up to the blue glow. “You really are an asshat for not telling me about this,” considering the wine with obvious experience.

“Fine,” said Al, “and it’s the limestone and loam that makes them that good – but the point is made. These are small local producers of excellent wines, no different that the small local brewers down the road. Good beer is like fine wine is like good cheese. Like good books and good… good… anything! But these days, it’s either overlaid with all this victim discourse or this needy even passive aggressive PR claptrap. You’d think we were talking about the endangered white rhino the way people go on…”

“…not to mention the pay for play whether in a bar’s tap line up or the contents of some of these communicator’s internet organs,” added Max, smacking his lips after dropping a second glass of Norman Hardie’s red. “You know, this would go well with a nice bit of manchego … or even lovecký sýr…”

“Or a good aged cheddar. You Canadians do a good job with that, you know. You wouldn’t happen to have… “ Alan was already walking again across the lawn back to the house to get them both some cheese, amazed how they well they were getting along.

“Grab some crackers while you’re in there,” shouted Max at Al’s back. “And olives if you have them…”

“Good call, Max” said Jackson approvingly.

4. The Path Forward

“You know, I knew you were going to say that” the blue form said.

“Of course you did. You can read our minds, remember?” Max said with a nod.

“Oh, yes. Of course. So where were we?” Al asked, nabbing that one last olive.

“Taste, local, good beer, good wine…” the blue man sighed, happy with the snacks. “It’s all about the same thing: is it good? When I started out, it was all so bad, so industrialized.”

Alan rubbed his the top of his head. “Bad? Isn’t beer always going through phases, being build up to a massive scale only to be replaced by the smaller and more agile? Even E.P. Taylor started out as a small disruptive force in brewing. It’s not about scale. You know, you once wrote:

Unfortunately people who take destructive and irreversible decisions based on “public taste” are usually ten years behind everyone else in their appreciation of whatever is at stake. People who quote “taste” to support their argument usually have no taste and no argument.**

“These days it’s not ten years or even ten months… ten weeks is old news,” Alan added. “It’s frenetic. So many brewers making so many beers with nothing lasting even long enough to be considered a seasonal anymore. Not to mention that craft beer has gotten so big.”

“And Big Beer’s gotten so craft,” added Max.

“You are quoting me to me, Al? What’s your point?” the ghost said. “Isn’t it enough that I am dead but that you quote the dead not living me at the now not living dead me?”

“Sorry. But it’s just that craft today is just a phase based on allegedly good taste as much as the next thing that passes craft by will be,” Alan said. “Craft craps on micro for not having the right taste. Big craft craps on big industrial for being supposedly “crafty” when the two are virtually identical. Whose taste can we trust if it all just marketing, just an argument?”

“Craft? Ah, craft! So that really took off, did it?” the blue man rubbed his chin, “I remember using that back in 2003, probably earlier. It’s was still a fairly new word for microbrewing from just before I kicked the bucket, right?

“Well, it was all craft. It’s independent now. You’ve really have been dead for a while,” said Max who quickly – and somewhat surprisingly – regretted his rudeness.

“Don’t worry. It’s just a word” said Jackson a bit to himself. “…craft, dead… just words.”

“Craft,” said Al shaking his head. ”It’s become just another form of phoney, another bastardization of the simple goodness, a fraud on the honest price for an honest beer. Radler, for God’s sake…”

“They brought back Radler?” the ghost said taken aback. “I never thought craft would take on producing and promoting, a drink that looks like lemonade.”

“So much tastes like lemonade these days… and Gatorade… and…” Alan said.

“It’s all about finding the next trick to play on the consumer,” Max said, “the next junk additive to chuck in the next stupid packaging.”

“Adulteration? Adultery? Hint? Can anyone pick up a hint from the dead guy in the room?” The ghost of Jackson was holding his hands up with a shrug looking at Max and then Al and back and forth.

“I’m not following you,” said Al looking back and forth himself.

“Sixth commandment anyone?”

“Are you saying that the adulteration of beer was prohibited by God?” Max asked.

“Bingo!” shouted the unJackson. “Everyone thinks it’s about marriage but that’s already covered by number nine, the whole coveting thing isn’t it. No, the rule relates to the whole of life. Don’t mess with stuff pretending it makes anything better. As with marriage so with beer and any number of other things. People can smell a phony. Good beer has a hard enough time without the phonies.”

Alan and Max had no idea what to say. Then they did.

“Whaaaat?” they fell over each other saying.

“Wasn’t that exactly what we said after our trips in our diary about the state of good beer?” Max added.

“Look, I have to go. But I will be straight with you,” the blue figure said standing up. “It’s not like your little book set the word on fire or said anything everyone else wasn’t thinking already. But you seemed to have the right goal, the intention to figure out what’s right and what’s wrong about good beer.”

Al and Max shrugged in agreement as they also got up.

“See that blue glowing garden shed over there? Whatever that is – and I am not sure I am all that sure myself – well, whatever that is… it sure likes the whole right and wrong thing. I spent my whole life thinking about the good, the bad and the ugly of beer. Keep it up. But Max? Maybe a little less of the garbage mouth, OK?”

“Screw that!” Max said with a laugh. Ex-Jackson was walking back across the lawn.

“Well, it’s been fun but I must be going, gents. I can’t believe it’s this late in the…” He paused, considering how to explain non-chronology. His form was starting to lose some detail as he spoke the words. “That other Jackson fellow seems to have taken a break and I need to take advantage of the opportunity. It’s been good talking with you but there’s only so much guidance I can give you. Beer is complex enough yet so approachable that there are plenty points of view worth exploring.”

“Even the communicators, the storytellers?” Al called out as the blue form moved back into the shed, fading and merging with the blue glow.

“Even the commuuunicatooors!” they could hear his last words echoing from a distance. Then was only silence.

“… the way-eh you make-a me feel…” drifted out of the shed quietly, breacking the silence. Echoing.

“Was that a groan?” Alan said.

“Poor bastard,” said Max shaking his head, following towards the shed as the blue glow started to fade.

A moment later, he was gone as well, Al standing alone on the lawn wondering to himself if Max had meant to do that and where exactly he might now be.

*See Jackson, The Beer Hunter, “Sweet flavours from the cowshed”.
**See Jackson, The Beer Hunter: “Wine snobbery … and brewers who won’t learn or fight back” – Published in Print 1 March 2002, Brewers’ Guardian.
***See World Guide to Beer, page 204.

Fascists, Racists, Pinkos, Brewers And…

Not much inclined to write for the last week or so. Late 1970s nuclear fear retro followed quickly by 1930s Nazi fear retro. Seems our neighbours to the south hired a moron and he is turning out to be a fabulous moron attracting other morons to flit about his flame. Like last summer, one barely knows what to reach for but, perhaps unlike last summer, one knows one might need to. What to do in these troubled times? Perhaps explore how fascism, communism and racism (perhaps bundled as “totalitarian supremacism“?) has been known to brewing over time? Let’s see.

Earlier this year, Hungary witnessed a bit of a political controversy over the appearance of Heineken’s red star – which Hungarian law considers a totalitarian symbol. As might have been expected, it was apparently as much as anything about contemporary politics and the time-honoured role brewing money plays in that game.

Totes Supps can also show up in more unexpected ways. In 2016, a brewery in Bavaria was accused of offering a Nazi friendly lager named Grenzzaun Halbe, or Border Fence Half. Priced at 88 euro cents a bottle, it was considered code for HH or Heil Hitler. The brewer in the usual way explained “insisted the name and slogan were not directed against migrants, but referred to defending Bavarian culture“* but, oddly, also said they had lent resources to the refugee influx.

Then there are the old boys who, you know, just say those sorts of things. Yesterday, Jason Notte provided a bit of a walk down memory lane offering the legacy of US brewing mogul Bill Coors who was apparently quoted in 1984 for providing such comments as “…one of the best things they did for you is to drag your ancestors over here in chains…” and “…they lack the intellectual capacity to succeed, and it’s taking them down the tubes” though the resulting libel suit against a newspaper that had the gall to report his words was dropped. The old git is still with us apparently, turning 101 the other day. Other similar substantial claims were made against the brewery in those days. Interesting, then, that three years later this was an opinion reported by the Syracuse Herald-Journal of February 10, 1987 just when Coors was entering the CNY market:

“When you buy their product you are, in effect, inviting the Coors people into your home,” said Joseph Welch, executive secretary of the Greater Syracuse Labor Council. “I think anyone with a conscience wouldn’t want those kind of people in their homes.”**

But these brewers can also be ingrained into the movement. If we go back a bit further, one can look at what brewers did during the time when fascists were actually in the ascent. To the right is a very handy graph with the somewhat vague title “Birra Peroni’s strategic response to institutional pressure” from the 2016 book Accounting and Food: Some Italian Experiences by Sargiacomo, D’Amico and Di Pietra. I say vague given it illustrates, in part, this business decision from 1926 to the regime’s fall:

…the Fascist government tried to control production and balance demand and supply by controlling the supply side…. In this context, the company’s strategic response may be viewed as a compromise. Giacomo Peroni, former president of the earlier Unione Italiana Fabbricanti di Birra (Italian Brewers’ Union) was put at the helm of the new association. As the managers of the new association, Giacomo could act as an institutional entrepreneur and therefore bend the institutional change to his own and his company’s interests. In fact, despite the need to reduce the company’s production volume as imposed by the Fascist government, in his role Giacomo Peroni managed to avoid such cuts and toss them off on his competitors. This is suggested by the fact that it was precisely in those years that the company increased its production volume and sales. 

Suggested?*** Hmm… Apparently, Peroni also fed demand from what are described as the “new African colonies” aka the invasion of Ethiopia. Nothing like a captive audience. Note: Peroni continues as a brand now owned by Japanese brewer Asahi, achieving apparently some recent success.

And we do also recall that the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch did lead to the army being called out, an arrest, a trial and a five year term. Well, then someone gave Hitler a pen in jail and he wrote down his evil which was shared after an early release.

What does all this prove? Well, as you can see in the footnotes, we can laugh at it. We can also support the democratic processes that stand against it. But that totalitarian supremacist is going to keep popping up. No point in pretending, offering a beer and dreaming that people are good. Some people are very bad. Having lived though an number of genocides at the youthful age of 54 – from Cambodia to the Balkans – I don’t expect that evil to change. But if we understand that it is an insidiously corrosive, inveigling tendency we should be aware that it needs being watched out for and given proper response.

*See here for more.
**See here for more.
***See here for more.

 

Half Hours On Earth, Seaforth, Ontario

I’d like to say that I visited Half Hours on Earth a few weeks ago but it was more like a drive-by shooting. Except I was only shooting with the iPad camera. See, it was summer and the kids at camps and cottages on the Lake Huron shore. My only job that week off was to get them there one weekend and get them back on the next one. Thirty-two hours of driving all in all. I needed some joy and a stop like this on a long haul is just the thing I needed. But I only had 12 minutes so I was in and out after asking 57 questions and coming across as a weirdo. I am used to me so it was fine.

 

 

 

 

Seaforth is a small crossroads ag supply town in south western Ontario that looks like a lot of the other small crossroads ag supply towns in south western Ontario that I married into. Lovely orange and tan brick houses and main street buildings. Gingerbread gothic revival churches sitting prominently on a grid of squares drawn on a map in the 1830s, long before the people arrived. All cooled by the shade of large hardwoods planted over 100 years ago – or maybe a dip in the river when it’s a hot one. The whine of cicadas interrupted by blizzards on an annual cycle. Alice Munro country filled with quiet towns laced with the quietly unhappy but satisfied enough. It’s not where you would think you would find great beer but a few weeks back Robin and Jordan declared it the best new brewery in the province and I went all in. I found the brewery and its two owner operators in the lower level of a grain depot by a rail siding. Here is what I thought.

Green Mind: The name is like a Third Doctor serial. Except it needs to have “of Doom” added at the end. I bought a quart jug, aka a small growlers. It provided me with a great follow up to a GLB Canuck and a Friday evening mow of the lawn. At heftier 7.1% its the biggest of the beers I bought, surprising similar but also the senior to the province’s favourite craft beer. Not a sour bomb so much as a weedy raggedy-arsed maybe even pissed-off IPA.  Pale malt sweet base under bitter greens. The lavender brett fitting beneath the lush ditch weed bitter herb hop. Remember. I just mowed the lawn. A bit of Chinese mustard green burn. Not really arugula black pepper bitter but green and sharp like a salad full of salad greens you never heard of. Quaffable. I quaffed. Rounded by the wood not a hint of any cheesy Chardonnay oak. Robust but not heavy. Extremely satisfying dry stinging nettle note in the finish. Cloudy but not milky, mustard – tan coloured ale under a rich clingy fine whipped egg white head. Sweet cream and herbs on the nose portending the unexpected. A thinking person’s ale. Or at least a person having a good think after mowing the lawn on a Friday. Lovely.

Jez: 5.6% rosehip rosemary farmhouse. Herbal lemonade on the nose. Smell like the sorbet/sherbet I want in my life. Cloudy dark lemon ale under rich white whipped head. Dry yet moderately full. Plenty of bright acid, lemon juice, rose hip giving both a bit of body and a seam of earthy slightly sweet must. Very attractive, vinous. Citrus rise at the start, lime and white grapefruit pith. Deftly confident if not bold. Could have been overbearing if a few element had gone astray. Could poach cod in this. With baby leeks and smashed new spuds. I came back to this one. As I thought about this beer, I agreed with myself about how brilliant the use of rose hip was.  Earthy but not mushroomed.

Corrigan: I believe I learned that this was the same 5.6% base beer as the Jez but with coriander and lemongrass. The lack of the earthy non-mushroom tone makes a great difference. This is all bright and light. The piccolo of citrus notes with a relatively slight herbal presence compared to Jez. The lemongrass adds green hues to the middlest middle where another brewer this summer or last might have placed cucumber. Very attractive…. again. The bretty lavender effect frames deftly. Did I use deft again, too? Sure did. A very much quieter sour beer but well worth leaning in a bit and paying proper attention.

Mingus Dew: I bought a full growler, a pottle to those who know. Quarts and pottles. Can’t we just call them that? This pottles-worth was drained in the backyard of the in-laws who were away out east on holiday. We were feeding grapes to the unwelcome rabbit who had set up shop, eating all their garden plants. Rather cheeky. It was the perfect antidote to a stinking hot day in a quiet town, another southwestern Ontario ag supply town. At just 3.8%, a dry hop table sour that offers no dangers, just promises. And opportunities. Dry citrus tang on the nose. Slightly clouded light golden ale under a rich rocky lace leaving head. I should pull the two emergency bottles of that Girardin with the black label out of the residual stash to see how they might compare. This is lovely. Yes, simple lemon but, as with GBL, there is that measured cream backbone from the light malt.

Pod Six: Last but not least. Again, I believe this is the same 3.8% base beer as Mingus Dew with sea salt rather than dry hopping. Side by side, very interesting. The most obvious difference is how the salt adds a slight coating to the lips. Next, it slightly takes the edge off the acid. It might contribute to a more restrained aroma. What, after all, is the smell of salt? A miner might know. The choice of sea salt is interesting as just down the road is Ontario’s salt supply at Goderich. I want to fill a jug with this beer and mild garden herbs. Parsley. Chervil.

We actually chatted a bit. Not what you would call an interview or anything. The kids were in the car. With the AC on. You can read the newspapers for that sort of information. Owners Kristen Harburn and Kyle Teichert grew up in the area. People I know probably know people they know or at least were at the same buck and doe. I asked how it was they got into sours and told me of trips to Buffalo to find Belgian sours, the empties of which were on display. I pointed at a few with strong memories for me, especially Brise-BonBons from Fantome which introduced me to hoppy and sour ten years ago. These beers are the the love child of that.

They ship their beers. You can order them and they stick them in the mail. I will do that. Likely today. After all, I am just about out. If I think of the thrill I had in the fall of 2007 finding myself in Dexter, Michigan getting an hour of Ron Jefferies’ time at the end of a busy week and then getting a case of quarts (and a woolly winter hat) to take away at $5.99 a bottle, the idea of getting beer this fine delivered to my door has a Jetsons’ tone to it here in Ontario the monopolistic. I like this future.

When Steam Was King… It Was Common

Two years ago – well, 23 months ago, I wrote a brief passing thing about the concept of “steam” beer in a post about another thing, cream ale, but given this week’s sale of Anchor, makers of steam beer who proudly proclaim they are San Francisco Craft brewers since 1896,  to an evil dark star in the evil dark galaxy of international globalist beverage corporations, I thought it worth repeating and expanding slightly. Here is what I wrote:

Adjectives from another time. How irritating. I mentioned this the other day somewhere folk were discussing steam beer. One theory of the meaning is it’s a reference to the vapor from opening the bottle. Another says something else. Me, I think it’s the trendy word of the year of some point in the latter half of the 1800s. Don’t believe me? Just as there were steam trains and steamships, there were steam publishers. In 1870 there was a steam printer in New Bedford, Massachusetts. A steam printer was progress. Steam for a while there just meant “technologically advanced” or “the latest thing” in the Gilded Age. So steam beer is just neato beer. At a point in time. In a place. And the name stuck. That’s my theory.

And here is what I would like to add. To the right is a news item from the Albany Gazette of 10 March 1814. As I have looked around records from the 18o0s for example of the use of “steam” I describe above, I found this one describing a steam battery both early and entertaining. I assumed on first glance that this was some sort of power storage system. In fact it is for a barge loaded with cannon. 32 pounder cannon which are rather large cannon indeed. Well, all cannon are large if they are pointed at you I suppose but in this case they are significant. For the nationalist vexiologists amongst you, I can confirm that the proposed autonomously propelled barge system of cannon delivery was reported six months before the Battle of Baltimore. Were they part of the sea fencibles? Suffice it to say, as with steam publishing and steam train engines you had steam based warfare by battle barge.

Next – and again to the right – is a notice placed in the New York Herald on 11 September 1859 indicating that John Colgan was selling three grades of ale and perhaps three grades of porter after “having made arrangements with W.A. Livingston, proprietor of steam brewery…” This appears to be an example of contract brewing where Livingston owns the brewery and contract brews for the beer vendor, Colgan. Aside from that, it is a steam brewery. Livingston’s operation was listed in the 1860 Trow’s New York City Directory along with a number of other familiar great regional names in brewing such as Vassar, Taylor and Ballantine. And it lists over two pages a total of four steam breweries, including Livingston’s. Which makes it a common form of industry marketing.

“Steam” is quite venerable as a descriptor of technology. If you squint very closely at this full page of the Albany Register from 29 January 1798 you will see steam-jacks for sale. It is also a term that moved internationally. In the New York Herald for 15 September 1882, you see two German breweries named as steam breweries. And again in the Herald, in the 10 August 1880 edition to the right, we see the sale of the weiss brewery at 48 Ludlow Street details of which included a “steam Beer Kettle” amongst other things. One last one. An odd one. If you look at this notice from the Herald from 14 June 1894 you will see a help wanted ad seeking a “young man to bottle and steam beer.” Curious.

What does any of it mean? Well, steam beer and common might have a lot more to do with each other than the just the name of a style.

 

 

The Summer Intern Hands Back His Smock And Tongs

Well, that’s it. Stan will be back next week. It has been fun but it’s also required a fair bit of attention. Something I am not sure I could sustain month after month. I sometimes see beer writers use the word “fascinating” and realize I couldn’t muster up that emotion if I was handed a vial of Fascinex 150 pills.

How much greater the rip roaring fun one finds in beery records of the past like this real knee slapper of a joke to the upper right from the 11 December 1811 Kingston Gazette of this my dear old colonial town. This brain teaser from the same paper’s 4 December 1810 edition had me spinning for hours. What chance does one week today have against this sort of quality work from the past?

More International Mass Craft

Is it even news that BrewDog is setting up another branch plant, this time in Australia? My thoughts, what with another quarterly report and another slip in Sam Adams sales offset “by increases in our Twisted Tea and Truly Spiked & Sparkling brands,” that there is a diminishing return on such things but – as we know from our Bible story time – avarice will have its way. Just as there is no thrill seeing another run of the mill Sam Adams product on a beer store shelf here in Ontario, I trust and likely hope that my Australian cousins have enough local breweries to support that a carpetbagger would get at best tepid reception.

Somehow, Martyn’s fuzzy picture from the event captures the spirit of it all.

Hiding in Plain View

GBH has tweeted a link to a very interesting reddit post by Sixpoint Brewing on the recent “investment” in 21 Amendment by Brooklyn that is fun in its bitchiness but also very telling in one particular comment: “…with a path to full control.” See, when these things happen and people say “whew, it was only a 19.9999% investment so it’s OK” they entirely miss the point. Percentage share ownership means nothing. The BA definition was either writing by non-lawyers or was crafted to dupe. See, you can own 1% of the shares or 99% of the shares of something and still effectively control it outright through the terms of the agreement that is entered into when making the investment. It’s called a shareholders agreement and under them you can list decisions which can’t be made without the approval of this shareholder, you can name names as to which founding owner is now only a front man for the business and you can establish rights to future purchases of more shares – aka the path to full control.

Fuggles Or Fuggle… Or Fuggle’s?

Ron has posted a picture on Twitter of an 1850s brewing record that uses the word “Fuggle” which has spun off a bit of chatter about the nature of the notation. Martyn suggests it references the farm family rather than the variety. But I wonder when the variety became itself. Not that the record says “Fuggle” and not “Fuggles.” Late in 2014, Martyn posted a detailed description of his understanding of the genesis of the hop variety. Mr. Fuggle was traced through the Manwaring-Fuggle family tree. Note in his explanation at one point we had a strain named “Fuggle’s Golding” which makes the question even more fabulous.

And, Finally, In Other News

North Korea has revealed the best beer in the world and it costs six cents. Kim Jong Un is apparently nuts about it. I love how it is “suspected they drew particularly heavily on British and German know-how” because, as you know, that is what all the best beers depend on.

Could Mr Zyankali make his approach to drinks sound more boring?

Endtimesy.

Jason N. tweeted a very interesting fact about the relative successes of two supposedly “sell out” brands. Which makes me wonder why we like one faceless global conglomerate more than another in some sort of form of corporate anthropomorphism. Why do we care? Why do we kid ourselves?

Thanks!

That is it. Of the five weeks I was assigned, this was a bit of a quieter one. What with the dog days of summer, I suppose that was to be expected. First trick I learned? Have a draft started by Thursday with at least 60% of the post sketched out. Second, make sure you do not just overlap Boak and Bailey’s regular Saturday post o’links. Only you can judge whether I can claim to have been effective.

Well, only Stan can. I trust he will be back at the coal face today building his links for publication next Monday, 7 August. I shall be back to my own semi-coherent ramblings upon my ramblings.

 

The Problematic Third… No, FOURTH (!) Week Of The Intern’s Beery Links

Week three.* I understand this is when a beer blog intern really lets the side down. I mean there is gardening to do, day dreaming about ice cream making demands and quality napping time to be enjoyed. Me, I weeded the leeks and harvested the garlic just yesterday. I’ve no time to write my own stuff. I clearly need a need a break. Fortunately, others have been doing a particularly swell job keeping an eye on the ball so there has been lots to think about this week.

What Is Bad Aurosa and What Isn’t

First, my co-author-in-law Robin LeBlanc wrote an excellent piece on a beer which neither of us are likely to ever see on a shelf let alone buy. Aurosa, a Czech brand aimed at… women. All of them apparently. All at once. But that, as you know, makes no sense. Robin deals with this handily:

…the type of women they have in mind are a very specific subset. Usually white, thin, rich, and the type that identify deeply with Kendall Jenner’s instagram account. There is nothing wrong with this type of woman, but if you’re going to market to all women you have to acknowledge that we’re not all one type and that is why women don’t need a brand of beer specifically for them.

This has wider implications beyond this mockery attracting form of thick-headed sexism… which, BTW, can in turn attract casual hate.  The fact is beer is not manly and also not not manly. It isn’t noble or ignoble.  It’s a fluid that gives you a buzz for lots of your money which can be branded in any number of ways, even the quite stupid – and, as Maureen wrote about in 2009,  even the blatantly racialized. Why all the attribution? Money? Money.

I illustrate the tendency in reverse. One aspect of the chameleon-like status of gender and brewing has been the presentation of early brewing as all female, an argument often begins with a paragraph on that Sumerian goddess. It is that, yes, and more. And less, too. Jay some time ago posted a helpful list of all the goddess and gods and neutral deities of brewing. The list conveys the many labels cultures and eras imposed on the joy juice. We make of it what we want. Or someone wants to tell us to want.

As with many things about beer, along with the money I blame the alcohol but if we do consider the many faces and facets of beer and brewing over time and cultures, for me, the interest lies in the diversity of ways it acts as a conduit – a trigger even – for both the highs and depths humankind can come up with.

Lars Travels East So You Don’t Have To

Clearly driven by more than booze and cash, we have Lars. Is there any more dedicated beer researcher than Lars Marius Garshol? This week he is sending tweets from out front,  where the new ideas and ancient ways are to be found. The eastern front that is. He sent out this update on Tuesday:

On the road to Kudymkar. Car shaking so bad I can’t look out the window sideway, or I’ll be sick. Should be there in an hour or so.

According to wikipedia, Kudymkar is a town and the administrative center of Komi-Permyak Okrug of Perm Krai, Russia. Lars took himself there to document traditional rural farmhouse brewing techniques and his twitter feed is on fire. Well, it’s not. OK. It is not flammable. But it is a hot take! Fine, it’s not – as it is actually well researched and properly considered. Let’s just leave it that his work is fascinating and valuable. This one tweet is more marvelous that 98% of the entire internet. What did you do for beer this week? Not much, right?

Rich Brats Pay Others To Make Beer

Much has been made of the article in Forbes on the three sons of rich people who are starting a brewery. The reality that money speaks for money may underlie the very access to the publication. Fun making of the three lads and story’s errors is to be found at Beervana but the best thing is the plan they proudly describe to make “pilsnar” – it’s the bestest dumb thing about beer of all this week.

But the matter may have gone to far with this question posted by John Urch: “Have three more arrogant, hubristic people opened a brewery?” As we all know, the answer is yes (and you can all name them.) Often it is a requirement for big craft success.

Andy Crouch on the Need for Transparency

The release by tweet of Andy’s July 2017 column for BeerAdvocate has caught the attention of more than a few. There was even the obligatory if weak gotcha .gif sighting. In his column, Andy* argues that the problem with big beer buying into craft bigly is all in the disclosure:

…consumers have a right to know about this. If you’re a Big Beer-affiliated brewery, own that. Don’t hide it. In your company’s “About Us” or “Brewery History” page online, don’t omit that AB InBev owns you as almost every formerly independent and now High End brewery does. Don’t play cute about it with the press. Stop telling consumers nothing has changed. Anyone saying that is either lying or negligently naive.

I spoke up thusly: “Add transparency about contract brewing + non-ownership financial arrangements, too. Maybe records of health + safety orders.” See, what matters to me has little to do with ownership but plenty to do with interests. I don’t care to spend my money on bad employers or false fronts. If we benefit openness and transparency, let the light shine everywhere. I want to know who is getting paid by whom, who is contract brewing, who is cashing out, who isn’t a good employer, and whose civics are admirable.

Other Stuff

More fun hate on for BrewDog. Why do they make it so easy?

Our stunned Jim Koch quote of the week explains what his version of big craft thinks of some of its customers – those who like to think:

It’s a dilemma other nationally distributed craft brewers have faced, including Jim Koch, the founder of Boston Beer, which makes Sam Adams and has annual sales of $879 million. “If you make great beer,” Koch says, “and people love it and drink it, and more and more of them love it and drink it, the beer geeks will turn against you. You’re talking about roughly 5%, but they’re an influential 5%.

If you are reading this – heck if you are reading about beer at all – that’s you. Get in line. Money needs more money!

Presenting a far more coherent grasp on reality, Stonch returns us to the topic of pie and mash reviews, with Jeff’s deft hand giving grace to an otherwise modest corner of English culture found in a car park.

And finally, Stan wrote a well thought out piece on what it means to be a brewmaster. Another form of over-reach, self-promotion exposed in a way. Is that all this is about?

And there we end your Monday morning story time. The book is being gently closed, your blankey adjusted, you can finish off the last of that nice warming drink and go back to quietly dozing at the office for another summer’s week.

*No, it’s the fourth, you dope.
**Disclosure: we hung out once four years ago.

Your Monday Beer New Links For The Return To Office Work

It’s not like I dislike office work. It’s just that I like a week off in summer better. Drove too much.  About 2500 km all in all. Did home repairs and lawn stuff. Took trousers to the tailor. Visited a tiny new brewery. Yes, that one right there. I expect to post on the beers I dragged home hidden amongst the kids’ camp and cottage crap. What else went on this week?

Flying Dog Quits The Brewers Association

The recently Maryland-based brewery Flying Dog announced it had quit the Brewers Association and folk quickly took sides or at least thought a bit about which side they might take. Nothing better than when libertarians and progressives face off over something even though the both have a thing for tie-die shirts. The press release is pretty clear about what’s behind the move:

The BA’s new Marketing & Advertising Code is nothing more than a blatant attempt to bully and intimidate craft brewers into self-censorship and to only create labels that are acceptable to the management and directors of the BA. By contrast, Flying Dog believes that consumers are intelligent enough to decide for themselves what choices are right for them: What books to read, movies to watch, music to listen to, or beers to consume (and whether or not they like the labeling).

What’s really interesting about this is how it is tied in as part of the new optional (and seemingly stalled at about 20-25% buy-in) logo thing. And… freedom!!! Or just licence… or debauchery… or something co-opted. J. Notte summed it up this way on Sunday: “BA sees itself as a parent setting the rules, Flying Dog sees BA as a roommate who just set a fire in the living room.”  What I don’t understand was where the BA membership outreach and committee work was on the logo and the code of conduct? Was this all actually just imposed without any trial balloons? More to the point, will others quit, too?

The Economist Noticed Craft Beer!!!

I found this story entitled “Craft Beer in America Goes Flat” interesting, pretty cool in fact as The Economist isn’t this micro focused [Ed.: get it? An economics pun!!] usually but it gets to the point: “the number of brands has proliferated, the number of drinkers has not.” [Ed.: sweet attention to that verb structure, too.] It might have been a link for last week but the lack of chit chat about the story since it came out is interesting in itself. I am sure if we ever see a retraction in US craft beer we’ll have months and months and months of explanation of how it’s not a retraction from all the smart people with careers invested in the expansion of US craft beer.

Why Even Call It “Contract Brewing”?

Ben Johnson expanded on his article in Canada’s newspaper, The Old and Stale, with a blog post that unpacks the contract beer situation in a pretty clearheaded manner. Me? I take nothing from the argument that consumers don’t care given that labeling laws don’t require that anyone tell consumers that a beer is brewed somewhere that isn’t the little sweet Grannie’s cottage the branding would make you think… but the other arguments are pretty good.

Let’s be clear. The firm that brews the beer bought on a contract is a “contract brewer.” Other folk in the retail supply chain are maybe a “beer company.” Nothing wrong with being a beer company. Also, it obeys English as one who does not brew can’t also be brewing. Doubt me? Ask one of them to change the yeast strain to improve the batch. Oh, not allowed. By whom? Oh, the actual brewer.

And the Co-opting Of “Punk” Started A Decade Ago

Good to see, as reported by Matt C., a Sussex-based brewery Burning Sky… a wee actual-ish crafty brewery has back away from BrewDog’s weird insistence that they are somehow connected to “punk.” [Ed.: they are only getting that in 2017? It’s like your nerdy accountant cousin Ken who likes to pretend he gets that hop-hip all the kids are listening to.] Anyway, BrewDog is great at marketing, aiming to be wonderful at opening branch plants globally as well as a chain of bars and half their beers are even sorta OK. But, let’s be honest, it’s hardly craft anymore let alone punk. A fledgling lawyer and his pal, a very successful brewer, dreamed up a way to get rich through beer with a smidgen less – what? – less of something… than even Malcolm McLaren‘s relationship to the actual invention of punk. Tellingly, Matt could only find a managing director for the BrewDog bars division to get a quote from. Small. Traditional. That’s it. Keep in line. Punks do that. Keep. In. Line. And… err… something co-opted.

Other Things of Great Importance

Jeff Bell posted a lovely short vignette of an encounter on the streets of London with a man sharing his beer.

Tweet of the week? From Matthew Osgood who neatly summed up the irritation posed by craft beer evangelists who just won’t stop it what with their knocking at the door fun, pamphlets in hand:

…my issue is that I don’t need a six-beer tasting session every time I come over to watch a game.

Jeff Alworth was exploring what things were like ten and twenty years ago in his fair town of Portland, Oregon care of a tweet and one of his best posts ever. Recent history benefits as much from reliance on records as much as the far dimmer past I wallow about in.

Rebecca Pate reported on her visit to our mutual hometown, Halifax, where she had a Pete’s Super Donair and… visited 2 Crows. Which is interesting as “crows” was a slag in my years at our mutual undergrad college.

Is Andy Crouch the first beer writer to actually pay with his own money when visiting Asheville? Seems incongruous.

And last but certainly not least remember to follow Timely Tipple for the weekly brewing history links.

The Intern’s Beery Links For Mid-July

Ah, the mid-July week off. Nothing teaches you more about how life is a fleeting interim stage than July. The poppies and irises are already in the past. The last of the early radishes have long been dug under. Time is passing. One day you wake up and discover you are a 54 year old intern for some guy named Stan. Hmm.

What’s gone on this week in beer?

When The Selling Out Game Has Some Weird Players

The BeerCast has posted an excellent unpacking of the sale of the discount shelf of London Fields (mothballed) brewery by an experienced guest of the Queen to those oddest of flatmates, the Danes of Carlsberg and the Empire State folk at Brooklyn Brewery. Expect a shedding of everything associated now with the name and then a massive leveraging of the name. For a mere four million pounds, most owners of craft beer won’t get out of bed in the morning. Given the situations of all involved, this deal looks like and smells like money all around.

Cheery Not Niceness

I enjoy these teletext messages from Matthew Lawrenson on Twitter. They retain his snappy direct humour but it’s like the words are coming out of the mouth of Tinky-Winky. I love the format he is developing. Thirty years ago visiting family in Scotland, I would sneak into the TV room to play with the remote, exploring teletext. Checking the weather forecast for Skye in multi-colour dot matrix… then checking out the soccer scores. All while the TV plays on underneath the text info. Magic. As a form of brewing and craft commentary this singular and effective. This one was posted Friday morning my time here in North America. Note the author. And the cheeky image.

Being Nice

I am less certain about this conversation one Twitter – while making no comment on the particular conversation.  It’s the pattern. You see it quite often, a double form of delicacy. The desire to speak discretely of a brewery or bar doing something wrong being jumped upon for either (1) not name the names or (2) raising the real issue without naming the names. I am never quite sure what makes folk more upset, not getting all the juicy gossip or finding fault with a craft community member without first satisfying a level of procedural test for bringing evidence before a criminal court. Yet, it is only beer. I dunno. Folk seem happy to slag airlines and coffee shops. It seems a particularly southern Ontario concern but you see it pop up in England, too. In this case, the misapprehension that brewery or bar staff have some deep loyalty if not a monogamous bond with the boss seems the root of the problem.

Oliver Grey expanded on this concern mid-week. He primarily discusses the tribal divide between big craft and big beer, framing it from the perspective of Campbell’s narrative structure:

I get it, the hero of the story needs a villain to triumph over. I wrote about it at length. But it’s important to remember that to the villain, the hero can often look like a terrorist. For every story a perspective, for every perspective a truth. Therein, the issue slumbers.

Seeing as he has to deal with fools like this, I get the point. But there is the greater risk that is engaged with far too much in beer – the Hosannas, all the Hosannas. Given alcohol makes you initially feel good, it is not unexpected that people like saying nice things about it but taking the next steps of treating it like something beyond criticism and discord has always struck me as a bit weird, leaving ideas and interests unexamined. Give me cheery naughtiness anytime.

Mentioning the Bad

Jeff Alworth made a promise on Friday that definitely borders on the niceness question:

…enough of the excuses: Boak and Bailey are right, I should be writing about bad beer more often. I’m actually going to start looking for them. Rather than just writing scathing reviews, though, I’ll use it as an opportunity to discuss why I think the beer is bad, because “bad” is in many dimensions an objective evaluation. A good brewer may fail to execute on a vision, which is one kind of bad. A mediocre brewer may compose an uninspiring recipe, a different kind. Or the beer may have faults and off-flavors, a kind of bad that is now rarer, at least in these parts. Beer may be bad because of technical, aesthetic, or other reasons–and there’s actual value in discussing the nature of the problems.

I am delighted by this declaration, if only because it is framed as contrary to the Jacksonian model we have inherited. I would note that it is not what was first given that was inherited but what was later devised. Change is good. Let’s change some more, please.

Jet Setting

In an effort to bite the hand that feeds me (not), I wonder about this tweet:

It’s not that I equate this sort of event with junketeers who dash off to lap up the gravy and PR before regurgitating some or all, then claiming to be clever. My question is whether this is simply another form of the internationalization of commodity craft, that globalist mono-culture that leaves nothing local in its wake. I would be thrilled to hear about what local beer questions and successes were discussed in South Africa by South Africans. Not sure I will.

Other Stuff

Interesting to see that Diageo via Guinness USA has a money flow to another beer site on the internets. GBH calls it underwriting. Beervana calls it sponsorship. This pays for interesting writing. Good. Also interesting that this goes largely uncommented upon especially compared to other funds flowing from other big drinks empires into smallish bank accounts. Just to be clear, I have happily spent sometimes shockingly generous sums for running ads on this website and its predecessor. To be fair, they were largely from outside the brewing world due to my (way back then) huge following. I call them ads. In the glory days, it paid for a lot of travel. Still, interesting quiet little pay packet play.

Yes, Mirella. Very good tee.

And finally, the best use of a GIF ever. Thanks Zak. This is going to end up dumber than “crafty” isn’t it.

Craft? Why Not Micro Brewing? Heck, Why Not Mini Brewing?

One of the interesting things about the language of beer is how little we think about it. Sure, there have been useful churnings over the origins of “craft“* and discoveries that before it became the popular term a little over a decade ago.  But the reality is in the thirty plus years of this revival of good smaller scale brewing, “craft” is a word that has had its day. Refer to the new Brewers Association logo if you don’t believe me.

So, before we had craft when all the current commentators were still in high school we had micro brews made by micro brewing at micro breweries. But why? Why was “micro” the prefix of choice? The image above is a passage from that bedtime favourite Seminar on Micro-local Analysis by  V. Guillemin, M. Kashiwara and T. Kawai published by Princeton University Press in 1979. “Micro” at that time was a science word.  Which make sense given since at least the later 1800s interest in the microscope was a popular interest.  In the book The Micro-macro Link by Jeffrey C. Alexander, published by University of California Press in 1987** the progression of the concept of “micro” is described in this passage in the introduction:

Although the micr0-macro theme has entered sociological theorizing as a distinct and firmly established issue only in recent decades, its prehistory can be traded from late medieval thinking through postwar meta-methodological debates over science, epistemology and political philosophy.

In brief, in the 1970s and early ’80’s the use of “micro” as a handy catch-all concept was relatively new. It appears to me that the route “micro” took from egghead to everyday was computing. We have the 1980 text Distributed Micro/Minicomputer systems: Structure, Implementation, and Application, for example, in which the future was described in this way:***

The continuing decline in processor and memory cost couples with the lower cost communications based on fiber optics, micro-wave transmission, and satellite communications, to use a few examples will hasten the development and widespread use of distributed systems based on micro- and minicomputer [technologies]…”

One is reminded of the SCTV character Gerry Todd from 1981-83 played by Rick Moranis to be brought back to the era when issues around what we might now call “personal” technology were sufficiently new and niche to be mocked.**** It is, in fact, always necessary to seek to place yourself back in a context when searching for a particular meaning. Otherwise, we are left with recollection and a lot of IMHOs which are often worse than useless. Fortunately, digital records give us a chance to reach back and pretend to relive the past – or at least can be used to cross reference the to often positive recollection.

Applying that principle, we see another interesting thing that is interesting for immediate purposes because it is included in the heading for this blog post.***** We see the words “micro” and “mini” bandied about. What did they mean in relation to the trendiest thing at this point in time? No, not beer… computers. Consider this articles in The Times Union of Albany, NY from March 11, 1986 under he title “Overbooked Libraries Seach for Space May Be Overdue”

At the central library of the Schenectady County Public Library across the street from City Hall, a space shortage has forced books to be stored on the second floor where administrative offices are located – off-limits to library patrons. Staff gofers bridge the gap between floors. “The lack of space is getting pretty serious,” said Ronald Lagasse, director of the Schenectady County Public Library. “The problem is we’ve had to increase the variety of formats of information we provide.” A micro-computer requires 200 feet, space the books used to get. Videocassette recorders, microfilm readers and printers and the storage for them have further eroded what was once the sole domain of books. 

First, shoot the person who put that pun in the headline. Then – notice that “micro” was not very… micro. Now, look at this schedule of events and the mid-afternoon listing under the title “Wildlife Expo is Four Shows in One” published by the same paper five days later:

*2 p.m – Bruck Brodsky of Upstate Computer will feature “Home Use and Education With Micro and Mini Computers.” Attending this one will surely help you in the operation of many computers used throughout the Expo.

Hilary Dustin of U.S. Forest Service will lecture on the Finger Lakes National Forest.

“Micro” and “mini” are two things, two points on a scale. Why do we care about this? Because “micro” and “mini” brewing may also be a bit older than you realize. Look at these images:

 

 

 

 

The image to the left is a Schlitz ad from Schlitz ad found in Black Enterprise magazine’s October 1977 edition. A similar ad ran in U.S. News & World Report and Saturday Review in 1977 as well as Business Week in 1976. This use of “mini-brewery” was the same as Bert Grant’s Ontario-based pilot brewery operated first at Carling in the 1950s and then at his home in the early 1960s. See also Food Engineering, Volume 43 from 1971 which described producing beer in a “laboratory mini-brewery.” Scientific beer.

The other two images above are for another thing. They are ads for Bierhaus International’s “mini-brewery” as seen in Mother Jones Magazine Feb-Mar 1981 and Feb-Mar 1982 editions. Variations of the “Try My All Natural” advertising were also placed for years in magazines like in Kiplinger’s Personal Finance, Field and Stream, Popular Science and The Old Farmer’s Almanac. Tremendously manly and busy ads they are, too. I hope someone will be able to tell me about Bud Weckesser, the president of Bierhaus International Inc., if only because he clearly seems to be a man of international intrigue.† More to the point, he was selling a “mini-brewery” to subscribers of those fine journals. Science at home.

Like the Schlitz and even Bert Grant’s pilot breweries, the Beerhaus International set ups were small. Small enough to fit in a home. Schlitz’s was only a five gallon set up providing “a world of care in miniature.” So you would think that “mini” is less than “micro” right? Not always. At least when it comes to brewing. Let’s have a look at that bit of the end of an article placed in the May 1982 edition of InfoWorld 17 magazine entitled “Micro Firms Vie for European Market at Hannover” in which the following is stated:

You can take comfort from one thought in all this scale. Although Information Technology is growing incredibly, it is still not the biggest section in the seven-pound-plus Fair catalog (supplied with extra-strength handles). That is reserved for Electrical Engineering. When you reach the part of Fair reserved just for new railway locomotives, you begin to grasp that there are still worlds for the micro to conquer. There aren’t any micros used yet in the mini power station, not the mini brewery that run each year for only eight days in the Spring as part of the Fair on the flat German plains of Hannover.

It’s a delicious description of a transition point. [The heavy catalog has handles alone was worth the price of admission.] “Micros” are under too new to be pervasive but the “mini” brewery seems to have been around for yoinks. “Mini” is just small. “Micro” is both small and new.

So what happened to mini? As we see today with “independent” being proposed as the new “craft” just as “craft” was once the new “micro” we know these things are propped up and then later taken down once stale. But did “mini’ ever get its day in the sun? In the 1989 Canadian book Ale & Beer A Curious History by Alan D. Butcher published by then powerhouse bookseller McClelland & Stewart we read this lovely transitional passage:

…scores of other mini-breweries are also simply satisfying local tastes? Upper Canada Brewing, an Ontario-based “micro” brewery, sells across Ontario and has recently entered the European market.

A few years earlier, the Australian publication Beverage Review appeared to use the term generously. In 1984, The Economist magazine’s Intelligence Unit published an issue on retail business which contained the description to the right. It describes a Whitbread pub, the still operating Alford Arms, as then having a brewing set up in house. A mini-brewery appears in this context to refer to the equipment more than perhaps than the business model. Similarly, in a 1986 publication from the apartheid era South African Information Service South African Panorama a similar description is used:

Barney’s Tavern and Heritage Brewery, which are administered by South African Breweries. The beer is brewed on site and Is called Digger’s Draught. The brewery is the only fully-fledged mini brewery of Its kind in South Africa.

The term shows up in the USA as well. A 1986 article on plans for Kentucky’s first micro, the Oldenburg Brewery, stated that it:

…will be a mini-brewery licensed under the new Kentucky microbrewery law enacted by the legislature in 1984. The brewery will have a limited capacity of 12,500 barrels of traditional German beer made only with malted barley and hops …

And in the 1982 travel guide Making the most of Sonoma: a California guide by Don Edwards we read one of the founding American micros being described in this way:

A wine country mini-brewery, New Albion, produces traditional British-style ale, porter, and stout— all good companions to Sonoma’s cheese, bread, and sausage.

And then? Not so much more. “Micro” soon starts to go macro as the inevitable dreams start to kick in. It then reigns for the best part of twenty years before it became clear that micros were not going to be in view of mini in the future. Change and growth occur. The idea that New Albion might lead to international scale big craft would have seemed very much a dream (if not a farce) to those sipping a stout with their Sonoma bread and sausage. Language needs to compete, keep up or fall away. “Mini” just never really got very deep into that game.

 

*Which includes some of the best sources ever including this clever one: “New Belgium is one of several breweries Alan McLeod, co-author of The Unbearable Nonsense of Craft Beer—A Rant in Nine Acts, describes as big craft. “What bugs me about ‘craft beer’ as a term is that it arose to cover up that micro beer was less and less crafted and more and more industrialized. It is double speak,” he wrote via email. “… New language was required to mask the industrialization and then nationalization of what is now big craft.”“
**Note obvious use of egghead texts found on Google Books to laydown a questionable baseline of cleverness.
***Interestingly, a now charming foreshadowing of only the nonthreatening parts of the argument of “Why the Future Does Not Need Us” from 2000. I actually cited this in my 2000-2001-ish LLM thesis so I don’t feel entirely dirty writing this footnote.
****But were more likely then thought of as “home” technology. Note: I also still have my rude 45 of “Turning Japanese”… so there.
*****You don’t post a blog. You post a blog post to a blog. Blog is short for “web log” which makes it a log and a log has entries. A log is not each entry. It is the total of all entries. A blog is not each post.
†More here.