Author: Alan

America’s Mood Lifts By 7.8

I have no idea what this means, what the 7.8 expresses or even what the units are but apparently things are looking up:

Americans are feeling slightly more optimistic this month as they come to grips with a struggling economy and an uncertain future, according to a Reuters/Zogby poll released on Wednesday. The Reuters/Zogby Index, which measures the mood of the country, rose sharply to 95.5, up from 87.7 in March, as all 10 measures of public opinion used in the Index climbed. Concerns about personal finances, job security and the direction of the country eased at least slightly, and positive ratings climbed for President George W. Bush, the U.S. Congress and economic and foreign policy.

Apparently 13% believed their squeeky shoes squeeked a little less, too, up from 21.

But why not. It’s spring. Well, spring lasts just until Friday when it will hit 20C which, for a Maritimer, means it’s summer. That’s the thing. What really makes you happy? Warmth. A drink maybe. A little baseball on the radio. Snowdrifts finally disappearing just last week. A collapsing pork market that will allow you to BBQ like a badly conceived cartoon character on Saturday. Spring is short around here. Time to get a low grade sunburn, baby.

Monday Morning Quarterback: I Watch TV A Lot

Not just TV, but I listen to the radio, too. I listened to golf on the radio at about 7 pm yesterday. 620 AM out of Syracuse had the end of the Masters going. Golf on the radio is hard to follow. Apparently there is a tradition and a guy playing lounge piano involved.

  • A guy from South Africa won the Masters. Good for him. He broke his major duck. Sadly, it was all nice-nice. Long gone are the days of Tom Kite blaming all around him for the failings of his game. That always was fun watching his thin veneer fade as things went wonky. No sniping from the crowd either like when Woosey won in 1991.
  • The Sox took 2 of 3 with Wang beating them on a four pitch complete game Friday. Big Papi is having a hard time of it. Pray for Big Papi.
  • Curling is over for another year. Thanks God. Now I can get some work done at the office. Curling this. Curling that.
  • The Morton have not yet made their big move to get out of the relegation zone. Arsenal lost, too, with our correspondent noting both Man U goals coming off cheesy set pieces.
  • I watched twelve minutes of NASCAR and learned of its proud moonshine connections.
  • I didn’t watch much hockey. The correct teams seem to be winning. I want a Montreal v. Rangers series and a Detroit victory over the Rangers in the finals and that seems to be on track. Ottawa is looking like it will be four losses and then summer. Did I pick Calgary in the pool? No I didn’t.

There you have it. MMQB edition #2 is over. The tradition continues.

The Anonymous Brewers Speak: Rating The Raters

anonbrew2aFrom Alan: Recently I was contacted by a brewer who wondered if he, too, could write for A Good Beer Blog. Sure, no problem I thought. If Knut and Travis can, why not a craft brewer? But the brewer wanted to do it under the cloak of anonymity. I wavered. I wondered. I let it go for a while. Brewers usually stay silent like the one to the right. Then, quite a while later, unbeknownst to the first, I got a message from another brewer a world away asking for exactly the same thing. I knew then that there was a venue needed. A way for brewers to share what they really felt. So, from time to time they, too, can post here and share their thoughts. This is the first, a message from someone I will call Brewer A.¹ Please feel free to comment as you would in response to any post.

Well, how to get started? Sites like R(H)atebeer.com are a thorn in the side for many brewers. They are dominated by a handful of posters that don’t reflect the opinion of the general public. As with most critics they go off half cocked and I think often fully pickled. They pretend to know grain and hop varieties that they feel were used in a certain beer. I have seen the same poster rate the same beer twice in the same day and give it very different reviews. Hiding behind the mask of anonymity (like I am now) instills false bravery into these fellas (mostly boys but not all.) I have witnessed raters backing up a certain opinion to follow later in the same paragraph with “but I have not tried it yet.”

These raters looking to increase their numbers will will gather at fests to collect single mouthfuls of a new beer in the same way they once collected mint condition action figures. No need to engage the brewer or enjoy the beer for the sake of it – just get “Han Solo in the original packaging” and never open it up.

This involves further discussion. Maybe nine RateBeer guys and I could split a six pack and talk.

¹Stan’s point is excellently made: it’s Secret Brewer XJ17 from now on.

My Last 24 Hours

I was within a couple hundred yards of highway 400 and highway 7 for around 18 hours not counting the drive to and from Toronto. It was very much like spending 18 hours within a couple hundred yards of highway 400 and highway 7. The oddest thing was getting out of the hotel room to go to where I was speaking to the conference only to learn that the conference was at another hotel. I know the strip malls and industrial parks of the area within more than a couple hundred yards of highway 400 and highway 7 very well now. I am enriched.

Hockey Pool 2008 And The Monday Morning Quarterback

A taunt. All it takes is a taunt. Looking for meaning with a blog that is approaching five years of its troubled existence, a glimmer of hope and purpose shows up in a 27th comment:

Temujin [12:19 AM April 7, 2008]
http://hockey-madness.blogspot.com

How about a special Monday Morning Bullet Points highlighting the Blue Jays sweeping the Red Sox :=)

Did you know the Jays are on pace for a record of 107-55?
Did you know Jeremy Accardo is on pace for 81 saves?
Frank Thomas is on pace for 28 grand slams!

Oh, the joys of being a Jays fan. April is always so much better than September.

It is a sad state of affairs but let’s review how odd this spring is:

OK, that last one is not a big surprise even if it is a disappointment. But that pool. I never even got the final stats done last year. It got too complex. And I didn’t watch one playoff game last year as the natural reaction of a lifelong Leafs fan is actually to reject the game in its entirety.

So, just to keep the continuity, I give you the Gen X at 40 NHL hockey pool 2008:

Pick five scorers, one goon, one goalie, eight teams and a dark horse.

  • A point for a goal by a scorer.
  • A point for an assist by a scorer.
  • A point for a penalty minute by a goon. If your goon is kicked out of the playoffs and thereby the pool, you double the penalty minutes he has achieved to that point. The logic here is that the goon is a nut-bar. The later that he freaks and gets tossed for the balance of the playoffs, the more nut-bar like he is, the more he is the essential goon.
  • A point for each thousandth save percentage over .900 by your goalie
  • 5 points for picking each of the teams in the second, third and fourth rounds.
  • 25 bonus points for picking the dark horse – the team with the lowest regular season points to go the farthest in the playoffs. The dark horse must be seeded in the lower half of their conference.

Get your picks in my, err, Friday at 10:00 am. That’ll even give you a few games. Just hockey, just NHL. Anybody in?

Beer Fan Terminology Update

What with all the April’s Fools joke posts as well as at least one seemingly authentic blog funeral announcement, it was good to see an true advance in the thinking about being a beer nerd/fan/geek and, as usual, the news comes out of Scandinavia as Knut describes:

I don’t care much what I’m called. When I talk to my wife, I refer to (in Norwegian) my beer friends or beer mates. I would not use the words connoisseur or aficionado, either, but it is probably the most spot on description. There is a Norwegian term that is slightly old fashioned – beer dog. I kinda like that.

The word in Norwegian is even better: ølhund. So “beer hound” is born. It has the nerdiness of “rock hound” as well as the cool of “You Ain’t Nothing But A Hound Dog”. While pivar is pithy, can any other language group top ølhund?

Bullet Points For The Week Of The Idle

It ended up not being that idle. Taxes yesterday. Driver’s license renewal Tuesday. I’m wiped. Must save up energy to pray for Morton tomorrow.

  • Here is the sound of someone singing in 1860. Here is what it means.
  • Funny how people have long memories.Interesting to note that baseball continues to settle – after a couple of years of little ball, now free agency is not as mad as it once was:

    this winter was the 32nd for free agency, and something worth noting occurred. For the first time other than the collusion years of 1985, ’86 and ’87, teams did not race crazily and expensively after free-agent starting pitchers.

    I remember my collusion years.

  • I feel like I have seen too much basketball for some reason. Do you really need that link?
  • The real reason I did not do it.
  • El Tigre has posited (or at least frets) that McCain will pick Romney. I find this highly improbably but in this US election campaign – the boring cannibalistic Democratic contest, the more interesting Republican one that ended too soon – anything can happen now. Apparently Fred Thompson knows he is not in the running for VP.

I have to admit, I have been on the internet less this week than most – could it be that there is a connection between the desk and surfing?

Pick A Date, Any Date, For The End Of Prohibition

Some of our US cousins are all happy happy over celebrating the 7th of April as some sort of anniversary of the repeal of prohibition despite strong evidence otherwise reviewed last year. While it is hard to pin point the actual date that celebrating should begin down south – and who really cares – imagine the situation in Canada where prohibition was, other than during WWI, a matter regulated by the provinces:

Québec rejected it as early as 1919 and became known as the “sinkhole” of North America, but tourists flocked to “historic old Québec” and the provincial government reaped huge profits from the sale of booze. In 1920 BC voted “wet” and by the following year some alcoholic beverages were legally sold there and in the Yukon through government stores. Manitoba inaugurated a system of government sale and control in 1923, followed by Alberta and Saskatchewan in 1924, Newfoundland in 1925, Ontario and New Brunswick in 1927, and Nova Scotia in 1930. The last bastion, Prince Edward Island, finally gave up “the noble experiment” in 1948, though pockets of dryness under local option still exist throughout the land.

Just a couple of decades ago it was illegal in PEI to stand up in a bar while holding a beer so these things do hang on.

The real point, however, for we Canadians is that the end of prohibition in the US led to a economic crisis in Canada due to the end of our monopoly on legal brewing in North America. In Craig Heron’s excellent book Booze: A Distilled History, it is shown that one St.John, New Brunswick taxi driver could make $1,600 bucks per bootlegging run into Maine in 1923. That is a real economic benefit to a hard-pressed part of this land. And, at pages 249-250, he quotes the following statement of proud Canadian brewing autonomy:

We have no knowledge or interest in the prohibitory laws of the United States,” the vice-president of Windsor’s British-American Brewery Company told a writer for Ladies Home Journal in 1923. “We believe we are privileged to fill orders for shipments of beer to the United States, even if it is illegal for citizens of the United States to have beer.

Huzzah, says I. So, I think it is fair to say, that any celebration on 7 April is also a rejection of good Canadian monopolistic illegal moonshine and beery goodness…and I think, frankly, that is a pity that our feelings are being treated so thoughtlessly in all this southerly happy making.

Belgium: Gouden Carolus Easter Beer, Het Anker, Mechelen

I had been planning on having this beer today as one small nod to the once busy task of brewing beer for holidays. Time was there were beers made for every saint’s day, every profession and every celebration of a stage in life. Now we are restricted to Yule and a few stragglers like this one for Easter. I had even complained about a lack of Easter brews when I was planning The Session last spring so I am at least grateful to have this one to try.

But before going there, I have read how Greg Clow over at Beer, Beats, Bites has uncovered calamity itself and has pointed out that the powers that be have censored the very label on this very bottle. I am quite innocent of all such understanding as my bottle kindly forwarded by the distributor, though slapped with the “Extra Strong Beer” label required by the Federal Food and Drug Act, is quite free from any thing dealing with the wickedness of the bunny.

Apparently, it is not so much this version of the bunny label, however, but previous versions that may have given the government some concern as is illustrated under the photos below. You will have to click to see the truth. I cannot bear it:*

 

 

 

 

Frankly, the more curious thing to me is the legal basis for the authority for making such a decision to enforce the banning of the bunny. In my chapter in Beer & Philosophy, I wrote about quite a number of these ridiculous sort of rules and they were all based on some sort or actual regulation. Ontario’s Liquor Licence Act at clause 62.1(10.2) provides that the Lieutenant Governor in Council (aka some particular bureaucract) may make a regulation in relation to labels:

…governing the information that may or must appear on labels and containers of liquor sold or kept for sale at a government store…

The government store is defined as a store established under the Liquor Control Act which would be the LCBO. You see, generally the LLA governs the activiities of the AGCO while the LCC speaks to what the LCBO can do – make sense? Well, in any event, regulations can be made for labelling at the store – but, as Greg points out, these beers are not for sale “at a government store.” So, in addition to there not actually being a bunny reference, there must be some other power to control labels. Under the LCA, it states at section 3(1)(j) that “the purposes of the Board are, and it has power…to determine the nature, form and capacity of all packages to be used for containing liquor to be kept or sold…” That might be it. But then somewhere there has to be a written statement of standards…and one would expect that to be found in the LCBO’s Trade Resources. And there it is: at page three of the Simplified Canadian Label Requirements (warning: pdf!) it states that beer label may not have imagery which is “misleading or imply irresponsible use of the product”. Hmmm – not very detailed authority for banning a bunny but the introduction to the LCBO’s SCLR mentions other sources of rules, including the CFIA which has jusrisdiction under the the FDA. Under that Federal law, beer is food and there is law about the labeling of food at section 5(1) of the FDA:

No person shall label, package, treat, process, sell or advertise any food in a manner that is false, misleading or deceptive or is likely to create an erroneous impression regarding its character, value, quantity, composition, merit or safety.

Could it be that beer is not meritorious enough to be associated with a rabbit? No, I think that we need to find the regulation that actually details this bunny stuff. The Food and Drug Regulations happily define in law what beer is but while section B.02.130(b)(vii)
allows for “irish moss seaweed of the species Chondrus crispus” it does not allow at all for Oryctolagus cuniculus – the European rabbit. Could it be under Canadian law the rabbit is not so much banned as just not included?

Anyway, I am having mine tonight in celebration of the resurrection of Jesus 2025 years ago and, in a bit, I will note down what I thought of the beer inside the bunny-fouled packaging.

Later: the beer pours the colour of seasoned pine lumber with a wild rocky head that quickly subsides. At 10%, one has to be somewhat responsible so I have nipped away at this one consious that the bottle has the equivalent strngth of five and a half ounces of rum. But it does not stick out as much as it might despite this being a quite mild mannered pale ale. It is somewhat tripel-esque but things can merge somewhat stylistically at this strength. Safe to call it a Belgian Pale Strong Ale as it is each of those things.

There is plenty of aromatic graininess, a little bit of mild apple and honey in the malt, a bit of a musty side and a nice cream note to the heart of it. There is a bit of a bite that makes me think there could be some wheat in the grist, too, but I know nothing about these things. The brewery says that the particular twist offered by this beer is the addition of three herbs but they do not stand out to my taste, though there is definitely a twiggy aspect. They also say “served with pride it isdrunken with respect.” Perfect – just as I like to be. Plenty of BAer love. Too bad it’s blighted by that frigging bunny.

*…it’s more than I can bear to think of you seeing these…