Friday Bullets For Your Labour Day Weekend

You better be meditating on the benefits we all share from the labour union movement this weekend. “Sure, I’ll take the day off but don’t you dare think for a minute that I like unions.” I can hear you. You hypocritical holidaying ingrates. Me, I will be singing “The International” and all my Billy Bragg 45s and calling everyone I meet comrade or maybe even Leonid.

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WATCH OUT! SPACE JUNK!!!

⇒ Glad that’s cleared up. Italians are now “ethnics” under the rural overlords world view. Next, Scots and Irish and soon New Brunswickers.

⇒ Ernie Eves busts out against those Ontario Tea Party Tory bastards: “I don’t think it was fair and I don’t think it was loyal and I don’t think it was compassionate and I don’t think it’s honest.” Crime: voting for someone. Now, that’s a Tory: anti-democratic and proud of it.

⇒ I have no idea how sad it must be to be a Blue Jays fan. I mean, it’s like they think the team doesn’t suck. See, being a Leafs fan, I know they suck.

⇒ Do we now feel a twinge of guilt for reveling in Conrad’s fall? I will give him this – there is no one else reporting honestly on the state of the back end of the justice system like he is.

Ahh… long weekend. I needed it. I earned it. Really did. Didn’t I. I didn’t? Who says?

None

So – When Was Lager Invented… Discovered… Evolved?

This is either just a bit weird or I have completely missed something. Apparently some scientists have been looking to find the yeast strain that started lager… and they think they have found it:

When the team brought the yeast to a lab at the University of Colorado and analyzed its genome, they discovered that it was 99.5% identical to the non-ale portion of the S. pastorianus genome, suggesting it was indeed lager yeast’s long-lost ancestor. “The DNA evidence is strong,” said Gavin Sherlock, a geneticist at Stanford University who has studied lager yeast but was not involved in this study. But Sherlock wondered how S. eubayanus could have traveled the nearly 8,000 miles from Argentina to Germany. “We all know that in 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue,” he said. “Lager was invented in the 1400s. It’s not really clear how that progenitor would have gotten from South America to Europe.”

Whazzates’sayin’?!?! Look, don’t get me wrong – yeast is interesting stuff. But to say lager was “invented” in the 1400? Now, if I dip into my copy of Hornsey, I don’t run into lager until the 1800s at page 485. Yet this story I posted in 2008 speaks of lager yeast evolving in the 16th century in a Bavarian cave which gets us in the ball park in terms of centuries. Maybe it’s the use of the word “invented” in the article that threw me off.

Most interesting of all, Gavin Sherlock posted a comment at this here blog back in 2008 as did Drs Dunn and Sussman all involved in this project. I will stay well away from the term “egg head” this time and invite some direction on their work and the implications for the lagered time line.

After Testing Basic Beer Theories On Family Members

It was like a repeat of last weekend’s Saturday of the abiding meatness except with more meat. Fambily was over and one had to put on a show. So, there were sausages and steaks, smoked pork and ribs. Plenty and plenty left over for a rerun at lunch today. But something happened. Yesterday, I bought a bunch of cans of Spaten Original and a bunch of bottles of Dark Star’s Sunburst Golden Ale. Today I pulled out a growler of a hoppy IPA and then moved toward some sour beers. Yesterday, where there was glee and mucho tanks very much, well, today there was a decided but polite lack of interest. What to make of it?

The response reminded me of a creeping feeling I have had for a while – that we have come to an end of something. By this I mean that I have reached the end of most flavours available to be encountered in beer. Little secret: I have passed on double IPAs for at least a year now. And I like the sours fine but I really can’t find anyone around here to share them with – and it’s not like I want them all the time. Fruit beers have always, lets be honest, been a bit boring and disappointing. And only so many get to travel to Rome, San Fran or wherever for the perfect pub moment. It’s a creeping feeling. It’s all getting a bit like 1976 and we are all waiting for punk to get big next year.

Except that I don’t see anything being the big thing next. Heck, even the beer bloggers had to go to the peelers to get a little excitement going. I am starting to feel like the hundreds and probably thousands of different beers I have had over the years have either served the purpose or run the gamut. Is it a rut? Or is it the call of mixed drinks or even those swanky Italian soda pops? I mean, have you had chinotto?

I dunno – whatever it is, I think I want a new stout. Or maybe just that stout I had back almost seven years ago now. That was a good beer.

More On Rural / Suburban Overlord Social Engineering

It is pretty obvious that the Prime Minister has a plan but it is interesting to note what isn’t there:

The Liberals embraced the Charter, the flag, peacekeeping and multiculturalism. Now, the Harper Tories are pursuing symbols and areas ignored by the Grits – the Arctic, the military, national sports and especially the monarchy, according to senior Tories. For Mr. Harper and his Conservatives, the payoffs could be great: a new pride in the country, an ability to shape the view of new Canadians and, politically, the potential to marginalize the Official Opposition NDP, who could be forced more and more to defend Quebec’s interests against all others. Quebeckers are not as supportive of national symbols and the monarchy as is the rest of Canada.

I happed to be rereading George Grant’s Lament for A Nation, the 2005 reissue of the 1965 book – or rather Andrew Potter’s extensive introduction as I sort of nodded off last evening before I got any further. I took course from Grant and, as a King’s Man, got to socialize with the guy over beers like other small college profs. Just remembered that he smoked all the way through class. Good guy.

Anyway, his lament was the end of the conservative era. But what he described as conservatism was dramatically different from what we know today: plenty of state institutional intervention in the economy, anti-libertarian, pro-heritage and pro-respect. The sort of thing still seen in Maritime Canadian politics and, in large chunks but not others, utterly different from Harper’s plan. Because Harper’s plan is actually liberal, progressive.

He wants to make something out of nothing. To create a new national order. He pledges to reassert the importance of the military then takes a billion out of the budget. He expects the largely population-free Arctic to be an important symbol but as it is a place few will visit which has other traditions and characteristics than where most Canadians live, it is a foreign land. He wants us to focus on sports – but only the ones we win at – like short track speed skating or ski dance, not the ones we actually like to play and which keep us fit… like soccer, softball or curling.

So what to make of it? Not traditional, not really conservative and not really authentic. Shallow, temporary and, in the long term, unsatisfactory. Good luck to you.

None

When To Have That Beer In Zimbabwe In 2012?

Laws around beer reflect cultural norms both in how they regulate and how they express norms that are unregulated. Consider this proposed reform to the hours of sale law of Zimbabwe:

The Ministry of Health and Child Welfare is crafting its own alcohol policy, which might alter the tough proposals by President Robert Mugabe’s health advisor, Timothy Stamps. Stamps has forwarded to Cabinet a policy document that seeks to force supermarkets, shops and bottle stores to sell alcoholic drinks between 6am and 7pm, while the selling of beer would be banned after mid-day on Sunday.

That comes off as a bit odd. Clearly breakfast time drinking is OK there. Here in Ontario, you can’t serve a beer before 11 am in a licensed establishment even if you can drink well past midnight. But in each case, you get over 12 hours stretch of imbibing. In Kenya you only get six hours. Alaskans get 21 hours in a row – why bother shutting at all?

Saturday Afternoon Beer As I Smoked Meat By The Shed

After two weeks off that saw a lot of road, it was good to have a Saturday to commune with 5 pounds of pork and 5 hours next to the Weber set up as a smoker. As perfect a summer day as ever there was, the fire sparked quickly given the subtle breeze. I dry rubbed the joint for only an hour or so and then settled in for a long afternoon’s watch.

 

 

 

 

Despite the moment, I took a few scribbled notes:

⇒ Mill Street Organic Lager is a beer that had been mainly offered in an irritating 10 ounce bottles but is now available in 500 ml cans. It has a nice body for a 4.2% beer – some pale malt roundness framed by slightly astringent hopping leafing to an autumn apple finish. one of the few Canadian better sort of sessionable beers. Good beer at a good price that lets you have a few.

⇒ I should be grateful to have a Rickard’s Blonde in the fridge – because I happily downed the first two samples sent and then had to go back and ask for more. It’s a slightly sweeter lager than the Mill Street, a bit darker with a slightly peachy tone supported by heavy carbonation. Its light astringency is present from first sip onwards leading to a bit of a rougher hop finish. Its sameness from the sip to swallow got me thinking but it is quite worth buying for what it claims to be.

⇒ Hop Devil is an old pal that served as a change of pace mid-smoke. It pounds that crystal malt that some English beer commentators now suggest is overkill. The hops have black pepper and pine tree with maybe a bit of menthol. A beer I would happily have on hand anytime.

⇒ The Samson came my way care of a pal who was traveling through Quebec and found this at the Government SAQ store up in Gaspé on the Atlantic coast. Apple butter with molasses notes open up into black cherry. Bready and bready crusty make me think of the drink that Dr. Pepper wishes it was allowed to be. No need of this to be held out for the few and the easterly. Nothing Earth shattering but more evidence that Canada needs better beer distribution.

Shed. Beer. Shed beer. They held me in good stead as the afternoon wore on. Slow smoked the pork and slow passed the hours as I day dreamed about the human condition as well as the drawing to the end of holidays.

Now I Know I Need To Move Into Innovative White Space

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sackets Harbor NY Vintage Base Ball Tournament 2011

sack2011

This year’s vintage base ball game was remarkable. The weather was so hot I thought that I was going to faint when I slowed into second on a couple of doubles. The team had a few new faces but was as keen as ever and took both games after never winning a single game in the USA in the four previous seasons. Well, there was 2008 when the game was rained out. We declared that we had not lost by default.

NCPR On Hop Farming In Ferrisburgh, Vermont

My local public radio station, North Country Public Radio, had a great story today as part of it’s series on Faming Under 40 that runs all this week. Today’s installment is called “New Direction for an Old Farm” and described how the next generation on a 210 year family mixed farm is trying out hops:

…last year Joe’s youngest son, Ian, approached him with an idea to grow hops in the lower field. Ian is 26 years old and his friend, Fletcher Bach, 23, had gotten him interested in brewing beer. They wanted to try growing hops – which flavors and preserves beer – instead of buying it. “We started with sixteen plants,” Ian Birkett said. “We were like, these are growing really well here. So we kind of put our heads together, wrote a business plan, and now we are on year two and we have 850 plants.”

The operation is called Square Nail Hops Farm. It has a Facebook page. They are getting in touch with the right advancement programs. They are getting involved with academic research. And they are selling to craft brewers. A great story.