Süffigkeit for the new year!

 

What makes beer so popular? Why is good beer in such demand?

[...] Many attribute this popularity of fine beer to the amiability which it fosters, but the ability of a beer to engender sociability is made possible by that precious flawlessness found only in the better beers, which the Germans have termed, "SÜFFIGKEIT."

There is no exact equivalent for this word in the English language, but it means that upon drinking one stein of any beer possessing "SÜFFIGKEIT," a second is invited, and these whet the appetite for still more.

—Arnold Spencer Wahl, Robert Wahl:
Beer From the Expert's Viewpoint. 1937.

Here's to a new year, of precious flawlessness, made merrier with süffigkeit.

Naujųjų metų sveikinimai!

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2013's Beer Quotation of the Year

I’m more of a German-school brewer, so I think in terms of original gravity. I don’t even like talking about alcohol. It’s like asking a butcher to measure his steaks or hamburger in terms of percent fat. Alcohol to me isn’t important. When I brew these beers, it’s about flavor.
— Dan Carey, co-owner/brewer of New Glarus Brewing Company (Wisconsin, USA)
as quoted by Jay Brooks (of Brookston Beer Bulletin).

Q.E.D.

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George F. Will gets it wrong, but, in 2008, he got it right, and then, wrong again.

In a recent op-ed about the state of Michigan's takeover of the bankrupt city of Detroit, columnist George F. Will managed to mangle the facts.

In "The one who would reinvent Detroit" (7 August 2013. Washington Post), Will wrote about Governor Rick Snyder and his plans for the city.

Against this litany of woes, Snyder happily illustrates the city’s revival by brandishing his shiny new wristwatch. It is a Shinola, manufactured here from Swiss parts, by a startup that also makes bicycles and other things. About the vacant land opened up as the population has contracted Snyder says: “Hops.” This grain [emphasis mine] is used to make beer, and microbreweries make, or at least often accompany, urban gentrification.

Correct on a connection between 'craft' breweries and urban renewal, Mr. Will is wrong on basic agronomy.

Hops (humulus lupulus) —despite many beer geeks' obsession with them— are not the grain that is used to make beer. They aren't grains at all. Hops are herbs, which, for hundreds of years, have been used as the primary flavoring, preservative, and bittering agents in beer. It is barley (hordeum vulgare) which is the principal cereal grain used to brew beer.

But, back in 2008, Mr. Will did get it right, at least about beer. In "Survival of the Sudsiest" (10 July 2008. Washington Post), he wrote:

It is closer to the truth to say: No beer, no civilization.

The development of civilization depended on urbanization, which depended on beer. To understand why, consult Steven Johnson's marvelous 2006 book, "The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic -- and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World." It is a great scientific detective story about how a horrific cholera outbreak was traced to a particular neighborhood pump for drinking water. And Johnson begins a mind-opening excursion into a related topic this way:

"The search for unpolluted drinking water is as old as civilization itself. As soon as there were mass human settlements, waterborne diseases like dysentery became a crucial population bottleneck. For much of human history, the solution to this chronic public-health issue was not purifying the water supply. The solution was to drink alcohol."

Then, in his summary, Mr. Will relapses.

So let there be no more loose talk -- especially not now, with summer arriving -- about beer not being essential. Benjamin Franklin was, as usual, on to something when he said, "Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy." Or, less judgmentally, and for secular people who favor a wall of separation between church and tavern, beer is evidence that nature wants us to be.

Although Mr. Will and many of us may share that sentiment, Franklin never actually wrote those words. What he did write was a prolix encomium ... to wine.

Ah, the inconvenience of facts.

Good fermentables for life

Ronald Neame died in June at age 99. He was a film director of many films. Several achieved critical acclaim, including Tunes of Glory and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. His greatest box office success —which he referred to as "just an ordinary, run-of-the-mill action picture"— was The Poseidon Adventure.

At age 95, four years ago, here's what Mr. Neame had to say about his long life, as quoted in the Washington Post:

Mr. Neame said that among the atrocities of old age was losing his taste for alcohol, which the Brit had long considered his fountain of youth.

"When people ask me about the secret to longevity, I say the honest answer is two large vodkas at lunchtime and three large scotches in the evening," Mr. Neame told Bowes. "All my doctors have said to me, 'Ronnie, if you would drink less, you'd live a lot longer.' And they are all dead, and I'm still here at 95."

Mr. Neame leaves a legacy in film, and a legacy of living life well. Good fermentables for life.

"We are all friends in fermentation."

Fritz Maytag is quoted, wonderfully, over at BeerBasics.com.

Beer author Peter LaFrance was attending a beer tasting, in 1991, at Windows on the World, its first ever. He recounts:

There were only five or six brewers in attendance and about three times as many journalists.

One of the brewers there was Fritz Maytag, owner of Anchor Brewing Co., San Francisco, CA. The topic of conversation came around to their "Our Special Ale" brewed once a year just in time for Thanksgiving.

I asked Fritz Maytag if that years beer was going to be more of a Burgundy or a Bordeaux. He began to answer me when one of the journalists listening to us said "We are here to discuss beer not wine aren't we?"... Fritz Maytag took a moment, and answered, "We're all friends in fermentation."

BEER BASICS.COM
Peter LaFrance
Vol.011 No.001
31 January 2010

Mr. Maytag's axiom could be a reminder to all of us in the alcoholic beverage business —be we makers, wholesalers, retailers, bartenders, writers, drinkers. We are in the business of fun.

Ten years later after that event, Windows on the World would be destroyed during the attack on the World Trade Center towers.

• I believe that Maytag says this again (originally?) on Michael Jackson's The Beer Hunter video series in 1991 (highly recommended, if you can find a copy), during a scene in which Maytag and the Anchor staff are on a bus driving north to a malt harvest. 
• Another quotable quote from Maytag, in the comments section below.

Thank you to DC Beer.com

Mike Dolan and Andrew Nations write the Washington, DC area beer blog DC Beer.com. They have initiated a series of interviews they call "Have a beer with ...".

One might argue that the main contributing factor to the ever-growing beer culture in DC is not the beer itself, but rather the people behind it. The brew masters, bartenders, beer geeks and distributors promote the scene, and in many ways, are responsible for the great selection DC has to offer. Have a beer with… is a new feature in which we spotlight individuals who play a significant role in promoting the DC beer scene in one way or another.

Since I merely report the beer news that intrigues me (and editorialize on it), I'm honored that they chose me as their first subject. I look forward to reading the upcoming interviews with the beer makers, beer movers, and beer shakers —known, and those who should be better known— in the Washington, D.C. area.

If you wish, you can read my interview here. I didn't embarrass myself ... too badly.

DC Beer.com is the beer blog. DC-Beer is a wholly separate subscription e-forum of beer lovers in the Washington, DC area.

Anyone who attributes that quote to Franklin is full of hops.

Beer is proof God loves us and wants us to be happy.

That quote —attributed to Ben Franklin— can be seen on the bathroom wall at a well-known Washington D.C. beer bar, and on many other bathroom walls, tee-shirts, websites, and in articles referencing beer. The problem is ... Benjamin Franklin never wrote that.

What he did write, in a rambling letter, was this:

We hear of the conversion of water into wine at the marriage in Cana, as of a miracle. But this conversion is, through the goodness of God, made every day before our eyes. Behold the rain which descends from heaven upon our vineyards, and which incorporates itself with the grapes to be changed into wine; a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy!
— Benjamin Franklin
as quoted by Bob Skilnik: What Ben Franklin Didn't Say About Beer

Franklin was, in fact, praising ... wine.

In 2008,  the owner of the Elevator Draught Haus in Columbus, Ohio, attended a lecture by Bob Skilnik, and heard the truth. Without hesitation, the brewpub owner issued a recall —and refund— of every single tee shirt he had sold at his brewpub that had been imprinted with that erroneous attribution.

Now, you too, Mr. Bar Owner: whitewash that bathroom wall!

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Beer is NOT made for judging

“Beer is not made for judging, nor for looking at,” he said. “It’s made for drinking.”

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“It’s not because a beer is industrial that makes it bad. I’m not against industrial production. I would rather have a well-made industrial beer than an artisanal beer that tastes bad.”

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“A brewery is a building,” he said. [As in, it's how you brew in that building that makes a good beer.]

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Bon mots from curmudgeon Jean-Pierre Van Roy of Cantillon, the last remaining lambic brewer and gueuze blender in the city of Brussels, who, as he said, "took over the reins from his father-in-law in 1969 on the day after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon."

More by Evan Rail at his Beer Culture blog: What I Heard at Cantillon

James 'Beer-d' Award recipient

This following was said as part of a keynote speech at a Craft Brewers Conference in the mid 1990s:

Beer brings together the Apollonian and the Dionysian.

I was there; I was struck that anyone could make such a classical allusion at a beer conference.

Who was the speaker?

Fritz Maytag —owner of the Anchor Brewing Company, and 2008 recipient of a James Beard Lifetime Achievement Award.

In 1965 Fritz Maytag acquired the Anchor Brewing Company of San Francisco and became a pioneer of American microbrewing. Since then, he has not only preserved the tradition of Anchor Steam Beer, but he has also made Anchor a national brand without ever compromising his high standards. In the 1980s and 1990s, due in part to Maytag’s example, more than one thousand small breweries sprouted up all over the country. <...>

In 1993 Maytag launched the Anchor Distilling Company whose Old Potrero Rye Whiskey and Junipero Gin quickly became models for a burgeoning artisanal distilling movement in America and around the world.

<...> since the 1960s Maytag has steered his family’s Maytag Dairy Farms in Newton, Iowa. Maytag Blue cheese, produced since 1941, was a creation of Fritz’s father, and the company has been a leader in the American artisanal cheese renaissance. <...>

Maytag is also the owner of York Creek Vineyards in the Spring Mountain District above St. Helena, where he grows more than a dozen grape varieties, and last year celebrated his 39th harvest.<...>

And, he is a classical scholar.

Congratulations to you, Mr. Maytag.

Established in 1990, the James Beard Foundation Awards are a program of the non-profit James Beard Foundation, whose mission is to celebrate, nurture, and preserve America’s culinary heritage and diversity...

• 2008 James Beard Foundation Awards Winners
• I toured Anchor in 2001.
• I was alerted to this story at MaureenOgle.com.

No beer for old men

We watched No Country for Old Men last night.

The film depicted (very) graphic violence when such furthered the plot line, but implied the violence when that depiction would have been superfluous or gratuitous. The non-ending ending took this Western-murder-thriller into the (infinitely) broader enigma of life and its purpose.

The film indeed deserved its Oscar awards.

Near the conclusion, there is this line about beer:

Llewelyn Moss: "I know what beer leads to."
Woman sitting at motel pool: "Beer leads to more beer."

Afterwards, I sipped on one Dogfish Head 90-Minute IPA.

Web-beer 2.0, and food videos

My Web 2.0 skills are as deficient — if not more so — as those of many other Baby Boomers. Heck, I think Thelonius Monk the distillate of cool.

But that being said, I do have a FaceBook page (currently devoid of much content), a LinkedIn profile, a Last.fm music page (better), and a Flickr page (better yet).

I recently joined Democracy's Drink, a newly minted social network "devoted to beer and the people who enjoy it". You can be a pioneer here; there are currently 184 members. (The badge below will show the updated figure.) The home page, however, has that spurious quote from Benjamin Franklin about God and beer. We'll have to get author/historian Bob Skilnik on board to debunk that.

Visit Democracy's Drink


And speaking of Mr. Skilnik, I've just finished reading an autographed copy of his Beer and Food: An American History. I'll post a review soon. Hint: good.

Bob also sent this request, and I'm passing it along here.

I’m slowly but surely working on a media-rich website/blog that will be a one-stop and entertaining site of video food recipes makingdeals.gifusing beer, wine and spirits. It will be short on my opinions and beer industry news (like http://www.beerinfood.wordpress.com/) and long on taped recipes of me trying my hand at whipping up “spirited” foods. More importantly, I’m hoping to find brewers, pub owners, distillers, vintners, importers, distributors, blog owners and book authors who are willing to contribute short recipe videos using their products. There’s no fee, no sales pitch…nothing required except the submission of a filmed recipe contribution along with the recipe itself that I can post to my soon-to-be-unveiled site.

In other words, Drinkz-N-Eatz-TV will be a very interactive and media-rich way of entertaining and informing anybody at home who wants to cook along and add some “zip” to any food recipe. I’ll also be working on audio podcasts of interviews with business types as listed above.

My video skills aren't even hand-held-shaky good. But Bob's project is eminently viable. More on Drinkz-N-Eatz-TV.

I am also a member of the two big sites for reviewing beer — RateBeer and BeerAdvocate — both of which have aspects of Web 2.0.

I don't contribute much to those two because of a conflict of interest: I work for a brewery now and in the past I worked for a beer wholesaler.

But the greater reason I don't rate beers is because the very act of reducing a beer to a number demeans that beer.

Shakepeare and beer, wine, and victory

From Stan Hieronymous' blog: There's buzz in the beer-blogosphere about a piece in Wednesday's San Francisco Chronicle that pegs a Senator Obama win in California to the wine and cheese crowd, while a Senator Clinton win rests with the blue-collar beer crowd.

Shakespeare said it this way in Act 3, Scene 5, of Henry V. (As the day wanes, the Constable is complaining to the Dauphin of the valor of the bedraggled English troops.)

Dieu de batailles! where have they this mettle?
Is not their climate foggy, raw and dull,
On whom, as in despite, the sun looks pale,
Killing their fruit with frowns? Can sodden water,
A drench for sur-rein'd jades, their barley-broth,
Decoct their cold blood to such valiant heat?
And shall our quick blood, spirited with wine,
Seem frosty?

The next day is the battle of Saint Crispin's Day. Plot spoiler: Beer (barley broth) wins.

Boozy playoff bromide

Here was New England Patriot Linebacker linebacker Adalius Thomas' delicious reply when asked how Peyton Manning and the Colts might have taken advantage of his Patriot's porous pass defense if it had been the Indianapolis Colts instead of the Jacksonville Jaguars on Saturday:

If 'ifs' were fifths, we'd all be drunk.

Of course, that speculation now looks silly: Peyton Manning's 402 air yards were insufficient in the Colts' loss on Sunday to ex-Redskin coach Norv Turner and his beat-up San Diego Chargers.

Thomas' quotation remains, however, standing on its own boozy merit.