America is worth fighting for

"America is worth fighting for."

... in the war trenches, in the day-to-day struggles, in the preservation of liberties, in the respect for labor's intrinsic worth (not merely as an economic asset), in the care of our health, in the many small ways, and yes, in politics (which is after all what the Founding Fathers bequeathed to succeeding generations).

Senator Clinton's New Hampshire victory speech may have in no way soared in eloquence as did Senator Obama's in Iowa, but its sentiment is one that gives hope as well.

Why not (good) local beer?

if you’d lower a restaurant’s score for using Velveeta, Wonder Bread or putting Blue Nun on their wine list, then why not if they had only pedestrian beer, too? <...> it’s hypocritical to be so fastidious about using only fine ingredients or carrying upscale items but then to not apply that same logic to beer. <...>

Chez Panisse, whose famous owner Alice Waters has written books about using high quality and local ingredients, carried crap beer until only very recently. And even that wasn’t Waters’ doing, my understanding is that one of her bartenders finally persuaded her to carry local beer. Her restaurant opened in 1971 and it took 35 years for her to apply the same logic that made her a food guru to beer? That she had to be convinced says quite a lot about how even devotees of fine, local food and wine can’t easily manage to extend their thinking to beer.

Great points from Jay Brooks at his Brookston Beer Bulletin. And there are many of us who have long talked about the marriage of good food and good beer.

But even though the post above is specifically about ignorance of good beer, that lack of support for local beer is sometimes part of the good beer movement itself.

It's almost as if it's sometimes a badge of good beer bona fides to believe that a beer must be from anywhere else, if it is to be truly worthwhile. It's almost as if it were tergiversation to believe that a fresh, local beer could be a good beer.

Redskins win for #21

Today, the Redskins may have lost their playoff game to Seattle. But, this year, these same Redskins have been forced to battle not simply an opponent, but real life — and death — itself.

These men have dealt with tragedy with steel and grace, and gallantly. So today, these players and coaches should — and I hope will — hold their heads high.

Hail to you Redskins.

No laughing gas in stout

I've heard this malaprop often, and again recently: Guinness Gas described as nitrous.

So-called Guinness gas is a blend of 60-75% nitrogen (N) and 25-40% carbon dioxide (CO2). Originally developed by Guinness in part to imitate the naturally cascading bubbles of cask ale, this mixture is now considered by many to be di riguer for dispensing stouts. [Stout, Michel J. Lewis, Brewers Publications, 1995, p. 119] It's ironic to note, however, that nitrogen is not natural to the brewing process. It must be added in.

If beer were indeed served via nitrous, rather than this nitrogen gas blend, the results might be quite hilarious. Nitrous is shorthand for nitrous oxide (N₂O) — laughing gas, an anesthetic used during dental procedures. It's most definitely NOT in beer!

Beer refrigerators are often placed far from the actual bar where the serving taps are located. Greater pressure is therefore needed to move the beer that greater distance. But using higher pressured CO2 to push the beer a greater distance will create a lot of foaming across the tap.

To get around this, many draft systems employ a nitrogen/CO2 blend. Nitrogen is much less soluble in beer than carbon dioxide, so a Guinness blend can push the beer at greater pressure for greater distances without causing foam across the tap.

There is a problem. Many bars make the common mistake of placing any stout on a Guinness gas line.

Stouts, because of some of the grains used in their recipe grists tend to contain a higher proportion of middle-weight proteins. These promote head retention. But stouts do not naturally contain nitrogen. That is not part of the brewing process. It is an artificial injection during packaging.

It is nitrogenated beers — such as Guinness — which will display the cascading waterfall effect when poured on a Guinness gas line (or cask ales, naturally without any gas). Pushing the beer through very small holes in a plate in a special tap, the nitrogen and CO2 break out of solution in very small, and thus stable, bubbles. But since nitrogen is insoluble, it stays in the bubbles, as opposed to CO2 which tends to break out — hence the tight thick head.

(It's interesting to note that draft Guinness is very lightly carbonated, in fact to no more than one volume of CO2, the level of most cask beers. The rest of the bubbles are nitrogen-derived, applied in the keg under 25 pounds per square inch.)

If a stout has not been nitrogenated — that is if it has been produced without artificially adding nitrogen — and if it's placed on a Guinness gas line, the result will be a lifeless, flat, beer. With so little CO2 in the mix, the CO2 in the keg will evolve out of the beer itself and into the headspace of the keg. The beer will dramatically lose its carbonation — i.e., go flat. The total
pressure of the blend doesn't matter as much as the percentages of the gas content in the mix.

There is a simple expedient however.

By reversing this gas mixture — that is, by using a blend of 60-75% CO2 and 25-40% nitrogen — there will be enough nitrogen to push the beer a long distance — without foaming — and enough of CO2 in the mix to prevent the beer from going flat.

Guinness gas is often referred to as mixed-gas dispense. This is somewhat imprecise, because there has been another mixed-gas blend used for years to push beer long distances: CO2 ... and air!

A simple air compressor would produce the additional pressure above and beyond the standard 15 psi at which most kegs are CO2 pressurized.

That's fine and dandy if the beer is to be consumed rapidly (similar to using a picnic pump to dispense a keg at a tailgating party). But if the beer sits for any length of time (even overnight), you've got nasty stuff.

Here's a deep dark secret: a few bars still do this ... as do many sports arenas.

That's usually not a problem with North American Industrial Lagers (N.A.I.L.s) and their ilk, since they are sold in high enough quantities at sporting and music events. But any craft beer served like this will suffer deleterious flavor effects. It would be like leaving a glass of beer open and sitting on your table for several days before drinking it.

... and that's no laughing (gas) matter!

No More DRM?

Album sales decreased in 2007 by 15%. Digital downloads (often single tracks), however, increased — by 49%. And even if that number is figured in with album sales per se — industry standard assumption is 10 tracks per album — album sales overall still decreased by 9.2%. [from New York Times]

Maybe that might account for this ... [from Business Week]

In a move that would mark the end of a digital music era, Sony BMG Music Entertainment is finalizing plans to sell songs without the copyright protection software that has long restricted the use of music downloaded from the Internet, BusinessWeek.com has learned. Sony BMG, a joint venture of Sony (SNE) and Bertelsmann, will make at least part of its collection available without so-called digital rights management, or DRM, software some time in the first quarter, according to people familiar with the matter.

Sony BMG would become the last of the top four music labels to drop DRM, following Warner Music Group (WMG), which in late December said it would sell DRM-free songs through Amazon.com's (AMZN) digital music store. EMI and Vivendi's Universal Music Group announced their plans for DRM-free downloads earlier in 2007. <...>

Many, including music executives, consider the industry's about-face long overdue. "This agreement is the first of many of these types we'll be announcing in the coming weeks and months," Warner Music Group Chief Executive Edgar Bronfman Jr. wrote in a Dec. 27 memo to employees explaining Warner's breakthrough deal with Amazon. "Many have argued that we could and should have done this long ago." <...>

[emphasis mine] "DRM tends to punish the innocent more than the guilty," says Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group, a technology research company. "It was hurting folks who were trying to follow the rules more than the folks who were pirating the music."

Labels used DRM software in an effort to prevent illegal sharing of songs on peer-to-peer networks, such as Gnutella. Instead, the restrictions served mainly to frustrate paying customers, forcing them to degrade the quality of music by first burning it to a CD before uploading it for play on the device of their choosing. <...>

Rather than following EMI's lead, other labels are hoping to create another Apple competitor in Amazon, which is willing to give the recording industry greater pricing flexibility.

Apple has had a holier-than-thou near monopolistic stranglehold on digital downloads, disingenuous at best.

Because DRM tended to tie consumers to the store most compatible with their music device, the record labels unwittingly gave much of the power over music distribution to Apple, the manufacturer of the most popular digital music player, the iPod.

Music industry executives say Apple has not wielded that power lightly. With control of an estimated 80% of the market for legally downloaded music, Apple pushed its preferred price of 99¢ per song over the opposition of several labels, which preferred variable pricing that would allow some artists to sell at a premium.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs also refused repeated requests from the recording industry and iPod competitors to license its DRM technology so that iTunes customers could easily put their music on other devices, without first burning it to a CD or otherwise altering the files.

• I was alerted to the Business Week piece by blog Musick in the Head.
• More from me on this topic: here.
• My most recent digital download (paid-for, of course): Levon Helm's Dirt Farmer. This is the first studio album in a quarter-century for this former drummer of The Band. It's a remarkable collection of music.