Pic(k) of the Year for 2014.

(Humbly) I won!

Every year since 2006, Alan McLeod —beer author and blogger at A Good Beer Blog— has organized an international competition for 'best' photo of beer or related to beer.

The name of the contest is long and quirky: Yuletide-Christmas-Hanukah-Hogmanay-Kwanza-Festivus Beery Photo Contest. The rules are few, but some quirky: such as disapproval of photos of beer-with-food (he doesn't much care for them) but encouragement of photographs of beer-in-snow.

The quality of many of the entries attests to the good state of amateur 'beer' photography, not merely the domain of Instagram schadenfreudists. Conscious preservation of the reflection on a beer-moment while in that moment.

This year (well, actually, now last year) my photo, above, entitled "Steam Brew," tied for top honors. Here's what Mr. McLeod had to say about it:

Thomas Cizauskas of Virginia sent in photo number three and I have to admit it is both unusual and fantastic. First thing you see is just a jumble. But then again that use of colour to create depth - the yellow emergency rinse station, the red trolley. Then I start to think I have seen this sort of structure before. Not the brewing structures but the layout of the image. It's like a Vermeer. The light is from the upper left. The steam acts as the curtain or the doorway Vermeer used to create a frame within a frame. Much of the scene is ordinary like so many 1600s Dutch household paintings. The red cart is the girl. Amazing. Quite certain Tom thought none of that. He named it "Steam Brew" and gave this note: "on a cold winter day outside, steam billowed, inside, during a brew at the Heavy Seas Brewing Company, in Baltimore, Maryland.

Mr. McLeod is correct. I didn't. But, I'll take it; thank you. ^*

I took the picture two years ago, in January 2013, at Heavy Seas, a brewery located just south of the city of Baltimore, Maryland. The vantage point was an 'L' nook between the old brewhouse to the right and the fermentation tanks extending to the left. That view is now an historical one. The brewery has since undergone a major expansion of its physical plant, and that original brewhouse, in operation since December 1995, has been decommissioned.

My camera was (and still is) an Olympus Pen E-PL1: not quite a DSLR, but more than a point-and-shoot.

Another of my photos, deliberately tailored to Mr. McLeod's wintry inclination, also 'placed' in the contest:

Thomas Cizauskas of Virginia wins this year's snow and beer prize in, admittedly, a smaller class of entries. The photo, however, is crisp and very snow-centric. My only quibble is earlier winners featured majestic landscapes on sunny days. Perhaps I need to rename the category as the "beer and snow within majestic landscapes on sunny days" category. Well, live and learn and in no way taking away from Tom's keen eye.

I purchased the beer —Enlightened Despot Ale, a 'Russian' Imperial Stout— at the brewery itself, Lickinghole Creek Craft Brewery, a farm-brewery in Goochland, Virginia, on a crisp, sunny March 2014 day. And not a moment too soon. The following day, a winter storm of ice and snow hit the area. I took the photo with the contest in mind ... and then moved back indoors, and enjoyed the beer, in warmth.

Running this contest as Alan McLeod does, as a one-man show, is a labor of love with no recompense. He deserves thanks (whether one won or not!). He's also a damn good writer.

The annual Christmas beer photo contest and all of blogging for that matter ... helps us with the understanding that beer is both not that complex compared to, say, the professions but at the same time it weaves itself into any number of interesting places that it is well worth pursuing with any and all means possible. [...]

Photography is one of the best media for discovering this. In a way, good beer is mute and makes us mute. It makes an inviting spot for us in the interior of ourselves. We need to remember to reciprocally keep drawing ourselves out of there and report on what we saw. Lingering over a few photos is as good or better than a weeks at the archives for explaining what is really going on between glass and throat. When you sit quite in a bar staring at that thing or out that window after hitting the particularly correct dosage of your favorite drink? Beer photography does that except it takes you where you yourself can never go - all the places beer is and has been. Well at least since around 1839.

See more of the other photos submitted: here and here. And see the gorgeous photo —of a beer set against glass-brick and the ouside view behind it— with which my photo tied: here.


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Pic(k)s of the week for 2014

Every week since 29 August 2009, I've annointed a photo of mine (again, humbly) as a Pic(k) of the Week: "one in a weekly series of personal photos, often posted on Saturdays, and often, but not always, with a good fermentable as a subject." Here are the 52 photos I selected in 2014, month-by-month, in order, January to December.

Enlightened Despot in the Snow was my pick for 15 March. My personal favorite of the year was this one from late March, that I called Snow Sprouts. (Steam Brew is not among these photos. It was a selection, the year prior, in January 2013.)

Tomorrow, the series begins anew, with my inital selection for 2015, an oldie but goodie.


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2014

January
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December

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We need a book on cask-conditioned ale in America. Please!

The Session is a monthly event for the beer blogging community, begun in March of 2007 by Stan Hieronymus of Appellation Beer and Jay Brooks of the Brookston Beer Bulletin.

On the first Friday of every month, a pre-determined beer blogger hosts The Session: Beer Blogging Friday. He or she chooses a specific, beer-related topic, invites all bloggers to write on it, and posts a roundup of all the responses received. For more information, view the archive page.

Alan McLeod —at the blog A Good Beer Blog— became the emergency host of the 95th iteration of The Session, when the original host went missing-in-action.

For January 2015, his topic is "What beer book which has yet to be written would you like to see published?"

I co-authored three books which were published in 2014 and now know what a mug's game it is. In fact, there was very positive talk of another at a more advanced level. But it was not a piece of work that was within the reach of the budget if a proper job was to be done. Travel and hotel costs to allow for research. Time away from work. We wanted to do the complete thing. No rush around the world or the internets for a skipping stone study would do. So it wasn't done. It may yet be but at this point it's on the back burner. Now that I know this I realize that resources may well stand between many a good author and many many more good readers. Does good beer suffer overall because of it? I have no doubt that it does.

So... on January 2, 2015, let the fates know that you know of their cruelty. What is the book you would want to write about good beer? What book would you want to read? Is there a dream team of authors you would want to see gathered to make that "World Encyclopedia of Beer and Brewing"? Or is there one person you would like to see on a life long generous pension to assure that the volumes flow from his or her pen?

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Jason Oliver is the heavily-medalled brewmaster for Devils Backbone, a brewery and brewpub in central Virginia, which, although flagshipped with a Vienna lager, is multi-modal, known for ales and lagers. A decade earlier, Mr. Oliver had been the executive brewer for the mid-Atlantic group of Gordon-Biersch brewpubs, a chain heavily Teutonic, where lagers predominate.

Thus, I give great credit to Mr. Oliver, who, when he was still with Gordon-Biersch, uttered this pearl of wisdom, not about lagers, but about ales. Cask ales. To an assemblage gathered at a beer tasting at RFD, a good beer pub in downtown Washington, D.C.

You put beer in a cask: that's beer in a cask. Anyone can do that. You condition ale in a cask: that's cask-conditioned ale. There's a big difference.

That is an understanding so simple, yet so profound. So why is it, a decade later, one sees and tastes so many cask ales whose construction shows only ignorance or churlish whimsy?

Cask-conditioned ale is fresh beer, tasting as beer straight from a fermenter: bursting with flavor not dulled by time, temperature, or travel. But such a pure ale-as-art has become harder to find in America. Indeed, it is easier to find beers tossed in casks by brewers with no consideration of appropriateness or skill, than it is to find beer whose freshness is sine qua non. No, to these brewers, a cask is merely a thing in which to toss a beer for sport, a pot in which to toss extraneous, irrelevant ingredients. And, unfortunately, more and more drinkers are coming to think the same, as well.

Exhibit one. This apostasy actually masqueraded as a 'craft' cask-conditioned ale.

Twix bars? That is what they're putting in a cask and calling it 'craft'? Did those brewers even know what was in a Twix bar?

Milk Chocolate (Sugar, Cocoa Butter, Milk Ingredients, Cocoa Mass, Lactose, Soy Lecithin, Polyglycerol Polyricinoleate, Artificial Flavor), Enriched Flour (Flour, Niacin, Reduced Iron, Thiamine Mononitrate, Riboflavin, Folic Acid), Sugar, Hydrolyzed Palm and Palm Kernel Oil, Corn Syrup, Milk Ingredients, Dextrose, Salt, Cocoa Mass, Sodium Bicarbonate, Soy Lecithin, Soybean Oil, Artificial Flavor.

Cask-conditioned ale is not a sponge from which to squeeze out Twix, or thiamine mononitrate, or cocoa-puffs and dingleberries^*, or whatever else might catch a brewer's fancy, with no forethought except for, "hey, what the fuck?"

And mind this. Not all beers taste better at the lower carbonation level or warmer temperature of good cask-conditioned ale. A cask saison? Why? Give me a bottle or draft.

Cask-conditioned ale is a skill; it's an art; it's the beauty of a beer at its freshest. It's unfiltered beer, brewed from traditional ingredients, that has undergone a final fermentation WITHIN a cask, and then served from that cask, at cellar temperature (52-54 °F, or so), without extraneous gas pressure, either pumped from the cask by hand, or by simply opening a tap which has been hammered into a bung. Think of a cask as a fermenter (albeit a small one) containing active, still fermenting, beer.

Exhibit two. Don't get me started on those (oh, too many) pubs that toss a cask on the bar, tap it with a —WOW— huge explosion of beer, and think that the resulting sludgy, now de-carbonated mess, is good beer.

Recently, after I had explained the cask-conditioning process to a newbie publican, he replied, "Why, that's easy." Why, yes, I agreed, it is simple, a truism that makes the presentation of so much bad beer, served in the name of cask-conditioned ale, all the more perplexing and distressing. Why can't others have this easy perspicacity?

Cask-conditioning is a continuum from brewer to cellarman to deliveryman to publican. Be lazy at any part of that chain, and the ale is not cask-CONDITIONED. It's crap.

This rant concerns 'craft' cask in America. The British, from whom we learned it, 'do' cask-conditioned well. And, yes, there are many conscientious brewers and publicans in the United States who have learned their lessons well, who understand the process. But, for the most part, cask-conditioned ale in America has jumped the Twix bar. It's become a bad joke.

Thus, it's due time. It's past time. We need a book, a primer, on cask-conditioned ale. Ask for it; plead for it; hope for it. So that our brewers can learn what an amazing thing cask-conditioned ale is and how to make it, and that our drinkers will understand what it is, and thus come to demand the same of their brewers.

Please.

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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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