Monthly Archives: August 2012

Rambles and rants

Get More From Your Beer

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I had the good fortune, this year, to be invited to present a little seminar at Beervana. Given the title Get More From Your Beer, the idea was to help wrap up the final (Saturday evening) session with a bit of a ramble on making the most of your beer-drinking experience with a few notes on commonly-confusing topics like “proper” glassware and temperature. There’s a lot of beer-drinking advice out in the wild, so I wanted to distill some of the best of it down, and simplify things a little, trying to empower people to resist some of the worst bits of snobbery and taking things way too seriously. For me, it amounts to this: drink beer with your brain engaged.

I made a few simple slides, and thought I should put a version of the seminar (which really is far too formal a word for drinking a few beers and rambling for a while) up here. It’s a little lengthy — I apparently speak at a fair rate of words-per-minute — but I offer it in the hopes it’ll help.

— The Fundamentals

Another catch-up session for 'Diary' entries stuck on coasters
Transcribing notes from random coasters into the Diary itself

Embrace subjectivity: Beer, like all matters of taste, is a subjective experience and you should absolutely embrace it as one of life’s rare opportunities where you are guaranteed to not be wrong. If you like it, you like it; if you don’t, you don’t. No one can peer into the inner workings of your noggin and tell you otherwise.

Understand its limits: But there’s a world of difference between you liking something and it being good — in fact it’s hard to find a genuine sense in which the latter can be objectively true in a domain such as this. So don’t browbeat people with tastes unlike your own, and don’t ever put up with a disdainful look shot in your direction over a mere difference in subjective experience.

Arm yourself with a little knowledge: Beer’s a richly varied and fractally interesting thing, but it’s always struck me (as against, say, wine or literature or technological gadgetry) as a subject which disproportionately rewards even a little knowledge. A good-enough familiarity with the canonical styles will let you decide whether you think the beer “does what it says on the tin” — as close to a criteria for objective goodness as we’ll ever get — and some idea of their usual intended timings and pairings will help you judge a beer on its best form.1 Some thought given to glassware and temperature will also be surprisingly effective at improving the experience (but we’ll get to that in a second) and it’s always worth having a quick look at the brewers’ own suggestions or what your fellow drinkers have to say — as long as you don’t let their words become Commandments.

Experiment, and pay attention: If, in the end, you enjoy something ‘abnormally’ and against the usual recommendations, that’s fine. You still bought the damn beer; it’s yours, and the brewery benefits from the sale no matter what the hell you do with their product.2 You just have to keep track of what you like, and how you like it. That’s possibly easy for people with memories that function within the bounds of Human Normal, but I had to resort to taking notes — and I can’t be the only one, and it’s a task made massively easier by the ubiquity of smartphones and websites like RateBeer and Untappd, if you think pen-and-paper just way too passé. (And if all other memory-aids fail, start a blog. I’ve had heaps of fun with this one.)

— Glassware

Boston glasses all stacked up at Hashigo
Boston glasses all stacked up at Hashigo

Rule Number One: Use a glass. It really is that simple. In my bartending days, the frequency and smugness with which all-too-many people would turn down a glass for their bottled beer with the worn-out joke “it’s already in a glass” was deeply depressing. This is a basic confusion of adjectives for nouns,3 and anyone making it should be sentenced to spend a week back in primary school, trying to bend themselves into fitting those teeny little desks and chairs. Giving up on a glass is giving up on seeing your beer basically at all, and on getting its aroma in anything but the weakest hint of a waft. You have more than one sense, and it’d be a shame to not put them to use.

Rule #2 & #3 to Rule #∞: From here, things threaten to get massively complicated. There’s a dizzying array of glassware varieties available and no danger of a global shortage on advice of what “must” go in what. But I don’t have the memory to keep them all straight, nor do I have the money to make sure I own a few of each. And it really needn’t be that difficult:

  • Tall-ish glasses for beers which are: lighter (pale colours shine brighter), livelier (carbonation will be emphasised and you’ll get better head retention), simpler and more focused on being thirst-quenching — like pilsners and other pale lagers, most wheat beers and pale ales at the easier end of the spectrum.
  • Wide-ish glasses for beer which are: heavier (the beer will be able to warm a bit…), more complex (swirling in a nicely bulbed glass will really bring out aroma), slower and more of a sit-and-sip affair — like bigger pale ales, porter / stout, darker Belgians, etc..

That’ll serve you really well for starters, and won’t amount to a cause of stress on mind or wallet. There’s also lot of specialty and/or branded glassware around, and it’s nice to slowly assemble a collection, but they’re mostly just for fun. Some of them probably aren’t even “right” for their own beers: a chunky hexagonal Hoegaarden tumbler is rather striking but rubbish at preserving the beer’s soft bubbly head and the classic heavy beer-hall mass doesn’t do pale German lager any real favours — the size of them is more about ease of serving seven million litres of beer to as many people over Oktoberfest; their heft and handle are meagre concessions against having your beer go warm and gross as you drink.

Three Boys Golden Ale
Three Boys Golden Ale, one of many I’ve had
Three Boys Golden Ale, serving suggestions
Three Boys Golden Ale, serving suggestions

As a Test Beer, we had a Three Boys Golden; a thing of pure marvellousness and an illustrative borderline case. Golden ales could go either way, depending on your mood and where they land on the spectrum — you could have one as a “lawnmower beer”4 or in a more contemplative mood. The one in the photo is also in a “Boston glass”, which is pretty standard in bars around here (and descends from half of a cocktail shaker, weirdly). They — like most beer festival glassware — are just exercises in compromise, really; usually both tall-ish enough and sufficiently wide-ish for most purposes. Finally, I think it’s a great case of how you should listen to — but not uncritically accept — the brewers’ suggestions: the label is bang on with its advice about how to store your bottles and with its plea that you drink like a grown-up, but I think that 8-11°C is way too warm for this beer…5

— Temperature

There’s no crucially important Rule Number One, here, comparable to the one there was with glassware. Once you’ve been convinced to pour your beer into a glass, and hopefully a vaguely suitable — and clean — one at that, you’re way ahead of the game and temperature will only be a secondary consideration. That said, there are two crappy suggestions worth dynamiting for good:

  • Boundary Road 'Celsius'
    Boundary Road ‘Celsius’

    Very, very cold indeed: Mainstream beers (and pale lagers especially) will often imply or outright declare that their beer is best damn near freezing point. Embarrassingly-many beer brands offer an elaborately-dispensed “Extra Cold” variant, but you just can’t physiologically taste much of anything down around zero degrees.6 Which is, of course, mostly the (unspoken) point; these are brands, not beers — they’ve given up on competing on flavour, concentrating instead on nonsense like product x being for Proper Southern Men and product y being for Urban Sophisticates.

  • Surprisingly warm: You can’t tend bar in the Antipodes for long without being lectured at length by a Briton who is adamant that the beer’s too cold and that proper beer (particularly “real ale”) should be dispensed at “room temperature”. This was never the case and overlooks the historical reality of beer being stored at cellar temperature — i.e., closer to 12° than the 22°-ish usually considered ideal ambient room temperature. If you or your friends live at cellar temperature, you are probably considered “in poverty” and eligible for government assistance, and perhaps shouldn’t be wittering your money away on luxuries like real ale.
Moa Imperial Stout
Moa Imperial Stout

The truth lies somewhere in the middle, and could generously be signposted as 4°-14° ish, broadly with lower temperatures for refreshing lighter beers and warmer ones for darker and more brooding sippers — quite nicely analogous and aligned, in a helpful coincidence, to the split outlined above for glassware. In general, thanks to various bits of physics you might remember from school, warmer temperatures will bring out more aroma and allow more carbonation to escape (i.e., the beer will feel flatter to drink) and will enhance (or just reveal) more flavour/s. Human sensitivity to sweetness and bitterness, particularly, increases with temperature and it’s not completely mad to say that beer is about the interplay of those two main basic tastes — so beers with depth and complexity will benefit enormously from a few more degrees Celsius. But more of everything will come out, including the fumey volatility that some higher-strength beers possess and the various faults the brewing process can kick up, so it’s very much a try-it-and-see situation.

For our Test Beer, here, we had Moa’s bloody-terrific Imperial Stout. It’s a brilliant behemoth of a thing, at 10+% and aged in Pinot Noir barrels. I think they’re going too far to suggest it be served “just below room temperature”, but it’s true that it has masses more character when served warmer, but so much so that some people preferred it cold. As with everything else: to each their own. And the beer’s a nice reminder that you should keep experimenting, and keep an open mind; Moa do a lot, marketing-wise, to enrage me — but they can still make a beer of real genius, one worthy of setting aside your anti-brandwank principles and not letting them turn into a complete boycott.

Again, the point is to keep the basic spectrum in mind, but not to stress out too much. Much-mourned beer-writing legend Michael Jackson (i.e., not one of the other ones) wrote about a five-category range of ideal serving temperatures, but the first three steps were separated by only a single degree Celsius each. Which is madness. I have plenty of gadgets, but a thermometer isn’t among them, and hardly anyone knows the precise temperature of their fridge — and if you’re drinking remotely-normal quantities in even-only-vaguely-normal conditions, your beer will slip between brackets on that scale as you drink. In my experience, taking a beer out of the fridge for a few minutes before opening it makes it nicely ‘cool’ but not too cold — and putting a beer in the fridge for a few minutes after storing it in a dark cupboard nicely approximates “cellar temperature”.7 Again; muck about, pay attention, and see how you go.

— Back to Fundamentals

Embrace subjectivity, within its proper limits. Arm yourself with a little knowledge — about styles, timing, glassware and temperature, but especially about what you yourself happen to enjoy. And if you’re in a bar and your desired way of doing things isn’t their usual way of doing things — if you want your beer warmer, cooler, or in a different glass than the bartender is reaching for — then you should damn-well feel entitled to say so. If they’re snobbish or uncooperative in response, find yourself another, better bar.

1: If you happen to not like a certain barleywine, for example, and you were tasting it at nine in the morning or while eating and explosively-hot curry (or, heaven forbid, both) then that’s probably more your fault than its, for dragging it so far from its ecological niche. (But, equally, if that’s how you like your barleywine… then by all means go nuts. Weirdo.)
2: Since there’s some considerable crossover among the fans of malted-barley-based beverages, I’ll happily say the same heretical thing about whisky. If you like yours with ice, or with Coke — or served in a Man’s hat, in which floats a single plum — I really don’t care. I usually take mine with a touch of water, or maybe a little ice cube, and I’d probably say that a subtle single malt is just money wasted if you’re mixing yours with sugary soda. But a sale is a sale, and brewing and distilling are precarious businesses which can use your cash to survive and keep snobbier drinkers supplied with booze.
3: It’s in a bottle made of glass. Similarly, I don’t live in “a wood”; I live in a house made of wood.
4: The usual nickname for the style is “Thinking Man’s Lager”, which is a) horribly snobbish, b) needlessly gendered, but still c) fairly close to the truth.
5: But again; if you like yours that warm, or warmer — go nuts.
6: The evidence also seems to be that if you’re actually exhausted — rather than just the sort of person to whom the “brand story” appeals — then drinks under around 4° are less refreshing. So the brandwank isn’t just lame, it’s unusually counterproductive.
7: Only use the freezer in emergencies and if you have excellent task memory / a timer of some kind handy; frozen beer is basically irretrievably fucked and won’t thaw back to normal.

Going meta

An acceptance speech — and a welcome

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Brewers' Guild Beer Awards 2012: Beer Writer of the Year
My surprising piece of new silverware

This is always a great time of year to be a beer geek. Beervana and its satellite events are like Woodstock meets Comic-Con meets some kind of secular-and-sudsy pilgrimage. But my week, hectic and exhausting as it undoubtedly was, took a turn for the surreal on Thursday night when I was sitting down at the Brewers’ Guild Awards dinner.

Formal proceedings of any kind aren’t usually My Thing — I don’t own a tie, any kind of proper grown-up clothes, or even a pair of shoes that aren’t my scuffed-and-trusty work boots. But I’ll make an exception for the weddings of friends, and for this. Beer People are My People, and Te Radar (our genuinely-excellent host) was right when he applauded the very real enthusiasm with which the whole room congratulated the individual who got the gong in each category.1 On its best days — which are mercifully in the majority — the craft beer community exemplifies that “rising tide lifts all boats” spirit, and the awards night demonstrated that.

Brewers Guild Awards 2012: Flavoured and Mucked-about-with
Garage Project’s trophy for ‘Dark Arts’ — and our newest-and-smallest piece of brewing equipment

Earlier in the year, the Brewers’ Guild had announced that they were adding a Beer Writer of the Year award to the lineup, and — on the suggestion of a few flatteringly-insistent people — I’d thrown my name in that proverbial hat. Halfway through the evening, my new colleagues at the Garage Project won an award, in what my unreliable memory has come to call the Flavoured And Mucked-About With category for ‘Dark Arts’ (a rather-lovely coffee bock, if I do say so), and I was admiring the surprisingly-functional trophy when James (from the Crafty Pint) began his spiel, quite-rightly praising the work of Alice Galletly (of the marathon and marvellous Beer for a Year blog) and Michael Donaldson (of the Sunday Star-Times, and author of the new Beer Nation book).

Then he mentioned that the possibly-somewhat-left-field winner’s work had entertained him with tales of Kegtris2 and I had a head-spinning realisation and much-appreciated few-moments’ notice before he read my name out. In something of daze, I recall making a few thanks on the night — there are photos of me, and I look like I’m rambling something appropriate, at least — but I’ll take the chance to repeat myself / elaborate:

Brewers Guild Awards 2012: My ramble
Trying to thank all those who needed to be thanked

We punch way above our weight, here in the Little Country. Our craft beer is better than it should be, and so are the things that surround it; the bars, the design work, and the writing. We’ve got a fantastic little-but-growing community of people who give a damn and comment on the scene in various ways. Geoff Griggs, Neil Miller, Kieran Haslett-Moore, Michael Donaldson and a growing collection of bloggers all keep me entertained and informed on a regular basis — and I want to give particular mention to Alice Galletly for her tremendously inspiring project and to Jed Soane for his fantastic photography and his work documenting all aspects of the beer industry; both of them encouraged me to always try to lift my game and always reminded me of the fun of this rather-weird hobby of ours. I desperately wanted to say that it was an “honour just to be nominated” in their company, but the awards were such that they required us to nominate ourselves, which was itself an indescribably weird experience.

Standing in a room full of them, I also wanted to thank all the brewers — whether I liked their beers, or not. Plenty of the latter were in attendance, but it would be quite-literally impossible to write about beer if no one was making it, and I’m well aware that there’s plenty of hard work in each day at a brewery even if things go awry somehow with the end product or if the marketing department go and do something stupid so as to fire up my twitchy rage gland. Special mention must absolutely go to Epic’s Luke Nicholas, Liberty’s Joseph Wood and Yeastie Boys’ Stu McKinlay; three who were particular sources of encouragement (and of web traffic) from the early days.

Then finally: not-habitual-enough thanks are owed to my family and friends; especially George — my podcast partner in crime (and producer extraordinaire), the purchaser of the original Beer Diary itself, and my friend since before I can properly remember3 — and the marvellously-distracting Emma — a spotter of many typos, and tutor in better camera technique, in addition to being a brilliant accomplice in many day off and holiday beers. Taking home that trophy was a genuinely surreal and appreciated moment; I’ll do my best to live up to it, as it looms and leers at me from my bookcase.

And welcome along, new readers! Grab a beer,4 have a flip through the back catalogue and dip into the podcast if you like. I’m sure it’ll take me a while to catch up — it always does —with Beervana, its related events and their beers.5 But there’s always something deliriously good, or grumble-inducingly bad, going on in this business; I’ve never struggled for material despite occasionally fighting to find time.

1: Especially when it was Liberty’s Joseph Wood, collecting a hugely-deserved trophy in the US Ale Styles category for Yakima Monster. He damn-near got a standing ovation, in a hotly-contested class, and accepted his award in his own style: having just swallowed a spoonful of murderous hot sauce.
2: A word I use a lot — and possibly even coined, such is my fondness for the activity itself.
3: Which might not sound like much, coming from me. But you get the idea.
4: Or a cup of tea, or whatever. I don’t only write this thing with a beer at hand, and though many are recommended, none are mandatory.
5: Not that there are terrifically many, when you’re working during these things, it turns out.

Podcast episodes

Beer Diary Podcast s02e04: Reintroduction / Recap

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There was a flurry of New Day Job productivity here, but the ramp-up to Beervana evidently derailed that somewhat. It’s an awesome time of year to be a beer geek, and I’ve got a brilliantly-enjoyable new gig in the beer business, but my best writing hours have always been from midnight to four — it’s probably genetic, for all I know — and I just haven’t found the time. That should begin to swing back, on the far side of this weekend.

So, with apologies for the delay, we here present an unintentionally-apt reintroduction and recap podcast episode, with less of a Topic For Discussion and more just two guys sitting down over a few beers. George and I hadn’t caught up for a while, and now — collectively — we haven’t seen you lot in some time, either. But nevermind that; welcome back and hello again. In his travels, George picked up a seriously neat new little recording gizmo, and it here makes its début. One immediate effect is that we suddenly go all stereo. We kind of like the effect, but if it drives you all mad — or just annoys some statistically-significant subset of you — we can smoosh it back to mono. We’ll also soon première some on-location footage that the New Gizmo gave us the opportunity to record, out and about. Feedback is always welcome — but even moreso when we go changing things a little.

As always, a direct download is available, there’s a podcast-specific RSS feed, and you should be able to get us on iTunes. George and myself can also both be reached on the Twitterthing, or you can leave comments here or on the Bookface.

Show notes:

  • (0.45) Just to give them some top-of-the-list credit, the music is from the Split! EP by The Coconut Monkeyrocket and Martinibomb.
  • (1.05) It has been a long time, for which I repeat my apology (above).
  • (1.20) Fun fact: Magellan didn’t circumnagivate the globe. He only made it just past half way — only (some of) his expedition (eventually) got all the way home. I think the “wonders” in Civilization confused my younger self.
  • (1.30) Full disclosure is always good.
  • (4.20) See? (Above.)
  • (5.00) Beer of the Week #1: Tribute. Which didn’t even have to come all this way; I’ve seen it on the shelves at Thorndon New World. (Referring to the band as The Motherfuckin’ D is something George and I have done since reading Y: The Last Man.)
  • (8.50) No photos yet, sorry. I’ll hassle George.
  • (10.50) I was nervous that I was being confused by Cedric the Sparkly Vampire, but no, he really is Ron Pattinson — and his blog is wonderfully wonk-tastic reading.
  • (12.15) That’s how topical this one isn’t; the Olympics have mercifully ended.
  • (13.30) Yep. That’s about right: the output of the Boston Beer Company (usually known just as Sam Adams) roughly equals the entire beer production of New Zealand — something in the order of 300M litres.
  • (14.00) I was being inadvertently high-brow, there: McSorley’s is a famous pub, for historical and painterly reasons. (To double up on the comic book references, it’s possible it’s in my brain thanks to Preacher.)
  • (15.00) Indeed; it seems the Americans seized the clean-slate provided by the repeal of Prohibition, and basically prevented tied houses from re-appearing.
  • (16.00) This is my distorted view from the Pacific, I think; Sierra Nevada is only about a third the size of Sam Adams / Boston Beer, in production terms.
  • (18.20) Not even remotely kidding. Yerk.
  • (19.00) George’s U.S. Recommendations: Cape Cod Beer and Carolina Brewery. Plus, the Warren Tavern and the Pony Bar, Hell’s Kitchen.
  • (23.10) Beer of the Week #2: Long Trail Coffee Stout. Vermont does indeed have needlessly-weird terminology for such things, as seems to be U.S. tradition. Also, just as a note to marketers and label designers: if I’m already holding the bottle, you don’t need to tell me how to find it. I forgot to get a photo of it, but The Google can be relied upon to come to the rescue.
  • (27.50) Unrecommendation: Croucher Coffee Stout / Ethiopean Pale Ale.
  • (31.00) Captain Parker’s Pub’s website is worth visiting…
  • (34.50) I have a very involved anti-tipping rant, if anyone’s keen to hear it.
  • (35.30) “Sleeped”? Getting up in the mornings really has broken me.
  • (36.30) Listener demographics. Because the internet will drown you in statistics, if you let it. And bonjour, our Mysterious Listener(s) in Poitou-Charentes. Also, I’m not kidding: I totally support D.C. Statehood; no taxation without representation, amirite?
  • (38.50) “News” will largely be “olds”, since I’m so far behind in posting this. Sorry about that (again, again). Though, fittingly, I’m drinking a Deep Creek ‘Dusty Gringo’ as I type up these notes. Alice did finish the 365 and ring in her own personal new year — and mark its extra day with a homebrew named “Stickler”, just for good form. Although, surprisingly topically, Liberty 365 will get it’s Wellington launch at Hashigo this Thursday (i.e., the 16th).
  • (42.50) This is a busy time of year. Hence the delay (sorry; again, again, again). IPA Challenge and Matariki have been and gone — but we recorded footage at both, which we’ll post soon. And the “Matariki” trademark is pretty freakin’ bogus, but it seems that the winery does own the marks in the relevant classes — which just means a) they’re over-registering bastards, and b) the Trademark Office dropped the ball, again.
  • (43.30) Beervana’s now less than a week away, of course. We’ll have the new recording gizmo with us there, too, and will hopefully get some interviews and such.
  • (45.20) Recommendation: Three Boys Best Bitter. Seriously; have some. And Dale’s Doppelbock, which was delightful winter fuel. And I do love the Thirsty Boys’ haiku.
  • (50.10) On the Beer List: Ben (“Yahtzee”) Crowshaw. His ‘Zero Punctuation’ is an absolute thing of genius. The “grumpy ones” I refer to here were D.B Export Beer and Hofbrau Maibock ones — my Day Job Productivity Increase was de-railed shortly thereafter by said day job getting busy to ramp up toward Beervana. (And there we go: three comic book references. You should seriously read Transmetropolitan. And incidentally, the author just put up a mournful rant about the Olympics Closing Ceremony which gets just the tone I mean.)
  • (54.30) Go to Beervana! (There will still be — some — tickets available.)
  • (55.30) Cue the music: ‘Shopping for Explosives’, by The Coconut Monkeyrocket. Audio editing done in Audacity. Habitual thanks to both. And I still have Tenacious D’s ‘Tribute’ stuck in my head, by the way.