The BeerCast

Brewed Awakening is a new book written by Brooklyn-based beer writer Joshua M Bernstein (as well as, coincidentally, a new coffee stout from Black Isle’s Cromarty Brewing). We were recently sent a review copy of the book – which is subtitled ‘…behind the beers and brewers leading the world’s craft brewing revolution.’ Flip over to the back cover and no less than the three tenors of the movement give their praise for the work – Domingo (Ken Grossman), Carreras (Greg Koch) and Pavarotti (Sam Calagione) – so it certainly comes highly recommended.

The book has several highlights – one of which is the feel of the thing, with a chunky yet concise build you can imagine standing a snifter of IPA on top to make an impromptu table (indeed, the inner cover is embossed to almost resemble this). The overall theme of the layout is great – faux-stained pages, torn notebook scraps and the book’s many photographs ‘held on’ with fraying tape. The dust jacket removes to become a beer map, a quick-guide though the constellation of styles and recommendations.

This is another high point, as Joshua selects about 150 beers to try, with a few at the end of each chapter (with one, notable, exception). The tasting notes are brief but amusing – the entire book is written in a relaxed, informal style – ‘Hops – I love those pungent, floral cones something fierce’. His definition of craft beer – a ‘nebulous, controversial, confusing term’ is one that can be readily applied – ‘to me craft brewers are any breweries that make flavourful, unique beer that you’ll never see advertised during the Super Bowl’.

Brewed Awakening is certainly well written, and is interesting to read – but it’s aimed fair and square at the US market. Despite the ‘world’s craft brewing revolution’ tagline, most of the non-US beers suggested are limited to those available in the States (which isn’t a criticism, I can understand the logic). For British readers – other than those interested in what’s going on in America – there might not be much to hold them in, as the vast majority of the ‘beers to try’ simply can’t be found here.

One chapter that will interest us Brits is the one on cask ale (the one with no recommendations) – I can imagine some American beer fans reeling at the knowledge that an opened cask only lasts three or four days. I find it fascinating that cask ale is now a trend in craft beer – everything’s come full circle, it seems. The book even has a full-page checklist for the cask/curious ‘Ask when the cask was tapped; Request a sample; How cloudy is it?; Ask the bartender to remove the sparkler before pouring’ *

It’s an interesting book, certainly. Although many of the beers and breweries featured will be unfamiliar to British drinkers, that shouldn’t be enough to put you off Brewed Awakening. It handles the different styles and brewing techniques well, is very engaging, and there’s more than enough to keep you turning the pages. It’s clearly one for the craft movement – as you’ll see if you scan the index for beers from our home country – Scotland’s BrewDog – p3, 13, 14, 62-65, 124-125; Scottish ales – p102, 103.

The familiar, tired comments of James Watt aside, I’d heartily recommend reading the book. UK readers might not get hold of any offerings from Smuttynose or Three Floyds with any regularity, but it’s still worth discovering the philosophies of the men and women behind the story of craft beer.

Brewed Awakening by Joshua M Bernstein is published by Sterling Eipcure, and is out now in the UK, priced £16.99 ISBN 9781402778643. It is also available on Amazon UK here. Thanks to Chandra at GMC Distribution for our copy

* My advice to the cask/curious on this particular point is – leave the sparkler alone. But then, I am an uncultured Northern heathen.

Since we began following the issue of taxation and duty on British beer, one term has come sharply into focus:-

“As part of the Coalition Agreement, the Government committed to reviewing alcohol taxation to tackle problem drinking without unfairly penalising responsible drinkers…”

Review of Alcohol Taxation, HM Treasury 30/11/2010 pdf

“By setting a minimum price for a unit of alcohol, we can raise the price of cheap supermarket white ciders, lager and value spirits sought out by problem drinkers.”

Nicola Sturgeon, Cabinet Secretary for Health and Wellbeing, Scottish Parliament

These two statements were made about very different responses to the modern perils of drink. The first related to the UK-wide introduction of High Strength Beer Duty (HSBD) – whereby all brewers of beer over 7.5%abv now pay a higher rate of tax. The second was a quote regarding Scotland’s draft bill on minimum pricing – long championed by the SNP – and destined to become law here sometime this year.* Both repeated the idea that these policies were devised to help ‘problem drinkers’. Both will see the price of alcohol increased.

It’s our opinion that the HSBD measure will not help these people, who will switch to other forms of alcohol (if they haven’t already). As beer over 7.5% constitutes >0.5% of UK alcohol sales, it’s not going to raise a significant amount of money for the Treasury either. The issue of minimum pricing is less black and white. Firstly, the actual price needs to be decided upon (45p has been rejected, rumours of 50p abound), Secondly, unless it’s north of 80p it won’t affect the on-trade – the booze boffins at Sheffield University are already talking about differential minimum pricing (i.e. 30p/unit off-trade versus 80p/unit on-trade). Thirdly – as this isn’t a tax (just a price increase), all the extra money raised will pour into the Supermarkets.

On Friday the BBC reported that a significant group of ‘problem drinkers’ were taking the matter of their health to the US courts. The Oglala Sioux are asking for $500m (£316m) for healthcare, social services, and child rehabilitation for the people of the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota. The lawsuit has been filed against a familiar line-up of names – Anheuser-Busch InBev Worldwide, SAB Miller, Molson Coors Brewing Company, MillerCoors LLC, and Pabst Brewing Company. These four (and Pabst) can be considered as ‘big beer’ – so are the Oglala Sioux going after them in the same way as others have taken on ‘big tobacco’ and ‘big pharma’?

The reason behind their specific targeting of the macro-beer giants lies over the state line in Whiteclay, Nebraska. The town would give Portland a run for it’s money as ‘beervana’ if the issues involved weren’t so cripplingly awful. With a population of 14, the tiny community serves only one purpose – to sell alcohol to the residents of the Pine Ridge reservation. The people there drive two miles to Whiteclay as alcohol sales are illegal on tribal lands. The four off-licenses in the town (who have also been named in the suit) sell only beer – but at staggering amounts. In 2010, the four bottle shops combined to sell 4.9 million cans to the Pine Ridge community – 12,300 every day.

In America, this is an infamous story dating back decades – local Indian groups have long led marches and urged action from local and national Government on the issue. But over here, the article generated by the lawsuit brought the story to public attention for the first time. To be fair, the tiny town also sold $2.7m worth of groceries in a year, so the citizens of Pine Ridge clearly conduct most of their transactions there (as Nebraska doesn’t levy sales tax on food, unlike South Dakota). But roast chicken doesn’t make the same kind of headlines as alcohol.

I wonder what would happen to the ‘problem drinkers’ of Pine Ridge – there are obviously a huge number of them – if something similar to the British proposals were attempted there? The documentary The Hidden Massacre of Whiteclay (YouTube link) reveals that where previously brands such as Budweiser were the big sellers, these days they have been replaced by blindingly strong malt liquors such as City Brewery Evil Eye (10%) and Camo 900 High Gravity Lager (9%). Under the HSBD rise, and if there were a minimum pricing scheme, these cans would become significantly more expensive to buy.

How significant depends on each individual person – as everyone’s situation will be different, of course. But the key aspect of both of these pieces of legislation is the notion of pricing people out. But onto what? What would be the next steps in Whiteclay? Would the citizens of the reservation revert to Budweiser? Or would something else fill the vacuum? When you put frameworks in place to make a drug more expensive to the people who abuse it, what will be the outcome? I’m not sure anyone really knows.

The lawsuit from the Oglala Sioux stands a small chance – but you can imagine ‘big beer’ will gather together many legal minds to defend themselves. If they do so successfully, what happens to the people of Pine Ridge, only time will tell.

*The latest update is that during the past week Ms Sturgeon met with Brussels counterparts, afterwards reiterating that the SNP believe setting a minimum price per unit of alcohol would comply with EU law. However, the European Commissioner for Health and Consumer Policy stated that it still wasn’t fully clear that the SNP scheme wouldn’t be illegal. Expect this to a) run and run; and b) end up in the courts.

For years it’s been an occasional subject of discussion whenever the BeerCasters gather in the pub. The road trip. Long passed into the realm of fable, a beer lover’s holiday of epic proportions. The west coast of America seems like the obvious place – the USA being the home of the road trip (although the first long car-based journey took place in Germany when the wife of Karl Benz drove this experimental car 66 miles at a dizzying 10mph). I doubt she stopped off for a flight of local IPA on route, however. Although, the Germans do love their beer, of course.

San Francisco has some cracking brewpubs, and as BeerCaster Shovels used to live there, it seems like the obvious place to start. 21st Amendment has to be on the itinerary, at the time of writing their current tap list has nine beers on, with all but one over 5.5%abv. Clearly, public transport is the only option – a luxury probably not available halfway up the coast. Designated drivers need to be decided upon well in advance once the trip begins in earnest. So after touring Anchor and enjoying the rest of San Fran’s pubs…where next?

Lagunitas? Russian River? Firestone Walker? Bear Republic? Anderson Valley? North Coast? Full Sail? Deschutes? Rogue? BridgePort? Ninkasi? Widmer Brothers? Caldera?

I don’t think we’re going to get past Portland…

“Please for the love of God don’t consume this filth.”
“After taking a sip, my wife refused to kiss me.”
“I needed Jager to cleanse my palate.”
“Smells of tomato, pepper and asshole.”
“There is absolutely no reason to drink this harsh, vile concoction of your own free will.”

In the same category as paying to watch Plan 9 From Outer Space, or going to every American Samoan football match, we also have drinking a Bud Chelada. Pariah of the beer world, this joke of a beverage is routinely slated on review sites such as Beer Advocate (from which those five different comments are taken), and RateBeer – where it has a rating of 0 for style, and 0 overall. A blend of Budweiser, tomato juice, clam juice, salt and lime served in a monstrous 710ml can – what’s not to like?

It’s been a long time since I’ve come across a beer quite that colour – it pours an opaque pinkish-red, like a rhubarb smoothie. The ratio of ingredients aren’t apparent – but tomato must be one of the leaders – it dominates the aroma (which thankfully contains little asshole). More than a few RateBeerians have described the smell of Bud Chelada as being like vomit – to which I say they must be throwing up after eating plenty of tomatoes. It’s not horrible; it just smells like cheap pasta sauce. No beer aroma, clearly.

This is the crux of the matter – why it scores so badly and why people generally hate it. Snobbery. AB InBev hoover up drinks brands as if their corporate life depends on it (which of course, it does). They produce some completely insipid and unrewarding beer – of which Budweiser is front and centre. I don’t necessarily think Bud is revolting – it just tastes of fizzy rice. If that’s your bag, go for it. If you prefer barrel-aged imperial loganberry saisons – good for you. Horses for courses, and all that.

One particularly unusual course is Clamato Juice – something very few Brits have experience of. Our Mountie-hugging chums from the frozen Arctic can’t get enough, however. Although it was ‘invented’ in New York, Canada is Clamato Country. A mixture of tomato and clam juices, along with several spices, it’s a popular ingredient in the Caesar cocktail – essentially a bivalve Bloody Mary. Having never tasted Clamato before, it was a struggle to pick it out of the overall Chelada experience – other than a hit of Worcester sauce spikiness at the end.

Is Chelada really that awful? There are two schools of thought. As a beer – it probably is. There’s no discernable flavour in there to make you classify it as such – not even any real alcohol presence. But as a drink – I quite liked it. I do love tomato juice – which is a key consideration when sampling it, without doubt. So for me, it was like a virgin Bloody Mary, with a salty, brothy, spicy finish from the clams/spices. Beer snobs are totally free to hate it for what it represents, but don’t hate it for what it is.

Our good buddies the Aleheads are never shy of an opinion or three, so when the duty rise kicked in at the start of October, I dispatched one of the Queen’s messengers to the colonies to get their reaction. Stateside brews are typically (although not always, of course) stronger and punchier than British beer, and Alehead Barley extorted us Brits to stand firm against the evil Government.* He then flipped the post around, to query just why Americans like nothing more than chugging (smaller) pints of enamel-stripping hop bombs, whilst over here we casually flounce our way through twenty milds of an afternoon.

Barley came up with six main headings – allow me to address them, in the respectful manner that befits the ‘special relationship’ between our countries (or is it ‘very special’ now? I forget which base Dave Cameron has got to with Barack Obama)

1. Differentiation from Big Beer Blasting out the multi-syllable words right from the start, Barley noted Prohibition deleted pretty much every small brewer in America, leaving a wasteland to be filled by macrolager. When the 1980′s brewing revolution arrived, everyone wanted to be different.

I can see this happening, the enthusiastic amateur homebrewers scaling up and letting their fantasies run wild. It would be like giving a Scalextric fan the chance to design a Formula 1 circuit – you’d end up with something that would give Princess Peach (the cheating b*tch) a run for her money. Over in the UK, we remember the 80′s only for Duran Duran videos (or at least I do). British brewing continued unabated, thanks to our own revivalists from the 1970′s.

Pub Drinking vs At-Home Drinking The next hypothesis was that we plummy Brits are constantly down the pub, whereas the Americans tend to favour more home-based drinking. As a result – we go for more, weaker beer, and they favo(u)r fewer, stronger triple dry-hopped Imperial whatnots.

I’ve been to more than a few cosy pubs in the USA – and had many more than a few solitary, slumped-against-the-fridge beers in the UK. We all know Americans live hundreds of miles from anywhere, and only travel over the state line during police chases – so locality must play a huge part. Many US drinkers have little experience with pub-based sessions. From my flat, I can probably pick from forty different pubs if I walk for twenty minutes – again, something Americans have little experience of (walking, I mean).

American Craft Experimentation Barley – in a non-boastful way – boasts that brewers over the pond just love to push the envelope a little more than we do.

Clearly, there are more than a few British brewers who experiment on a regular basis. But over there, the scramble to get noticed amongst all the other young pups on the craft scene (Sam Calagione excepted), inevitably leads to people doing many different things. I know the English have that reputation for being reserved (unlike the rest of the home nations, the reputations of which I won’t go into), but I think that’s kind of true.

One way to illustrate the inherent differences between people (and therefore by weak association; brewers) from the US and UK, is to recant something I saw on the tiny Scottish island of Iona a few years ago. With tourists scurrying everywhere, my Dad – rougeish Liverpudlian that he is – was sitting on a bench (where we often leave him). Another man sat next to him, a similarly aged tourist from the States. How do we know this? Because he was wearing a name badge that said “Dick Todgee, Iowa”. Americans think nothing of sporting name badges in public – because it facilitates interaction. My father, of course, shuns interaction at every opportunity.

Brewery-Owned Pubs Pub ties over here maintain the status quo, whereas over Stateside other than the occasional brewery tap, bars are largely independent and therefore free to sell what they want.

The big pubco’s in the UK do tend to limit choice – to a certain extent, as ‘guest ales’ are often in evidence. However, having said that there are certain parallels in both countries with the large breweries merging – whether it’s Molson and Coors or Bass and Whitbread. Over there – for market share. Here – market share + pub estates. Like a giant board game, over time the number of players decreases…

Historical Trends Finally, Barley fails to heed Basil Fawlty’s advice and mentions the war, quoting this chart from the Pub Curmudgeon showing the O.G. of British beer dropping during both World Wars.

The effects of two devastating conflicts that rocked Europe understandably reached every facet of life. The lack of ingredients, shortages of fuel, manpower, and difficulty of distribution made brewing particularly difficult – as Ron Pattinson expertly covers in his book War!. But everyone knows we Brits are a spunky lot, and Jerry wasn’t going to get in the way of our foamy warm beer for very long (although we did have help, of course).

I think Brother Barley is along the right lines when it comes to some of the differences between our two proud, beer drinking nations. Another main one was first raised by Steve Beer’s I’ve Known Lamond, who pointed out the simple reason we’d all failed to remember – tax. The difference of taxing on strength (as here) versus on overall outpout (as there), gives US brewers fewer reasons to hold back, when it comes to high abv brews.

Anyway, whatever the differences between the two – subtle or not – our great nations share a common bond – beer. As long as there are moustachioed Brits and cigar-chomping Americans, there’ll be a variety of beers out there to take away all of life’s problems…

*Much like Lincoln in his ‘cold dead hands’ speech at Gettysburg. Or something.