Beer Photo of the Day

A bottle of New Belgium's Mothership Wit is the subject of today's beer photo by flickr user mjwesty:

Tragedy Outside Munich!

A spill of 200 crates of wheat beer in Bavaria "formed a slippery beer puddle that disrupted traffic for over an hour - but caused no injuries."

Bottles crashed onto the highway flooding it with foamy wheat beer and disrupting traffic for 90 minutes... The brewery suffered losses of some €10,000 in the beer tragedy.

Oh, the humanity! (Link via Fark)

Beer at Market Prices

A friend sent me this post on the Freakonomics blog about a bar in Germany where the "market prices" of the beers available are adjusted dynamically according to supply and demand.

I have discussed this possibility before, and it is great to see that it is actually being implemented somewhere. Imagine the possibilities:

• Could you "sell short" a new beer after tasting it and finding it to be a stinker, thus profiting from your good taste?
  
• Apparently it is possible to "pick up a breakfast bargain or take advantage of a lunch time sell-off." Would the effect of this for the bar be to spread out demand, and therefore reduce peak requirements for service? For example, if prices are highest at the peak of the lunch hour rush, and price-sensitive consumers respond by coming a half hour earlier or later, the bar may be able to get away with fewer servers.
• Presumably, this would encourage freshness - beers that would otherwise have low turnover would become progressively cheaper, encouraging demand to drain the keg before spoilage occurs.
• Since taxes are often a percentage of the sale price, I am curious how the bar calculates its tax liability. It may require some computing with each sale.
• Speaking of computers, I'd imagine it would be too complicated (both legally and practically) to have patrons actually buying and selling, so how would you implement the system? A program which adjusted prices downward by a fixed percentage after periods of low sales, and vice versa?
  

The addition of market incentives (unsurprisingly) seems to open up all sorts of possibilities for efficiency! What other implications are there for such a pricing scheme? Would you go to such a bar?

Beer Photo of the Day

A Lagunitas IPA sign "somewhere in the East Village" provides today's beer photo.

Bocks are "All About the Malt"

In this The New York Times feature on bocks, the author and his brave associates tasted 25 bocks, mostly from Germany and the U.S. (aiy, the perils of being a journalist!) in an attempt to disprove the notion that "bock" is synonymous with "dark" and that, were that the case, it would not be a bad thing.

Like many beer styles, bocks have a long and rich history:

The term bock dates back centuries, at least toward the end of the Middle Ages, when the Hanseatic city of Einbeck became well know for its strong, malty lagers. In Bavaria, where the style was particularly valued and eventually duplicated, the beer was called Einbeck, rendered in the local dialect as Einbock, and later simply as bock.

Bock also means billy goat, which became the symbol for this style of beer. That’s how the story goes, anyhow, and we’re sticking to it.

In beer tastings that I have run, I try to introduce the variety of beer flavor by showcasing different beers whose flavors focus on hops, malt and yeast, respectively. One of my showcase "malt" beer is without fail a delicious German doppelbock, which has an interesting history of its own:

As with so many beer styles, we have monasteries to thank for doppelbock, in particular the devout monks of St. Francis of Paula.

Forbidden to eat during the 40 days of Lent, they brewed a particularly rich and nutritious beer, a sort of liquid bread, to sustain them through Easter. The monks called their beer Salvator, for Savior, and to this day doppelbocks can be identified by the distinctive “ator” names they go by. The monks eventually secularized their brewery, Paulaner, which continues to make Salvator among many other beers.

According to one version of this story I have heard, the monks sent a barrel to the Pope for his approval. During the long overland journey to Rome, the beer had spoiled, so when the Pope tasted it, he gushed over the pious resolve of the monks to subsist on the foul stuff for a full forty days. I can only imagine the cheers and clinking of glasses when word reached the monastery that the Pope had given his seal of approval to the plan!

My two favorite doppelbocks are Ayinger Celebrator and Andechser Doppelbock Dunkel. As for weizenbocks, Aventinus is a classic. I have yet to try a decent eisbock.

California "Stealth Tax" Magic

A friend who works on the Hill tipped me off to an attempt in California to pass what Americans for Tax Reform calls a "stealth tax" on flavored malt beverages.

The proposal in question reclassifies flavored malt beverages as “distilled spirits” rather than “beer” as designated by current code. Various groups have launched this campaign to change the way in which flavored malt beverages are regulated, and subsequently taxed, based on the false premise that doing so will reduce underage drinking.

According to Americans for Tax Reform, "reclassification would result in a whopping tax increase on flavored malt beverages from 20 cents to $3.30 and prevent over 35,000 stores that currently sell flavored malt beverages from doing so."

For its next trick, I suppose, California's Board of Equalization will make black white and up down. As brewing giant Diageo rightly points out in its lawsuit to stop the change, "malt-based flavored beer is not a distilled spirit and has been taxed as beer for decades." The proposed change has even been parodied in The Onion.

I have somewhat mixed feelings on this issue. Most "flavored malt beverages" are not of a particularly high quality anyway, and I prefer more traditional beer, but in addition to the Zimas and Mike's Hard Lemonades of the world, many fine flavored craft beers would be taxed out of reach as well. This is a blatantly dishonest attempt at revenue collection, and would be akin to using a chainsaw to perform brain surgery.

Beer Photo of the Day

Some delicious looking Guinness cupcakes for today's beer photo by flickr user spinphase:

Recipe here.

Review: Tesco Bière Blonde

Tesco Bière Blonde from Brasserie Saint Omer
Rating: D-

Someone left this in my refrigerator after a party I hosted, and it's setting off all kinds of warning bells. Apparently it's contract brewed "Exclusively for Tesco" by Brasserie de Saint Omer.

• Green bottle? Check...
• Grocery store own-brand? Check...
• Not only that, discount grocery store brand? Check...
• 2.8% alcohol? Check...
• Corn and caramel coloring on the ingredient list? Check...
  

Am I a masochist for opening this? At least it's only a 25cl bottle! How bad can it be?

Appearance: Poured into a Leffe blonde glass, shows a golden straw color, with a one finger white head that fades astonishingly quickly. Does not look super effervescent. Filtered clear.

Smell: Corn and DMS dominate. Some French and Belgian beers have a "farmyard" aroma but this is not what that is supposed to mean! Smells like canned corn. No trace of hops in the aroma.

Taste: Not as bad as the aroma, mercifully. Light, corn & grain flavors dominate, with a bitterness that is reminiscent of tonic water. Tastes like there was just one early (cheap) hops addition in the brewing process. It's like they mixed the liquid at the bottom of a can of corn into a glass of tonic. Not as bad as some macro lagers, but objectionable to be sure. At 2.8% ABV might be useful as a thirst quencher, but Gatorade is healthier and water would taste better.

Mouthfeel: Super light body, like sparkling mineral water except it doesn't taste as good. Carbonation is average. Lingering aftertaste of over-boiled bitter hops and over-extracted grain.

Drinkability: I now understand why it comes in a 25cl bottle. Even that is more than I want to drink.

The brewery's other products don't seem to have fared much better in Beer Advocate reviews. I suspect the guys who put together this Youtube "commercial" for Bière Blonde put in more effort than Tesco's ordering and QA guys did when arranging this contract brew.

Alabamans Attempt to "Free the Hops"

The plight of Alabama beer drinkers has received attention in the media, but so far attempts to change the state's draconian beer laws have gone unsuccessful.

...in Alabama, home-brewing beer has long been a Class A misdemeanor, with a penalty of up to a year in jail and a $2,000 fine. It’s another Class A misdemeanor to sell or distribute any beer with more than 6% alcohol content. That puts off-limits 85 of the 100 top-rated beers in the world, as ranked by BeerAdvocate.com.

In order to change this, beer-loving Alabamans have joined together to form Free the Hops and lobby for legal changes.

Stuart Carter, the president of Free the Hops, counters that most of the higher-alcohol beers do not appeal to teenagers. They’re thicker, more complex, often more bitter. They’re also considerably more expensive. To him, craft beers have nothing to do with getting drunk. They’re all about flavor. To prove his point, Carter has been known to offer lawmakers an illicit taste of a Yeti Russian Imperial Stout, with 9.5% alcohol content.

“It looks like used engine oil – black, thick, sticky. It will glue your lips to the glass,” he says.

“The first taste you get is the bitterness. Then you taste coffee. Then dark chocolate. Then caramel, with a hint of plums or raisins. The aftertaste is pancake syrup,” Carter says. “You give it to these legislators and the look on their face is priceless.”

Free the Hops' new Montgomery chapter had its first meeting last Thursday and the momentum appears to be building. Good luck, Alabama!

Beer Photo of the Day

Today's beer photo of the day is of the Brick Store Pub in Decatur, Georgia.