The Friday Mash (Micro Republic Edition)
On this day in 301 A.D., a stonecutter with the wonderful name of Marinus of Rab founded what is now The Most Serene Republic of San Marino. This “micro republic” has a flag, a constitution, a parliament, and even a coat of arms. Unfortunately, it’s never had an event listed on the Beer Festival Calendar.
And now…The Mash!
We start with the discovery of two-centuries-old bottles of beer at a shipwreck in the Baltic Sea. So far, the divers who found the beer haven’t reviewed it on RateBeer.com.
It’s chile harvest time in Hatch, New Mexico, and Jesse Hughey of the Dallas Observer hunts up beers that pair with chile dishes.
Overshadowed by its beery neighbor to the south, Washington State is on the verge of a microbrewery explosion, with as many as 20 new establishments about to open their doors.
Stan Hireronymus reviews Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, by Dan Okrent. Factoid: James Madison, who stood only 5′4″, drank a pint a day. Whiskey, not beer.
Alan McLeod (A Good Beer Blog) argues that macrobrewers still don’t get it: they rely on T-shirts and $5 coupons, not better beer, to attract customers.
Seth Levy of BeerConnoisseur.com caught up with Jennifer Tally, the brewmaster at Squatter’s Pubs & Beer. He also found out how good-tasting a beer can be despite an ABV of less than 4 percent.
Finally, scientists have found that the ancient Nubians drank beer containing the antibiotic tetracycline. To your health, indeed!
Really, Really Retro Ale
A while back, we ran across an interesting article about colonial-style ale, which is occasionally brewed at Colonial Williamsburg. The brewer is Frank Clark, the head of the Department of Historic Foodways at the historic site.
Clark runs the Art and Mysteries of Brewing program four days each spring and fall in a scullery near the Governor’s Palace where, back in the day, one royal governor kept hundreds of bottles of high-quality beer in the basement.
On this fall’s brewing schedule are Bristol beer, a strong, dark, highly hopped beer, September 12; an 1820s-style porter, October 9; mum, a North German medicinal beer that became a popular English brew rich in herbs and oats, October 24; and strong ale, November 20.
Update (8/23): Matt Gottlieb of BeerConnoisseur.com reminds us that Thomas Jefferson was a homebrewer, and that his favorite style was pale ale. Matt had the good fortune to taste Clark’s interpretation of Jefferson’s recipe.
The Friday Mash (NFL Pre-Season Edition)
Ninety years ago today, representatives of several professional football leagues and independent teams founded the American Professional Football Conference, which later became the National Football League. Which, eventually, led to the invention of the sports bar.
And now…The Mash!
The opening kickoff is taken by Logan at Blog About Beer, who’s picked out ten Oregon beers you need to try.
It’s August, much of the country is still sweltering, and Oktoberfest beers are already on the shelves. MusicMook at Blogcritics.org thinks we’re rushing things a bit.
This isn’t exactly the publicity MillerCoors craves, but Jet Blue flight attendant Steven Slater swiped a Blue Moon from the plane before sliding down the chute and into infamy.
James Fallows of The Atlantic assesses President Jimmy Carter’s role in bringing about this country’s craft beer revolution.
Baltimoreans of a certain age remember National Bohemian. Well, “Natty Boh” is back, and their children and grandchildren are discovering the beer “From the Land of Pleasant Living.”
German craftsmanship at its best: a group of architecture students at the University of Applied Sciences in Detmold have built an experimental pavilion out of more than 2,000 beer crates.
Before the final gun sounds, here’s one more item:
Jay Brooks tries to make sense out of a Gizmodo.com post that links the discovery of brewing to monogamy and a whole crazy train of consequences that inevitably lead to war. Ludwig recommends having a pint of imperial something before reading it.
Party Like It’s 1487
Today, the English city of York will roll the calendar back to 1487 by re-enacting the Assize of Ale, a centuries-old law regulating the price, weight, and quality of beer.
Members of The Guild Of Scriveners, an organization founded to regulate lawyers and scribes, will serve as sergeants, roughly the equivalent of American deputy sheriffs. They will visit local pubs and determine whether their ale is of high enough quality. Pubs that meet the scriveners’ high standards will be issued certificates, while “violators” will be asked to make a donation to charity.
After the sergeants make their rounds, there will be a medieval-themed feast, complete with costumed revelers.
Brew Like a Monk
Yes, we lifted the headline from the title of Stan Hierynomus’s excellent book about Belgian beer. But there’s a good reason why.
Not content with rolling out a 30th Anniversary Series of special beers, the Sierra Nevada Brewing Companyit also joined forces with Trappist monks to brew authentic abbey-style beer in America.
The story begins some 800 years ago in Spain, where Cistercian monks established an abbey. The legendary William Randolph Hearst bought the abbey, and had it shipped to Vina, California, a town not far from where Sierra Nevada’s headquarters are now located. (By the way, the abbey was located on land owned by another legendary Californian, Leland Stanford.) Hearst never restored the abbey but in 1994, the Trappist-Cistercian Abbey of New Clairvaux started to rebuild it.
“But what about the beer?”, you ask. Next year, the Sierra Nevada-New Clairvaux partnership will bring out Ovila, America’s only authentic Trappist-style abbey ale. It’s part of a three-beer seasonal rotation that will also include a Saison and a Quadruppel.
We’re looking forward to trying the beer. And reading Stan’s review of it.
The Friday Mash (Rain Delay Edition)
On July 23, 1994, the longest rain delay in Major League Baseball history–three hours, 39 minutes–occurred at Shea Stadium in New York. Ludwig hopes that there was plenty of beer on hand for rain-soaked Mets fans. Especially those who used the No. 7 Flushing Line train as their designated driver.
And now…The Mash!
Who coined the term “craft beer”? Vince Cottone, who used it in 1986 in The Good Beer Guide: Brewers and Pubs of the Pacific Northwest, has as good a claim as anybody else.
DeeDee Germain of Allagash Brewery takes us on a tour of the brewery’s Barrel Room.
The former Rolling Rock brewery in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, is now owned by Wisconsin-based City Brewing Company. Plans are in the works to add Duquesne Beer and Narragansett Lager to its portfolio of contract-brewed beers.
Don Russell, a/k/a “Joe Sixpack,” asks this question: Can you brew a zero-calorie beer? One, that is, that actually tastes like beer and has alcoholic content? According to the experts, the answer is “yes.”
Bavaria’s ambush beer marketing scored at the World Cup. WebWord, a “social media listening tool,” found that Bavaria got 3.71 times as many blog mentions as Budweiser, the official beer of the Cup.
From the Video Department: Henrietta Lovell of The Guardian visits the Meantime Brewery at the Royal Naval College in Greenwich, England.
Finally, can American-style craft beers make it in Europe? Clay Risen of The Atlantic thinks it’s only a matter of time.
The Friday Mash (Popcorn and Beer Edition)
On this day in 1907, Orville Redenbacher was born in Brazil, Indiana. Even as a youngster in 4-H, he was determined to make the perfect popcorn. His efforts paid off: popcorn made him both rich and famous; and nearly 15 years after his death, Orville Redenbacher remains the number-one selling brand.
If all this talk about popcorn made you thirsty, fear not. The Mash is coming your way!
We lead off with this year’s international Beer Challenge, where the Supreme Champion was Samuel Adams Utopias 2009.
Karl Ockert, the founding and long-time brewmaster at Portland, Oregon-based BridgePort Brewing Company, will leave the brewery on July 30. Ockert, who is credited with turing Portland into “an IPA town,” will become Technical Director at the Master Brewers Association of the Americas.
Duquesne Beer, a Pittsburgh-area favorite a generation or two ago, is coming back. The reincarnated version will be brewed with pricier hops–Saaz and Hallertau varieties from Europe, and hops from Washington State–as well as two-row malt.
Bobby Don Johnson, the Lafayette Craft Beer Examiner, offers his take on what makes a beer “drinkable”, and how “drinkable” differs from “sessionable.”
Legislation in Congress that would cut small brewers’ taxes continues to pick up support on Capitol Hill. According to the Brewers Association, 17 senators and 87 representatives have signed on as co-sponsors.
Finally, from the Department of Ancient History: a story in the April 10, 1988, New York Times attempted to distinguish micro-brewers, craft brewers, and “pub brewers.” Hat tip: Alan McLeod of A Good Beer Blog.
Beer and Battlefields
For 15 years, British tour operator Chris “Podge” Pollard has been leading beer tours through Belgium. This year, he’s added history to the itinerary.
Pollard recruited Siobhan McGinn to research Britain’s World War I archives and find statistics and stories about the role that beer played during the war. The result: a Beer and Battlefields tour which combines brewery tours with visits to battlefields, cemeteries, and other historically significant sites.
An article about Podge Tours, written by Christopher Middleton of The Telegraph, focuses on Poperinge, a British garrison town during the war where several establishments served beer to the Tommies. The beer, as you might expect, left much to be desired. One reason: a vat used to bathe 120 men would immediately be put back to use, brewing beer.
In 1895, All Helles Broke Loose
Don Russell, a/k/a “Joe Sixpack,” went back in time for his most recent column. Back in time more than a century, when Munich’s brewing establishment was fuming over a plague called Pilsner. As the owner of the Augustiner Brewery put it, “I take the view…that the reputation of Munich beers has been greatly damaged by the brewing of pale beers.”
By 1895, however, Spaten–the brewery that invented the original Oktoberfest style–concluded that “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em,” and brought out Munich Helles. That beer looked like Pilsner, but its signature was a malty character rather than Pilsner’s Saaz hops (Helles was brewed with Tettnang and Hallertau hops). Russell explains that Spaten added those hops for balance, not bitterness, because Munich’s water gives hops an overly harsh tang.
Another Brewery Coming to Chicago
Pete Crowley, the award-winning brewmaster at Rock Bottom in Chicago, has moved on to another Windy City brewery, the Haymarket Pub & Brewery. Crowley and his partners hope to have the new brewery up and running by the end of this summer.
The brewery is located at the southeast corner of Randolph and Halsted west of the Loop. That is the exact location of the 1886 Haymarket Affair, in which an unknown person threw a bomb at police during a protest rally organized by the Knights of Labor. The bombing, the police reaction to it, and the trial of the alleged anarchists behind the bomb-throwing attracted international attention, and are part of an important chapter in American labor history.