I wrote a handful of the entries in this new beer book, 1001 Beers You Must Taste Before You Die. This thing is a monster encyclopedia of beer descriptions and beer porn (someone recently told me this term isn’t as intuitive as I thought it was – beer porn is pictures of beers that make the viewer drool with lust). My contributions include descriptions of Hakim Stout and Meta, both from Ethiopia, and iJuba sorghum beer from South Africa.
The book was compiled and edited by Adrian Tierney-Jones who, based on the editing he did on my reviews, is an excellent writer. His awards back up the claim. He is also the editor of the Brewer’s Herald, author of The Big Book of Beer, and blogger at maltworms.blogspot.com.
The bad news has been thick this week. My brother’s cancer got more complicated. Democrats lost their super-majority in the Senate after using it to accomplish … exactly nothing, no universal health care, no climate bill, no nothing. (I don’t see what’s so “super” about that). Haiti, a country with a tragic history but that seemed to be on a slow path of progress, suffered yet another massive tragedy. And finally, the supreme court decided to make it official that corporations run America.
The injustice of all this is enough to make a good man sit down at the bar and cry into his draft beer.
Draft beer. Ah, at least we have that. The one thing that reliably helps make sense of a world in chaos, or at least makes it briefly more tolerable. But this is where the news gets worse. This comforting crutch of man has crossed over into the chaos.
I am referring, of course, to draft beer in a bottle.
In a nutshell, or in a bottle as the case may be, draft beer in a bottle represents everything wrong with the world today. Greedy corporate pigdogs lying outright and getting away with it — nay, even succeeding as a result of it. According to dictionary.com, the term “draft beer” is a noun, originating in 1780-90, meaning: beer drawn or available to be drawn from a cask or barrel. So, putting beer in a bottle and calling it draft is simply lying. It is a lie, people. And we accept these corporate lies every day. They sell us pig shit and call it baby back ribs.
This week has been bad enough. So to come home yesterday and find free beer in the mail was kind of like winning the booby prize — yes, I lost the game but at least I get a beer. But then I opened the box and found a bottle of Tsingtao “Pure Draft Beer.” Yes, it is pure alright. Pure bullshit. You are kicking a man when he is down, Tsingtao.
I’ve had it. This is what I think of your “draft” beer in a bottle, you liars.
"Pure Draft Beer" in a bottle makes me very angry.
In Fermenting Revolution, I wrote about how the pyramids were built on beer. This much has been known for some time now. Not only do many of the pyramids of Egypt have beer chambers and beer offerings carved in stone, but we also know the builders were given rations of beer.
What we didn’t know, apparently, until now is that these beer drinking masons may have been free men not slaves as some have thought. Building beeramids was heady stuff, so I’m glad to hear the laborers not only enjoyed the stuff themselves but were not tethered to job.
I took the below picture in a museum in Aswan, in Upper Egypt. It shows a skeleton buried with beer jugs.
The big news today in Big Beer is that Heineken, who also owns Newcastle Brown Ale, bought FEMSA, Mexico’s number two brewing company and owner of Dos Equis, Tecate, Sol and Bohemia.
I read the top several stories listed in a Google News search and noticed something funny: none of the articles talk about beer. They discuss the market position of Heineken, the ownership scenario of the merger, who paid who for what and how the markets responded.
But they don’t mention a thing about beer or beer drinkers. So what are the “benefits” of this merger to beer drinkers? You’ll soon be able to get Heineken anywhere in Mexico. Wonderful. And Mexican television viewers will be uplifted by Heineken’s female forward advertising, like the smart and sexy DraughtKeg campaign in which a robotic woman’s abdomen gives birth to a minikeg of beer which she promptly serves to her well-deserving man.Then she multiplies herself so her man can really enjoy maximum pleasure.
In Fermenting Revolution, I posed a challenge to brewers: make a beer with fair trade ingredients. Today there are a few such beers being made in the U.K. In fact, one of them, Banana Bread Beer from the Wells and Young’s Brewing in Bedford, England has been being brewed since at least 2002.
This is a standard English bitter gone fruity with a pronounced banana twist. The neck label asserts the brew is made with “our own natural mineral water and fairtrade bananas.” And boy do the bananas come out swinging. As soon as I popped the cap I could smell bananas.
Now, having attempted banana brews myself, I know that bananas do not produce a taste or smell of bananas in finished beer. So it was unsurprising to read on the front label this more detailed description: “Malt beverage brewed with bananas and banana flavor added.” In other words, there are bananas in there but all they provide is some additional fermentable sugar, the banana taste and aroma come from chemical flavoring.
It is a powerful candy-like banana aroma and flavor that doesn’t have much body, just chemical punch. Otherwise, this is a middle of the road bitter, somewhat overcarbonated, and rather thin. After about half a pint, I was ready for something else. I think it would benefit from a better malt backbone. Maybe they could try using hefeweizen as the base style. This way the yeast could provide a natural banana aroma and flavor and they could axe the chemical flavoring.
Thumbs up for going the fair trade route, but I won’t be going back for seconds of this one.
Posted by beeractivist 
