James Fallows

... be sure to come by the 5th anniversary Air Show / celebration for the Hangar 24 craft brewery. If I weren't necessarily at a policy big-think event in DC this weekend, I would be there myself.

I was living in Beijing when I saw news of Hangar 24's opening five years ago: that long-sought combination of small-airport aviation and micro-brewing in my original home town. I ended up spending more time there than I expected in 2008, as I went back and forth from China in my dad's final months. I've been there in happier circumstances as often as I can recently. Have a Columbus IPA or Orange Wheat for me if you go there -- or for my dad, whose 88th birthday it would be. And enjoy the air show!

At the wonderful CaCao "Mexicatessen" in Eagle Rock, near Occidental College where my wife and I are based this week, I have my first experience tonight with the products of Cucapá Beer, from Baja. What gets my attention, apart from the idea of this kind of craft beer coming from Mexico, is the label on their impressive "Runaway IPA":

Uinta Brewing Company (UBC) became 100% wind powered in 2001. The first company to be 100% wind powered in the State of Utah, Uinta has worked cooperatively as a Visionary with Pacificor's Blue Sky Program to promote the use of wind power to commercial and residential users throughout the state. Blue Sky Pilsner was named in honor of wind power. In 2011, Uinta installed solar-electric paneling on the brewery's roof, allowing up to 30KW of electrical power to be generated for Uinta's beer production--roughly 15% of the brewery's power usage. Uinta is currently 15% Solar and 85% Wind Powered.

... which means that the One Day Only, All-Day Festival of Election Eve Posts™ is at its end. With a zillion reader reflections on the future of the GOP still lying there in the inbox.

Only one way to go out. First, the best new (to me) beer I encountered on my latest trip to Australia:

For anyone who might not yet have seen this: Mike Shannon and Will Feltus, at the Atlantic Media's Hotline site, have provided a psycho-graphic/beer-o-graphic post matching beer preference to political outlook and behavior. Read their post for elaboration, and this related story, but this is the crucial graph:


My no-contest clear favorite among all the beers listed turns out to be the reddest of red-state, high-turnout-Republican preference. And the most purely Democratic beer is one I avoid -- although to be fair, I would take it over most of the other weak-tea alternatives displayed here. And, not to be too catty or snooty about it, but how exactly does anyone tell most of these other beers apart?

To me it is interesting (a) that the winning red-state beer has almost nothing in common with the other beers in its same high-turnout Republican-leaning quadrant, and (b) that another beer from the reportedly right-leaning Sam Adams family was the one chosen by Henry Louis Gates at the famous White House beer summit back in 2009. You do have to wonder how this chart would look if it included any craft or micro-brew products other than Sam Adams, the biggest "micro" brewer of them all. Sierra Nevada? New Belgium? Lagunitas? Flying Dog, and Heavy Seas? Victory or Boulevard or Dogfish Head or Summit? Without going down the long list, it is interesting to speculate on the correlations.

But instead of quibbling over methodology, I will say thank you to the creators of this chart (and to our friends at Hotline) and stick to the "I encompass multitudes" interpretation of the results. Democratic in economic outlook, Republican in beer preference, all-American in loyalties, I take this as new evidence that we can indeed all get along.

Part One: A weirdo conceptual plane, a flying wing designed to look like a ninja star, will shift from subsonic to supersonic flight by turning 90 degrees and going sideways. Or so we are told by Innovation News Daily:



I am not sure whether this is the pre- or post- sideways-turn view, but you can find out that and further details at the Innovation News site, also here.
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Part Two: The classic "pint glass" for drinking beer, which has what I think you would call a truncated-cone shape and which is shown at right and left in the picture below, turns out, according to findings of research scientists, to be the best way to drink beer!

When I can stop by the local Kwik-E-Mart and there, alongside the Cheetos and 128-oz 2000-calorie Big Guzzlers, I can find sitting on the shelves:

 

The New York Times had a highly trafficked feature a few days ago highlighting travel tips from tech-world sophisticates. Two I agree with:

if you have work to do or a stack of magazines to pore over, try it [one tech whiz's] way: Go [to the airport] early. Absurdly early.

Yes. Almost no "savings" in time is worth the surplus stress of wondering if you're going to miss the plane. This is a lesson someone told me when I was in my 20s, and I have only learned to appreciate it more with the passing years. And, regarding our friends at the TSA:

As you approach the X-ray belt, put your shoes in the first bin, your laptop and liquids in the second bin, and your carry-on bag in the last bin. This way, when you're waiting for them on the other side of the metal detector, you'll be able to put your shoes back on first, then grab your laptop and liquids and, finally, return them to your bag.

Yes, yes, yes! Anyone who has not been doing it this way is a chump.

But mysteriously the article left out an important travel tip: how to bring back, safely, bottles of Three Sheets Pale Ale, from the Lord Nelson Brewery Hotel, long renowned as the best brewpub in Australia. The Lord Nelson home base in Sydney, as it looked last week. [Note the trees and the long shadows. It is dead of winter in Australia.]

 

"Savor" -- an "American craft beer & food experience" -- closes out its two-night run in DC this evening. Information is here. I was there last night and recognized the sensation that previously I had had only when attending the Oshkosh "AirVenture" mass airplane rally in the summer, or going to a multi-day tennis camp. That is, entering a culture I had an enthusiast's interest in, and realizing that there were worlds upon worlds of people who were far deeper into this than I had even imagined. To see virtually every craft brewery I'd been aware of -- from Samuel Adams and Sierra Nevada at the top of the "mainstream" pyramid; through Stone and Dogfish Head and Brooklyn and Rogue and New Belgium in the "mid-major" bracket; to regionals I'd enjoyed, like Boulevard and Mirror Pond and Surly; plus many others I'd never heard of, most of the companies having the CEO or brewmaster in their booth  -- it all induced a sense of vertigo. But in a good way.

Visual aids:  The founder and CEO of Maui Brewing, Garrett Marrero, talking about his (very good) pineapple- and coconut-infused beers, in a special "education" salon:




Posters from Foothills Brewery, in North Carolina, that caught my eye:




The general vibe in the National Building Museum (young, mostly white, hip and generally  in-shape considering the central focus on beer):

 

I mentioned several months ago my pleasant surprise at discovering Sierra Nevada's Ruthless Rye IPA at the local Kwik-E-Mart. That was a seasonal offering, whose season tragically appears to have passed.

And so I give you, also from the corner convenience store: Harpoon Rye IPA! Shown ready for action in an office setting.



Haven't exhaustively taste-tested it yet in comparison with Ruthless Rye, but will set about that soon.

 In related news, I was saddened on last week's visit to Shanghai to see no trace of the longtime local staple REEB in the Shanghai corner stores. (REEB motto: "Not only do we have a jokey name, but also our beer is less horrible than Chinese-brewed Suntory." The latter is the only beer I have ever spat out -- and I've had my share of formaldehyde-laced beers in various Asian haunts.) But on the next trip I will look for the REEB Tavern.

It's Tavares, Florida, which has declared itself "America's Seaplane City."




Or maybe again it should be Mills River, North Carolina, based on a news release from the wonderful Sierra Nevada brewing company:

CHICO, Calif. -- Jan. 25, 2012 --Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. is pleased to announce that it has chosen a site in western North Carolina for the future home of an East Coast brewery. The site, approximately 90 acres in the Henderson County Town of Mills River-- along the French Broad River, 12 miles south of Asheville -- will be home to the new production facility, as well as a proposed restaurant and gift shop. "We are thrilled to have found an ideal location in western North Carolina for our second brewery," says Ken Grossman, founder of Sierra Nevada. "The beer culture, water quality and quality of life are excellent. We feel lucky to be a part of this community."

If I were in big-think mode, I might say something about the contrasts a superficially similar society, like Australia, offers to the modern United States. How much more egalitarian the culture feels, in a thousand detailed ways that remind me of the age-of-abundance California of the Pat Brown era. And this despite the heightened local concerns about a "two-track economy" and the distortions created by a Gold Rush-scale resource boom in the mining areas. How much less poisonous the disputes over the role of government seem -- what they call "Medicare" is like our Medicare, but of course it covers everyone, of all ages -- despite flamboyantly contentious Parliamentary politics. (Plus mandatory voting! Hard for an American even to contemplate.) How much more authority the "mainstream" media still have, as was true for America back in the Walter Cronkite era. Update: Benjamin Schwarz covers a mega-big-think book on exactly this question in our current issue. Subscribe!

And so on. Instead I'll mention a few little practical fit-and-finish details that would improve life here if we could emulate them. Which we probably can't, but I might as well dream.

1) Switch-off power sockets. As shown on the right, all electric sockets come with little rocker switches to turn the power on and off. You can find similar things in New Zealand, a variant in the UK, etc. These are safer -- parents don't have to worry about kids sticking a knife into a socket, and I don't have to worry when I stick a knife into the toaster to fish out the bread. They also are conveniently energy-saving. I don't usually go to the bother of unplugging the chargers and power cords for all my various appliances when they're not actually in use, even though I know that they're a significant power drain. I realize that you can use power strips for the same purpose, but they can be cumbersome. It seems more convenient and precise to snap individual sockets on and off. More from Grist.

2) Cab cards. Lots of Aussie businesses give their people these "Cabcharge" cards, which most cabs are set up to accept. Little boxes in the taxis transmit the sum to HQ by wireless network and print you out a receipt. They're the parallel of the magnetic subway cards that I could use to pay for taxis in Shanghai and Beijing. Here's the point: the "can you break a twenty?" and "please give me two dollars back from that, and a receipt" petty-cash exchanges that are part of US taxicab life are primitive by international standards.

3) Related: No tipping. Yes, some people expect and offer tips in Australia, but that's the exception rather than the degrading-to-all-parties rule. I realize that there is no chance that we'll actually switch to a similar system with a much higher minimum wage (> $15/hour in Australia) and consequently higher service-sector prices, but no expectation of the ongoing bazaar-and-bribery ritual that is the tipping culture. That's too bad, because the no-tip system is better.

5) No leafblowers. Or nowhere near as many, and more consciousness of their externalized nuisance. One Aussie's take:

But what about when someone is using a power tool, that despite being extremely noisy achieves nothing? A device that is not just appalling in terms of noise pollution, but damages the environment and as often as not creates work for the user's neighbours?\You might have guessed: I am talking about the leaf blower.

More on this anon.

Winter is coming, as they would say in Game of Thrones land. By which I mean not the actual season but grim-toned political discussion ahead. So again let's pause to look on the bright side with:

1) Chinese hoops. Here is a very nice brief video, courtesy of reader AK and SB Nation, of Stephon Marbury joyously celebrating with his Beijing Ducks teammates after their victory over the Guangdong Southern Tigers to win the Chinese Basketball Association championship. Really, this is heartwarming in about twelve different ways -- and a partial balm for this season's untimely end to Linsanity.


 

2) Aussie beer. The promised full retrospective report is still to come. But as a guide to anyone who wonders whether Australia's brewers, long famed for blah watery lagers, could produce something more ambitious, here are another two signs of progress.

One is the Stow Away IPA entry in the James Squire line of craft brews, shown below in its natural setting in a James Squire brewpub in Hobart. (The company itself is based in Sydney -- and is owned by Kirin, which in turn is part of the Mitsubishi combine.) Stow Away is the purple one on the left and is about the closest thing I've found in the Antipodes to the current American-style IPAs.

Americans know that Foster's is "Australian for beer." That's actually not true -- Foster's is a marginal player in the Aussie domestic market, although the Foster's-owned VB brand is very popular. But what I think of as Foster's-like beer -- feeble lagers, "refreshing" but why not just have water -- has typified the Australian domestic beer style. As it has in most other places on this side of the Pacific.

Until now! A craft brew explosion, in the good sense, is underway in Australia, promising to correct one of the few sub-standard aspects of the Aussie lifestyle: bad beer. I'll have more to say about this shortly, but for now, here is the view this afternoon from the place I'm staying in Sydney. Each of those 11 bottles is a local craft brew, including four from the influential James Squire range of beers and one from the phenomenal Lord Nelson Brewery, where I have been dozens of times over the years and where my wife and I tried pints' worth of various brews last night. The bottled version of Lord Nelson's "Three Sheets" ale, perhaps not as good as straight from the brewpub but still very good, is second-from-right in the picture below.
 

In response to my nomination of Jim Koch, founder of the Boston Beer Company and creator of the Samuel Adams line of brews, for craft-beer canonization, three main trends in reader response:

1) What about Fritz Maytag? Many people wrote to say that the founder of the Anchor Brewing Company in San Francisco deserved first-tier credit. For instance:

Don't forget Fritz Maytag on your list of heroes! He single-handedly saved a  classic beer style from extinction, and was the first to introduce what we now think of as American Pale Ale. A great modern-brewing pioneer!

And:

[You should honor] Fritz Maytag of Anchor Brewery, who instead of choosing to be a bored member of the rentier class took his inheritance and started craft-brewing before Messrs. Koch and Grossman.... When I started home-brewing in 1984, it seemed that the only craft beer around was Anchor's, not Sam Adams (which I do like) or Sierra Nevada's. Praise is free; please spread it around.

2) What about Jimmy Carter? The post-incumbency rise in esteem for our 39th president continues, in this case because of what he did for the the home-brew and craft-brew industries:

I have to note that you left out Jimmy Carter from your list people who deserve credit for leading America into its current Golden Age of Beer.

I personally know of 3 people who began home brewing when he sparked the legislation that made home brew legal. One of these people ... is a commercial brewing concern now! One of several here in the greater Springfield, MA area.

3) What about (in a different sense) Jim Koch? Paul Rickter, a home brewer in Massachusetts, thinks praise of the Sam Adams line and its founder is overdone:

Your hagiography on Jim Koch touched a nerve with me.

You state up front your "bias" in favor of Jim Koch, and that's helpful. As a longtime Boston-area homebrewer, I'm happy to admit being biased against Koch, for a variety of reasons... He makes some good beers (the niche specialty varieties, not the mass-market stuff that is contract-brewed for him), though his real talent is in marketing himself everywhere as the man who single-handedly saved American beer.  He's certainly played a key role in the resurgence of American craft beer, but he's been a little too eager to grab that spotlight and has been loathe to lose the "craft" label, even though his company has grown way beyond that status.

I have one major quibble in what you wrote about the list of "craft" brewers: "Koch's Boston Brewing is #1, and Grossman's Sierra Nevada is right behind him" Look at the 2011 numbers (displayed in the slideshow) -- Sierra Nevada is #2 at 858,000 barrels and Boston Beer Company is #1 at 2.44 million, almost 3 times the size of Sierra Nevada. The only reason that Boston Beer Company is even on this list anymore is that the rules of the Brewers Association were changed a year ago, increasing the "craft" limit from 2 million barrels to 6 million barrels. In other words, when the sales of Boston Beer Company were about to exceed the craft limit, the rules were changed to accommodate Jim Koch, allowing him to maintain his reputation as a small craft brewer.

Jim Koch: great salesman and decent brewer, but NOT a craft brewer and he should stop pretending to be.

Even our greatest heroes: feet of clay. Still these are all figures worthy of respect and credit.

I've long been biased in favor of Jim Koch, founder of the Boston Beer Company, at right in a picture from today's NYT.

  -- Two percent of the reason: he was a college classmate of my wife's -- along with Frank Rich, Chuck Schumer, Bonnie Raitt, Katha Pollitt, and other worthies. Those were the days (although I didn't meet Koch then and haven't since).

  -- Ninety-eight percent of the reason: founder of the Boston Beer Company, and as such not just the creator of the Samuel Adams line but also the man who, as much as any other one person, deserves credit for leading America into its current Golden Age of Beer. When a Beer Mt. Rushmore is built, he'll certainly be there, along with Ken Grossman of Sierra Nevada. Some other time I'll fill out the full Beer Rushmore lineup, or maybe instead a Hall of Beer Heroes. For now, here's Grossman, below, in a pose nicely similar to Koch's. Come to think of it, all pictures of happy brewers tend to be posed this way.

Today I learn of a new reason to hold Koch in high esteem. In the NYT's Sunday business section, Jeff Sommer explains how Koch went out of his way in the mid-1990s to structure the Boston Beer Company's IPO so that it advanced the interests he cared about in the long run, rather than wringing out absolutely maximum capital or returning most of its riches to those with the most extensive inside connections.

The heart of his idea was giving actual customers -- people who loved his beer -- a favored place in line for IPO shares, and a bargain price. The story says:

As Mr. Koch saw it, when an I.P.O. is controlled by investment banks, it is structured "to reward the banks and their favored institutional investors" and not the fledgling business or its customers. He realized that he "wasn't comfortable letting Wall Street underwriters control the process, set the price and allocate the shares to their favored clients at a favorable price."

Instead, he said: "I wanted to take care of my Sam Adams drinkers. They were the people who were really important to me and who were going to continue to be."...

"The laws and regulations were set up to make this kind of thing very difficult," he says. "But I had a strong feeling that we should do this." 

The story goes on to explain how he did so, what he learned, and how some companies -- though not enough, and notably not including Facebook with its splashy new IPO -- have followed his example. The most depressing aspect of today's globalized, maxi-connected, financially-minded market-industrial system is the way that short-term profit is pushed to the absolute maximum, at the expense not just of unpriced "externalities" (pollution, community dislocation, inequalities, and so on) but also of the long-term welfare of the firm itself. Very nice to see this real-world example of someone putting his own company's money behind a different approach.

BONUS: For a view of the world that Jim Koch helped create, you can see this slideshow on the top-selling 20 craft brands during the current Golden Age of Beer. Yes, I hate slideshows too, but this is interesting. Koch's Boston Brewing is #1, and Grossman's Sierra Nevada is right behind him; I recognize, fondly, the others on the list, with a sole exception I have not yet tried.

In response to previous installments one and two, an Actual Scientist writes to set us straight about what really happens to precious droplets of beer when they are housed in amber-colored glass bottles as opposed to metal cans:

Sure, cans will keep out light better than bottles. But I want to correct something one of your readers wrote regarding ultraviolet light getting through amber bottles. The reason for the amber coloration is that it allows longer-wavelength, low-energy light to pass through, but blocks the high-energy photons including virtually all of the UV. Here's one spectrum I could find online, here. (My students would look at me funny if I walked into the lab with empty beer bottles to take their spectra.)

Amber glass transmits some visible light, so yes you can still see the beer--and since beer has some color, it does absorb some visible light and in principle this can trigger some reactions. But it's UV light that does some serious photochemistry, and if your beer is in an amber bottle, you don't need to worry about UV. (You can neglect that tiny hump around 340 nm.) I would expect that the difference between amber glass and aluminum cans is minimal as far as photodegradation is concerned.

So there. Granted, this chart is from a company that makes protective glass, but at face value it suggests that no UV light at all makes its way through amber glass. I will turn to my bottles of Lagunitas or Victory or Sierra Nevada or [name your brown-bottle-using brewery] with hope and trust restored.

Further on the trail of error, a veteran of the beer industry writes to chastise not me but one of the readers I quoted.

Your post admitting a wrong opinion of beer cans contained the following quote from a reader:

>>As someone in Colorado put it, "New Belgium Brewing in Ft. Collins has their flagship brew "Fat Tire" available in cans as well as their "Ranger IPA" [JF: I have had this, and it's great] and "Sunshine Wheat".  Great for traveling.  And don't forget, ALL draft beer is packaged in aluminum kegs." <<

I work for a beer distributor and can assure you that beer kegs are not aluminum. The industry standard is steel, although some craft breweries have turned to plastic to cut costs.  I'm not aware of any beer kegs made of aluminum. Steel is used for its durability. Most kegs remain in circulation for many, many years.

Now, back to self-criticism as it applies to me. I mentioned yesterday that can-protected Dale's Pale Ale, of Colorado, had been in the "top ten" of a NYT tasting panel, rather than "winning" it, as a loyalist reader in Colorado had claimed. And in the most recent testing I was talking about, from 2010, that was indeed true. But the reader has come back to point out that in an earlier taste-test, in 2005, DPA had been the NYT's winner. So we're all right. And just as we still address George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter as "Mister President," even though someone else later got more votes than they did, so too can we refer to Dale's Pale Ale as a "national champion" beer, as at least once in its career it has been.

Bonus international comment after the jump.

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A week ago I confessed my bias against beer that came out of cans, rather than from a tap or one of the brown glass bottles that have come to be associated with America's craft-brew renaissance. Reminder, on the counting-our-blessings principle: for us Yanks this truly is the Golden Age of Beer.

I have the additional blessing of being able to rely on the reading public to set me straight. In case you shared my confusion on this topic, the sampling of messages below may be useful to you as well. Visual aid at right: a can of Surly Furious, one of the fine products of Surly Brewing company of Minnesota, which many readers touted.

From a reader in Pennsylvania:

Snob! Throwback! Don't you read Consumer Reports? Cans are much superior to bottles in protecting beer from light, its worst enemy. All the classy European beers come in cans. If you've ever ordered beer on an airplane, it was in a can because a canned beer weighs only 2/3 as much as a bottled one. It also doesn't shatter if dropped. The idea that the beer tastes of aluminum is an urban legend. After all, draft beer comes in a big can.

Many people wrote to hammer home the point made in that last sentence. As someone in Colorado put it, "New Belgium Brewing in Ft. Collins has their flagship brew "Fat Tire" available in cans as well as their "Ranger IPA" [JF: I have had this, and it's great] and "Sunshine Wheat".  Great for traveling.  And don't forget, ALL draft beer is packaged in aluminum kegs."

Similarly:

I remember a brewer telling me once that cans are just as good as bottles for storing beer -- in fact maybe better since they don't let light in.

The problem, he said, is that your sense of taste comes partly through your nose, by way of smell.  When you drink beer from a can, your nose is buried in the aluminum can.  When you drink from a bottle, you're not smelling aluminum.  When you pour a beer in a glass, your nose is in the glass, and you can smell the beer as well as taste it.  He held that preference for tap beer is largely rooted in this fact.

So pour your Dale's Pale Ale in a glass, and see how it stacks up.  I'm not sure a glass can help your Texas Pride, however.  The theory has its limits.

Yes, I agree. Except in conditions of duress, I drink my beer out of a glass, not a bottle or can. Seeing it is part of the enjoyment! Except perhaps for Texas Pride. Also:

Aluminum canning has a ton of advantages over bottling. First, it's lighter and stronger than bottles, which means easier transportation. Weight also means that cans are supposedly more environmentally friendly than bottles (this Slate article explores the issue). Second, aluminum blocks light and glass doesn't. Even though amber glass does a reasonably good job, you can still see the liquid, right? Ultraviolet light exposure is probably the worst thing that can happen to your brew. Lastly, cans are just easier to handle on the consumer end. Lightweight, less breakable, easy to recycle, just a lot nicer on that end.

So why don't more craft brewers can beers? According to my friends, it's because it costs a hell of a lot of money to set up a canning operation. Filling bottles is relatively easy by comparison (obviously, filling kegs is even easier). That's basically the long and short of it, as far as I can tell.

After the jump, one more omnibus in-praise-of-canned-beer message. This is just a small fraction of what came in, but for now I say: Uncle! Thanks! And I'm looking for Surly.

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