Another great thing is that such a post can get 87 comments (at last check).

Update (28 Aug.): Make that 180!

I have a fascination with fruit beers, as long as they don’t come out tasting more like pop than beer. I had long imagined that persimmons could be used in making a good beer. Now I know it is true. As noted in the article, Back Street Brewery (Ladera Frutal’s closest) has come up with Santa’s Little Fella, which “uses 70 pounds of locally grown persimmons and wildflower honey.” I can’t say for sure that I taste persimmon, specifically. But I sure taste the hops! It is one fine brew, and the hops and the sweeter ingredients certainly provide for a nice balance.

And, of course, he is right.

It is very encouraging to know that, after an initial phase of brewery closures after the communist regime fell, the number has been trending upwards again. Proof that the market works after all!

And future travel note:

There was one beer I found in Pribor, which is Sigmund Freud’s home town, and they call it Freudovo pivo. You can only find it in that town, it’s a 13-degree dark beer, and it’s rich and chocolaty and malty – it’s more like a desert than or a Sacher-torte than it is a beer itself.

The stuff of dreams, for sure.

On the impact of tourism on the variety and quality of beers:

It’s definitely helped and I encourage every tourist to do his or her part. Please drink as many beers as you can and try as widely as you can to drink beers from different places.

Words to travel by!

Now, if you will excuse me, I’m feeling rather thirsty.
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1. And he has a blog about Czech beer. Both these links I owe to A Good Beer Blog.

The salmon poached in witbier at In’t Spinnekopke in Brussels.

The gueze sauce at 3 Fonteinen in Beersel. (No, I do not remember what was cooked in the sauce–it hardly mattered–and yes, there really is a place in Belgium called Beersel.)

The VepÅ™ové smes porter (Baltic porter that is) from Pivovar Pernstejn in Pardubice, Czech Republic.¹

I owe entirely to Mr Jackson that I found the first two places. I am very proud to say that I found the third on my own, and as far as I know, he never wrote about that place. If only he had had more time…

I stole the “beer is food” line from a young bartender who served my wife and me many a glass of Termanli Desert² in Ljubljana in 1992 on our honeymoon. (Speaking of great marriages…)

1. An image of this amazing brew comes up on the website. And, no, I do not eat vepřové anymore, but I am sure glad I did back then!
2. A weird name, yes, but I have the glass to verify the name. It is from LaÅ¡ko, which does not show such a brew anymore, though it could be the Temno, as that looks like it would be the word for dark. And, how ghastly that this fine brewery now produces a Bandidos Tequila malt pop. Ugh, but if it keeps them in business to make great beer…

The obituary in Tuesday’s Guardian by Roger Protz is nicely done. Some excerpts (though I am leaving out a lot of good stuff!):

The enduring legacy of Michael Jackson, who has died aged 65, will be that he elevated beer from the belief that it is a simple refresher to its true status as one of the world’s great alcoholic drinks, with a long tradition and deep roots in the history and culture of many societies… He showed … that beer comes in many styles and is often made with the addition of fruit, herbs and spices alongside malt and hops. [...]

Jackson was born in Wetherby, Yorkshire, and he remained proud of his Yorkshire stock, though it was a stock that had a major input from the Jewish community of Lithuania. His grandfather, Chaim Jakowitz, had emigrated to Yorkshire from Kaunas. His son, Isaac, married a gentile, Margaret, from Redcar, and they had twin sons – Michael’s brother died shortly after birth – and a daughter, Heather. Isaac Jakowitz anglicised his name to Jack Jackson [...]

The young Michael quickly developed a taste for rich home cooking, inspired by Jewish and eastern European traditions. [...]

However far he travelled, he always waxed lyrical about the pleasures of a pint of Taylor’s Landlord or other good Yorkshire brews. [Yummmmm---MSS...]

As a beer writer, his aim was to encourage people to treat it as being as worthy of attention as wine. In arguably his greatest book, the Beer Companion (1991), he wrote: “No one goes into a restaurant and requests ‘a plate of food, please’. People do not simply ask for ‘a glass of wine’, without specifying, at the very least, whether they fancy red or white, dry or sweet, perhaps sparkling or still … when their mood switches from the grape to the grain, these same discerning people folk often ask simply for ‘a beer’, or perhaps name a brand, without thinking of its suitability for the mood or the moment … beer is by far the more extensively consumed, but less adequately honoured. In a small way, I want to help put right that injustice.”

He certainly did succeed in that. And, I never knew of his descent from either Yorkshire or Jewish stock, but both facts sure make a lot of sense.

Also recommended, the thoughts of Lew Bryson, who notes, “it was Michael’s sense of place that really made his writing so important to me. When MJ wrote about a beer, he wrote about where it was brewed and where people drank it, the look of the walls and the lay of the land, why the town was there and who the brewer’s father was.”

Lew further notes that Jackson believed it was “crucial to go to the place where beer or whisky is made to understand it.” Having gone to many places where beer is brewed–always with one or more of his books in hand–I most certainly agree.

I have used his fantastic guidebooks and other writings for years to explore great beers on my travels. I always considered it a real badge of personal honor when I found something world class that he hadn’t written about. That did not happen very often.

Mr Jackson taught us what a rich, complex, and varied drink the fermented malt beverage can be. And he got paid to drink the greatest beers in the world. I’d call that living a good life. But, at 65, it ended too soon.

Now, what if a beer is called Wild Hop Lager and bears the USDA seal that it is organic? As far as I know, there are no hops growing in the wild that are used by brewers anywhere, but you might assume that, even if the hops in this beer were cultivated, they at least would have been cultivated organically. Reasonable assumption, no? Uh, no. The hops in question are grown with chemical fertilizers and pesticides.

Of course, if you noticed that that Wild Hop Lager was produced by mega-factory brewer Anheuser Busch, you might be less surprised at the misleading labeling. The USDA has interpreted the Organic Foods Protection Act of 1990 as allowing various ingredients that constitute a stipulated maximum percentage of the total product to be produced non-organically without disqualifying the product itself from bearing the USDA organic seal. And that list is about to be expanded, and the percentage of allowable non-organic ingredients in a product is about to be increased (to 5%).

What a shame that the USDA is allowing such debasing of the value of the organic label that products can have significant non-organic ingredients. Certainly hops are a significant ingredient in beer, even if a little goes a long way. (Well, not for me, but then I am hophead. I could eat them raw and have been known to enjoy a cup of hop tea now and then.)

I remember some years ago when there were discussions among organic producers about the mixed blessing of the then-budding mass interest in organic products. Of course, those of us who grow and consume organic products want the concept to spread–for both our own interests and those of the planet. But we knew it was inevitable that government agencies would begin to relax standards at the behest of the big-time processors and retailers, who can hire better-connected lobbyists than the committed organic growers can. An article from earlier this month in the LA Times, from which the not-wild, not-organic hop lager story comes, suggest that this relaxation of standards is very much underway.

My own advice is not only to look for the “organic” label, but to favor relatively smaller producers who specialize in organic whenever possible. If it is local, even better.

I came to the United States on March 3, 1939.

Actually, it became obvious in 1938 – the crisis of ’38 – that war was unavoidable. When Mr. Chamberlain went to Munich with his umbrella and proclaimed “Peace in our Times” and all that, everybody with any brains who lived in Germany at the time knew he was blowing smoke.

This got me wondering, to what extent is there a tradition of Jewish brewers?* Beerhistory.com claims that King David himself might have been a brewer. However, the brewer’s hexagram (still seen on at least one lambic label that I know of) almost certainly originated separately from the Magen David (which itself may have had its earliest formal usage by a Jewish community in Prague–speaking of great potential for brewing connections!). I can say that, whatever the tradition might be, one of my wife’s cousins is carrying it on as a brewer at a microbrewery in Portland–obviously a source of considerable family pride!

The obituary on Strauss also indicates that he worked for macrobrewer Pabst for 44 years before setting up the breweries under his name in partnership with one of his cousins and another founder. Strauss had an interesting comment on his beers, compared to those that have made several of San Diego’s micorobreweries award-winners, as quoted in the obituary:

His goal, he noted, was “not to make a bland beer – but not one so distinctive that only 5 percent of the people drink it.”

I am certainly in that 5%, but there are several excellent beers on the regular Strauss rotation, especially the Red Trolley Ale and several of his Bavarian-style lagers, notably his Amber and Oktoberfest.

To the memory of Karl Strauss: Prost, l’chaim, and alav hashalom.

* Some Google results: