Beer Science

Here's a sentence I'm overjoyed to have need to write - I've been holding blind beer taste tests at work lately.

About every two months or so, I put on a lab coat and compose a series of verbose and urbane emails about how taste testing beer is the only way we are going to propel humanity into a suitably progressive future. I ramble on a bit about how Science (always capitalized) is an unstoppable collective effort, and how "[it's] hobbled without the fervent participation of a gang of dedicated adherents such as all of you. Together we will heave back the leaden curtain of ignorance and complacency, and reveal a gilded world of knowledge and progress rolling out to the horizon before us." And so on.

This all started during a party at my apartment building here in san Francisco. Most people were drinking beer that evening, and one guy in particular was drinking a Pabst Blue Ribbon, the hipster beer of choice. Someone gave him a hard time about drinking a beer that was so simultaneously lauded and abhorred, and he shot back, "Man, if you took the labels off this and a high-priced Pilsner, no one would be able to tell the difference." I took that as a challenge and set up a taste-test.

As I recall, it was PBR vs Bud Light vs Stella Artoi vs Tsingtao vs Coors vs some craft brewed pils (can't remember that last one). I set up six cups labeled 'A' through 'F', and made score sheets on which people could record their impressions of the beers on a scale of 0-5. Someone made some pizza, and there were salted nuts there as well, so it wasn't the most scientific thing ever, but it was a good time. In the end, PBR ended up dead last and, somewhat surprisingly, Tsingtao came out on top. Myth Busted, as they say - PBR truly does suck ass.

Fast forward a couple of months to my Creative Director and his buddy enjoying a few cans of Tecate in the kitchen at work. Someone gave my CD a hard time about Tecate being gross, and he said, "Man, if you took the labels off this and a high-priced Mexican beer, no one would be able to tell the difference."

And that is how Beer Science was born. The first challenge was Mexican Lagers (titled the 'Mexican Standoff', of course), but the idea caught on well in the office, and there have been four more 'testing sessions' since then: Stouts, IPAs, Belgians, and Asian Lagers. I approach these 'tests' in a more stringent fashion than I did the initial PBR test; donning a lab coat, upgrading the scale to 1-10, not allowing food other than water crackers to accompany the beer until the testing is done, &c. I've even made a spreadsheet on which to tabulate the results, which I then disseminate among the entire office as soon after testing as I am able. It's a lot of fun, and a good excuse to get the whole office together sample a little brew.

What were the results of all these taste tests, you ask? Well, here you go:


Mexican Stand-off

1 - Corona
2 - Modelo Especial
3 - Tecate/Pacifico Claro (tie)
4 - Dos Equis
5 - Sol

Stout Science

1 - Young's Double Chocolate Stout
2 - Old Rasputin Russian Imperial Stout
3 - Sam Smith's Oatmeal Stout
4 - Sierra Nevada Stout
5 - Murphy's Stout
6 - Guinness Stout


IPA Inquisition

1 - Sierra Nevada Torpedo 'Extra' IPA
2 - Bear Republic Racer 5 IPA
3 - Speakeasy Big Daddy IPA
4 - Lagunitas IPA
5 - Stone Brewery IPA
6 - New Belgium Ranger IPA


Abbey Inquisition (Belgian Ales)

1 - Chimay
2 - Blue Moon
3 - Fin du Monde
4 - New Belgium Abbey
5 - Duvel
6 - Saison Dupont

Asian Persuasion

1 - Tiger (Singapore)
2 - Saigon (Vietnam)
3 - Tsingtao (China)
4 - Kingfisher (India)
5 - Singha (Thailand)
6 - Sapporo (Japan)

What does the future hold for Beer Science, you ask? Probably a Red Ale, then a Pale Ale, then a Porter, but who can know these things? I usually let people vote on what they'd like to taste before I set up a Beer Science, but once we are through all the normal beers I'll have to get creative. In any case, the journey is the destination, is it not? Yes, it is...

How I Survived Sierra Nevada Beer Camp

Every once in a while, Sierra Nevada invites a bunch of beer-industry types out to it’s brewery in Chico, California, for a couple of days of beer tasting and elbow rubbing which they call ‘Beer Camp’. This year, for the first time, they held a contest to select from among NON-industry types to attend this camp. I like Sierra Nevada well enough, and there’s nothing I don’t like about the words ‘Beer Camp’, so I submitted an entry to the contest (link). Happily, my entry was one of ten selected from California, and I subsequently spent a bleary couple of days staggering around the Sierra Nevada brewery, meeting all the brewers, sampling their fine selection of brews, and observing first-hand how they make the magic happen.

I arrived at the brewery on a sunny morning, Golden Ticket in hand* and stupid smile on my lips, and met up with the other Beer Campers. The ten of us stood around for a few moments, introducing ourselves in the steadily rising sun, all excited to be there. We sauntered into the lobby and handed our Golden Tickets over to the cheerful lady behind the counter, who then issued us our safety goggles and earplugs. Shortly, Steve Grossman, brother of the brewery’s founder, came out to collect us and get the day going. After a short welcome, Steve handed us off to the Master Brewers, our guides through the byzantine maze of the brewery. They were a cheerful bunch of guys with sharp wits, quick smiles, and no illusions about the strength of our desire to sample what was in the fermentation tanks.

And sample the tanks we did – standing in a spotlessly clean ‘basement’ under rows of massive fermentation tanks, a brewer tapped each tank in succession and let us sample from each in turn. By the time we got to the end of a row everyone was feeling pretty good, so we lit out for an informational tour of the brewery’s history to clear our palates before lining up under another row of tanks in a different part of the brewery. At one point we all loaded up onto a 12-person ‘bike,’ complete with two attached kegs and a sound system, and pedaled our way around the outside of the brewery, once again taking in the size and complexity of the place before ducking in to yet another sampling room. After another sampler of truly sublime ales, we glided out to the hop fields to pick fresh hops for the beer we would brew the next day.



The first day went by like that in a slow blur; tours of the facility and exposition from the staff punctuated by serial tastings under fermentation tanks in every corner of the brewery, the rhythm of all this broken only by a lunch of gratuitous generosity (and several more beers) in the brewery’s Tap Room. By the end of the day all of us were clouded by stars and ready for a nap – but the Sierra Nevada staff had different ideas. We were instructed to meet them out on the town at a local watering hole, Madison Bear Garden, to sample some of the local fare and further abuse our livers.

I’ll reveal here that my memory will only produce scant details of that evening, but here are some highlights; drinking a further number of delicious pints, playing an inexplicably skillful game of pool, eating something called a Jiffy Burger (An inordinately large hamburger served with peanut butter, bacon, cheese and mayo. Better than it sounds), dancing around in the streets of Chico, singing for a cab driver, and the subsequent nauseous cab ride home (Not paid for in song, sadly. In fact, my singing may have raised the fare). At some point that evening I hobnobbed with a few luminaries of the Sierra Nevada brewery, all of who endured my drunken babbling with admirable patience and all of who were just about as jubilant as I was. In any case, it was a wonderful evening (I believe).

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Other than the beer, what’s probably most impressive about the brewery is that it started right there in Chico, in what was essentially one man’s garage. Back in 1979, Ken Grossman, a graduate of CSU Chico, rented a shabby little shack and began to acquire enough brewing equipment to turn his home-brewing hobby into a legitimate business. From there he just never stopped; he still runs the brewery today, overseeing daily operations as well as the numerous facility upgrades and brewing explorations that are constantly going on. The end result of Ken’s dedication is a brewery that is a staggering engineering fete, and a beer that is the strongest selling craft brew in the world.



The Sierra Nevada Brewery is a sprawling place, too: towering copper lauter and mash tuns imported from Germany, thirty-odd acres of hop fields, on-site Q/A labs, a well-appointed taproom with a very impressive menu, frenetic shipping and receiving areas, and a labyrinthine system of levels built around a dizzying assortment of fermentation tanks that would send a Trappist monk into fits. And for as massive as it is, the whole place is remarkably well laid-out and efficient; like one giant, heaving organism that eats semi-trucks full of grain and excretes some of the most delicious beer in the country. It’s all very impressive.

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The second day of Beer Camp was not as easy as the first. Everyone showed up at the brewery looking haggard and somewhat worse for wear, but still in good spirits and ready to enjoy another day. The Sierra Nevada staff, in an impressive and possibly practiced gesture of empathy, provided us with bagels, water, and strong coffee almost as soon as we got there. This was to be our day to brew, and though no one wanted to think too much about the end product of that brewing just then, we were all excited to get the show on the road.

As a matter of happy circumstance, every Beer Camper there with me was a home brewer; a couple had even won competitions with their brews. This meant that we all had a keen appreciation for not only beer, but the process of making beer. As we stood under an oak tree in the mid-morning sun, eating bagels and nursing our headaches away with warm cups of strong coffee, we swapped casual notes on brewing and told each other about interesting brews we’d made. It was all very pleasant, and we slowly began to shed our hangovers and pep up a bit. Suddenly, a brewer showed up to roust us from our coffees and rally us up a laboriously steep set of stairs to start making our beer, so off we went.



The Sierra Nevada Brewery has a small brew house exclusively dedicated to producing seasonal, short-run and experimental brews; the large brew house is where most of the popular brews are made, and this smaller ‘pilot’ brew house is where the brew masters get to go a little nuts. We spent most of our morning in this ‘pilot’ house, putting together our Oaked Scottish Lager (which we have since named ‘Loch, Hop, and Barrel’), and chatting about the business end of things with the Master Brewers. Half-way through the day, however, we were herded down to the tasting lab and given a chance to see how people who make their living with their noses do things.

The brewers at Sierra Nevada are understandably obsessive about the quality of their beer being consistent. Consequently, underneath the ‘pilot’ brew house, in a small but well-appointed laboratory, they have a staff of people who have actually been certified with superior olfactory senses, who they employ to smell, taste, and chemically test every single batch of beer that passes through the brewery’s fermentors. Though their noses are not as large as you might be imagining, their knowledge of beer and what can cause it to smell or taste ‘off’ is certainly huge, and they ran us through a gamut of test strips that illustrated several of the offending bacteria. A taste test was next, which illustrated two things to me; 1) my powers of perception as regard my own sense of taste are, essentially, shit, and 2) there are people in this world that can taste the difference between a bottle of beer that has been properly stored and one that has been set on a sunny window ledge for a mere 30 minutes. I am not among those people, and happily so; I must muddle along every day blithely enjoying things that would make them gag. That kind of sensory acuity is not something I envy.

The taste test was extremely informative, and proved to be a little hair of the dog as well; after it, everyone was a bit more jovial. True to form, the Master Brewers sensed our change in disposition and began once again to ply us with samples from the tanks. There had been numerous other Beer Camps before ours, of course, and we sampled their brews next, all of which were amazing. Then it was off to another lunch in the Tap Room, accompanied by the Master Brewers.

The rest of the day was spent making further brief tours to areas of the brewery we hadn’t gotten to the day before: the hop room, the gift shop, the performance stage, an additional Q/A lab, and so on. Once we’d trod every single tile of the brewery, we were once again ushered into the Tap Room to drink from the never ending fountain of the brewery’s generosity and watch the performance of a couple of original acoustic tunes about the Sierra Nevada brewery and/or beer in general, performed by other Beer Campers.

I limited myself to one pint, followed by two bottles of water, as I still had a four-hour drive back to San Francisco ahead of me. I made it a point to wander around and shake the hand of every Beer Camper and Sierra Nevada staffer I had met, though; every one of them had made my stay in Chico a memorable and very enjoyable one, and I wanted to tell them each that personally. The staffers tried to get me to stick around, using promises of free beer and another night on the town on the brewery’s dime; but in the back of my head I heard a listless keening from somewhere deep in my gut, and knew that my liver was imploring me, begging me not to stay. I thanked everyone once again and stepped out into the sobering heat of a dry Chico afternoon, and headed home.



*Yes, there really was a Golden Ticket

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Chico is a small town and bit out of the way, but the Sierra Nevada brewery is really worth a visit (link). Their Tap Room is amazing, their tours are truly impressive, and the staff are a pleasant bunch of people. Chico itself is a college town, so it’s a good day or weekend trip, and an easy drive from Sacramento.

Corpulent and feminine...

Well, my bit's done as far as the Plastiki is concerned. It's a worthy project, nebulous aims and nominal management aside, and I hope the boat makes it to Sydney. They'll have some trouble getting there, no doubt, what with all the ego involved, but they have a few colorful characters pulling for them so I hope they make the news at the very least. Good luck to them.



A girl at work and I have been playing this game that is as juvenile as it is absorbing; we try to flip one another off in slight and ever more creative ways. It started out as a kind of 'disrespect-you-as-a-joke' sort of thing, but quickly became something much greater when I flipped her off by blowing into my thumb and "inflating" my middle finger. While that kind of junior-high antic is old-hat to me, she'd never seen anything like it. She got so excited that she immediately started thinking of funny new ways to flip me off; she pulled her thumb like a jack to crank her finger up, she put a napkin over her hand and waved her fingers like a magician before quickly pulling the napkin away to reveal her now-erect middle finger, she tied an imaginary string to her middle finger and used it to pull the finger up and down, &c. Ultimately we started hiding slips of paper with a middle finger drawn on them in each other's bags, coats, whatever. She hid a picture of that kind in my paystub. She delivered the coup de grace when she drew a middle finger on the birthday cake she made for me. The whole thing's been hilarious, if a bit uncouth.



All this has made me think of two things - 1) How different people make their 'bird' gesture (with the ring and index finger or without, straight up or wilting back, &c.), and 2) that game in which boys (always boys) form a ring with their index finger and thumb, splaying the rest of the fingers out straight, and display this gesture near their penis in an effort to get their friends to look at it. Once viewed, the 'ring gesture', or 'pussy' as it's sometimes called, entitles the gesturer to punch the viewer (or some variant interaction thereof). I ran a youth hostel for a year and took an informal poll of this 'game' and how it's played among people from all over the world. With only 1 (one!) notable exception, ONLY boys knew of this game. NO girls had ever heard of it, and guys from every country knew the gesture for what it was the moment I made it (most acknowledging this recognition with a pained expression and a shoulder offered for punching). During my 'study' I noted only small variations of display or execution of the 'pussy' gesture, and the only guy who didn't know what it was was from Quebec. Go figure.

So, stay tuned, I'm back on the novel bandwagon.

Homina, homina, homina...

The San Francisco Old-Time and Bluegrass Festival is on this week. Halima and I went to one of the shows last night (this one). It was pretty fantastic to get some of that 'old lonesome' sound in my ears after so long away from the south. There was even a guy there doing a sort of shuffly clog-dance thing right in front of the stage that reminded me of how people back in Tallahassee used to get down to a little bit-o-plucking when the mood took them. After the show we were able to thank a few of the musicians for coming down, and they were all polite and enthusiastic (particularly the bass player for the Clampitt Family. She was super-cute). We plan on going to see a few more shows while the festival's on, but what I'm more hopeful for is meeting a few musicians to play with on a regular basis. Maybe I'll go to one of the 'jams' that are set up this week.

After the show we went to Grubsteak, the local Portuguese-American diner that's stolen my gastronomic heart away. We've been avoiding that place recently in favor of cheeper though less delicious and likely-to-kill-you fare, but the siren of linguica and Portuguese Steak was too much for us last night. As we were leaving a whole crew of frat guys and their sorority dupes staggered in, hooting and carrying on in that singularly banal and annoying 'Greek' way. The waiters looked dismayed, and I felt a pang of regret in my chest as well; every cool little nook blows up at some point. What was your private little slice of heaven yesterday catches the ear of the masses today and will be the 'hip spot' tomorrow. The first time Halima and I ate at Grubsteak, in fact, I overheard the good looking couple sitting next to us say, "Man this place is great. I hope the hipsters never hear about it." Well, my friend, rust never sleeps.

Underneath this paragraph you'll see a couple of pictures; the first is the cabin frames for the Plastiki as they were just after I completed them near Christmas. The second picture is Eva crouching near the doorway of the newly covered cabin mold itself. Yay! We've come so far! Now we're starting to work with foams and PET panels to get the actual construction of the cabin skin going, and while that's underway Eva and I have been busily working away on trouble-shooting the bottle-mounting method. I've worked out how to fit the bottles in a nice, laminar fashion, and Eva and I are now trying to translate my full-size tinkering into a workable template for cutting foam panels to size. It's a challenging drafting/building puzzle and very exciting (if you're a nerd like me it is, anyway).





Later this month is my birthday and the San Francisco Ocean Film Festival besides! I'm going to go to Program #3 - Sharks (pft, of course...), and hope to see long, loving footage of those majestic and terrible fish. There's a panel discussion of shark issues after the films show, and you can bet the farm that I'll be there come Hell or high water. Oh, fuck - I love sharks.

Feather duster

OMFG!

I haven't written anything here in a long, long time. I've been very busy lately, it's true, but I've also been either going out to see friends or nerding out with World of Warcraft. Also, drinking too much. It's a slippery rabbit hole, my friends, and I've got at least one leg sunk well deep in it.

Nonetheless, I have been doing a few wholesome and worthwhile things lately as well; I bought a bike, for instance. I've been riding it to work when the weather is dry, and riding it through Golden Gate Park on weekends (Did you know that you can ride a bike right through the Broadway Tunnel if you stick to the sidewalk? Well you can). San Francisco's a famously bike-friendly city, it's true, which is why so many people who ride bikes here have really, really good locks. Thinking that there are a lot of bike-riders in this city shouldn't give you the impression that the roads are smooth though - they are decidedly not, in general - but there is an awareness of the biker's presence among the car drivers here that is both very pleasant and novel (to me). People actually watch out for you here. They know you have as much right to the road as they do and they let you have your space. It's the best.



The Cricket, my loyal and steadfast motorcycle, has been sitting down on the sidewalk below my window, woefully ignored by me*. Every time I walk by her I feel a pang of guilt. She rode me through a wonderful, occasionally harrowing trip. I promised her the world when we got to where we were going, and I've let her down. There is a motorcycle shop not two blocks from my house, and I intend to take her there and get her spruced up, but I've been trying to allocate funds to smooth over some of the debt I incurred on my way out here. So Cricket sits, sad and dirty, victim of the slow pace of America's economy and my own lax attitudes toward motorized conveyances of late. I'll get her back in shape soon though. I have to.

I've been spending a great deal of time near the water lately. Mostly as a result of the boat I'm helping to build (the Plastiki), but also because I've been doing a little sailing with my old friend Mike Rose. We've rented a boat together and plan on taking it around the bay and beyond in the months ahead. Note: it gets fucking cold out there.



Halima and I have been slowly discovering our new city; the surface layer of restaurants and stores, the slightly deeper layer of its people and personalities, its ephemeral past. I suppose that our course here will make itself more evident as time wears on, but for now we are just enjoying everything about San Francisco we thought we would. Spontaneous brass band performances on BART trips, well attended free Lindy Swing dance lessons in Golden Gate Park on Sundays, historical brass plates on the sidewalk denoting where San Francisco used to be (and not be), quirky book stores, stunning restaurants, balmy weather (mostly). It's everything we thought it would be.

Ok. More later.



* But not by the parking cops, unfortunately. I got a $100 ticket on her for parking on the sidewalk. Here's a tip - if you need to park your bike on the sidewalk in San Francisco, put the cover on it and lock the cover on. If the cops can't get to you VIN, they can't properly identify your bike. If they can't identify your bike they can't say for sure how long it's been somewhere, so they can't give you a ticket for anything (and the junkies can't get to your spark plugs easily either). For informational purposes only, of course.

Fennel, Flannel, Funnel, Final...

Dame Darcy's coming through San Francisco. She'll probably sign her comics and pluck a tune or two on the banjo. I'll probably go up to her again and say 'hi', tell her I knew her childhood friend back in the day, give her the news about what her friend's doing, buy any records she's got with her and get her to sign my comic. I know I'll feel dumb for bothering her once I've done it, but I won't be able to help myself. I have a soft spot for Darcy in my heart - she and John Marr both. They were my favorite 'zine authors at the height of my interest in the subject.

Here comes a non sequitur...

I used to go to this Greek joint in Seattle, just next to the laundromat at which I did my weekly laundry. I’d put my stuff in the washer, then walk over to the gryo place and give them my order. At the time I was a vegan, so I’d order a falafel gyro with hummus instead of tzatziki (which is fantastic, BTW). Over time, the owner got to know me because of the frequency of my visits and the unusual order I was placing. He was a stocky Greek guy, dark and hairy and always ready with a smile. He was the local soccer coach for his son’s league, the main chef in his restaraunt and about as Greek a fellow as you could meet outside of Athens. After a time when he saw me coming, he’d just point at me and say, “The usual?” I’d smile and answer in the affirmative, he’d yell the order back to whomever was behind the counter, then he’d shake my hand and we’d chat briefly about our lives. It made me feel as though I were really part of that neighborhood.

One day I went in to place my usual order and there was a new kid behind the counter. I gave him my order, and he looked back at me and said, “You can’t have that.”

“What?” I said back.

“We can’t make that. A gyro comes with tzatziki, not hummus.”

“But I get it all the time,” I replied, “I get it here every week.”

“It’ll be extra,” he said back to me.

“No, it won’t,” I began to reply.

Just then, the owner came out from behind the counter wiping his hands on a paper towel and asked what the problem was. The new kid told him that I was trying to order something that wasn’t on the menu and that I couldn’t have it. The owner put his right hand up between his face and the new kid’s face and made a, “pssshhhht!” sound. “He can have what he wants!” He shouted.

The kid looked at me like I had just peed in his flowerpot, then he skulked off into the back to do God-knows-what (hopefully not spit in my gyro…). The owner extended his hand in appology and said, “I’m sorry my friend. The usual?”

I miss that place a lot.



I have yet to find my 'usual' place here in San Francisco, but I've been working on it pretty hard. Two places that stand out as possible candidates are Asuka Raman on Bush street downtown, and Kennedy's Irish Pub and Curry House, up in North Beach. Both of these places have good, cheep comfort food (if you think of raman or curry as comfort food, that is) and pleasant staff. Kennedy's is the more atmospheric of the two, but Asuka has genmai cha, which is one of my favorites. Anyway, North Beach isn't exactly on my way anywhere, so Kennedy's will probably end up being the once-in-a-while treat instead of my 'regular' joint.

Asuka, you win!

Supergroup

That map up there is the route I took here to San Francisco from Tallahassee. It was an amazing ride, one that I'll never forget. There were the typical ups and downs that one might expect on such a long distance road trip: many moments during which I caught my breath in excitement at something beautiful just off to the side of the road, many times that the hairs on my thighs went stiff and my guts were shot through with a bolt of ice as some yokel narrowly missed destroying me utterly with a careless swerve along the road, many quiet moments spent utterly alone in an unfamiliar place along an unknown road in an almost inconceivably large country, many friendly faces that came unexpectedly out of the gloom to provide me with just the nudge of kindness I needed to get me down the road. There were many times that I found myself asking God for favors, too; asking Him for luck.

You know, there's an old saying that conveys the idea that it's good luck when a bird poops on you. I've always felt that this saying originated out of a desire to stop people from complaining about getting pooped on more than anything else (as in "Oh, fuck! I've just been crapped on by a bird!" "Oh. well, that's good luck, you know. Now shut up, here comes Isabella..."). Anyway, it's a saying not entirely sensitive to the revulsion one feels when defecated upon by a bird.

I was wearing my favorite "fashion/casual" jacket here in San Francisco, a grey turkish sport-coat that I never found much reason to wear in Tallahassee. I was ambling through North Beach, the Italian neighborhood of San Francisco up near Fisherman's Wharf, when I happened to look to my right and lift my arm at an awkward angle for just a moment and for no real reason when a pigeon flew over me and dropped a dollop of wet, white pigeon poop on the back of my right arm. "Ho, fuck," I said, automatically. Halima was walking next to me. She asked, "What?" I replied that I'd been dive-bombed. "Oh, that's good luck," she said. I replied, "Yeah, but it's still shit on my favorite jacket."



If I truly believed that getting shit on was good luck I'd run around under the pigeons in DiMaggio Park. I'd sneak around on the waterfront, scaring seagulls into flight, hoping to collect a poop or two as they jumped up, startled into the air. I'd shuffle around on the flat concrete patio at Union Square, bread in hand, waiting to receive my good fortune by way of avian incontinence. But I'm not so sure it is such good luck to get pooped on. If it were, why would you want to wash the poop out so badly? Why wouldn't people who've been pooped on just leave the poop there in an effort to soak up as much luck as possible? Wouldn't more or larger poop be more lucky? People might stand around behind horses or elephants much more often if it were.

Who knows? Getting shit on is no great fun, in and of itself; but here's to hoping that pigeon poop has a quiet effect on my fortunes that's working in ways too subtle for my leaden intellect to detect. Let's hope pigeon poop leads to something great, shall we? Let's do, lest my revulsion get the better of me and I burn my good coat.