All posts by dispar

Beer, Clueing, expertise, food philosophy, journalism, media

Beer Terminology and Media Coverage

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Thomas comments on coverage of the Yakima hop fire.

Bear Droppings :: Crying Over Spilled Beer

Beer and ale, funny I always thought ale was a kind of beer, just goes to show you what happens with you send a unknowledgable reporter to write a story.

Distinguishing “beer” from “ale” is not the most accurate measure of cluelessness in terms of beer. Some terminologies (say, in legal documents) have very specific definitions for those terms, distinguishing them from one another (say, alcohol percentage). Inaccurate for brewers but accurate for many newspaper readers.

Actually, most of the articles on the Yakima hop fire were relatively appropriate in terms of beer knowledge. Not “worthy of beergeek praise” appropriate, but “better than your average wine journalist” appropriate. Be thankful that those articles actually mentions hops as contributing bitterness, flavour, and aroma to beer. Some people seem to think that hops are the main ingredient in beer fermentation.

What I still don’t understand is why some people maintain that the warehouse belonged to Hop Union while most people seem to say it was one of S. S. Steiner Inc.’s warehouse (and those people are quoting a Hop Union warehouse manager who might know whether or not his hops burnt). Of course, it’s still possible that it was in fact a Hop Union warehouse but, if so, it’s rather strange that the Hop Union corporate website makes no mention of this, even to reassure clients.

There definitely should be better media coverage for beer in general. It could potentially help people understand what beer really is. Thankfully, some people, like Joseph Hallinan of the Wall Street Journal and Jennifer Iannolo of Food Philosophy are doing their homeworks and are getting people to learn more about beer.

advocacy, aesthetics, Alcohol, art, Beer, cluetrain, Cluetrain Manifesto, community-building, consumerism, consumption, craft beer, craft beer culture, creativity, cuisine, cultural capital, cultural diversity, democracy, development strategies, economics, ethnocentrism, Ethnography, experience, expertise, food and society, foodies, globalization, glocal, grassroots, groupthink, hegemony, individualism, joie de vivre, leapfrog effect, location-specific, market economy, marketing, mass media, moral enterpreneurs, musings, nationalism, nostalgie, playfulness, pleasure, podcasts, product and process, productivity, Radio Open Source, rants, responsible drinking, snobbery, social capital, social change, social dynamics, social networks, standardization, statistics, success in life, taste, tasting, trendiness, trusting people, United States, universalism, writing

Individualism, Freedom, and Food

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A surprisingly superficial podcast episode on what could have been a very deep subject.

Open Source » Blog Archive » The End of Free Will?

start a conversation about manipulation, persuasion and freedom from choice

To summarize the main issue of that episode: is marketing and "upselling" by restaurant chains undermining the individual freedom to choose quality food? Apparently simple a question, but billed as much more than that.

Maybe they refrained from delving deeper into any of those issues because philosophical discussions, perhaps aesthetic ones especially, are off limits in "polite company" in U.S. media. Too bad.

Actually, I’m genuinely disappointed. Not necessarily because restaurant chains are very important an issue for me (in Montreal, they don’t seem to have the exact same type of impact and I love to cook). But because the show’s participants all came very close to saying very important things about individualism, food, and freedom. The first two are too rarely discussed, IMHO, and the third could have been the "hook" to discuss the other two.

Ah, well…

If you want to know more about my thoughts on this podcast episode, check out some of the tags below.

freedom, movies, randomness

The Future Is Non-Linear

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In this movie, the audience picks the scene | CNET News.com

Non-linear narratives are among the favourite concepts of several post-modernist scholars. The online world in which we live certainly makes non-linearity quite apparent, often equating it with freedom. There’s also a playful dimension here. Although such a movie is quite different from “Choose your own adventure” gamebooks (what we knew, in French, as «livres dont vous êtes le héro»), there’s a clear connection between a non-linear movie and those games/narratives.

Does sound like an interesting project. The film’s website explains some of the technical details (including the fact that it can’t be played on Mac OS X computers).

music, Spoofs, YouTube

Effective Advertising

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Promotional video on Dan Levitin’s book:

[youtube=http://youtube.com/w/?v=JvBoHohvQ54]
YouTube – This Your Brain On Music: Punk

About the title of my new book: Most people born before 1984 or so and raised in the U.S. remember a PSA (public service announcement) that ran for many years as part of the government’s “say no to drugs” campaign. In that ad, which has been parodied many times from “Married With Children” to Weird Al Yankovic, a man holds up a single egg and says “This is your brain.” he then cracks it onto a frying pan and as it cooks, he says “this is your brain on drugs. . . any questions?”

The title of my new book is a nod to that old Reagan-era ad, because of new research that shows that music activates many of the same pleasure centers as drugs do. Also, there is lots of new research on how people use music in their everyday lives; many people use music for mood-regulation, and for self-medication. We use music the way we use drugs such as caffeine and alcohol – to help us get out of bed in the morning or finish an exercise workout, to calm us after a stressful day, or to ease social interactions. As a fan once told Joni Mitchell, “before there was Prozac, there was you.”

Beer, craft beer

Burning Hops

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CNN.com – Beer drinkers beware: 4 percent of U.S. hops crop burns – Oct 3, 2006

No mention of which hop varieties were present but it sounds as if these hops were meant for macro-breweries like Anheuser-Busch. Which means that the price of hops might increase a bit. Because consistency is extremely important for those macro-breweries, they can’t simply start brewing less hoppy beers. Those huge breweries are already having a relatively tough time so even though they will easily overcome this problem, it is sad (though not devastating) news for them.
One advantage craft brewers have is that they can easily adapt to changing conditions. In fact, that’s how many beer styles have sprung up and it’s part of what makes craft beer so interesting.

academic podcasting, course management systems, democracy, Digital Life, folkloristics, geek culture, language ideology, Moodle, online publishing, Québec, tolerance, Web 2.0, writing style

Early October Quickies

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Actually, they’re more like late September links, but still…

Is that Disparate enough for you? 😉

Beer, craft beer, culinary, food philosophy, podcasting

Beer, Food, Culinary Podcasting

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Just listened to:

Food Philosophy: Food Philosophy #21: Beer and Food Pairing

From the Culinary Podcast Network.

My comments:

Welcome to the world of beer!
Incidentally, the Craft Beer Radio podcast is the reason I went to the CPN (though it had been mentioned on Eat Feed and by Fran, over at Betumi).
As it so happens, beer is one of my passions.
The interview itself was fairly interesting (shows that you’ve done your homework). But the world of beer as a culinary item is much larger than what A-B lets out. A-B should be commended for their attempts to join up forces with the craft beer movement in North America, but there’s still a lot more to think about.
On food pairings, you might want to check out a recent episode of Basic Brewing Radio when they interviewed Randy Mosher on food pairings. Very insightful and quite surprising to some (IPA and… carrot cake!).

As craft beer people tend to say, pairing food with beer makes much more sense than pairing food with wine (with a few exceptions in Italian cuisine). And beer is really quite complex, with more than a hundred styles in several categories:
(Not to mention regional differences. There are literally hundreds of different Belgian Specialty Ales…)
A large beer category which wasn’t mentioned by A-B (because they don’t brew any) and which pairs very well with food is that of sour beers. From gueuze, Flemish Red, Oud Bruid, and Lambic to Berliner Weisse and Gose.
Some restaurants are even hiring beer sommeliers:
Actually, there really should be a feature on beer and food in Imbibe magazine.

knowledge people, leapfrog effect, sciences

Worldly Scholars

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Been quite taken by the last episode of Les années lumière, Radio-Canada’s scientific radio show. Made me think about scientists as human beings. Of course, there are several anthropologists working with scientists as groups, including Cultural Critique Michael M.J. Fischer and Maggie Paxson. My goal here is quite limited.

It’s fascinating to hear Ethiopian-born paleoanthropologist and MPI Professor Zeresenay (Zeray) Alemseged discuss his discovery of Selam, in French, for a Canadian national radio, directly from Ethiopia. People like him show the importance of the global network of scientists.

Hervé Fischer’s section on Internet penetration in Chile made clear the association between increased communication, computer literacy, knowledge management, and local empowerment. What MIT Media Lab director Nicolas Negroponte and numerous others have called the “leapfrog effect.” More than mere techno-enthusiasm, it’s a testament to knowledge’s power to cross all borders.

The feature interview of this episode was with Camille Limoges, a major figure in Quebec’s science politics. During that interview, Limoges stressed the importance of training creative people to process the growing wealth of knowledge representative of today’s world.

Altogether, a fascinating show, as is often the case.