Beer News Blog

Well, well folks - it’s Thanksgiving again!  For some of us it’s a time to overeat, become a couch potato and watch some good football.  For me, Thanksgiving represents the one day in my life where it’s acceptable to have a beer at my parent’s house.  In fact, Thanksgiving was the first time I ever had a beer in front of my father.  Each year, I’m reminded of the simple pleasure of popping a cold one with my old man, talking about life and which team we think is going all the way in both the BCS and the NFL.

The first time I ever had a brew with my old man was when I was 18 years old.  It was my senior year of high schol and I had just signed to play football at UCLA.  He knew the opportunity to sit around the house and B.S. with his youngest son was coming to an end, I was just looking for the chance to down some suds and not got grounded.  My dad’s from Texas, so naturally his favorite beer is Lone Star, but in its absence he likes to drink Budweiser.  So on that particular Thursday afternoon the beers would be ice cold, bottled Budweisers.

My mother was upstairs tending to my older brother and his latest steady girlfriend, so my dad and I snuck out to the back yard.  We brought the beers, a tennis ball and the family German Shepherd.  My dad threw the ball for the anxious K-9 and had his first gulp of Bud.  Nervously, I followed suit with my own.  He started in with the whole “Well, son you’re all grown up now …” speech, but there was something different in him that day.  He had been visibly shaken on my 18th birthday, his youngest son was all grown up.  Now I could see the emotion starting to well up in him.

My father had raised both my older brother and I in his own mold.  He had played football in college, and had a small stint in Minor League Baseball.  My older brother was the baseball player, going on to play at a small private school in San Diego.  I, on the other hand, had taken to football and was headed to Westwood for school.  My father had a deep appreciation for UCLA and its winning tradition, and was very proud of the fact that I was headed there in a few months.  On this day, however, the often selfish love of a father shown threw.  As happy as he was that I was going, he was sad to see me leave.

See, my father wasn’t the type that you would find in an episode of “Beyond the Glory” or “E! True Hollywood Story”, he was always there for me.  He taught me how to throw a baseball, shoot a basketball and make a tackle.  My successes had always been his successes and he knew I was always happy to share the limelight with him.  Going to UCLA was the culmination of both his and my hard work, yet he knew at this point his hard work was done.  He would be able to rest his head at night, knowing he had reached his goal of seeing me advance to a new level of competition, one that most prep players would never see.

As I saw his eyes begin well up with emotion, the warm and blurry moisture started to flow from me as well.  We looked at each other with the utmost admiration and respect for one another, not as father and son but as two men who had spent a lifetime working towards one goal.  I embraced him tightly recalling my time as a young boy getting in a three point stance in our backyard.  And he held me tight as if I were still small enough to hang from his neck - recalling the times I used to attempt to tackle him in the halls of our home.

We didn’t say a word to each other, we both knew exactly what the other meant in his look.  The tennis ball was thrown a few more times and the German Shepherd was glad to chase it.  Budweisers finished, we headed back into the house to watch John Madden give away the 8-legged turkey to Emmit Smith. 

To this day that tradition remains.  We grab a beer, head to the backyard and toss the ball for my father’s dog.  We talk about life and football and enjoy a nice brew.  This year I’m bringing down a case of Firestone from San Luis Obispo.  I can’t wait!

Let us know what beer you drink with your father, drop us a line in the comments section and let us know.

Books, Covers, Judges

This week I’ll take a turn away from the malt and toward the grape.

I once ran a little place in the Santa Cruz, California, area community of Soquel called Django’s. We had some snacks, some beer, some wine and some jazz. Newly opened and off the beaten track, sometimes we’d not have a single customer during the day.

Such was the situation one Wednesday afternoon as I worked the bar and a very large, unkempt man entered. His clothes were tattered and matted, with leaves and twigs stuck here and there in his long hair and thick unkempt beard. He had a slightly unhinged look in his eye and could probably have made two of me.

Santa Cruz is a place where lots of wackos literally live in the woods, completely “off the grid”, and rumors of strange goings-on were common. Django’s was at the base of the Santa Cruz Mountains and its thick forests. Many of the people that lived in the forests also used the hillsides and creek beds to travel around the county. I was alone with this guy, and thinking that I might be trapped by a crazed maniac.

Squinting up at my wine board, he growled, “Gimme some of that there ‘Merlaht’. I always wanted to try that.” I glanced up at the board and realized he wanted the Merlot, but mispronounced it. I was getting more hints that he was a nut and just hoped to placate him long enough to get rid of him before he became violent and murdered me.

It was 1983, and Django’s offered some high quality, and for the time, expensive wines. It was my conceit then that I would open any bottle of wine on my list and serve a single glass. This Merlot was one of my most expensive bottles, and I thought I had a way to get rid of him quickly. “That’s a $5.00 glass of wine sir, just wanted to be sure you knew”, I informed him.

Breathing noisily from his mouth, he grunted and reached into his overalls, pulling out a giant handful of coins and flopping them noisily on the bar. With no paper money in the mix he began to carefully count the pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters, muttering the amount as he added it in his head.

Oh, yes, indeedy, completely nuts for sure, but I hoped he wouldn’t make it to $5.00 and he’d go back to his tent in the hills. Sadly for me, he had $5.16 in loose change and I knew I was stuck.

Slightly nervous, I opened the wine and poured him a glass.

He set it on the bar, just looking at it for a moment. Holding his beard back with one hand, he bent over, stuck his nose deep in the glass and took a giant sniff.

He stood up straight, contemplating the experience, and growled again. “Late pickin’, I’d say.”

Oh, yeah, sure, dude. You ARE cuckoo.

He took another giant sniff, saying, “Alcohol about 13%”.

Whoa, Nellie! Was he crazy, or was it me? He was starting to make sense. I took a surreptious glance at the bottle. “This Merlot is from a special late-picking,” the label read. He was right! Alcohol content 13.3%…almost exactly his estimate.

He finished one more sniff and said, “Residual sugar about 0.8” and quickly seeing on the label ‘residual sugar 0.8’, I knew then I had somehow misjudged this beast from the wild.

Not only did he have an incredible knowledge of wine, but he had an amazing sense of smell. I relaxed a bit and we talked as he began to actually drink form the glass. He was a winemaker from the Bonny Doon winery (one of America’s premier wineries) straight up the mountain behind me, he said, and one way he unwound after work was to walk through the forest.

So here’s the long-awaited moral of this story—you can’t judge a book by its cover, but some of us can judge a wine by its nose.

And don’t get trapped alone with a homicidal maniac.

Tap handles…you see them by the bazillion now…big, gnarly, colorful, showy tap handles, artfully sculpted into skeletons, gargoyles, shapely women, even a battery-powered lighthouse—anything that establishes a visual connection to the brand that slides under it.

Do they help sell beer? Nobody knows, that’s for sure, but brewers and their marketers sure have fun doing it. So do the retailers working those handles, and the customers who are able to watch their favorite handles being pulled. Again, the question, does anybody try a beer based on what its handle looks like?

The truth, as superficial as you may find it, is “yes”.

One year, Rogue Brewing in Ashland, Oregon presented us at Father’s Office with a beautiful skeleton as the tap marker for their brand. It was with great pride we pulled a beer from that one. Did staff suggest a Dead Guy Ale so they could pull that handle? I think they did.

One thing about those who sit at the bar and not at the tables…they tend to be more involved in beer, more interested in what might be new. Even though at Father’s Office the beer selection often changed each day and was printed and handed out to careful scrutiny, a lot of places stick to a list in a more doctrinaire manner, changing rarely. A new handle could have a greater import and stand out.

Some handles are so top-heavy that when they are pulled downward they exert so much stress on the fitting below that eventually they actually break…an embarrassing moment indeed!

Others are so fat they can’t be pulled without opening the adjacent tap and sending good, expensive craft beer gushing down to the floor…another embarrassing moment.

But you still see it over and over…someone sits at your bar and begins the familiar head waggle indicating they’re trying to figure out what you have on tap. It’s at that point that a kind bartender jumps in with, ”Let me tell you what we have on tap.”

Or at least that’s what numerous the beer giants would want you to believe. The holidays are rapidly approaching and that means it’s time to have a couple.  You may want to escape your Aunt Edna, or maybe just relax and watch a game with your old college buddies.  Either way, nothing says holidays like an ice cold brew.  Below I’ve put together a little list of unique flavors that will be hitting shelves in the upcoming months.  The theme of the year appears to be chocolate, as both A-B and Miller Brewing Co. will be launching their own variations of chocolate lager.

Miller Brewing Co. recently announced they will be releasing a chocolate lager named for the company’s founder.  Frederick Miller Classic Chocolate Lager will hit six Midwest markets this month - Cleveland, Chicago, Minneapolis, Indianapolis, Valparaiso, Ind., and throughout Wisconsin.  The brew will remain on shelves through the end of the year, establishing itself at those two very small affairs known as the Holidays and New Year’s Eve.  Never heard of them …

“…the holidays are a good time to bring out a chocolate beer because it’s the time when people are indulging and going to parties,” said Pete Marino, a spokesman for the Milwaukee-based brewer.

Not to be outdone by their close, but still in second place rivals, A-B will also be launching a chocolate flavored brew.  A-B will release the chocolate beer as a part of their Michelob Celebrate line.  You may remember Michelob Celebrate from last holiday season, when A-B tapped the brand to release a “vanilla oak” lager.  Yummm?  This year Michelob Celebrate will benefit from being sold beyond just the tap, making its debut on store shelves in 4-pack bottles.  Coinciding with the release of the chocolote flavored holiday-themed beer, Michelob Celebrate will also have pumpkin flavored beer for the fall and a vanilla-flavored bourbon ale for the winter.  For some reason vanilla bourbon just sounds a lot better than vanilla oak, right?

Analysts point out the release of the beers may just be a ploy to restimulate consumer interest into a slumping beer market.  Many have been quick to point out the big boys have been taking cues from the growing craft beer markets as a means to bring back customers.  With the success of many small craft brewers experimenting with unique flavors, A-B, Miller, Coors and the others may have to play copycat to earn their customers back.  Stay tuned!

At a time when companies across the nation are merging, forming joint ventures and absorbing one another in an effort to turn larger and larger profits, Anchor Brewing stands head and shoulders above the ugly word of corporate pirates and backroom deals.  While other companies seek to monetize their businesses at every angle, cutting quality to produce higher quantities, Anchor has remained firm in their ways.  They sell craft beer, plain and simple.  Or maybe not so plain and simple because they don’t just sell craft beer, they have been selling incredible craft beer since the 1950s!

The small, privately held company has held on to its roots from its humble beginnings.  The owner of Anchor Brewing, Fritz Maytag, is an heir to the Maytag fortune.  However, after heading west to study English Lit and Japanese at Stanford University, he found himself engrossed in San Francisco’s “Beat” culture in the late 1950’s.  Wondering what to do, and not wanting to “sell out”, Maytag decided to purchase a dilapidated old brewing company filing for bankruptcy. 

Brewing only a few hundred barrells each year at the outset, Maytag and his Anchor Brewing were lauded by competitors as a small time operation that was not capable of keeping up with the big boys.  Although Maytag wasn’t able to use his Stanford degrees to his advantage at Anchor, he quickly began to master the art of craft brewing.  Members of the San Francisco bar scene fell in love with Anchor Brewing, and soon the product was turning up all over the United States. 

By the early 1990’s Maytag faced a serious dilemma. He needed to raise funds to spread his product into more U.S. markets, however, in order to do so he would have to go public.  After pondering the decision for a few months, he decided against the public offering.  He and his employees knew they had a good thing going, and bringing in a board might stifle their corporate culture or worse - lower the quality of their beer.

The decision to remain private turned out to be the decision that defined Anchor Brewing.  Over the past two decades dozens of larger beer companies have sought out the small craft brewing house, hoping to sell the brand in an effort to increase their revenues.  Each time, Maytag just smiles and politely says, “No thank you.”  His goal is to continue creating a great craft beer, not to make hundreds of millions of dollars.  His business mantra is simple, and is one that more business owners should consider: Take pride in your work. Don’t grow beyond your company’s means. Treat and pay employees well, even after they’ve retired. Create a collaborative atmosphere. Give generously to schools, libraries and other neighborhood nonprofits.  Thanks for the wisdom, Fritz.  Keep knockin’ ‘em dead!