Don Barkley, New New Albion Beer, and the First SF Beer Week

Jay Brooks has posted photos of Don Barkley pouring/tasting the commemorative version of New Albion ale at San Francisco Beer Week.

I explored Don's connection with New Albion in chapter seven of Ambitious Brew, but here's a blog entry about his current venture, and another one from First Draft Follies about the brewpub in Mendocino, which is where he landed after the closing of New Albion.

Sidenote: I emailed Jack McAuliffe about this week's beer event, but have not heard back from him. Will update that end of the story as it happens.

First Draft Follies: "Kids," Beer, and the 1960s, Part 7

Part One --- Part Two --- Part Three --- Part Four

Part Five --- Part Six --- Part Seven --- Part Eight 

Welcome to First Draft Follies, an ongoing series here at the blog. This edition is a true folly and a prime example of why my first drafts are so damn long: I research what is intended to be a minor point, become fascinated by this minor point, and next thing I know, I've written an embarrassing amount of completely extraneous text.

The material is presented "as is" from the first draft of the manuscript that became the book Ambitious Brew. In a few places I added one or two words in brackets -- [like this] -- for clarification. The excerpt is long, so I'm breaking it into manageable bits and posting those bits over the next few days.

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That Lewis and his lawbreaking students hailed from California was no surprise. The state was epicenter of culinary experimentation, as well as resistance, rebellion, and general weirdness. In 1962, Look magazine described California as a "window into the future," a "laboratory of social and cultural change" where "almost incomprehensible new forces" were "reshaping the lives of men" -- and women. (*17)

Hyperbole matched reality. At Palo Alto and Stanford University, engineers, mathematicians, and scientists explored human intelligence, electronic engineering, and communications, and the relationship among them. Hewitt Crane and Douglas Engelbart, seminal figures in the creation of the computer as we now know it, worked at Stanford Research Institute. John McCarthy, who coined the phrase "artificial intelligence" in the mid-1950s, founded the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL) in 1963.

To the south at Big Sur, Michael Murphy founded the Esalen Institute, a "think tank" that drew such names as Paul Tillich and B. F. Skinner. At the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute, psychologist Carl Rogers pondered the nature and potential of "human relations."

The University of California-Los Angeles housed a laboratory where W. Ross Adey and his colleagues used electronic probes to explore the physical brain and the mechanisms of thought.

Other Californians employed less conventional methods to explore life’s meaning. The “freak” scene in Los Angeles, named after the bizarrely clothed dancers who followed The Byrds from performance to performance, congregated around the dance clubs and coffeehouses that lined Sunset Strip: the Whisky A Go Go and Fifth Estate, London Fog, and the Trip.

From there the scene rippled out to Laurel Canyon, where barefoot girls "wrapped in songs and gypsy shawls" and long-haired boys decorated in motley outfits pulled from secondhand stores wandered in and out of the neighborhood’s winding lanes and ramshackle cottages. (*18)

Drugs flowed freely and so did the creative imaginations of Frank Zappa, Joni Mitchell, Stephen Stills, Judy Collins, and other singers and musicians who, "pouring music down the canyon," packaged their stoned sensibility for mainstream America. (*19)

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*17: Special issue on California, Look, 30, no. 13 (June 28, 1966): 30.

*18: Joni Mitchell, "Ladies of the Canyon," Ladies of the Canyon, Reprise Records, 1970. *19: Mitchell, "Ladies of the Canyon."

First Draft Follies: "Kids," Beer, and the 1960s, Part 6

Part One --- Part Two --- Part Three --- Part Four

Part Five --- Part Six --- Part Seven --- Part Eight 

Welcome to First Draft Follies, an ongoing series here at the blog. This edition is a true folly and a prime example of why my first drafts are so damn long: I research what is intended to be a minor point, become fascinated by this minor point, and next thing I know, I've written an embarrassing amount of completely extraneous text.

The material is presented "as is" from the first draft of the manuscript that became the book Ambitious Brew. In a few places I added one or two words in brackets -- [like this] -- for clarification. The excerpt is long, so I'm breaking it into manageable bits and posting those bits over the next few days.

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So, too, beer. In 1963, sales of imported beer rose nine percent, a heady gallop compared to domestic sales’ trot of two percent. Choosing an imported beer over a domestic one, opined an advertising manager for Heineken, was like buying a Cadillac instead of a Ford. The decision bespoke sophistication, worldliness, an appreciation for "the finer things." (*14)

"It’s fun," said a man from suburban Los Angeles, "when you have guests in to ask, 'Would you rather have German or Mexican beer?'" (*15) He stocked up at Tony’s Liquors, where thirty-two different imports lined the shelves.

But even those on Ford budgets could enjoy a Cadillac-type brew by making their own at home. Unlike homemade wine, homebrewed beer was illegal, thanks to an oversight written into repeal laws back in the 1930s. That didn’t stop anyone.

Michael Lewis knew that for certain. Lewis, a biochemist in the Department of Food Science and Technology at the University of California-Davis, specialized in brewing yeasts and processes. (*16) He’d joined the faculty in 1964 and immediately suffered an inundation of homebrewing enthusiasts who bombarded him with phone calls and letters, each one wanting to know why his or her beer had gone bad or what kind of yeast to use.

A year of that was quite enough. In 1965, he began teaching homebrewing through the university’s extension program to a mixed lot of students. Some had discovered stouts and ales while traveling or living abroad. Many had begun homebrewing while working for multi-national corporations in Muslim countries where alcohol was not available. Lewis cautioned his students not to sell their beers and to avoid discussing their hobby too openly, just in case.

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*14: "Snob Suds," Newsweek 63 (February 17, 1964): 80.

*15: "Snob Suds," 80.

*16: Michael Lewis interview with Maureen Ogle, May 18, 2005.

More Good Commentary On Twitter . . . Keep This Up and I May Be Convinced

Who knew? Now David weighs in again (see his comments in this entry) -- with even more insight into how/why Twitter might, er, actually have some social value.

Urgh. Am I gonna be forced out of the Age of the Dinosaur?

And speaking of which, today I received a book I'd ordered from Amazon. It's an obscure monograph -- won't even bore you with the title -- and I bought it because I need to read it for research and the university library doesn't own it and I'm trying not to burden that library with my research needs. (*1)

And I opened the box and looked at the book, whose contents are, again, of interest to only a minuscule number of people -- and thought "Good lord. If ever there was a book that ought to have entered life as an e-book only, this is it." This is a new book, published in 2008. And it feels positively dinosauric that paper and ink and gas (to ship from the printer to a warehouse) were expended on this obscure creation, that only a tiny number of people will read, when it all could have been rendered digitally. And for less money. Sigh.

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*1: Because I'm not a faculty member or student there. Yes, I could have asked the library to order it through interlibrary loan, but that would cost each library money.

Middle-of-Road Beer = Big Bucks = Happy Shareholders. MOR Beer Therefore = Smart Beer

I know that among the beer geeks, this is the standard view: Big Breweries make bland beer. I'm gonna go out on a limb here and disagree (which, yes, I so hate to do. Stan is smarter than me and he'll likely chop up this post and use it to mop his floor. . . .) Big Breweries make profits. They do so in order to make shareholders happy. That's what they do, because their owners went into business to make lots and lots of money.

And the way they could make money was by making beer that appealed to the largest number of people. Which, by definition, is a beer that contains a balance of malt and hops. Not a malt-rich beer.

Not a beer stuffed with as many hops as the brewer could stuff into it using his keeno, whiz-bang, hops-stuffing device. It's a beer that hits the middle road and therefore appeals to the most potential buyers.

Ain't no one, and I mean no. one., gonna get Big Rich making beer only for the roughly 50% of the population that prefers the flavor of hops.

Ain't no one gonna get Big Rich by making beer only for people like me, who prefer the flavor of malt.

The people who will make Big Bucks (and make their shareholders happy) are the ones who hit the sweet spot in the middle. So: it's not bland beer. It's smart beer.

(Because of the book I'm working on. I've been spending a lot of brain power lately thinking about how capitalism works, and why and how big corporations grow -- and thereby attract shareholders, and then grow more by making shareholders happy.)

What Happens When the Bean Counters Step In?

Stan replied to my previous post, and you can read his entire comment at that entry -- but I want to highlight something he wrote:

I worry, since they've been a great supporter of the Halltertau hops region, about what happens to the hops growers there when the bean counters step in.

He's referring here to Anheuser-Busch InBev, which is now in the hands of bean counters par excellence. Stan's right to worry, as are those hops growers. Indeed, one of my fears during the Great Takeover was that A-B will go the way of other great breweries that have been destroyed by bean counters -- the classic example being, of course, the spectacular collapse of Schlitz Brewing in the 1970s.

I console myself with this thought: People at A-B have read and studied my book (that's not intended to be boastful; it's fact), and so they know about what happened at Schlitz. Maybe they can persuade Brito to read that section of that chapter. (*1) Time will tell

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*1: A used copy of the book, of course, because he'd never agree to, ya know, buying a new copy. Although the library at ABI is still intact and it contains several copies. So the guy has no excuse.