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Brew Biz: Werts and All

Ken Carman is a BJCP judge; homebrewer since 1979, club member at Escambia Bay and Music City Homebrewers, who has been interviewing professional brewers all over the east coast for over 10 years.

The Topic: Worst Beer in the World?

There has been a lot of noise on the net about Olde English 800 3.2 being the worst beer in the world. Why am I suspicious? The full 800 is merely a mediocre’ malt liquor: a style that was marketed at first in an attempt to encourage young Blacks to show their manhood by becoming alcoholics in the 70s. For some odd reason this pissed off the African American community. Go figure. Some smaller brewers got burnt by that campaign despite the fact they offered sans the racist marketing, simply because major brewers, who weren’t sensitive enough to promo without racist assumptions, screwed it up for the other brewers. Go figure again.

The term “malt beverage,” just so you know, is not the same. It’s all gotten very legal where malt beverage is a term brewers must use for various reasons that go far beyond the focus of this edition of Brew Biz. Malt liquors from those days, and those still around like 800, tend to use cheap ways to pump up the abv. Corn. Rice. Squeezed kidneys from diabetics that just ate a whole box of donuts.

Kidding.

They tend to be a bit harsh and not a lot of complexity. Kind of like very weak Ice Bocks without quality ingredients: essentially instead of brewing quality, freezing, removing water, you just put it up with sugary crap.

A 3.2 Malt Liquor is an oxymoron.
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Cascadian Dark Ale?

Written by Matt Van Wyk, Oakshire Brewing, for Craftbeer.com

Lately there has been much fuss over a new—or is it old—beer style and what it should be called.  The style I’m referring to is known by three different names; Black IPA, India Black Ale (IBA), or Cascadian Dark Ale (CDA). In short, it is a dark hoppy beer. But in truth, it is so much more. So the questions remain; what do we name it, who made it first, and what defines the style? And, do any of these details even matter?

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8th Circuit Stifles Beer Drinkers’ Last Gasp

ST. LOUIS (CN) – Calling a complaint by 10 Missouri beer drinkers “speculative and localized,” the 8th Circuit ended their quest to block InBev’s $52 billion takeover of Anheuser-Busch. The beer drinkers claimed the merger would diminish competition and raise prices. But the 8th Circuit found that allowing the case to proceed would have the same effect.

A three-judge panel on the 8th Circuit upheld a federal judge’s August 2009 decision to throw out the case.
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This Bud’s for Sale

How the Busch clan lost control of an iconic American beer company.

Written By Patrick Cooke for The Wall Street Journal

If ever an American company represented the land of milk and honey for corporate executives it was Anheuser-Busch, though perhaps the land of hops, rice and barley would be more apt. For decades a palace of well-paid vice presidents in cushy offices presided over the manufacture of Budweiser, America’s beer, in that most American of cities, St. Louis. They also oversaw the Busch Gardens theme parks in Virginia and in Florida, where Shamu the killer whale was on the payroll, along with a stable of 250 Clydesdale horses. It was a first-class operation all the way. There were $1,000 dinners, hunting lodges, sky suites at Busch Stadium and a fleet of Dassault Falcon corporate jets with a staff of 20 waiting pilots. Every kitchenette refrigerator at corporate headquarters was well stocked with Bud, Bud Lite and Michelob.
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Seasonal Beer Profiles

Profiled by Tom Becham

Pumpkin pie is appreciated for Thanksgiving and the Christmas Holiday as well, so these beers are passably seasonal for the rest of the year.
Pumpkin has a long history in ale making in the United States.  The colonists used pumpkin as an adjunct, using the sugars as an aid to fermentation.  And truly, since most Brits regard pumpkin as an item to be fed to cattle, it could really only have started in the New World.
The first of the three I tried was Dogfish Head’s Punkin Ale.  Dogfish Head describes this as a spiced pumpkin beer with a brown ale base.
My impressions?  It poured a nice rosy orange. On the nose, it smells like they dumped the whole friggin’ spice rack in this one.  The usual pumpkin pie spices – cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger and allspice – are very strong on the nose.  Only when the beer warms does the brown ale’s toffee-like malt aroma come forward.  The head is small and short-lived, but a lovely tan color.  Taste-wise, the spice again overwhelms the pumpkin at first.  The pumpkin comes out to play only upon warming, and is never more than faint, and almost overwhelmed by the slight minty hop.  On the plus-side, the 7% ABV is never obvious.  I’d recommend this only if you like spice – and a lot of it – in your pumpkin ale.  I love Dogfish Head for their intrepid spirit of experimentation.  But sometimes – as with this beer – they swing and miss.
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Powerful “Witch” Community Squashes Offesive Beer Label

Please note: Wiccans are not necessarily “witches”- PGA

Written by Adrian Chen for gawker.com

Wiccans flexed their muscles earlier this month by railing against the media’s treatment of Christine O’Donnell’s witchcraft revelations. Now, they’ve succeeded in getting the makers of Witch’s Wit ale to change their logo from a witch burning at the stake.

After famous witch lady Vicki Noble saw the label in the store, she shot off an email to her witch friends. The New York Times reprinted a choice bit of the email:

“Can you imagine them showing a black person being lynched or a Jewish person going to the oven?” she wrote. “Such images are simply not tolerated in our society anymore (thank the Goddess) and this one should not be, either.”

After being bombarded with emails, the brewery’s founder agreed to change the label. The once-ostracized witch community grows stronger every day! Won’t be long until we see campaign ads declaring: “I’m not a witch, but some of my best friends are.”

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Vicki Noble Responds

When Professor Goodales told me what he had planned for the 31st I asked if I could contact Vicki Noble and get her response to the commentary and “news” stories that appear on this site. I can’t imagine a more perfect response…

In case anyone is wondering why I would even care about this, it’s actually right up my alley. For decades I have been researching women’s history and the roles women have played in human cultural evolution. Brewing medicinal ales is one of the earliest and most widespread functions of the shaman-priestesses from all around the world. You have to think about ale or beer in a completely different way, in order to understand the sacredness it has represented for indigenous people everywhere. It has to do with ritual and primordial religion, drawing down the wild yeasts into a sacred cauldron and allowing them to do their alchemical work. Sometimes the local fermented beverage provides the only real nutrition people get during certain seasons; it’s full of vitamin B and other nutritious substances, all of which is enhanced and amplified by the fermentation process. It was always women who brewed the magical beverages, from Egypt to Sumer, from the Greek Maenads to the India Yoginis, and finally right down to the “witches” of medieval Europe. It was the Catholic Inquisition and the Protestant Reformation that put an end to women’s centrality in the brewing of the magical medicinal beers. The abbeys took over the brewing and changed the contents of beer from psychotropic to narcoleptic; the powers-that-be decreed that hops would be the only herb allowed in the beverages (because they don’t activate a sexual charge, but instead put you to sleep). And now, in the last decade, breweries in the United States and other places are bringing back the ancient recipes and processes for “microbrews” and fancy nutritious ales. Lost Abbey is one of those breweries, and they take a particularly ironic approach to the presentation of their various ales. I think someone just stepped over the line with Witch’s Wit and didn’t even realize it.


If you want to read more about the wondrous history of sacred fermentation, read Stephen Harrod Buhner’s Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers: The Secrets of Ancient Fermentation. The chapter on bees and bee products is one of my favorites.

The Goddess is Alive and Magic is Afoot! This is, after all, her most riotous season as we approach All Hallows Eve and enter the dark (winter) time of the year. Salud!

-Vicki Noble

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Outrage Over Witch’s Wit Beer Label Better Focused on Real Persecution

Written by Chris Bradley for examiner.com

There has been a lot of hoopla this week over the image on a bottle of beer portraying a witch being burned at the stake. The label is on the Witch’s Wit beer produced by The Lost Abbey brewery.   It’s a label that has been in place since 2008 and comes complete with a story depicting witches being persecuted for being evil.

This story apparently starts with a prominent member of the Pagan community coming across the label, then sharing her outrage over it with the online community.  A community that promptly took up the cause and brought an email letter campaign against the brewery.  Unfortunately, many of these emails contained insults, intolerance and hate themselves.  At The Lost Abbey Brewery website, they quote one such letter: “ “Screw you, you fat ass beer slugging alcoholic Christian Ass Hole.”  Surely this is not the way to get anyone to listen to us?

To tell the truth, I obviously dislike the horrible portrayal depicted in the art work. It’s completely not appropriate in this day and age.

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