The End of an Epic Feud

Let's get one thing straight: Michael Jerome Cialini is one of my oldest and most treasured friends. I met him when he was a mulleted, bespectacled 9th grader, and I immediately thought he was an asshole ... but my kind of asshole. We rode the bus together, made fun of the entire class of 1994, then later I would send him mix tapes while he was in the Air Force and he would send me illegible letters. (This was before the internets, mind you.) Mike was good enough to let me be a part of his wedding to his wonderful and lovely wife Brenna, and hopefully I will be able to punch him 32 times this coming May 1st.

Through our nearly two decades of friendship, we have probably agreed on perhaps four things. Everything else has been a bitter feud. I like rap music with a positive message, he likes it only with lots of swearing. He likes Stern, I like Opie and Anthony. I like baseball, he likes the Mets. We are on polar opposites on nearly every spectrum of ideas. And that's an okay thing; it's good to have dissent.

Many topics I take with a grain of salt -- politics, sports, philosophy. But when it came to beer, I could stand silent no longer!

Mike launched his new site, The People's Beer Drinker, and I reacted in a visceral -- and as one person has told me -- overboard way. Point taken. And as expected, Michael fired back, taking umbrage with my assessment of the need for a macrobrew blog.

In the course of his retort, Mike made his opinion known, and naturally I read it and understand where he's coming from. But I had to take exception to a few things, mainly three main assertions I find to be patently incorrect. Hopefully they will clear up a few points and Mike and I can go back to fighting about the NFL (the best sports league in the nation).

Myth #1: I am a beer snob and I don't like ANY macro beers.
I consider myself a "geek," not a snob. Contrary to my misunderstood "internet persona," I don't actually look down on anyone who likes macro brews. To the contrary, I still will enjoy a few of them from time to time. I never said that I think people who drink what I consider to be lesser beers "lesser beer drinkers." The truth is -- as my compadre Javen recently pointed out to me -- the macro lagers of today are by-and-large pale copies of German styles. The microbrews are the true "American" beers, because like jazz and baseball, they were invented here, or at least finely tuned to become their current incarnations. In my very humble opinion, microbrews and craft beers are truly in the American tradition, in that they eschewed the Xeroxing of old tried-and-true, popular styles and went off the beaten path by innovating. I am the furthest thing from a snob, to be honest. In "real life" I have never chastized someone for drinking Bud or Coors. I used to drink nothing but the Big Three in college, as well as maybe something from Labatt or Molson. I drank Blatz and Stroh's in Milwaukee, and three pitchers of Coors light in Baltimore. I own a Miller High Life t-shirt! And these are just examples from the last few years. I can't deny that expanding my scope has opened me up to a new and exciting world, but I don't look down on those who drink something I don't like. Drink what you like and be happy, dammit!

Myth #2: I believe that anyone who doesn't agree with me is wrong.
This could not be further from the truth. I would never tell anyone to drink something they hate any more than I would have anyone tell me to eat green beans. I was speaking to a friend today and told her that I probably dislike 2 out of every 5 beers I try, and I spend a lot more money than most people do on beer. Like, an embarassingly lot more. No one will ever convince me that beer that is mass-produced with inferior ingredients is as good as craft-brewed beer, on the whole. I still think that there is a craft brew for everyone out there, and that no matter what macro style you like, there is a micro waiting for you that you will love. However, if you don't want to do that, I'm not going to call you out just because of that fact. Will I offer that you try something I'm drinking? Yes. Will I suggest an alternative based on what you like? Sure. Honestly, I never even discuss the subject of beer superiority with someone else unless they take the tone -- which I feel Mike had toward me, unprovoked -- that for some reason I'm some sort of elitist because I don't buy cases of Blue Light anymore. People who know me know that I have never "forced" a beer on anyone, but rather I shepherd anyone who is interested toward beers I think they may like, or give them a sip of mine. And more often than not, they hate the beer. But at least they tried it, and that's all I ask.

Myth #3: I am shitting on Mike's new blog.
I think Mike could actually make something out of this blog that would be worth reading. I will certainly be checking back from time to time. I do have to admit I question the motive behind it, whether it's to actually explore and celebrate American macros and pale lagers, or whether it's just to sort of "stick it" to so-called beer snobs. (Mike has a history of inflammatory internet speech.) To me its like -- to use an example to which Mike may relate -- starting a mainstream rap blog as a reaction to the undue attention that independent hip-hop blogs get. The fact remains that Miller/Bud/Coors account for 75% of the beer industry in the United States, and are therefore hardly underrepresented. I find it hard to believe that someone would want to stick it to the "little guy," small businesses in America that are trying to stay afloat while the Big Boys are constantly swallowing them up. To me it's akin to a site lauding how great Microsoft is, as a reaction to, say, Linux, or a lesser-known entity. If Michael can do something with it that is good for beer as a whole -- and not just the beers I like -- I will be a regular reader. My initial, emotional reaction to Mike's post is one that goes way way back to when Mike would simply say "_______ sucks" to any post I made regarding a topic I liked. There are a lot of "soccer sucks," "the NFL draft sucks," and the like out there with Mike's byline, and when it came to this subject I thought a counterpoint was in order.

So I hope I cleared a few things up for everyone. Mike, let's one day get together somewhere we can enjoy both Cascade- and Amarillo-hopped Imperial IPAs as well as Genny Cream Ale. It's time we let America being healing.

The One Blog to Read When You're Reading Only One

Ok so listen.

Do you love beer? I don't mean in the sense of "do you like to get drunk?" or "do you like to crush beer cans on your head after you're done with them to leave a rather unsightly ring?" or do you love "AND TWINS!!!"???

I mean, do you have an appreciation for not only malt, barley and hops, but also ... well, water? Can you tell the difference between an India Pale Ale and a Pale Ale? The difference between a Stout and the Porter (hint: there is little difference)? The difference between a Hefeweizen and a Witbier?

Of course you can't. And neither can we. But that is absolutely no reason that you shouldn't be visiting BEERJANGLIN', the site for those that love good beer, and gorgeous prose. If you enjoy the taste of a good saison in the middle of summer, but also enjoy the turn of a phrase, then this is the site for you. We have compiled some of America's finest young scribes, all committed to the dual arts of craft brews ... and the written word!

Have you ever tasted a beer, but struggled to find the words to describe how wonderful and/or godawful it was? Do you take your beer seriously ... but not those who write about it? Have you ever craved a beer at 10:30 in the morning? Oh, just me? Okay then....

If you are a novice in the ways of barley and malt, or a Beer Geek looking to get an alternate point of view regarding the art of great beers, this is the site for you. We take drinking beer seriously. We bring notepads, and send text messages to ourselves to crystallize that moment of the perfect pour, the perfect sip, the perfect pint. You will not find flowery prose full of bullshit descriptions. You will not picture a beer drinker spying his tumbler through a monocle, stroking his bushy moustache as he humorlessly breaks down the components of the beverage he has just sampled. You will not run into pointless narrative, meant to camouflage the fact that we are truly only trying to be narcissistic by pontificating about ourselves and our own paltry lives. (That's what this blog is for.)

If you love beer. If you love the joy that beer gives you. If you could drink beer all night and not care whether or not you even get the slightest bit intoxicated....

BEERJANGLIN' is the site for you.

Teetotalers, Just Turn Around and Walk Away

I have what you call "writer's block." Looks like I spilled the beans on everything significant that happened to me over the last three months. (At least the stuff that won't get you fired for reading it at work. Wink!) So I've decided to point you to my BeerAdvocate profile.

For people who know my propensity for making lists, there could not have been a better site created than Beer Advocate. It allows one to digitally log beer into a computer database, which then sorts and ranks all the beers one has tried. Basically, whenever I am at liberty to record how much I love a certain beer (and yes, cool-kids, I sometimes drink with a pen and pad to write stuff down, sue me!), I can enter the scores on each of the categories (Appearance, Smell, Taste, Mouthfeel, Drinkability) and the computer machine will calculate what my favorite beers are -- and least favorite. More than just a log of the best beers, it also salvages the experiences of drinking a terrible beer by allowing me to trash it. I win either way!

Yes yes, I know. This is the apex of the masturbatory nature of blogs, where we just start throwing out information and/or lists that are of no interest to anyone else but he who posts it. But I am not doing this for prurient self-flaggelation. There are two reasons I put it out there for public consumption: one for you, one for me.

First, the reason for you. I love beer. I love it so much that it actually hurts me that 90% of Americans drink bad beer. Let's face it: Bud is shit. Labatt's is subpar. Miller is mediocre. For years, I put up with the adjuncts (which is when they use rice or corn to make the mash instead of barley) and the piss-yellow color of normal beers. Now, I'm not dismissing these out of hand; sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do. I cut my teeth on Beast Ice and Natty Light, which is the beer equivalent of ramen noodles: you drink it cuz it's there and cuz it's cheap.

Many of you might say, "Bill Shannon, I drink good beer. I like Heineken / Guinness / Smithwick's / Blue Moon / Amstel. I don't need your guidance." Well, maybe not. But I submit that if you are willing to shell out the couple extra bucks for higher-end beers, maybe you're willing to follow me just a few steps further. You are already spending more than the average person at a bar for beer that, while perhaps trendy, is really in the lower tier of beers. I don't say this to sound condescending; I'm saying this because I want to help. It's one thing to have good beer; it's a completely different experience to have transcendent beer.

Javen and I have talked about this, as we talk about beer almost all the time: right now the United States, on the whole, is making the best beer in the world. We are in the midst of an American Microbrew Revolution! Think of it, right in the same country in which you live, brewers are making some of the finest beers in the entire world. Germany, Belgium and England may have the history, but we are arguably doing it the best. So many fantastic breweries to choose from: Middle Ages, Victory, Stone, Dogfish Head, Smuttynose, Lagunitas, Brooklyn, Stoudts, Mendicino. They are all making phenomenal beers of all styles, and those are just the ones on the coasts. And even the second tier micros -- like Long Trail, Magic Hat, Saranac and Ithaca -- are starting to become available in retail grocery stores at good prices.

So if you get a chance, please give the site a few minutes of your time. It can likely direct you to a beer you will love. If you like the dark porters, stouts or strong ales, it can give you the highest rated. Or if you are a non-beer-lover, it will direct you to the best hefeweizens, belgian whites and lambics so as not to overwhelm you with that beer bite. I think it's worth exploring.

The second reason I put this link up there (and on my blogroll) is because you can read my beer reviews. It's not like you are going to find any fine writing, but you can sort the beers by my highest rated and maybe pick me up a sixpack or two here and there. (My birthday is coming soon, cough-cough.) Basically anything that rates 3.9 or above is in rarefied air.

Maybe you think this is the first step toward becoming a true alkie. I can understand. Due to the fratboy lifestyle and the stereotype of people like Billy Carter and Homer Simpson (who is otherwise heroic), beer has taken a backseat to wine and liquor in terms of class. But you betta recognize.

I would like to think that Javen and I have helped spread the good word of great beer to our many faithful companions (hetero!) and maybe challenged them to try new things. The gauntlet has been thrown down, American citizen, will you pick it up?

I am spoiled to live in Syracuse, which is truly one of the better beer towns on the East Coast. It's plentiful, it's affordable, it's available. People here flat-out know beer. Get on that gravy train, babies.

Ziggy sokky, ziggy sokky, Hoy! Hoy! Hoy!

Beer Enlightenment

I don't have any beer, and it makes me sad.

There was never a time in my youth that I thought I would ever become what I am, which is a Beer Advocate. I never thought that I would ever even like beer, let alone love it. Let alone find not only a sense of community, but an unusual serenity in enjoying it.

It used to be that when I thought of beer, I thought of a foul smelling mug of some foamy, malty concoction that my dad would drink at one of his parties which I could scarcely bear to look at. It was usually Genny Cream Ale, the flagship brew of the commonwealth of Rochester, New York, the jewel of the Genesee River.

My father, while not strictly a drunk, was a fan of the alcohol. He has been sans-spirts for about 6-7 years now, and though I still love him, I miss the nights he would come home from work and gently drift away on the couch after work with a deep snore and a divine calmness on his face. In his later years, he was a screwdriver man, but early on he was a fan of beer, as I remember. In fact, there were many times when my parents would host a Casino Night or some such spectacle, and a beer-ball would be present. (In this case of course, "casino night" meant a night my mom and dad would invite a bunch of their friends over and dad would somehow always end the night wearing nothing but an undershirt and holding a handgun. I miss those nights.) Ah, the beer ball, what a relic of the 1980s.

But given this pandering to mass consumption, my first and formative impression of beer was of a stale and smelly yellow liquid, bitter to the taste buds and nearly impossible to choke down. (I think my dad snuck me a Genny Cream back when I was about 7 or so. Sorry mom. I didn't want you to find out this way.) But given the questionable element with which my father was associating at the time, I assumed beer was for nothing but low-lifes and hooligans. At any rate, my initial impression of beer was unimpressive.

But things change. And when one goes away to college to live on ones own, one tends to experiment. So one William H. ended up going to school and was exposed to beer. The beer, I believe, was Keystone. Or maybe Rolling Rock. What do I remember about it? I remember that I had to choke it down and that it had almost no redeeming qualities other than it made my face feel numb and made me all giggly. Its qualities as a social lubricant far outweighed its qualities as a delicious elixr. Many of my best male friends have been gained with the assistance of beer.

But even to this point, beer was the means to an end. It was never something consumed for pure enjoyment; it was a conduit through which to get inebriated. Sloshed, bombed, ripped, tanked, wasted. It was a vessel by which you would start slurring your words and end eating Doritos at 3AM and watching some crappy late night movie back at the dorm with a dozen of your most wasted friends. Beer was not the destination, it was just the path.

For years I treated beer as such. It was a fizzy yellow liquid, about $15 for a case. It was usually about 5.5-5.9% alcohol, with little deviation between the Buds, Millers and Coorses (or BMC as we Beer Advocates call it). Basically, back then, I would look at the choices available to me in the local Wegmans, and then maybe look at the unit price of each one, and decide which was the best value. Whatever would give me the most beer for my buck would be my selection.

Brief aside: it is amazing how the palate operates. On one hand, most people can identify great food vs. mediocre food. When we are babies, we eat whatever we are given, but when we grow older, we can tell the difference between good beef and mediocre beef. We can tell if the food at a restaurant is simply passable, or mouth-watering. We do not have the same sophistication with beer. Maybe it's the fact that we are not "allowed" to enjoy beer until we are 21, but many people tend to stunt their growth beer-wise early on.

One day -- and I'm not sure what day it was -- I grew up. I realized that all beer was not the same. I realized that the purpose of beer was not to get tanked, but to drink beer. I realized that I had been drinking the beer version of McDonald's my whole life, but had been missing out on the gourmet beers on the menu.

It was an awakening.

Because now, and over the last year, I no longer drink to get drunk (which, let's face it, was the only reason to do it in the first place). Now I drink to enjoy. I drink to find out whether a beer has dominant malt or hops. Whether beer has a fruity flavor or if it's bitter. Whether it's smooth or "chewy." Just tasting a beer and immediately identifying the style is a strangely satisfying sensation. Being able to tell the difference between a Belgian White and a Hefeweizen, or between a Pale Ale and an IPA, is such a pleasure. Yes, I do make notes of the different properties of beers as I drink them. Yes, I do sniff the inside of the pint glass. Yes, you could consider me a bit of a "nerd" when it comes to beer. I've been called worse.

But much as a hungry man has a hankering for a porterhouse, I too have the almost constant yearning for delicious beer. This does not, I submit, make me an alcoholic. Because whether or not I actually get drunk off of beer is purely inconsequential. (Although try telling that to a State Trooper.) The beer is now the thing. If it should happen to give me a slightly light-headed sense of euphoria, so be it. I could do without it. If you put ten delicious beers in front of me and told me I would not feel the slightest buzz, I would gladly sip each one down with the exuberance of Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend, but with the fervor and meticulous eye of Paul Giamatti in Sideways.

Mr Bohall and I have had this discussion, and I would have to agree with him. Though wine has its place, with its foreign names and fancy looking vineyards, beer is just as majestic, just as refined, and just as well-crafted. Wine, with its sweet or dry fruitiness, may be a more palatable to delicate or uninitiated taste buds, but beer (in my experience) has just as many various styles, just as many deviations in ingredients, and is made with just as much care. (Plus, President Jimmy Carter made it legal again to brew beer at home in November 1978. No wonder he's considered our greatest president!) Beer also ages, just like wine; it's just usually better to let the heavy-alcohol beers age longer.

Yes, I have drank beer with a pen and a pad. Yes, I know what IBUs are. Yes, dammit, I do believe in the tenets of the Reinheitsgebot! Well, plus yeast, and other stylistic exceptions. (And no, that doesn't mean I'm a white supremist.)

We are in the midst of an American brewing revolution. In the last decade alone, the United States microbrewing industry has given us some of the finest beers in the world. I would have to say that to my taste, Americans are leading the way in high quality beermaking. If we could only get people to shell out the extra couple bucks for a six pack of Dogfish Head (instead of a half-case of Bud) or a 22-oz of Middle Ages 10th Anniversary. Even the middlebrow selections, like Magic Hat, Long Trail or J.W. Dundees are a good step up.

Even if you are a person who doesn't like beer (a.k.a. a "wuss"... just kidding), there is at least one beer style for everyone. Once American society starts embracing beer as a dignified beverage, and not just an excuse to show stupid Bud Light commercials, we may finally pull ourselves out of this lowest-common-denominator culture and into an age of true enlightenment. Of course we'll have to add fine arts, good music, thought-provoking literature, innovative humor, important films, appreciation for history, political awareness, work ethic, conservation and dexterity in math and science. But beer's a start.