Beer That Couldn't Even Hurt A Fly

I went to Otto's brewpub last week for a drink with a friend, and got the kind of slap in the face that is so typical of eating or drinking out in State College. You try to give things a chance here rather than to become preemptively embittered, and then you get hit with the mediocre. (Full disclosure: I am writing this after a mild food poisoning episode from eating an ill-advised "Gator and Pork Burger" at Rathskeller -- I was trying to give it a chance.)

They had a Green Hop Ale #1 on cask-pull, so my friend and I decided to try that out. Possibly interesting. But it sucked. Had almost no hops at all. Presumably they ONLY used green hops and no dried hops, and as Joy Of Cooking will tell you, dried herbs are 4-5 times stronger than fresh by volume. Anyway, it was bland beer, indistinct, not much fun to drink. Should have been dumped down the drain, all 1000 gallons of it. I ordered a Slab Cabin IPA to wash it away, which is reliably good. When my friend went back to the last 1/3 of her beer, she found a little fly in it and just gave up. The penultimate insult.

I mean penultimate in its real sense. As we got up to leave 10 minutes later, the FINAL insult was revealed:

While we were talking, the fly managed to crawl all the way back up to the rim of the pint glass, apparently unscathed by hops, alcohol content, bad vibes, or anything else, and like us was also getting ready to go somewhere else.

Whack.

A Reflection on Guinness

Yes, I've been away from the blog. The holidays took their toll.

But fresh on my mind since I was trying to drink it today is Guinness. I went to a local sports bar, The Westside Stadium, to watch the 49ers play the Falcons, of course hoping to see the reemergence of the good-old days of Montana or Young. It's pretty obvious the whole structure of the game has changed since the 80s and 90s, so I won't dwell on that. But I started with a pint of Guinness since it was the afternoon.

It sucked. Overcarbonated. It ended up tasting like Coke ... no, Pepsi.

The last couple of times I was around Dublin (Ireland) I drank some stout with a much older cousin of mine in his 70s. He told me both times that the pub we were in had good Guinness, and you'd never go wrong with it. Allegedly they sent their people out to clean the pipes and so no mold ever grew in the Guinness taps. Fair enough. But they also get their Guinness from the St. James's Gate Brewery itself, not from afar.

Since some time in the last decade or more, all the North American Guinness is brewed in Canada. It was first Labatt's in Montreal, I believe, and now since the whole thing was bought out by Diageo, it just says "Product of Canada" on the label. And of course it's okay, but not all that great. Very carbonated.

When I lived in Santa Cruz, CA, in the 90s, I often went to The Poet and Patriot pub. They were so Irish they had a separate tap of Room Temperature Guinness. All the people in the know drank that. It took longer to pour since the keg was kept at room temperature, whatever that happened to be, from January to August and back again. Wanting to be authentic I always asked for that, even in the summer.

I was in Dublin (Ireland) in the summer of '98 drinking away at my favorite bar there, The Quays -- which is now more cleaned up and corporate, like everything in Temple Bar and Grafton Street and the rest of the fucking town -- and asked the proprietor about this "Room Temperature" Guinness, does he serve it, did they used to in the rare auld times, etc.?

"Room temperature? No. It's undrinkable like that." And he went on dealing with other stupid foreigners. When he came back I explained the Poet and Patriot to him and he still just wrinkled his brow and shook his head. Then he said:

"Back in the days, there was no carbonation. Everything was pulled from the casks and they were down in the basement. So they stayed more or less cool year-round." Then he diverged into stories about when he was a teenager  he had to wrestle the casks off the wagon and down the stone steps and into the cellar in the rare auld times. The final analysis was that "Room Temperature" probably meant cellar temperature, not the heat in the room where you're drinking. And so room temperature Guinness in August in California is not only nasty, but inauthentic.

Which of the two crimes you consider to be the greater will tell you something about yourself, it seems.   

First Central PA Casualty of Sandy: Wine Supply Shutdown

I left the lab earlyish today as everyone is hunkering down for this epic storm, and figured I'd get a few things that I might need for a few days if things get really bad. I stocked up yesterday on most things, but I thought "I should get a couple of bottles of wine just in case". And of course, because it's all state-run wine and liquor stores here -- and they'll be closed for no reason at all let alone for a good reason -- they're closed by 4pm, if they ever opened today. UGH! I'm an adult, what is wrong with this state? My resentment makes me imagine that there are a bunch of folks on the liquor control board making moral judgments about what things people need and don't need to weather a storm. Like they shut down the liquor stores in State College to reduce the debauchery around "State Paddy's Day" last March. Which Bell is here? What? The LIBERTY BELL? Oh yes. What? Bill of Rights, Constitution? What?

So I manged to get an ordinarily extraordinarily over-priced 6-pack of beer. Sierra Nevada Torpedo IPA. This reminds me of California, where you can buy anything you want in a grocery store and people assume you are an adult (behaviorally). Or if not, that's your own business as long as you don't make it somebody else's business.

Egads.

Barley genome breakthrough = better beer? Bullshit.

I'm a scientist. That's how I make my money. I am not anti-science, therefore, but I AM anti-bullshit.

Today I see this blurb from Reuters about some Scottish geneticists that have mapped the barley genome and then expound upon all the benefits that will ... or may ... result. The usual line from folks doing this sort of work: greater food security, more efficient and focused breeding efforts (presumably meaning old-fashioned breeding through plant sex rather than sticking genes into stuff, but that will happen as well), and new breeds that will withstand environmental change. Fair enough. You got a grant to do this, you need more money to keep doing this kind of stuff. But the public doesn't know anything about barley, other than beer. So they say their breakthrough may even improve beer.

"This research will streamline efforts to improve barley production through breeding for improved varieties," said Professor Robbie Waugh, of Scotland's James Hutton Institute, who led the research.

"This could be varieties better able to withstand pests and disease, deal with adverse environmental conditions, or even provide grain better suited for beer and brewing."

Grain better suited for beer and brewing? IT'S BARLEY! Fuck off, Robbie, leave beer out of your mad quest for fame and glawr. Yes there is a lot of worthless, shitty beer in the world, but it's not because the available barley isn't well-suited to beer and brewing. It's because people want cheap crappy beer. Your genetic work will more likely only make crappy beer cheaper or cheap beer crappier. No one who makes decent beer will want to have anything to do with a modified barley. But yes, you'll save starving people everywhere, just like all the GMO corn in the world is saving starving people.

Dr. Waugh has spliced himself with potato genes.

Well, I'll have a look at the Nature paper (Nature 2012; A physical, genetic and functional sequence assembly of the barley genome; The International Barley Genome Sequencing Consortium. doi:10.1038/nature11543) and see how much of this sort of stuff is there, and report back later.

Update: I scanned the article, and in fact there is very little reference to any fluff in it. They note in passing that 20% of all barley is malted for alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages. There is a pretty cool map:

Track a gives the seven barley chromosomes. Green/grey colour depicts the agreement of anchored fingerprint (FPC) contigs with their chromosome arm assignment based on chromosome-arm-specific shotgun sequence reads (for further details see Supplementary Note 4). For 1H only whole-chromosome sequence assignment was available. Track b, distribution of high-confidence genes along the genetic map; track c, connectors relate gene positions between genetic and the integrated physical map given in track d. Position and distribution of track e class I LTR-retroelements and track f class II DNA transposons are given. Track g, distribution and positioning of sequenced BACs.