Sunday School: Three-tier Distribution System

In the laws of physics, every action has an equal and opposite reaction.  In the laws of historical governance, the stipulation of equality quite often proves to be an unattainable goal.  The American experiment with prohibition is a very good example of this.  Faced with the actions of men overindulging themselves, the people decided to ban all intoxicating liquors.  Nowadays the response would be more subtle, like Scotland’s new fifty pence minimum per unit of alcohol or simply cracking down on volume promotions at bars.  Instead, a full ban was put in place and led to thirteen years of thirst-fueled crime.

Now although the 21st amendment put an end to prohibition, the legislative legacy of this teetotaling period is still very much alive today.  The vast majority of U.S. states have some form of a three-tiered distribution system for alcohol.  For the most part, producers are legally barred from selling directly to consumers, or even retailers.  It must first pass through a distributor before reaching the bar tap or store shelf.  This government mandated extra layer in the distribution chain seems peculiar for a country that espouses a love for laissez faire, anti-regulatory rhetoric.  Indeed, a lot of smaller brewers lose out in the patchwork of state-enforced middlemen.  Citizens of Illinois can thank abused legislation for their lack of brews from New Glarus and (between ‘06 and ’07) Bell’s.

There are signs that this system could be weakening.  In 2005, Granholm v. Heald ensured that any exceptions states make for small in-state producers must be applied to all producers regardless of where they’re based.  And last year Washington passed a bill that dealt a heavy blow to the traditional three-tier system by eliminating the government’s active role as one or more of the tiers.

Now we have to be fair.  A lot of the problems the current system produces or exacerbates were not on the horizon when the laws were being drafted in 1919.  Prior to prohibition, many producers owned or had heavy influence over the bars.  Bar operators were often pressured to sell more product, which in this case is not a good situation.  The three-tier system was an attempt to remove the economic incentive for binge drinking.  As a reaction to overindulgence, it is much closer to “equal and opposite” than outright prohibition, so it has survived a lot longer.  But with the explosion of microbreweries, it is reaching the end of its useful life.

Wake up Dead, Left Hand Brewing Company

Man, it’s been a while.  I must have gotten distracted.  Damn ADHD!  I can’t help it, the doctor said it’s real.  Speaking of it’s, I recently sent a message to a friend and typed it’s when I meant to type its.  Texting can be a pain, especially when driving.  One summer, I was away from my car for over a month and when I came back to it, driving felt really weird.  I bet that’s how someone from several centuries ago would feel if you brought them to our time and drove them around in a car.  That seem like a silly thing to do though.  “We’ve finally mastered time travel!  Now to go ride in a car!”  I wonder how long it’ll take for cars to become obsolete.  What am I doing here?  Oh yeah, a post on ADHD.

No worries on copyright here,
our tax dollars paid for this!

Well, not really.  I’m supposed to be here for beer.  How can I stay on one beer for a whole post?  I have ADHD.  That means I have no control over my focusing capabilities!  If only I could find a beer as multidirectional as my totally not made-up affliction...  I’ve got it!  Wake up Dead, by Left Hand Brewing!

The bottle kind of looks like it has tiny horns

The head has a whipped cream feel that triggers thoughts of pumpkin pie.  It’s accompanied by an aroma full of dark fruit and chocolate.  The carbonation seems rather low, providing a smooth quality that helps the beer go down.  It has a sharp bite, but there’s also a markedly sweet malt character.  This complexity probably comes from the diverse grain bill of seven different malts.  You have to be pretty confident to toss in that many types because you run the risk of producing a beer that’s too busy.  Wake Up Dead keeps it pretty well under control, but you do feel a little scatterbrained when you drink it.  “What’s that over there?  And this over here?  And something around that area?”  Setting out to identify each individual flavor and how it blends into the whole would make a great work out for your mind.  Move over puzzles, we’re gonna combat Alzheimer's with Imperial Stout!

Moral of the story, ADHD will save you from Alzheimer's. Or maybe this beer will. Either way I'm in the clear!

Pranqster, North Coast Brewing Company

Taste is subjective, kind of.  If one person likes hops and another doesn't, they will have divergent takes on an IPA.  If you ask a jazz cat and a phishhead to identify the most important American musician of the 20th century, you won't get one answer.  But there is a limit to taste's subjectivity.  If you're not really a beer person, you can probably still taste the difference between a $5 six pack and a $12 four.  Even someone who hates the idea of a sport centered around inflicting blows to your opponent has to concede the brilliance of Ali's rope-a-dope strategy or acknowledge the ambidextrous efficiency of Sugar Ray.  So when a beer consistently receives good reviews from multiple sources, I generally assume that I'll appreciate it no matter what the style is.

Enter North Coast Brewing Company's Pranqster.  I was quite thoroughly surprised by my experience with this Belgian cousin of Old Rasputin.  Maybe it was the presentation.

That sounded a bit harsh, it does look good.

An area where taste truly is subjective is preconception.  About five years ago, neuroscientists at the University of Wisconsin found that what we expect influences what we taste.  Belgian beers I had tried in the past were slightly darker, cloudier and had fine heads.  So when I looked at a very clear brew with foam consisting of big bubbles, I was a bit apprehensive.  Its lack of chalice or tulip glass probably didn't help either (even though my experience with both of those is rather limited).  The rest of my observations fit in pretty well with that initial reaction to the visual.  The aroma contained the standard Belgian notes with a deemphasis on the fruits while the yeastiness had the right "shape" but didn't follow through, as if it were the shell of a great nose.  The taste was as clean as the beer was clear.  It did an absolutely spectacular job hiding its 7.6% ABV but also seemed to be hiding its flavor somewhere.  The mouthfeel reminded me of Sprite (or what I imagine Sprite feeling like since beer is the only carbonated beverage I drink regularly any more).  I came away with an impression of a lowest common denominator (LCD) beer best consumed in multiples.

But wait.  What's that?  The Bros gave it a score of 100?  The review is from 13 years ago, but the descriptors he uses are pretty similar to what I tasted.  Also, BeerAdvocate is by no means alone.  The web hosts a plethora of good reviews for this beer.  Could it be that my expectations were misplaced?  If the explanation of Pranqster's name this blogger provides is true, maybe I completely missed the point, like getting angry at an author for grammatical errors in quotations from Sojourner Truth.  I guess I'll just have to try it again.  Oh darn!

Sunday School: Olfaction

Pop quiz.  Why is it not good to drink beer "ice cold?"  There's really no way for you to answer that, so I'll just tell you.  The capacity of a liquid to hold carbonation increases as its temperature drops.  So when you chill a beer, you reduce the amount of gas available for olfaction.  What's olfaction?  Well the latin verbs for "to emit a smell" and "to make" come together to refer to our sense of smell.  That makes perfect sense.  Nothing backward about it, right?  As we all know, olfaction is a large part of taste.  How much?  Let's ask our friends on the web!

Not helpful...

Man, nothing good comes from the internet.  (Except for meeeeeee!)  Okay, okay, seriously this time.  It appears to make up somewhere between 70-80% of taste... or more.  This sense is really important for enjoying your beers to their fullest, but how does it work?  Being the most primitive sense, the most straightforward answer is we don't know.  "Primitive" in biology means "old" and the inevitable product of time and evolution is seamless complexity.  There's just so much to learn about it that researchers haven't gotten it all down.  What we do know is there are receptors for specific chemicals sticking out of the roof of our superior nasal concha, which is where air goes when you take a whiff.  These receptors are the only part of you brain that is exposed to the outside world in some way, so they're coated in a mucus rich with antibodies to protect against infections.  There are ten thousand different receptors, each responding to one and only one chemical.  Pretty simple except for the fact that we are capable of detecting at least ten million scents.  We don't know how this happens.  It could be accomplished by multiple receptors combining to trigger single smells, but there's dispute over that too.  Remember how I told you your brain reads chemicals to distinguish smells?  Well, we're not exactly positive on that either.  Some have theorized that what our brains are actually measuring is the frequency of vibrations in a molecule.  This theory is supported by research showing we can distinguish between identical chemicals at different energy levels.  Maybe we smell by listening.  No one really knows.

I guess I picked a bad topic for this week's Sunday School.  "This is how it works, we don't know how it works."  Oh well, it works, so go use it on some beer!

#9, Magic Hat Brewing Company

Today's beer has a penchant for mystery.  It is very well known but there is disagreement over what style it represents.  Is it a pale ale or a fruit beer?  There is also disagreement over whether or not it's any good.  On BeerAdvocate the average deviation from the mean review score is 17.49%, the highest I've ever seen.  Mot beers fall in the 8-12 range.  Then there's that name, #9.  No story has been proffered for it by the brewery, leaving drinkers to speculate on its origin.  One idea that I kinda like is that it's a reference to the Beatle's "Revolution 9."  This avant garde track confuses musically much like Magic Hat's #9 appears to confuse flavors.  It would also be quite fitting to reference the song that was meant to be a musical representation of a revolution considering this beer appeared in the mid 90s, a time of revolution in the beer industry.

When I think of #9 however, I don't think of rockers from Liverpool.  I think of The Nines.  The Nines was a movie made in 2007 that has an interesting ability to mystify its audience.  Just ask google autofill.

I blocked out what is explained to that person.
p.s.  It's wrong.

The thing about The Nines is it's not very confusing.  The characters even explain it in the movie.  Meanwhile there are movies like Mulholland Drive that really don't make any sense at all.  That movie's director has even been asked to explain it and refused.  But critics love Mulholland Drive, defending its borderline stream of consciousness with statements like, "...the film is an intoxicating liberation from sense, with moments of feeling all the more powerful for seeming to emerge from the murky night world of the unconscious."  Magic Hat's #9 is not the most out-there beer out there, but a lot of people seem to be turned off by its weirdness.  Come on guys, give it a chance.

The aroma is thick with apricot atop a yeasty body.  It entices you to find out what's down there, so you take your sip and become befuddled.  What happened to the apricot?  From where did these almost lager-like flavors come?  It's like it started out with all these wacky ideas for a new ground-breaking drink and then didn't know how to finish it.  Which is ironic since the finish is actually quite good.  The high alpha acid hop varieties seem more contradictory than complementary to the fruitiness.  The aroma and finish are both yummy beers but the taste is a battle for supremacy between the two.  Maybe this beer is a revolution... in a bottle!

#9 strikes me as a beer that would considered a centrist if more beers were like it.  If there's any real confusion, it's found just under the cap.

Every cap says something nonsensical.  Mine was pretty tame.  But why do they do it?  What does it mean?  How does it connect to the drink?  I'm so confused!