On today’s show… some thoughts about this podcast. I’ve got a quiz question for the amateur craftbrewers out there. I’ll tell you about a conversation I had with my buddy Rasan on the subject of local economies. And, as promised last time, I’ll tell you about my home pub.
I’m not put out by the fact that Graham Sanders, the host of the famous Australian Craftbrewer Podcast (radio.craftbrewer.org) put my podcast in position four (of five) in his “minor league” brewcast reviews. I’m just glad I got a mention at all.
The fact is that I’m not trying to do what Graham calls a “brewcast”. Yes, I talk about brewing beer at home (amateur craftbrewing), but my goal isn’t to instruct anyone in the mechanics of the art/hobby. There are plenty of “basic brewing” podcasts out there and I don’t feel the need to compete with them; namely, because I think the other guys are doing a fine job. Why dilute the potential audience?
Graham notes that my podcast is focused on a limited geographical location: Long Island, New York. The primary reason my podcast is so narrowly geographically defined is because my end goal is to get people thinking more about building local culture. I live on Long Island, so I’m speaking to my fellow Long Islanders about the importance of growing the local craft beer culture. So far I’ve focused on all aspects of that local beer culture: commercial and amateur, retail and free.
Now that the Long Island Beer & Malt Enthusiasts are doing the work that I was pretty much doing single handedly before, I believe it’s time for me to leave the commercial craft beer culture to develop without me leading those efforts. As you have probably gathered from the last couple of episodes, I’m talking more about life style and cultural criticism than I am brewing techniques.
I don’t know how this podcast will develop. I’ve tried all kinds of formats since I started podcasting on May 19th, 2005. My show was called Angler Radio back then and the first episode was a freeform ramble on the French filmmaker Eric Rohmer and the French novelist and screenwriter Marguerite Duras.
I won’t give you a history of this podcast, but the phrase “constantly reinventing itself” comes to mind. I suppose that a more accurate name for the podcast would be The Donavan Hall Show, but that formula is so overused and, besides, I’m no celebrity and the name “Donavan Hall” has very little drawing power — and I’d like to keep it that way. (No danger of getting famous here.)
What amazes me is not the small number of listeners that I have, but that anyone bothers to listen at all. Don’t get me wrong, I want people to listen, but (I’ve said this before) the show has to interest ME or I won’t do it. I don’t get paid for this. I don’t have sponsors, nor do I want any (though I’ve considered it in the past). The only reward I get from this activity is the occasional email from some one saying that something I said made them think.
Now, let’s get away from this navel gazing and move onto to the subject of brewing.
This last month I finished drinking the Mild that I had on tap in the home pub. I sanitized the empty keg and moved the “blond ale” I had sitting in the fermenter into the now clean keg for serving. Immediately, I hit the beer with some CO2 to pressurize the keg and I poured myself a sample. It was at cellar temp and still, but it was a pretty tasty beer. There wasn’t enough head space in the keg to do a proper job of force carbonating the beer, so I drank a couple of pints still the next night, then force carbonated. Hit the keg with 40 psi and shook until the overpressure dissolved into solution.
Then on day number three, the beer is fizzy. Pours with a great head, but all the sudden I’m noticing the aroma of sulfur. It’s a punch in the nose kind of sulfur aroma. The question for all you brewers out there is this: where did the sulfur come from?
If you think you know, send me an email with your answer. Or if you want me to play your response on the show, send me an mp3. I’ll discuss the causes of the sulfur off-flavor in beer on the next show.
Here’s a hint. By day seven the sulfur aroma was completely gone. Put those thinking caps on and let’s hear from you.
A while back, my buddy Rasan and I started talking about local economies. He wanted to know more about the current cultural interest in craft beer and how that ties in with the “buy local” movement. Of course, part of the craft beer scene is made up of folks who are “drink local” advocates. Rasan suggested that maybe our culture is on the verge of rejecting global corporate culture and embracing that which is local. As always, time will tell, but I might be able to help raise consciousness about our responsibility to look after our local economies by making wise choices and not just choosing whatever is cheapest.
One of the proposed books in my beer culture series is called Cottage Industry; it would be an account of my experiences brewing and drinking my own beer at home. Cottage Industry is rooted in what I have called Slow Brew (echoing Slow Food of course). The idea is to keep it local and grow as much of what you drink as possible. Obviously, I can’t grow enough barley for my own use and I haven’t had any luck with hops, but I’m sure I could do more. I’m not sure if buying organic stuff is really the answer, since that usually involves increased shipping costs. What we need on Long Island is a community run Beer Farm growing barley, wheat and hops right here. Then we brew it ourselves and drink it. Beer Farm, I like it. Book Five?
I see a time when the US is dotted with nanobreweries, one or two in every neighborhood. Enough to supply the community pub that is within walking distance of everyone who drinks there. Yes. This is a Golden Age vision of how things once were when people who brew beer at home and sell it to their neighbors. British beer writer Pete Brown talks about the Beerhouse Act of 1830 (repealed in 1993). That bill made it legal for anyone to brew and sell beer as long as they paid for a moderately priced license. When I first heard about this, it sounded to me as if this state of affairs would be paradise on Earth, but Brown says it killed brewing. He argues (if I remember correctly) that this paved the way for the “tied-house” system where brewers could own the beerhouses and thereby control the supply of beer sold. Instead of proliferating local beer production, the Act ensured the centralization of production. It sounds as if the English Parliament forgot to put in a clause forbidding this sort of mass ownership of beerhouses.
Small producers can’t compete with big (read industrial-scale) producers. The corporation brewing beer will always be able to sell cheaper beer than the one man operation in your neighborhood. What happened in England was that the local beerhouses realized that it was a lot cheaper to buy industrial beer and resell it rather than mess with brewing it themselves. The failure of the Beerhouse Act wasn’t a fault of the Act itself, but of people’s choices — choosing cheap over choosing local. We have to give people a reason to choose local over cheap. The argument that locally brewed beer tastes better than industrial beer doesn’t really hold, since we all know that the big breweries are capable of making interesting beer. It’s just that the mass market stuff has less character precisely because it is mass market.
So why is local better? The economic argument is too complex for most people. Or perhaps we have been brainwashed by the industrial capitalist mechanism. As counterintuitive as it may seem, buying cheap might save you money in the short run, but it ultimately lowers your wealth. I talked about this effect on the last podcast. Money spent in your town at local business stays in your community at an almost two to one rate over the same money spent at non-local chain stores.
That’s what Rasan and I were talking about a month ago. Rasan believes that people are starting to wise up about corporations and they are beginning to realize that deregulation is destroying local culture. I don’t know. I hope so.
Thoughts on the home pub revolution: see The Beer Hall for some text and photos.
That’s all for this edition Radio Beer Hall.
Next time… I’ll tell you about my new home pub.
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I flew down to New Orleans and sampled the brews in the Crescent City. We visit Abita Brewing Company in Abita Springs, Louisiana and the Crescent City Brewhouse on Decatur Street in the French Quarter.
Rich Thatcher is back for part two of our chat about the 
