Comments on: Ahem

By: roy belmont

roy belmont — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 21:49:08 +0000

Subtlety takes time
Yes, but no, consistent subtlety takes time.
Consistently reproducible subtlety requires subtleties of recognition and technique, which take time to gather and and confirm and collate, but subtlety itself can happen overnight.
The right amount of the right spices on the right chicken cooked just the right amount of time. Ciao bella!
Now, how the heck did I do that?

By: John Emerson

John Emerson — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 18:05:04 +0000

I was a McDonald’s cook in 1967-8. My cooking training was 15 minutes and mostly was about keeping the area clean. I refused to eat the hamburgers I cooked, and so did all of my coworkers.We weren’t boycotting McDonalds, we were boycotting me. And I was the most adamant boycotter of the bunch.

I only ate the fish sandwiches, which were hard to ruin, and I eat them even today in a pinch. With a more interesting bun and a more interesting sauce they’d be absolutely good.

By: seth edenbaum

seth edenbaum — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 16:29:37 +0000

I go to McDonalds sometimes too.
I used to like their apple “pies” when I was a kid and they were fried in the same fryer with the french fries and the fish.

By: MQ

MQ — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 15:52:03 +0000

Good comment, Seth, but can’t you argue that Budweiser expresses a mass production ethic that in itself has a craft dimension of the sort you describe? I would argue that mass production is(was) a particular genius of America. It doesn’t aim for subtlety in its products, but historically an immense amount of craft went into the development of standardized, mass-produced food and drink that reliably appeal across a wide range of tastes.

By: seth edenbaum

seth edenbaum — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 15:11:03 +0000

Between corporate and industrial culture and the cult of individual self-expression there is the culture of community and communication, and language. Nothing that has been made the same way for hundreds of years has actually been made the same way for hundreds of years. That applies to beer as much as law. It’s slow change. You put 20 people in a room you’ll get an argument. You put 3 people in a room followed by 3 more as the first ones leave and 3 more following again on and on for 500 years you might get something interesting, whether it’s or bread or beer or wine or cheese or Homer or the Bible.
Budweiser is not good beer. Microbrewers, by and large, miss the point. Of course they do, they’re beer geeks.

This is the critique from cultural “depth” which some conflate with mysticism or ‘spirituality.’ It’s simpler than that: Subtlety takes time.

By: David

David — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 00:39:47 +0000

@50 C.K. Dexter. The analogy doesn’t really hold up. People who like Budweiser and similar industrial brews generally do not like even mild craft beers. Many people who like Harry Potter are both voracious and discriminating readers and just as likely to vary their reading diets with your “literature.” Tolstoy with tatertots, why not?

By: tom bach

tom bach — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 17:23:19 +0000

Re Bud in Pubs, I remember reading something about large volume vertical drinkers or mass volume vertical drinkers (lads who stand and drink from bottles) in London and recall that it was Bud or like products they stood and swigged.

By: John Emerson

John Emerson — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 17:14:10 +0000

Dsquared’s own opinion is product placement. That’s what you wanted me to say, right?

Raising little Attilas can be spendy. They often kill their own fathers in their eagerness to take power, too. It will be like a family comedy, except with more bloodshed.

Budweiser asked themselves: “What one man in Europe is best capable of making us cool?” The question answered itself.

By: Bloix

Bloix — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 16:51:01 +0000

I saw Mike Leigh’s new movie “Happy-Go-Lucky” last night. There are a fair number of pub scenes, and in every one the characters – young attractive Londoners – seem to be sipping from bottles of Budweiser. I wonder if this is purely product placement or if young people’s beer of choice in London really is Bud.

By: bad Jim

bad Jim — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 09:00:17 +0000

My objection to branded products is partly Heraclitean: you can’t drink the same bottle twice, not least since the first bottle changed the biochemical environment you call yourself. Apart from that, a cold brew after a spate of physical labor on a hot day isn’t the same as a bottle from the same batch on the patio in the cool of the evening.

It’s trivially true that non-industrial beverages vary from batch to batch, year to year, like any agricultural product. Where are the snow peas of yesteryear? I encounter difference in every glass (I try to control this by opening only one bottle at a time) and I entice myself to continue by promising that the next one will be as good as the last, but interestingly different.

By: John Emerson

John Emerson — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 01:31:51 +0000

Grandpa Selzer’s wife was named Vasser, leading to no end of crude jokes. The brewery still exists, I’ve been told.

By: Colin Danby

Colin Danby — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 01:12:50 +0000

Well let me be the first, John, to defend the humble, quotidian “Selz” against all those hypothetical snobs complaining about its watery, industrial taste. And I quite like the idea of you as a beer baron. In that alternative universe, I assume you’re a Republican.

By: John Emerson

John Emerson — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 00:38:37 +0000

The conversation having slowed, I’ll just repeat my claim that if Iowa had not imposed prohibition decades before the rest of the US, you people would be grumbling about Selzer beer made in the brewery founded by my great-great-grandfather Rudolf Selzer two decades or so before Budweiser got started under that name. and a few years before the proto-Budweiser brewery was founded under a different name.

By: Mrs Tilton

Mrs Tilton — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 23:35:54 +0000

Ronnie P @7,

His Brooklyn Lager has way more hops than Bud

When we lived there, the Brooklyn Brewery sponsored (and ergo sold beer at) the wonderful Celebrate Brooklyn summer concert series in Prospect Park. On a visit after we’d returned to Europe, we discovered to our horror that the sponsor was now AB, and no, they weren’t content to simply pony up but let BB go on selling the beer. We also visited the man who runs the festival, whose son had been friendly with ours during our two Brooklyn Years, and scolded him roundly. With a sheepish shrug, he noted that he had a festival to run, and that AB had deep pockets. No doubt it would have salved his conscience to learn that Daniel thinks Bud a good beer, but the poor man knew not that balm. AB are still sponsor, BTW, as I learned this summer when we went to hear Brazilian Girls. The music (not least that from the opening acts) was almost good enough to make me forget my annoyance. Almost.

Nick L @ 19,

American mass market beer simply sucks

True to a first approximation. But don’t let Bud and Coors mislead you, there are some half decent American non-”craft” beers out there. Yuengling’s certainly springs to mind. I suspect that, in export markets like New York, it benefits from something of a Coolness Bonus. But in Pennsylvania, there is nothing in the least Exotic about it; it is Just Beer. And it’s a Yank beer I’d non-ir0nically offer to a German. Nobody here would mistake it for anything German, but I think a lot of people would like it. There’s plenty of mediocre and even bad German beer, BTW, not least where I live (which, to be fair, is traditionally a cider rather than a beer region). It’s just that the Purity Law limits the extent of the badness German brewers can achieve.

RB @51,

Would anyone turn down a Bud if it was free and was all that was offered over the course of, say, an hour?

Yes, I’ve done so myself. To be accurate, what I turned down was a second Bud. (I note, at some risk of prompting Daniel to mount his other hobby horse of that name, that AB are not allowed to call it “Budweiser” here .) This was at the Togo-Korea match in the group round of the 2006 World Cup. Purely to stick it to the chaibe Schwobe, Sepp Blatter had negotiated a deal that made (American) Budweiser the only beer sold in German stadia during the whole of the WC. (Not the worst of Blatter’s sins, surely, but the one for which watching demons prodding him with pitchforks for all eternity will be most enjoyable.) Before taking our seats we grabbed, as we customarily do in the Waldstadion, a beer and a bratwurst. This was on a sunny, humid, blistering day, the sort of day on which, one is told, American beer is sort of not really that bad at all, actually, if taken ice cold. Half an hour into the first half I was asked did I want another. I did not, and stuck with Apfelschorle for the rest of the match.

By: nick s

nick s — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 23:06:14 +0000

It is to Budweiser what a bouillabaisse is to fish stock.

Er, no. It is to Budweiser what nam pla is to fish stock. I remember seeing video of that stupid contraption at the Dogfish brewery tap where the beer is/was piped through dried hops at high pressure en route to the glass.

The obvious parallel (for botanical reasons, as roy b. notes) is with stoners who breed plants and plant-substance-absorption methods that (so I’m told) make you fall over at first puff. For High Times, read IPA Times.

(Me, I’m still waiting for Americans to go full-on microbrew with cider. There are plenty of places where, and it’s got tradition behind it.)