A friend calls: “Fancy going to hear some music tonight?” I ask: “What do you have in mind?” He tells me the name of an artist, or a band. I have never heard of them. “It’s not medieval chamber music is it? Like that last gig, where each set was about a year long?” He reassures me, but I am still not confident he understands my tastes. There was another bad experience, with an especially syrupy pop-country band and some Nebraskan line-dancers. “No, it’s classic 1950s East Coast bop, with a scat singer.”
The breweries couldn't afford to invest, were badly maintained, and hard to keep clean. That "cellar character" seemed significantly more interesting than no taste at all.
If I am going to spend an evening listening to music, I would prefer to know what style. I don’t mind experimenting if I am in the mood, but I would like to be spared something I definitely don’t fancy. Maybe that band would not have seen themselves as classic bop, but I wasn’t going to be a paying customer unless I had some general guidance as to what was on offer.
It’s the same with food. If I order a burger, I don’t expect a Coney dog. Everybody knows what a burger is, don’t they? Words have to mean something.
I have an old friend called Gary Gillman, with whom I have enjoyed gastronomic tours of places as distant as Montreal and Lille. I have reason to believe Gary may occasionally enjoy corned beef on rye. If he ordered corned beef in Britain, he might be confronted with bully-beef, a horrible wartime dish. In Britain, you have to ask for “salt beef”. There is a degree of fun to be had in exploring different states’ view as to what constitutes chili or barbecue (or even how either should be spelled), but I wouldn’t be happy to order either and be given a dish of granola. There is a company somewhere that thinks barbecue sauce should be yellow; well, you always get one.
As you will have guessed by now, we are talking about beer. That is to say, about styles. Gary wrote a letter to the paper recently on this subject. To this paper, actually. He said that the beer world was not a Cartesian exercise. I have no idea what that means, having left school at 16 to become a writer.
The paper gave Gary a good reply, which should have left everybody happy, but won’t. Everybody in the world of beer loves arguing about styles, and I want my ten cents’ worth (rates of pay around here aren’t spectacular). I am not sure of this, but I think I may have invented the term “beer style.”
As I was mentioning the other day, when I started writing about beer, there were fewer than 50 brewing companies in the US. There was only one that did not make a light lager: Anchor Steam. It was the only brewery with a truly serious commitment to speciality products. The next most serious was Champale, making flavored “malt liquors.” (Was there ever such an oxymoron as malt liquor? It’s not malty, and it’s not a liquor).
There were several dark lagers, such as Augsburger and Prior Double Dark; a few “cream ales,” notably Little Kings (which even then was not really an ale). Utica Club and Genny (which were); the odd golden ale (Black Horse. for example). There were two amber-colored ales: Rainier (which wasn’t) and Ballantine’s IPA (which was). There was the odd porter (e.g. Yuengling, Stegmaier). Those breweries were the last vestiges of American brewing tradition and diversity. Some had products that were further variations on their themes, but scarcely anyone expected either the breweries, their beers or the styles to survive. The idea that some, notably Yuengling, would expand: that would have seemed crazy. In my 1977 World Guide to Beer, I described ales in the US as “a persecuted minority.”
None of the beers I have just mentioned was readily available nationally. In most parts of the US, only light lagers were available. Choice?: “Sure, we have Blatz, Old Milwaukee, Bud, Heineken…”
