How might I alarm you? Not by criticising your beers, if you are a brewer; your pub, if you are a saloon-keeper; or your taste in beer, if you are one of those noble souls who describe themselves as “just a drinker.” That humble description indicates that you are a paying customer, which ennobles you in the view of both of the previous parties.

Being a critic is one of the things I do for a living. Being a reporter is another. Is a reporter a fearless seeker-out of truth, neutral and objective? Or does he recruit those qualities in support of his personal passions? When I enlisted, at the age of sixteen, I may have been attracted by the powerful purity of the first role. In the event, I grew into the second.

My favorite exponent of subjective reporting was Whitney Balliett, jazz critic of The New Yorker. He recently died, and I am wondering how he is coping with being offered a position Upstairs when all decent jazz clubs (not to mention drinking dens) are in the Other Place. There is also the question as to the choice of beers Downstairs. One might expect a decent Hell, Helles or Heller, depending on the grammar of the label, but what is on offer for darker days? For the moment I shall not pursue this investigation any further, for fear that I should find out soon enough.

A man who has the chutzpah to be both a talented writer and a cartoonist, Alan Moen, once drew a cartoon showing a bearded, bespectacled fellow exuding a storm of sweat while declining to accept a glass of Miller Lite. The heading on the cartoon was: Michael Jackson in Hell.

I have wondered how imminent this assignment might be. It has been a busy year already. Let me see, where have I been? In love. Yes, I have been in love. That’s for sure. Still am.

I have also been in Turkey, where I cavorted professionally with a troupe of Russian girls in tubular golden dresses. (It was the girls who were in the dresses, not me. They were purporting to be stalks of wheat.) This curious event was in the service of a major Turkish brewery which was launching a wheat beer in broadly the south German style.

I have been in Poland twice this year. On both beer and whisky business. I am beginning to reach the conclusion at this late stage that Slavic girls are as magnetically charming as Colleens, perhaps without the downside of Yeats’s “terrible beauty.”

Italy, I can reveal, is as beautiful as ever. I spent a week there this year promoting my new book, Storie nel bicchiere di birra, di whisky, di vita. This is an anthology comprising mainly articles from Slow Food magazines, especially their Italian edition. It includes some writing in a new vein: what might be termed memoir, in some cases lightly fictionalised. There is even the odd fiction short story.

This book was commissioned by Slow Food, to whom I was originally introduced by Charlie Papazian. Unfortunately, it is thus far available only in Italian. A couple of people have offered to translate it into English for me. I nearly agreed before remembering that I actually wrote it in English. The problem lies not in finding a translator, but in locating a publisher for an English-language edition. I am working on that at the moment. I also hope eventually to find an English-language publisher for the revised version of the fifth edition of my book the Great Beers of Belgium.

Before the end of the year, there will also a be a new book, the Eyewitness Guide to Beer which is published under my name as writer/editor, but with substantial contributions by Stan Hieronymus, Derek Walsh, Conrad Seidl and others.

Heavyweights in a Clinch

I am hoping that my next book will be an account of my dealings with Parkinson’s Disease. I have lived with Parkinson for many years, but I have only recently allowed him out of the closet. I find myself referring to ‘my Parkinson’s’. We do this, don’t we? We refer to our ailments possessively, as though we are staking a claim. Perhaps we are. Perhaps I am. I would rather him inside the tent, pissing out, than the reverse. Pissing, with excessive frequency and desperate urgency is one of his annoying habits. I cannot exclude him, so I embrace him. It is not the bear-hug of old buddies. We are more like heavyweights in a clinch, or even schoolboys locked in a playground fight.

It is this element of my behavior that may frighten you. I am sometimes the quiet, courteous, friendly Lithuanian Jewish Yorkshire Englishman that I always was. On other occasions, I look about as fresh and mobile as one of those ancient men found in peat bogs (no doubt in search of an Islay Malt). Other versions of the new and not necessarily improved Michael Jackson include the Immobile (Good heavens, I didn’t realise they’d made a statue of him already), the Dancing Dyskinetic, The Mumbling Mystic and the Garrulous Grandstander. It was a virtuoso performance of these characters at Denver Airport a year ago that led to my longest and strangest journey in a lifetime of restlessness and wanderlust.

Or perhaps it was simply the fact that I appeared to be drunk. I was not. I hadn’t had an alcoholic drink that day or the day before. As to when I last consumed too much alcohol, that is history—of the ancient genre. I do not have, and never have had, a drink problem.

Apparently, it **appeared** as though I did and, unbeknown to me, many friends had been concerned that my profession had taken its most obvious toll. The Lady from the Friendly Skies was also concerned. She wanted me to meet some friendly paramedics who apparently reside at the airport. They were keen beer lovers, and I seem to remember signing a few autographs on my way to the hospital. In the meantime, my Parkinson’s had taken a turn for the Tourette’s (if you’re going to embrace virtuoso ill-health, you might as well go for gold).

When I woke up, I was in a hospital bed. It was just like it is in the movies. I was surrounded by people in white coats, one of whom asked me: “What is your name?” When I replied, “Michael Jackson,” there was none of the usual sniggering. People in Denver know who Michael Jackson is. Nonetheless, he asked again. My voice sounded a little crackly. I later learned that I had had a tube down my throat. It had been removed before they brought me out of a coma. That’s where I’d been? Coma? Where is that? Iowa, perhaps? Oklahoma? North Dakota? I have heard of Hygiene, Colorado. Been there, in fact. Likewise, Intercourse, Pennsylvania. Now I have been to Coma, Iowa. “Tell us your name again,” said the doctor. “The Artist formerly known as Prince.” He looked across at another of the white coats whom I later came to know as a neurologist. “I guess he’s OK,” he said.

Then, addressing himself to me, he asked whether I was hungry, and what I fancied to eat. I suggested a large mimosa and a Denver omelette, though I think something less extravagant was eventually provided.

They said they thought I might have had a minor heart attack. My previous travels had taken me from Poland to Patagonia. Now I had pursued a journey almost to the end of my life. As occasionally happens, I had missed the plane I had intended to take. Sometimes I prefer to travel by rail. An advantage of the train is that one can always, like a Glasgow Catholic practising coitus interruptus, get off at Paisley. Metaphorically, this is what I had done. For the moment, I had cheated Mort Subite.

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You might expect such bewilderment after a terrorist bomb, but this was a far lesser atrocity, though it was a bombshell to some. It is no doubt distasteful of me even to allude metaphorically to those acts of wholesale murder that threaten daily to exhaust our capacity for disgust. Fortunately, our emotions have their own self-governing mechanism to protect us from overload. We can feel outrage at the toll of global strife, and still be rendered speechless by a wholly legal calamity on our doorstep. No one was killed, but it was nonetheless an act of destruction.

The Ram was to be silenced, The Ram of Wandsworth.

With its crown of horns, the uncastrated male sheep has been a symbolic creature through the ages. The Ancient Egyptians considered the ram to represent God the Creator, his breath, or life itself. The ram, as a symbol, also frequently crops up in both Old and New Testaments. Did monks once have an abbey, brewery and inn on the river Thames at Wandsworth?

The Thames, the Terroir

The Thames is the main river of Southern England, but is little more than 200 miles long. Its sources are insufficiently distant to be seriously regarded as either the West or the Midlands of England. It becomes a river in the hill country known as the Cotswolds, between the mellow limestone villages of Gloucestershire and the golden ironstone of Oxfordshire.

The hills here are gentle, not steep, and the flow of water leisurely. It is the England of eccentric men and unflappable women, where even the Dunkirk landings are remembered as a bit of a jape; the England of Mrs. Miniver, Wind in the Willows and Three Men in a Boat: the England the rest of the world expects (far from Wuthering Heights of my native North).

The river becomes navigable to shipping in east London, then forms an estuary that separates the barley-growing and malting region known as East Anglia from the hop county of Kent.

Losing the Breweries

The Oxfordshire stretch of the Thames has, in less than ten years, lost three renowned breweries. In Oxford itself, where monks brewed on Swan Nest Island in the 1500s, and Morrell’s Brewery stood since 1743, the site boiled its final kettle in 1998. Morrell’s Brewery was worth more as a piece of property than as a brewery. This brewery, and its Oxfordshire neighbor Brakspear’s, inspired John (Rumpole) Mortimer to write the television drama series “Paradise Postponed.”

Brakspear’s, bearing the name of the only English pope, fell to mammon in 2002. Its beautiful brewery, in the regatta town of Henley, was inexcusably converted to condos. The beers were rescued and are now produced at the Wychwood microbrewery, in Witney, Oxfordshire. The new owners reproduced Brakspear’s very traditional fermentation hardware. I have never heard of a brewery going to such lengths to maintain the integrity of orphaned beers. The stepfather who insisted upon this, thus recognising the products as beers, and not simply brands, Mr. Rupert Thompson, will, at such a time as is deemed appropriate, be admitted to Heaven. Being by profession a marketing man, he would normally have gone elsewhere.

The third Oxfordshire brewery to fold had been founded in 1711 by the family of landscape painter George Morland. It was acquired by Greene King in East Anglia. That enterprise, founded by the family of novelist Graham Greene, is now a large regional brewer. It is also Britain’s biggest beer orphanage, having in part expanded by acquiring smaller, family-controlled, local breweries: five or six of them in seven or eight years.

While a local brewery would once have been known only in its home town or county, most are now recognised well beyond their hinterlands. Initially, this was not as result of planned marketing, but through the network of active (rather than passive) new generations of beer-lovers that have emerged in the United Kingdom since the creation in the 1970s of the Campaign for Real Ale.

While the beers from the acquired brewery are a bonus, many of them will simply duplicate products already made by the bigger, ostensibly more successful, new parent. Usually, the old brewery is closed and just one or two of its products switched to the new parent. The real prize is the “estate” of pubs owned by the old brewery, or tied to it by contract. Within limitations, such arrangements are permitted in the U.K. They are not allowed in the U.S.

Branded to Death

The river becomes busier as it enters the suburbs of London. At Mortlake, on the south side of Chiswick Bridge, the Stag brewery made the industry’s most infamous brand. At the time, the Stag was owned by Watney’s, one of the then “Big Six” that dominated the British brewing industry. Its corporate graphics, branding and advertising were so polished, so cohesive, that Watney’s and its Red Barrel ale seemed to be everywhere. Neither the company nor its flagship was the biggest in their categories, but their splendidly-executed visibility gave the impression that they were.

When consumer attitudes changed, “Watney’s Red Barrel” became shorthand for all that was deemed bad: the big brewer as a corporate bully, taking over independent family brewers, reformulating beers, using hell-knows-what adjuncts and additives, filtering and pasteurising: in short, selling brands rather than beers. Red Barrel was laughed off the market, and Watney’s vanished, victims of excessive branding. A victory for “real ale,” but with a sting in the tale; the Stag Brewery is now operated by Anheuser-Bush. It makes Budweiser for the British market.

How did the Campaign for Real Ale achieve such power? “To make people believe in God, you have to frighten them with the Devil,” I was long ago told by Michael Hardman, one of CAMRA’s founders. The Devil was Red, courtesy of Watney’s.

Which brewery represented God? The next one along the river, also in Chiswick, was Fuller’s Griffin Brewery, at the point where the outer suburbs meet the inner neighborhoods. Fullers was slow to respond to the opportunity, but eventually did, with a new generation of the owning family. It is now one of the world’s great ale breweries.

God and Mammon

There was one more family-owned independent brewery, two or three miles further into the neighborhoods. If inner-city London had a local brewery, this was it. The Ram Brewery had operated since 1581, begun to take its present form in 1675, and been acquired by the Young family in 1831.

Does the acquisition of such an old establishment carry with it a responsibility to nurture and preserve it? John Young, who ran the brewery, seemed to take that for granted.

Other local brewers had begun to copy the filtered and pasteurised beers made by the Big Six, but he persisted with “real ale” before CAMRA made it popular. His ales had the robust, hoppy dryness of a true London brew. The nearest pubs received their beer by horse-drawn dray. The brewery was protected by a flock of geese. There was a live ram. Peacocks added a splash of color.

Young’s Ram Brewery, adjoining hotels and pubs, dominated Wandsworth’s “downtown.” There would occasionally be whinges about traffic congestion. From time to time, a horse would bolt or the ram charge someone, but the most persistent complainant was mammon.

As an inner-city neighborhood, Wandsworth wore a blue collar. Then, in recent years, “white flight” went into reverse. As places like Wandsworth developed a certain chic, some of Young’s shareholders began to point out that the riverside at Wandsworth would be a prime site for condos, with easy access to central London and the financial district. Why not close the brewery, sell the site, and continue to run the chain of pubs?

At the company’s annual meetings, shouting matches would develop. John began to take a loud- hailer. He fought long and hard but this year, aged 84 and in ill-health, he had to acquiesce. A plan was unveiled to sell the site (a price of £69 million was later announced).

Young’s would be the minority partner (40-60) in a new brewing company formed by a merger with the old-established Charles Wells’ Eagle Brewery, of Bedford. Beers would be made there for the pubs of both Young’s and Wells. The pub chains of both companies would remain separate.

No doubt for the sake of family unity and business stability, the plan was blessed at the annual meeting by the ailing John Young. He stood “like Captain Ahab lashed to the mast,” recalled one observer.

Michael Hardman, the gruff Northerner and ex-Fleet Street journalist who helped found CAMRA was enlisted long ago by Young’s to publicise its good works. Now Hardman had to find the words to explain this weasel’s breakfast.

A shotgun marriage with a lesser cousin in a provincial town may ensure a decent approximation of some of Young’s beers for a time, but that is like moving the Carnegie Deli to Poughkeepsie and reversing it into Einstein’s Bagels.

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Funny how a chance encounter can change your life. One day, I had to visit someone in another neighborhood. I mis-timed the journey and arrived at their local subway station earlier than planned. I noticed a pub. Its sign indicated that it sold a decent beer, Young’s.

To kill half an hour, I popped in for a pint. I had never heard of the pub, but it was love at first sight.

The pub still exists: it is called The Thatched House. Perhaps it once had a thatched roof, but today the name seems incongruous. When London was a smaller city, the pub would have been at the rural fringe. An area where minor royals once lived became blue-collar during the industrial era, then accommodated Welsh, Irish, Polish and Black immigrants. For the last few decades, it has been accommodating what we used to call yuppies, who don’t want to live in the outer suburbs

It is called Hammersmith, and it has no thatch. Nor is there anything visually striking about the exterior of The Thatched House, apart from the contradiction of its name hanging beneath a tiled roof.

A Sympathetic Ear

From that first visit, all I can remember about the interior is that it was unobtrusively comfortable. That is enough to ask of pub décor. If a pub is a gem of Victoriana, or art nouveau; or has a world-beating collection of bicycles, dubious banknotes or severed neckties hanging from the ceiling, that may be a bonus—or not.

The nearest that The Thatched House came to such contrived eccentricities was the genuine customer who, after a two or three pints, would stroll around reciting the speeches of Winston Churchill. Mellowed by four or five, he would segue into the songs of Richard Tauber. If his voce was anything more than sotto, the publican turned down the volume by the simple device of raising an eyebrow.

On my first visit, the publican—a tallish man in his 40s or 50s, fit-looking, in shirtsleeves—was having a low-key conversation with a customer wearing a Tony Curtis haircut, frilled shirt, bolo tie, and drainpipe trousers.
Two decades earlier, young men in the United Kingdom had dressed like this to attend screenings of the movie “Rock Around the Clock” and dance wildly to Bill Haley and the Comets. These young men occasionally erupted into what were regarded in those innocent days as riots. They trashed coffee bars, sometimes breaking plastic spoons. People were afraid of them, and mayors of affected communities said that rock’n’roll should be banned: these people were juvenile delinquents.

This quaint survivor of proto-delinquency was not breaking anything. He was talking about his kids. They were not doing as well at school as he had hoped they might. Schools were not strict enough. There was no discipline. A shirtsleeved shoulder and a sympathetic ear were being provided by the publican, but with the professional boundaries of a psychotherapist.

He offered me his other ear with a friendly smile, then turned his hand to the pump. He drew me the best pint I had acquired in many a month, or possibly a year. My next significant purchase was a house three minutes’ walk away. (In the interests of accuracy, I have just timed it.)

The Shirtsleeved Publican

Like the deraciné delinquent, the shirtsleeved saloon-keeper had seen more exciting days in the 1950s. Being myself a supporter of Rugby League rather than soccer, I did not recognize Bedford Jezzard. Had someone told me, as they eventually did, I would have known the name. “Beddy” Jezzard had been a star player, and later coach, for one of London’s teams in the national league. He had also played for England. The local London team, Fulham, has enjoyed only modest success, but its stadium is regarded in London as being especially friendly, in much the way that Wrigley Field is in Chicago.

Soccer players did not make big money in those days, and upon retirement would often cash their fame in a pub. For Beddy, this situation was more than expedient. His family had been in the pub business, and he understood that it was more than a source of income. In the time it took him to pull a pint, the course of my life had been significantly determined. I still live in the same house.

“I hear you wanted to borrow a ladder for your decorating,” Beddy’s wife Joyce said on one of our early visits. “See that fellow with the curly gray hair? He’s called Jeff. He’ll lend you his.” The Thatched House made better neighbors of us all.

A lonely lady widowed in December was provided with Christmas dinner in the pub. Most evenings, a blind lady had a beer while her husband quietly read her a selection of stories from the afternoon paper. If the husband could not be there, another of the locals would deputize.

One regular customer always looked drunk, but had actually been the victim of a stroke. He needed help to get off his bar stool and walk across the room to the john. He was a Protestant from Glasgow. His voluble comments in support of the Protestant soccer team Glasgow Rangers were dangerously inflammatory in our Catholic and Irish Republican neighborhood of London. One day, I saw him being helped to the john by a regular who sported the green scarf of Celtic, the Irish-Catholic team. The Catholic gave me a resigned look, and a hushing gesture: “Don’t tell anyone,” he pleaded.

An Ecumenical Pub

Despite Beddy’s previous occupation, The Thatched House had no big-screen televisions, nor any other electronic intrusions. The most local of the borough’s three league soccer teams attracts Irish Catholic support. When the team won an important trophy, an army of drunkenly chanting supporters occupied the streets. A platoon marched into the pub. “Not tonight, lads,” smiled Beddy. They left like lambs.

There are within a further three or four minutes’ walk several Irish Catholic pubs, some favored by people from particular counties. Within five to ten minutes walk, there are pubs favored by Black Londoners; gay pubs (one for drag acts, another for people who are turned on by leather clothing); pubs that serve cuisines from French to Thai
The Thatched House was—and still is—ecumenical.

Within Hammersmith, our neighborhood has no natural center, but is within a square formed by four main roads. These also mark the boundaries of our electoral ward. A more representative system would be to deem as the electorate the regular drinkers at The Thatched House, my wife once suggested, only half joking.

She did successfully run for election—within the official boundaries, of course. Then, while still in her thirties, she died suddenly. She had become very popular in the neighborhood, and I was very conscious of this when one day I walked into The Thatched House with a new partner on my arm. I need not have worried. In its own quiet, warm, way, the pub made her feel at home.

I had also wondered whether her father would approve of me. A connoisseur of pubs, he had barely crossed the threshold of my chosen local when he extended unreserved approval.

A Club for All Classes

In the mid 1980s, Beddy let it be known that he wanted to retire. Regulars protested but in the end had to accept fate. Popular wisdom has it that no one is indispensable, but Beddy was the exception. For 21 years, he had run a pub that must have been a goldmine for its owners, Young’s brewery. Their attempted replacements for him ranged from the dull to the daft to the drunk and the dishonest. In recent years, The Thatched House has staged a partial recovery, but as a successful “gastro-pub.”

It no longer fulfils the role of a permanent town meeting, a center for the venting of gossip and serious information, a club for all classes, a reading room… Despite that, I still pop in occasionally, and have a pint with my neighbor Arnie, who remains loyal to The Thatched as though Beddy were still there.

I am one of a larger group who defected to The Andover Arms, which is a four-minute walk. There, Tom and Maura Mahedy serve a superb pint of Fuller’s.

Arnie often knocks on my door with items of news. The other day he came by to say that Beddy, who had been widowed for some years and in ill-health, had ascended to the great saloon in the sky.

Largely on the strength of his soccer career, and especially as he had played for his England, I emailed The Independent, a national newspaper to which I sometimes contribute, and suggested they assign a sportswriter to produce an obituary. I indicated that I would be pleased to add a few paragraphs on Beddy’s subsequent career. The obituaries editor of The Independent thought this was a good idea, and acted upon it. No other newspaper followed suit.

There were in that week obituaries for pundits, politicians, planners, psychologists, and policemen. What about publicans? In serving the sinners among us, they teach us to love our neighbor.

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The newspaper, aimed at the half of Belgium that speaks French, was angered by the fact that I listed only two beers from its territory: Orval and Chimay Grande Réserve. Given the decline in the complexity of Chimay, I had a tough time deciding between it and Rochefort. Perhaps I should have sidelined both in favor of Saison Dupont. That is one of the many problems in compiling such lists.

If the newspaper is a daily, you will be put on the spot. You may even start a war. The reporter, behind his notebook, or at the other end of a telephone line, or perhaps on email, will want instant answers. He may be the only non-drinking journo on the paper. After a night on the town, your brain may not be working very well. Geographical balance is something I always consider, though it distorts the end result. No doubt people would complain about that, too.

The greater problem was the ranking given to the beers. The Belgian newspaper had placed them in order, like a league table, with Duvel (from the “Flemish-speaking North) at “Number One” and Orval way down. The newspaper argued that these positions be reversed.

The “positions” were based on a page layout in another newspaper. The Belgian paper had taken its story from The Independent, a national newspaper published in Britain. The Independent had photographed each beer in the bottle. Each had a separate text, displayed like an extended caption. The beers had then been arranged on the page in a way that highlighted the differences in the shapes of bottles and the colors of labels. I had not ranked them or scored them.

Even then, I was annoyed with myself when I saw The Independent and realised that I had not included Saison Dupont—or, for example, its neighbor, Bush Beer. In these situations, even in my books, I always miss something which, in retrospect, I would have included. This can be embarrassing. These are not tablets handed down by Moses, but word does get around.

The awarding of points or rankings is notoriously difficult, but the word “best” is superlatively troublesome. In some categories of beer, there may be an obvious best; in others, there isn’t. The Ten Best Belgians? In that case, as you might expect, I wanted also to demonstrate the diversity of styles. A further factor was that they all had to be available n Britain.

So, were these really the ten best? I am not sure it is possible to devise such a list. Why did I try? Because they offered me a whole page, in an influential national newspaper, to highlight beers that the consumer can find in the supermarket, and that are substantially more interesting than the usual drinks.

I could have told The Independent that, while some beers are better than others, none is “best.” They would not have changed the name of this series to accommodate me. To turn down the offer of a whole page in a national newspaper would have been to look a gift horse in the mouth. After years of fighting for coverage, I would hardly do that.

Treasured Memory Syndrome

After the difficulty of scoring and ranking comes the problem of treasured memories. My first tastes of Orval and Chimay, in the early-to-mid 1970s, were delightful shock.

The bitterness of Orval was even greater than that of the legendary British ale White Shield Worthington. I later learned about the semi-wild yeast Brettanomyces, and recognised its influence in the woody, hessian-like, horse-blanket dryness of Orval. Another semi-wild strain, or perhaps several, gave a clove-like spicy dryness to the White Shield of my youth.

In more recent years, none of these brews seemed quite as I remembered. Was I suffering from the “treasured memory syndrome?” This thought renders me cautious in revising my written opinions, though I will do so once I am convinced. No beer can remain exactly the same. Strains of barley and hops change over the years, as does equipment. Nor is a brewery obliged to do what writers desire but, if a great beer loses some of its character, that should be reported.

Younger writers have a lesser context, but fewer treasured memories. One aspirant who beat a path to my door some years ago was a student called Christian Debenedetti. I encouraged his interest, and he later very ably documented the changes in Orval. Though they were significant, and to be regretted, it is still a great beer.

Chimay’s beers are still complex brews, but markedly less so than they were. At first, I blamed this on adjustment to a new brewhouse, but years have now passed. Another writer friend, Jim Leff, raised some questions in an article and was dismissed by Chimay as having “misunderstood” a discussion with a brewer there. Jim recently drew my attention to the ingredient labelling on French bottles of Chimay:

“Made exclusively from natural products: water, malted barley, wheat starch, sugar, malt extract, hop extract, yeast.” None of this will kill you, or even corrupt your morals, but it does not evoke a monastery garden.

The Brewing Father

The last time I was at Chimay, I raised some of these points, and my comments were greeted with pained indignation. “We thought you were our friend” seemed to be the message. I am. Chimay was one of the first breweries I visited when I was researching the original edition of The World Guide to Beer in the mid 1970s.

The brewery was scarcely known outside Belgium. I was a highly experienced journalist, but it was only as a consumer that I reckoned to know my beers. There were no “beer writers.” My every naïve or stupid question was addressed with clarity and care by Father Theodore, the brewer.

I did not know then that this puckish monk had worked with the great brewing scientist Jean De Clerck in the shaping of the Chimay range. De Clerck must have been a wonderful tutor. Father Theodore had a brewing scientist’s knowledge of water, barley varieties, hops and yeast.

He demonstrated a quality which he identified 15 years later, in my ”Beer Hunter” TV films, as “Benedictine patience.” He was keen that I should understand brewing, especially its Belgian dimensions—not just the ways of Chimay. He complimented me on the tenacity of my questions, and later told me that my writing was causing Chimay to flood the world.

My memories of Father Theodore are aired in my book The Great Beers of Belgium. My favorite recollection was the day, soon after his retirement from the brewery, that he faxed me, saying he was bored. The Order is silent, but St. Benedict did not legislate for communication by fax. With holy thoughts to think, I don’t suppose monks are supposed to permit boredom. In the last two or three years, I lived in hope of a text message.

Earlier this year, Father Theodore slipped away to the Auberge in the Sky. I was on the road somewhere, and did not hear in time to publish an obituary. He was in his eighties, and his achievements were commensurate with his long life.

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If we miss each other in the crowd, I shall be sorry, but it is understandably popular. There will be about 25,000 people there.

I shall be even more regretful if we have already failed to connect; if our date for a beer is well past time, and the first weekend in October fading in the distance.

Everything fades eventually, though the distant memories are often clearer than the recent ones. There have been not only sad anniversaries this year but also happy ones. I have been remembering the time that Charlie Papazian, the guru of homebrewing, came down from the mountains (the Rockies, in his case) and made his first visit to London. He stayed at my house, and we went to the Great British Beer Festival.

“Do you think we could do this in America?” he asked. He says that I responded, “Yes, but what would we do for beers?” Homebrewing was doing well, but microbrewing had barely begun to emerge. There were only four or five micros, and fewer than 20 regional breweries, but he somehow managed to create a Great American Beer Festival.

Forgive me if I have told you all of this before. It’s just that this year’s GABF is the 21st, and that thought has nudged me into a rare moment of reflection. By helping Charlie in London, I played a part in the creation of the Great American Beer Festival. It turned out to be a very big creation, and scores of people have played major roles over the years, but I remain very proud of my very small part. The Great American is the world’s best beer festival. None comes close in the diversity of beers available.

Across the United States, homebrewers drove this diversity, bringing enormous dedication and skill to their creations, and often turning professional. This new industry was serviced by Charlie and a growing team of enthusiasts. A competition for homebrewers, a conference for those who wished to turn professional, and the festival have all grown out of a single beer weekend.

Many of the homebrewers, and even some of the new professionals, were trying to produce beers in styles they had never tasted. Sometimes, their only reference was a (probably slight) description in the 1977 edition of my World Guide to Beer. On the odd occasion, judging the homebrewers’ competition, I would be the only person present who had tasted a commercial example of a particular style. My descriptions were not very detailed, but they helped lay the foundations for today’s judging criteria.

I had been discouraged from detail by my publishers, who were afraid that the book, which was aimed at the consumer, would be “too technical.” They were worried that anything remotely thoughtful would be “too difficult” for beer-drinkers. In their hearts, they thought that people who liked beer couldn’t read.

People who like beer are fair game for derision. “Homebrewers!” some polystyrene man would laugh. “My Uncle Hiram used to homebrew down in the hollow. His bottles always exploded.” I heard this story so many times that I wanted to explode a few bottles myself. The polystyrene men were usually radio journalists on whose shows I was appearing in order to publicize the Great American.

This was arranged by an ostensibly bookish fellow called Daniel Bradford, who emerged after a couple of years as the director of the festival. I would come into town (initially Boulder, later Denver), a day or two ahead of time for media appearances. I usually had a new book, or an update of my Pocket Guide to Beer. A “London-based, internationally-known author on a book tour” was more easily sold to the media than a beer festival run by people who lived in Boulder. No matter that the beer festival would soon be internationally known.

I would then struggle to squeeze a mention of my book and the essential information about the festival into a three-minute interview conducted by someone who kept telling his audience that the festival was a celebration of homebrew; that the products on offer would have names such as Toad-Spit Stout; and that all the bottles would undoubtedly explode.

One year, I wrote an article about the festival for The Denver Post, emphasizing the point that it was a festival of American beers. The paper illustrated it with bottles of imported beer. I complained, but understood. Such things happen, I know. Daily newspapers are produced quickly. I first worked on a daily when I was 18 years old, and still contribute to one, writing an occasional column on beer. (Unrelated: The Denver Post subsequently started a beer column by the estimable Dick Kreck.)

The Denver Post’s rival, The Rocky Mountain News, once covered the festival with a single paragraph, which appeared a week after the event. It was an A.P. story, on a New York dateline, and noted that the event was “said to be the biggest beer festival in the U.S.” I wrote a letter, from London, suggesting that a reporter in Denver might have been better placed to write a properly researched story. I did not receive an answer. The Rocky Mountain News much later became one of the sponsors of the festival.

Some people in Denver still don’t realize that they are not just one venue on a national tour. “Where do you go next?” someone asked me. “Japan,” I answered. He looked surprised. “Not somewhere more like, say, Kansas City, Missouri? The whole show goes to Japan?”

I liked the idea of a place being “more like Kansas City, Missouri.” I tried to imagine putting the KC test into practice. Supposing you are on tour, and arrive in Albuquerque, New Mexico. “I don’t know. It’s not much like Kansas City, Missouri, is it? Shall we head on to Oklahoma City? I’ve heard that’s a bit more KC–ish.”

More like KC than Japan? Supposing you went to Dallas, Texas? Would that be more like Japan? Could be…

Excuse that digression. I needed to stretch my legs. The “show” does not go to Japan, but I do. In Tokyo, I appear in a “show” called “Whisky Magazine Live.”

The Great American Beer Festival has thus far stayed within the Rocky Mountain Empire, whatever that is (I guess Fort Collins is a frontier station). Denver is capital of that Empire. There is much missionary work to do even in Denver, but it is one of America’s best beer cities. That’s another reason to visit at least once a year, but this is an indulgence, like our conversation today, spiked with private jokes. We need to do missionary work everywhere.

While the main event stayed in Denver, there was one year a smaller, out-of-town, production in Baltimore, but it lost money. I was not able to be there, and therefore cannot report first-hand that the big crowds were absent. I believe it was the wrong time; possibly the wrong place; but the right idea.

The U.S. has the world’s greatest diversity of beers, but a significant majority of Americans don’t know that, cannot believe it, or don’t care. In this respect, Americans are no different from anyone else. Some people just don’t understand the importance of beer. We have to take beer to them. This may involve being patient: there could still be jokes about exploding bottles,

Was that one I just heard? No, it was a bag of pennies dropping. Kansas City used to be regarded as more or less the geographical center of the continental U.S. It would be convenient.

There are some good breweries in the area–and the folk at Boulevard once sent me some excellent jazz CDs. Kansas City jazz, of course, All we need now are some red-headed women.

Read more of our favorite columns by Michael Jackson

Beer Around the Garage and Workshop

If  you like to putter around, then you may be spending a good amount of time in the workshop and garage. Besides enjoying a beer when you’re putzing around, here are some ideas for using beer as a tool in your kit.

Flying Bug Catcher. If you like to work free of flying insect, then setting up a trap may be a solution for your workshop and garage. Many bugs are attracted to the smell of beer and you can construct a simple one-way in, noway out trap for flying insects. Punch holes in a metal-lidded jar or plastic lidded tub just large enough for winged insects to get inside. Pour beer into the container deep enough to drown the bugs and replace the lid. The insects will climb in and be unable to escape, creating a no-fly workshop zone for you.

Polish. Beer is an effective polish for metals and surfaces. Dampen a rag with beer and rub down the surface of choice. In some cases you may want to rinse the surface with clean water when you’re done. In other instances you don’t need to rinse the beer from the surface, for example if you are scrubbing garden pots. . Keep in mind that rinsing will help keep critters away from the finished project as well as keep it from being sticky to the touch. The residual sugars in beers will be attractive to our small multi-legged friends so rinse them completely if you’re not interested in making new friends.

Soaking. Do you have an old coffee can or catch-all containers of assorted screws, nuts, bolts and washers? Beer can help dissolve or soften the rust if you want to salvage those priceless project parts. The acidity of the average beer  will help eat away at rust that has developed on metal parts and pieces. If the beer you’re using is still carbonated, thee CO2 will assist in the release of the rusty particles. Pour beer into a watertight container, place the pieces in the beer and set your timer for an hour. Stirring or shaking the pot a few times during their bath will help agitate the parts and get beer into more nooks and crannies to do its work.

Winter seasonals, as you can see in the following pages, often reflect our natural surroundings. Leaves, snowballs, cabins and lots of Santas. Other times, it’s what comes with your beer be it a glass or book. Anything to make their product jump off the shelves and into your hands.

Let the shopping begin..

Shmaltz Brewing Company HE’BREW Holiday Gift Pack

This unique, limited edition gift set comes with eight beers from HE’BREW – and candles – so you can make your own Menorah. Lest you find yourself at a crossroads on just how to do this, it comes with instructions—and some suggestions like placing a bottle of beer in Matzo Ball soup—on how to put your beer Menorah to good use. Did I mention it comes with a glass as well? L’Chaim! $30. Available at Whole Foods, Total Wine, BevMo, Cost Plus and other retailers.

Mikkeller Red/White

A Britsh red ale meets a Belgian wibier in this seasonal offering from Mikkeller, brewed with American hops and bitter tropical orange peel.

Holy Grail

What better way to enjoy your bottle of Holy Grail ale than with this commemorative goblet? This 12oz ceramic cup would make a great addition to your drinking vessels collection.

Shiner Holiday Cheer

An Old World Dunkelweizen brewed with Texas peaches and roasted pecans. The malty flavors of this dark wheat ale are enhanced through the use of malted barley and wheat, from the seminal Texas brewery Spoetzl.

The Brooklyn Box Set

This limited edition comes with the massive Garrett Oliver-edited The Oxford Companion to Beer. Signed by the brewmaster, this book crests in at almost 1,000 pages and features 160 beer industry experts weighing in on a myriad of topics and claims to be the most comprehensive book published on the subject of beer. As if that wasn’t interesting enough, it comes with a bottle of The Companion Ale,an old style wheat wine. $80. It can only be obtained in person at The Brooklyn Brewery, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY.

Beerables Global Glassware Set

This 8-piece glassware set is the perfect starter kit for those who want to be able to pair their beer with the right glass. Includes pilsner, kölsch, hand glass, tulip, snifter, chalice, lambic and weiss glass. $39.99 www.beerables.net

2011 Brewery and Brewer of the Year Awards:

Small Brewing Company and Small Brewing Company Brewer of the Year
Sponsored by Microstar Keg Management
Chuckanut Brewery, Bellingham, WA
Will Kemper

Mid-Size Brewing Company and Mid-Size Brewing Company Brewer of the Year
Sponsored by Brewers Supply Group
Firestone Walker Brewing Co, Paso Robles, CA
Matthew Brynildson

Large Brewing Company and Large Brewing Company Brewer of the Year
Pabst Brewing Company, Woodridge, IL
Bob Newman

Small Brewpub and Small Brewpub Brewer of the Year
Sponsored by Briess Malt & Ingredients Co.
Pizza Port Ocean Beach, San Diego, CA
Yiga Miyashiro

Large Brewpub and Large Brewpub Brewer of the Year
Sponsored by Brewers Supply Group
Pizza Port Carlsbad, Carlsbad, CA
Pizza Port Brew Guys

Brewpub Group and Brewpub Group Brewer of the Year
Sponsored by Country Malt Group
TAPS Fish House & Brewery, Brea, CA
Victor Novak

American-Style Wheat Beer – 20 Entries

Gold: SchWheat, SweetWater Brewing Co., Atlanta, GA
Silver: Shredders Wheat, Barley Brown’s Brew Pub, Baker City, OR
Bronze: Wagon Box Wheat, Black Tooth Brewing Co., Sheridan, WY

American-Style Wheat Beer With Yeast – 38 Entries

Gold: Leavenworth Boulder Bend Dunkelweizen, Fish Brewing Co., Olympia, WA
Silver: Tumblewheat, Altitude Chophouse and Brewery, Laramie, WY
Bronze: Leavenworth Whistling Pig Hefeweizen, Fish Brewing Co., Olympia, WA

Fruit Beer – 56 Entries

Gold: Raspberry Tart, New Glarus Brewing Co., New Glarus, WI
Silver: Brainless on Peaches, Epic Brewing Co., Salt Lake City, UT
Bronze: Derailed Black Cherry Ale, Erie Brewing Co., Erie, PA

Fruit Wheat Beer – 48 Entries

Gold: 5 Lizard, 5 Rabbit Cerveceria, Chicago, IL
Silver: Mr. Pineapple Wheat, SanTan Brewing Co., Chandler, AZ
Bronze: Vintage Blonde Ale, Blue Moon Brewing Co., Golden, CO

You tear the pull-tab off a tallboy can of Oasis, a double IPA from a microbrewery halfway across the continent that showed up without fanfare a local retail outlet.

You have the bartender draw you a pint of The Public, a hoppy pale ale from the first packaging brewery in Washington, DC, since the Eisenhower Administration.

Did you ever think about the long and winding road that your beer took from the brewery to your lips?

It’s a Big Beer World

There are over 13,000 brands of beer registered in this country, according to the National Association of Beer Wholesalers. Some accounts, like the Westover Market in Falls Church, VA, will take whatever you’ve got. The grocery store lines it shelves with over 1,000 brands for takeout and operates a small bar and beer garden. “It’s chaos!” laughs Zachary Duarte as he shows me their cold room, which contains an Everest of kegs and cardboard cartons, alongside boxfuls of dormant tap handles.

Most businesses need to be more selective. Recently, I was allowed to sit in on a meeting between Dogfish Head Craft Brewery’s Sam Calagione, a partner in Manhattan’s recently-opened Birreria brewpub, and the managerial staff as they plotted beer orders. The group poured over a printout listing units sold over the past month for 35 brands: house-brewed and guest beers, bottled and draft. Written next to each were comments like “sold three 50-liter kegs in five days,” “spikes depending on crowd,” “failed to sell well.” Calagione says he’s a proponent of “craft beer Darwinism”: “If a beer is doing well, award the brewery with another tap to see how it goes.”

Birreria, perched on the fifteenth story of a high-rise cater-corner from Manhattan’s famous Flatiron Building, attracts a young, adventurous, well-heeled crowd who are willing to pay $10 a pint for house beers like the chestnut mild and thyme pale ale, and as much as $38 a bottle for some of the specialty imports from Calagione’s Italian partners in the venture. “People want a back story here. They want to have fun,” remarks general manager Allen Arthur.

Note cards. Basically, you need to provide a method for guests to take notes. This can be either formal or informal. Formal choices might include the BJCP Checklist score sheet, while an informal solution is a simple one-page rating form listing all the samples along with spaces for notes on appearance, aroma, flavor and overall impression/notes. If you pre-print the forms, you can include reference information (name of beer, brewery, style, price, where purchased, age, etc.).

Pencils/pens. Not everyone will bring writing utensils. Have enough for everyone.

Glassware. Personally, I prefer to use hard plastic tasting cups (5 to 8 oz.) over glassware. Glassware often has an odor from the dishwasher, and can break. Hard plastic cups can crack, but they usually don’t have a plastic odor, they are reusable and they are quite clear. Cleanup is much easier with plastic cups. You can wash and reuse them, or simply recycle them.

Dump buckets. This isn’t wine; you don’t spit when tasting beer. However, not everyone will like every sample, and some might want to control their consumption.

Openers. Most craft beer does not use twist-off caps, so have openers handy. Some beers are corked, so you may wish to have a corkscrew available as well.

Beer (duh). If you forget to bring this, your guests won’t be happy.

Palate cleansers. Provide relatively bland crackers or bread during the tasting of the beer. These aren’t to eat as much as they are to clean the residual flavors from your mouth.

Food. If you aren’t doing a beer-and food-pairing event, you should provide some food to help absorb some of the alcohol and keep people more engaged. Be careful about passing food that will overshadow the beer being served, or save the food for breaks.

Water. Make sure it doesn’t taste of chlorine or other off-flavors. Buy bottled water if your water doesn’t taste good. Use this for both palate cleansing and general hydration while drinking.

Descriptions of beers. Guests will want to know about the beers you are serving. Provide descriptions from the breweries, or from online reviews.

Style guidelines. These might be useful for geekier audiences. BJCP Style Guidelines can help describe the typical characteristics of the beer styles you are tasting.

Table mats. Strongly consider providing a pre-printed form with the names of the beers you will be tasting. At a minimum, provide blank white paper so guests can identify their beers. You will be serving the beers one at a time, but guests will likely want to keep around some of their samples for comparison. Having a place to put them means that the samples won’t get mixed up.

Ample room. Needless to say, you should have room enough for guests to have all their samples on the table at once. If you can arrange the room layout so people can look at each other while they discuss the beers, it will be more of a social format. You can setup the room lecture-style, but this will make it seem more formal and stuffy. You can even do this standing up, provided you have enough side tables where people can put their samples and write their notes.