I started this blog during an interesting moment in American history. George W. Bush had just finished the fifth year of his presidency. The Iraq war had settled into a slow-rolling quagmire, and Bush had just lost a high-profile battle to privatize Social Security. His poll numbers dipped below 40% and kept falling through the remainder of his presidency. Conservatives weren't happy because their president was flailing; liberals weren't happy because he was still the president. A couple years earlier, I had helped co-found a politics blog that was attempting to overturn GOP dominance in Oregon. It was a grim time for all, a moment of political trench warfare. This blog was actually born as an antidote to politics, a place to write about something uncontroversial and fun.
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A bit of background on the quotes that follow. I interviewed Dan in 2013 and was curious about why the early lagers they brewed when I lived there--the early focus of the brewery--fell into the background. In The Beer Bible, I highlight Staghorn as one of the best examples made in the US, and I wondered why it and other lagers weren't featured more. (I have hope that the "craft lager" trend will help New Glarus find a new generation of drinkers for these beers.)
Monet is easy. There's a reason his lush, bucolic scenes are reproduced as posters for dorm rooms everywhere. The colors, textures, and composition delight the eye; it doesn't take any specialized understanding to enjoy them. But try something like abstract expressionism, with splatter art and color field paintings. These works aren't easy; they're neither immediately accessible visually, nor are the compositions naturalistic enough to interpret intuitively.
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Monet is easy. There's a reason his lush, bucolic scenes are reproduced as posters for dorm rooms everywhere. The colors, textures, and composition delight the eye; it doesn't take any specialized understanding to enjoy them. But try something like abstract expressionism, with splatter art and color field paintings. These works aren't easy; they're neither immediately accessible visually, nor are the compositions naturalistic enough to interpret intuitively.
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“It’s a very flocculent yeast and it has a natural tendency to float to the surface of the beer. That can be a mixed blessing during the fermentation, because the yeast is so flocculent it does want to do that at a fairly early stage in fermentation. So the approach taken to encourage it to ferment right to the end is to carry out rousing. The rousing effectively means that we pump from the bottom of the tank up and around this circular [inaudible]--a fishtail/fan arrangement that screws onto the pipe and that throws out a fan of recirculated beer into the top--and that pushes the yeast back down and it keeps the whole thing in a dynamic state.”
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Bryan Roth, beer's Nate Silver, has applied some data journalism to the idea that rare beers dominate "best of" lists--and beer geeks' hearts. Riffing on that, he wondered about causality: do we just happen to like rare beers, or do we like them because they're rare?
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I've gotten a few odd reactions to the announcement that I'll be working on a biography of Kurt and Rob Widmer for CBA last Friday. Just to be perfectly clear: if I do my job properly, you should notice absolutely no difference here at the blog. I anticipate continuing on as I have the last 11 years, providing you all the quality and objectivity you've come to expect*.
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One of the pleasures of doing a podcast with an economist is that occasionally he surprises you. We have long planned to do an episode on the the value of superstar brewers--those folks who have created some of the indelible beers that sell hundreds of thousands of barrels of beer each year. We used local legend John Harris as our example, who brewed some of the first beers at the McMenamins empire, then the classic line at Deschutes, went on to elevate Full Sail, and finally founded his own brewery Ecliptic. How would we calculate his value?
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I'm just beginning year eight of full-time writing, and the project of supporting myself remains a work in progress. Writing itself pays crap, as most people are no doubt aware. There is a tier of professional nonfiction writing that is very lucrative (your Ta Nahisi Coates, Michael Lewises, and Malcolm Gladwells). Somewhere below that tier is the one I'm on--where it's possible to publish books and articles to your heart's content and still not make enough to live on. The entire enterprise of publishing--newspapers, magazines, books, online--has been hemorrhaging money for years, and there's less and less of it to go around.
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Indulge me, if you will, with one last end-of-the-year post. As part of my year-end routine, I went back and looked at the top posts of the year, as measured by the number of direct visits--which basically indicates which posts went viral. When people start sharing my posts on social media, it sends people to direct links, and Google tracks those. Now, of course, there's no arguing that every post on this blog is a delight, so there are no wrong answers here. And yet...
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A look back at my perambulations over the past year. This may or may not be the final year-end post--even though we're trotting merrily into 2017. (Click any photo to enlarge and get an (uncaptioned) slide show.)
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