NanoBryg rss syndication » A Good Beer Blog » February 16, 2010

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• 

  Fully Expect 48% Beerish Stuff Has Been Made

  Posted: February 16th, 2010, 1:51pm CET by Alan McLeod

  

  And it sits in a bottle waiting for the appropriate marketing moment for a price of 127 dollars. Between you and me, I don't really care that it is all about marketing but I also do not care to try this or any other loony strength beer. Drinking it isn't the point. Consider this statement:

  "Beer has a terrible reputation in Britain, it's ignorant to assume that a beer can't be enjoyed responsibly like a nice dram or a glass of fine wine. A beer like Sink the Bismarck should be enjoyed in spirit sized measures. It is important that you be careful with this beer and show it the same amount of sceptical, tentative respect you would show an international chess superstar, clown or gypsy."

  If it weren't for peeking at the use of "sceptical" I would have spat my coffee on my keyboard when I hit the word "enjoyed." Given that we are about ten weeks past 32%, and about as many days past 40% there can't be a heck of a lot of thought going into the recipe. Or the aging. It's all just a variation on Garrett Oliver's comment about the idiocy of the world's saltiest food. Gak even if gak with a ideological point.

  Makes me yearn for beechwood aging all of a sudden. A technique with a purpose related to flavour even if you don't like the flavour.

• 

  Dutch News: "The Consumer Is Being Taken For A Ride"

  Posted: February 16th, 2010, 1:23am CET by Alan McLeod

  Back from a few days on the road and I am shocked - shocked!! - to find out there is an underworld of bootlegged beer out there. The news today comes from the Netherlands but this could be happening in your home town:

  People drinking a beer in Amsterdam have a big chance of it being an unbranded brew. Hospitality businesses are serving illegal beer en masse to get out of stranglehold contracts they complain they have to sign with the established brewers like Heineken... Many cafe and restaurant-holders quietly put unbranded barrels under their taps, because they can save 25 to 50 euros on purchasing and the customers do not taste the difference, Amsterdam newspaper Het Parool reports. The unbranded beers come from brewers with overcapacity in Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands. Insiders in the drinks trade believe that 60 percent of the established hospitality businesses take this route.

  Hmmm: "because they can save 25 to 50 euros on purchasing and the customers do not taste the difference." Isn't that odd. In what other product category could a merry oligopolist demand "stranglehold contracts" when the consumer can't perceive a distinction between the oligopolistic version from a discount one? And then there is that idea in the story's headline: "Most Heineken Beer in Amsterdam is Fake." Can a beer actually be fake? Sure the branding may be stolen and now doubt an example of widespread commercial fraud - a zwendel even - but does that make the beer in your glass fake beer? If you can't tell the difference? Isn't it really just switched? Or is there something so elemental in Heineken or other macro-brews that can be falsified in such an elemental way?