One Iconic Beer
I am very excited to announce the launch of a new podcast: “One Iconic Beer.” The first episode will go live on Monday, and we’re busy putting together the second episode, which will follow in a month. Anyone familiar with my “Making of a Classic” series on this blog will gather the main idea. We’ll be looking at a single beer and unpacking why it has become an icon through its history, accomplishment, cultural impact, and influence.
The idea for the podcast came from All About Beer editor John Holl and, full disclosure, my friend. AAB will host the podcast and John has agreed to following me down a slightly more ambitious path than he might have bargained for. We’re going to interview a couple people to tell these stories; someone from the brewery who can give a personal account of the beer and describe how it’s made, and someone who can reflect on the broader story, providing historical background and the reason for the beer’s stature. I don’t know that he planned on an involved editing process when he pitched the idea, but he was game to give it a shot. I hope the result is richer story than any single person could provide.
If you’ll indulge me, I’ll give you a bit more background on the idea behind the podcast—and perhaps it will whet your appetite for the show.
The Value of Thinking in Beer Rather Than Style
When Americans started making contact with the wider world of beer fifty years ago, they did so through single beers—Guinness, Heineken, Bass. For the most part they weren’t thinking in terms of beer style, a concept that would have seemed as foreign as those beers. They were encountering these single emissaries in their tangible form. They were these amazing, exotic beers from faraway lands, all possibility and mystery. It was a direct and naive (in the best way) knowledge.
Eventually, people would begin to fill in the background. Having tasted a Chimay, we would go on to learn about monastic brewing, the Trappist order, and Belgian brewing. Eventually, we’d talk more about dubbels and tripels than Rochefort and Westmalle. The style-ification of brewing gave us a conceptual framework for placing beer in a historical and cultural context. But there has been a downside to thinking in terms of style.
Fifty years on, we’ve lost some of that tangibility, the blood and bone and tooth of the beer. Style is a heuristic, a shorthand that stands in for a much more complex concept. The problem with heuristics, however, is that they necessarily flatten meaning. In beer, that flattening comes with a real cost. It strips a lot of the value out of a beer and can even reduce it to a kind of bland flavor description. In ice cream, you have vanilla and chocolate; in beer you have IPA and stout. It may not be quite that reductive, but it heads in that direction.
To illustrate the point, consider this thought experiment. How does it change your thinking if I describe a beer as a “double IPA” versus saying “a beer in the style of Russian River’s Pliny the Elder?”
As you ponder that, let me throw on a second question: would you rather read or hear a description of a style, with bland talk of ABV and IBUs and possibly a potted history, or hear about how a specific beer was originally created and came to be a classic? Telling the stories of specific beers is clearly more entertaining. I’ve come to think that it may be more illuminating, as well. Contained within the story of any classic beer are all the elements that describe a style, but they’re more immediate. In some ways, the distance between style and specific beer is the same gap between description and immediate experience.
That’s what I hope we achieve in this podcast. As you may surmise from the picture, we’re launching with the story of Allagash White, which of course entails the history of witbier, one of the more fascinating tales from Belgium. We hear from Allagash founder Rob Tod, who had one of those direct experiences with a witbier more than thirty years ago, tasting a Celis White while at his first brewing job. Celis White is named for Pierre Celis, the revivalist from Hoegaarden who saved the style from extinction back in 1965. We hear about that history from Stan Hieronymus, who wrote a fantastic history of witbier in his Brewing With Wheat. In the debut podcast, we’ll hear how we got from spontaneously-fermented wheat beers in a small Belgian village to a beer in Portland, Maine that may embody the modern style better than anything made in witbier’s country of origins. Each month we’ll have a new beer, and a new exploration.
A few notes on the podcast. You’ll be able to find it in the All About Beer podcast section of the website, or on your favorite podcast service. Please bear with us as we get our process down. We’re both print guys, and producing a more complex podcast like this means cutting and arranging audio, which is new to us. Indeed, the process of organizing an audio story is different than an article, so we’re still getting our sea legs. (Not to say that the first episode is bad—it’s awesome! But I do think we’ll learn as we go.) Finally, the podcast’s music is not AI, as has become eally common for stock music now. It comes from Ukrainian artist Anastasia Chubarova.
If you like the show, subscribe and rate it on your podcast service so people can find it. And let me know what you think!