My friend and colleague, Greg Kitsock, had an article last week in the Washington Post that got me thinking. It was titled Another Layer of Enjoyment and tackled the issue of blending beer, especially with Guinness, as in beer cocktails. It was written to coincide, one presumes, with the then impending St. Patrick’s Day holiday. The two most common of these are a Black & Tan — which Guinness has long promoted as Guinness and Bass Ale (the two shared distribution for many years) — and a Half & Half, which is Guinness and Harp Lager, also a Guinness product. Obviously generic stout and a pale ale or lager may be substituted, but as Guinness has promoted the combinations for such a long time, they are well and truly most closely associated with those brands. I once got into a huge row with the copy editor that Beverages & more used to employ when she changed my text for our March newsletter and switched Black & Tan to Guinness and Harp, and vice versa, without consulting me, so the paper went out to thousands of Club Bev members (the company’s loyalty card) with the wrong information and my name on the item as the author. She was one of those insufferable people who felt they already knew everything and couldn’t conceive of ever being wrong. Surprisingly enough, many continue to spread confusion, with plenty of websites — even bartending websites — with conflicting definitions, including a few that contradict themselves. So perhaps the dilemma is not as well-settled as I believed.

Even Wikipedia, which states that the term Black & Tan, in its meaning as a mixed beer drink, was first recorded in 1899. It’s not listed in my OED, so I can’t confirm that. But after beginning by claiming the two drinks are as I think they should be, they later in the article state that “[t]he two most common types of Black and Tan in the United States use Guinness Draught (not Extra Stout) and either Bass, or Harp Lager,” [my emphasis] which at best is contradictory. When you consider that Harp Lager was first launched in 1960, it’s seems hard to imagine that after 61 years of Black & Tan meaning one thing that it should suddenly make no difference what kind of beer is used, but then I presume the Wikipedia folks who wrote that entry were not on to the finer points of what makes a lager and an ale different. Perhaps they simply assumed a light colored beer is a light colored beer.

I know these drinks are just marketing gimmicks, and possibly not even worthy of discussion, but that ’s the anal-retentive in me. Is there some confusion about what goes in a martini or a gin and tonic? I just think there should be some consensus, that’s all. Am I asking too much? Anyway, there are actually plenty more of these type of mixed beer drinks, many of which are black and something, like black and red or black and orange. Wikipedia has a huge list and a website, No Sheep, has a few more as well. Personally, my favorite thing to add to Guinness is just a few drops Crème de Cassis, which gives it just a touch of berry sweetness. But I’ve never had a name for it — I suppose I could call it a black & currant or a black & black.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day everyone. Enjoy your pint of Guinness, or Murphy’s, or Beamish, or whatever. In Ireland, they’ll be sitting down to a traditional family dinner, which while it may include a dry Irish stout, is not all about the drinking. But here in the United States, the supposed melting pot, we take everybody’s holidays and run them through the cultural meat grinder. When they come out on the other end they’re invariably bigger, glossier, brighter and most people probably think more fun, if your idea of fun is to drink yourself silly every time you have an extra day off. But whatever solemn purpose or commemoration or event is being celebrated it is all but completely erased and what remains is fun, fun, fun. Now I like fun as much as the next guy. I’m a curmudgeon, certainly, but I still like to have fun. But we’re talking about days set aside so that we don’t forget our heritage, the often selfless sacrifices people have made on our behalf or the celebration of religious traditions. And how do we treat those days, almost without exception? We drink. And not just a toast. We drink to excess. We drink until the streets run pink or brown or yellow or whatever with vomit. Of course, we do this to our own holidays, too. Unfortunately, I see this as fairly recent trend. I remember when Memorial Day wasn’t just an excuse to have a picnic or barbecue and drink. I remember when Halloween was just for children and not the biggest keg sales weekend of the year (which it actually is now).

Now I enjoy a party, a picnic, a barbecue as much as the next guy. Any excuse to get together with friends and family is a welcome event. That’s not what I object to. My objection is twofold. First there’s the general over-commercialization of holidays. Second, there’s the way in which the big breweries, mass market imports along with the wine and spirits industries have seized upon each and every holiday as a way to sell more booze. And, of course, I’m not anti-alcohol. I hope that goes without saying but just in case, feel free to read more of what I’ve written before and you should quickly realize that I don’t like the neo-prohibitionists as much as they no doubt dislike me.

As to the first point, the over-commercialization of holidays, I’m going to take it for granted that most people will agree that this has happened. It’s hard to miss that whatever commercial aspects are inherent in a given holiday, they have been wildly exploited and expanded upon. A stroll through the average card shop should be more than enough to drive this home. If not, then how about that stores start decorating for Christmas in October now, sometimes even earlier. Anyway, I don’t want to belabor this point too much because I think most people will accept it and my second point is, I think, more novel.

Before I dive into this further, a little more background is probably in order. I’m also something of a calendar geek and have an almanac blog, too. I started collecting dates about thirty years ago when I picked up a book on mixed drink recipes that had an appendix with a reason to celebrate and have a drink each and every day of the year. That got me thinking and I started keeping a notebook where I’d write down new holidays, famous birthdays and historical events I happened upon. As a result, I may be more sensitive to holidays than the typical person, if such a thing is possible.

Anyway, it seems to me what was once a solemn religious holiday celebrating the patron saint of Ireland on the date he was believed to have died, March 17, 461 C.E., has been perverted into a way to sell more Guinness and all manner of other Irish doo-dads. Several years ago, Guinness gave away an actual pub in Ireland to a winner in America. They did this for a few years running. What happened to the pub and the pub owners once they were out of the spotlight wasn’t always pretty and I suspect that’s why they stopped. Then there was the yearly attempts to break the world’s record — from the Guinness Book of World Records, naturally — for the largest number of people simultaneously toasting, which was accomplished with some elaborate coordination. I’m not even sure what they’re doing these days, since the parent company Diageo has had them off in bizarre directions which have not done the beer itself any favors, and I’ve pretty much given up on them as a brewery. They still seem to enjoy a good reputation, even among beer geeks. Of course, the stuff available here is brewed in Canada. That’s done so they can still put “imported” on the label. It’s a common trick. Foster’s does the same thing, as do a few other larger import beers. There are around 19 or 20 different Guinness beers worldwide, of course, and at least four different ones are sold here. The beer in the widget can, widget bottle (an abomination in my opinion), regular bottle and in kegs are not the same beer; I mean they’re not even the same recipe. I’m not saying there’s anything necessarily wrong with that. They’re fairly up front about it though still, I doubt most people are actually aware of it. So when somebody says they like Guinness, I have to wonder which one? I think it says a lot about peoples’ palates that so few realize they’re drinking completely different beers when they order a can or bottle of Guinness.

To be fair, St. Patrick’s Day isn’t the most egregious of these holidays by a long shot. At least dry Irish stout, which is what Guinness and most other Irish-made stouts are, is actually originally from Ireland. Many other non-Irish beer also advertise themselves for St. Patrick’s Day in about as shameless a fashion as one could imagine. Last weekend, while in Philadelphia, I witnessed part of their annual parade for St. Patrick’s Day. There were the requisite social organizations marching in their green colors, bands, floats for Irish bars and bagpipers. Oddly, one float was blasting the song 500 Miles by the Proclaimers. It’s a catchy little tune, but the band is Scottish, not Irish. To me, that’s a perfect illustration of how little we all know about our shared heritages. Nobody else seemed to notice they were celebrating Irish culture with a song from Scotland, least of all the people on the float who chose the music.

For most of its history, the holiday was a relatively quiet affair in Ireland, a time for family, church and reflection. There were shamrocks and other greenery, but it was mostly for the tourists who flocked to Dublin and other parts of the Emerald Isle.

Sadly, this may no longer be true in Ireland. In 1996, the government of Ireland began what has become a five-day celebration in Dublin known as the Official St. Patrick’s Festival, which this year began on the 13th and concludes today. The stated goal of the festival is the following.

1. Offer a national festival that ranks amongst all of the greatest celebration in the world
2. Create energy and excitement throughout Ireland via innovation, creativity, grassroots involvement, and marketing activity
3. Provide the opportunity and motivation for people of Irish descent (and those who sometimes wish they were Irish) to attend and join in the imaginative and expressive celebrations
4. Project, internationally, an accurate image of Ireland as a creative, professional and sophisticated country with wide appeal, as we approach the new Millennium.

That’s certainly a modern approach to raising revenues for the country through tourism but it feels a bit like a sell-out. Given that the Irish have been shedding their own blood over religion for centuries, it seems odd to me that they’d so cavalierly commercialize their national holiday. But perhaps the momentum was too great and they decided to go with it rather than fight a losing battle. America has a way of ruining almost everything it touches, remaking it our own image of bigger, glitzier and with an eye toward profit, always profit. But when profit is the prime motivator, the meaning of the traditions that binds a people become lost. No matter how rich we might become, nothing can rival the social connections that make us a society rather then a group of self-serving individuals who care nothing for their fellow man.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day! Enjoy it with friends and family.
 

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. What the hell is Diageo doing with the Guinness brand? Are they trying to kill it, make it a mockery of its former self, or insult their customers even more than they already have? If so, they’re succeeding brilliantly. Diageo was created out of the merger between Grand Metropolitan and Guinness ten years ago. The new name was chosen for reasons passing understanding. Why take two recognizable names and trash them in favor of a new one nobody knows? The word Diageo came from the Latin word for ‘day’ and the Greek word for ‘world’. Apparently they couldn’t even make up their minds about what language to create the new company name from.

At any rate, over the last decade Diageo has displayed no respect whatsoever to the legacy, history or taste of the original Irish stout. Guinness had been brewing beer at St. James’s Gate in Dublin since 1759, with stout production beginning several years later, and now they’re even considering closing the brewery. Then there’s the $13 million widget bottle abomination that in 2001 tried to convince people to drink out of the bottle after all, setting the cause of better back again in the process. More recently, they’ve introduced “Extra Cold Guinness,” another useless novelty, and the test marketing of “Guinness Red” in England last year. The latest assault on their brand is “a plate-shaped device called the ‘Surger.’”

For a mere $25, Guinness wholesalers can stop selling Guinness on draft. Instead, they’ll pour it into a pint glass and put in on the “Surger.” Then “the bartender pushes a button to activate sound waves, which course through the liquid creating gas bubbles and ultimately the familiar cascading effect typical of a Guinness pint poured from draught.” One east coast distributor liked the idea, saying. “It gives me a new talking point that I can bring to my customers which is good for us.” Yes, forget about the beer itself, we need more talking points. This same guy “foresees the Surger eventually becoming available to consumers so they can drink a draught-like Guinness at home.”

Brandweek is spinning it like this. “One facet of marketing these days is to create an experience for the consumer. So Diageo will marry its new “Alive Inside” advertising message about the Guinness pour with a plate-shaped device called the ‘Surger.’” Given that there’s another, more important “surge” going on in the middle east involving more American soldiers fighting, was “the Surger” really the best Diageo could come up with? I always marvel at how the large companies strategize over their advertising and marketing messages. I suspect it’s embedded into the culture of big business, and in particular marketing, that nobody says “no” if the boss likes it or if a committee came up with it, once more proving that “group think” is a terrible danger. I always assume there’s some lone voice in the back, not being heard, saying “but what about the beer?” That guy will undoubtedly be fired within the week.

Here’s one of the new “Alive Inside” television spots:

Again, I must be the most out-of-step, uncool guy in the universe, because I find that ad more than a little creepy. Oh, I’ll grant you the music is slick and the effects are cool. But I can’t get past the idea that when I take that first sip, a million tiny men in white suits will be swimming down my throat. Yuck. It’s alive inside! What a terrible allusion to make. Isn’t that going to make the beer crunchy? Yeah, I know I shouldn’t take it so literally, but that’s how I roll. See, uncool to the bitter end.

With at least 4,500 small breweries dotting the Irish landscape, you might be tempted to call this the Golden Age of Irish Brewing, but all this brewing was taking place around 2500 BCE, in the Bronze Age. At least that’s a new theory being proposed by the Moore Group, whose ideas will be published next month in Archaeology Ireland.

Apparently there are these odd features of the Irish countryside called “Fulacht Fiadhs” that include a mound of stones and troughs dug in the ground in the shape of a horseshoe. They are usually lined with either wood or stone. Alongside the trough is a hearth used to heat stones. There something like 4,500 throughout Ireland. Their exact purpose is largely a mystery, although there are many theories. “It is postulated that these pits were filled with water and heated stones thrown in to create a pool of boiling water in which meat was cooked.” This is the leading theory, but as has been pointed out, the sites are generally not littered with the bones of animals or other food-related items, which you would expect to find if they were places of cooking.

Other suggested uses include for bathing, the washing and dyeing of cloth, metalworking, tanning and leather working. In any event, the sites are almost always found near of source of water. The way it was believed to be used was that the trough would be filled with water and then heated stones dropped in to quickly bring the water to a boil.

Billy Quinn and Declan Moore, two archaeologists from Galway, puzzled over this enigma until, nursing a hangover one morning, pondered “the natural predisposition of all men to seek means to alter [their] minds” and wondered if perhaps the Fulacht Fiadhs might have served a very different function. After doing some intensive research around the world on the habits of Neolithic man, have concluded that the Fulacht Fiadh’s primary use may have been for brewing, though they believe it may also have had other secondary uses and functioned much like the kitchen sink.

To prove their theory, the pair had to recreate the process that early Irish people would have used to brew their beer. So they set up an experiment using as close to the original method as they could to try and brew some Bronze Age beer. Here is a summary of that experiment.

The experiment was carried at Billy’s home in Cordarragh, Headford, Co. Galway. Seeking authenticity in replicating our Bronze Age ale we decided that our equipment should be as basic as possible. The wooden trough, posthumously donated by Billy’s granduncle, was 60 years old, leaky, wedge-shaped and measured 1.7 m in length, 0.7 m in width with a depth of 0.65 m (roughly consistent with the average trough dimensions from excavated examples). When filled with water to a depth of 0.55 m, it held 350 litres. After digging a pit, the trough was lowered into the ground and water added. Despite some initial leakage we eventually reached an equilibrium in the water level by simply flooding the immediate area. For the purposes of our experiment we sourced granite and sandstone from Connemara.

The stones were heated in a fire for roughly two hours. Step one involved transferring the heated stones into the trough using a shovel. After 15 minutes we achieved our optimum temperature of 60-70c. At this point we half submerged a wicker basket in the trough and began to add our barley in small amounts to prevent the mash from congealing. Over a period of 45 minutes, maintaining a fairly constant temperature with the addition of occasional heated stones (some of which were recovered from the trough and reheated) our water transformed into a sweet, syrupy, workable wort.

After converting the starches to sugar, ascertained by tasting the mash, we brought the mixture to a boil to sterilise it and simply baled the final product into fermentation vessels. We used spigoted plastic containers with a total capacity of 75 litres. Including the leftover liquid we could easily have produced up to 300 litres of wort. At this point we added flavourings, the majority of which were growing around us in Billy’s garden. These additives were ground in a mortar, wrapped in muslin and suspended in the top of our wort. We added 150 ml of brewer’s yeast after cooling the vessels in a bath of cold water for 3 hours.

We produced what is more properly termed a gruit ale (gruit is a term used to describe the herbal mix used to flavour ale). Through our experiments, we discovered that the process of brewing ale in a fulacht using hot rock technology is a simple process. To produce the ale took only a few hours, followed by a three-day wait to allow for fermentation. Three hundred litres of water was transformed into a very palatable 110 litres of ale with minimal work.

At the end of the process they were pleased with the results. “It tasted really good,” Quinn said. “We were very surprised. Even a professional brewer we had working with us compared it favorably to his own.” The beer itself is said to be a “cloudy, yellowish brew with no discernible head with a yeasty taste reminiscent of weiss beer.”

Here’s the basic recipe for Bronze Age beer:

1. Hot stones rolled through grain to malt it.
2. Grinding of malted grain.
3. Rocks heated on fire.
4. Heated rocks transferred into water in a fulacht fiadh trough.
5. Malted grain in wicker baskets plunged into water heated to 67° C (153° F).
6. Mixture stirred to break down starch into sugars that will react with yeast to form alcohol.
7. Mixture spiked with local ingredients such as bog myrtle, the hop-like bog plant, heather, elderflower, juniper berries and honey.
8. Mixture baled into fermentation vessels, which are cooled in running water before yeast is added.
9. Leave for three or four days to ferment.
10. Drink.

The Moore Group has an extensive photo gallery of the experiment and has posted a video on YouTube of the experiment:

Fascinating stuff. I’d love to try some of that.

I generally eschew going out on the major holidays, primarily because America — and especially the business sector — has turned them into reasons to get drunk and sell crap that none of us need. Much is written about the commercialization of Christmas but, really, is there a single holiday that Hallmark isn’t trying to sell you on the idea that you should buy your loved ones a card to celebrate it? And perhaps most sad of all is how many holidays that used to be a chance to spend time with family, to commemorate something worthwhile or to celebrate a shared history with your community have been turned into another drunkfest. The most egregious of these are New Year’s Eve, Cinco de Mayo, the 4th of July, Halloween (the #1 keg sales weekend for most beer retailers) and, of course, St. Patrick’s Day. Since I essentially drink most days and as a paid professional, I refer to these holidays simply as “amateur drinking days” because it seems like people just go nuts and drink as much as humanly possible. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the holiday’s original purpose, but is used simply as an excuse to drink to excess. And it’s hard, for me at least, to be around such people. They give drinking a bad name, not to mention providing neo-prohibitionist’s fuel for their bonfires of intolerance.

So I was glad to see I’m not entirely alone on this one. An editorial in Pittsburgh’s The Times Leader by Michael O’Hare today discusses what’s happened to our holidays using the recent St. Patrick’s Day as a catalyst. In his editorial, he gives voice to the frustrations of his older Irish-American friend, Seamus, who tells him he didn’t go out on the holiday because he’s no “pop culture Irishman.” Asked to explain, Seamus relates the following.

“Well, you know, the Irish have a reputation for drink. But the Irish were like the Brits, the Welsh, the Scots and any number of nationals and races who at one time shared their time with neighbors in pubs. And, but for the local drunks, they didn’t pound down their beer and whiskey; they savored it, along with the conversation. It was the celebration, not the drink, that was the center of the gathering,” he said.

Exactly. Beer should be savored with good friends and good conversation. I couldn’t agree more.

There’s a delicious sounding recipe for “Carbonnade of Beef” in today’s Belfast Telegraph. Irish cookery expert [their description] Paula McIntyre makes her dish sound tantalizingly good. I defy you to read it and not start salivating.

There was an interesting article in Friday’s New York Times travel section about microbreweries in Ireland.