Leap Day in Philly? How about Allagash-a-go-go?

If you haven't heard about the 'new' Trestle Inn (11th and Callowhill), it's a retro go-go bar with a big whiskey selection; worth checking out. Yes, "go-go bar," with dancers in boots and Barbarella-style outfits, not noodie stuff. Weird, I know, but there you are.

Tonight they prove they're not just another pretty...face, or just a whiskey bar: they're hosting Our Girl Suzy Woods for an Allagash Tap Takeover, featuring Bourbon Barrel Black (Belgian-style stout aged in Jim Beam barrels), Odyssey, Saison Mihm (Belgian farmhouse-style ale brewed with local (to Allagash!) honey), and three others (including Allagash White, which we recommend as your cool-down beer after your Allagash workout).

I know I don't post a lot of events, even though I do get a lot of releases on them, but I'm feeling particularly good about Allagash and Rob Tod today, after coming across this video yesterday. Check out Rob talking about me and Curieux and Ommegang and dill starting around 39:45.


Anyway, I'd go to The Trestle tonight, but I've got a once-in-four-years chance to celebrate a good friend's birthday tonight, and that's where I'll be!

Think ahead for Mom

I'm not dead...just busy. Being busy is good, it means I'm making money (or doing interesting things), and that means I can keep blogging.

Meantime, a quickie. I just got a press release urging me to remind my readers that Father's Day is coming and that ties suck, so buy Dad a bottle of nice booze.

I say, Mother's Day comes in just two weeks, and doesn't she need a drink too? I know Cathy likes a good peaty Islay whisky, or a brisk New Zealand sauvignon blanc, or (her fave) a case of IPAs. It doesn't have to come from the kids; all you dads out there owe a lot to the mothers of your children. So get to a liquor store and find her something nice. Who knows, she may let you have some too!

The Naked Pint book launch dinner at Fork

November 16th will see author Christina Perozzi in town for a beer dinner at Fork (6:30 PM, $55 for all the food and beer you see below...and I have never come away from an event at Fork feeling like I'd gotten anything but full measure) to celebrate the launch of her book The Naked Pint, a beer book that opens up beer's feminine side. That's not to say this is all cliches about fruit beers and chocolate beers; far from it. Perozzi and her co-author, Hallie Beaune, are experienced beer sommeliers and presenters, and love beer deeply and fully. The book is more about proving beer is okay for women. Can I get a big "Hell yes!" (I'll be reviewing the book here soon; I got a copy a few weeks ago and I've been reading it.)

Anyway, to match this woman of beer from the west coast, Fork has invited some of the cool Philly-area women of beer: Suzy Woods, Philly Beer Week maven Jennie Hatton, Megan Maguire from Ommegang, Tracy Mulligan from Victory, Seb Buhler from Rogue, and possibly Jodi Stoudt, Whitney Thompson from Victory and Wendy Dormant from Dogfish Head. Quite a line-up, and a lot of experience. But check this menu!

Menu

Spicy tuna confit with capers on focaccia toasts · Grilled flatbread with artichokes and saffron aioli

Victory Prima Pils, Stoudt’s American Pale Ale

Chef’s selection of tapas: grilled house made chorizo with spicy white beans · salmon rillettes · grilled shrimp with grits and smoked tomato jam · vegetables à la grecque · marinated olives

Sly Fox Saison Vos

Seared sea scallops with coriander, caramelized brussels sprouts, meyer lemon jam

Ommegang Rare Vos

Lightly smoked duck breast with spiced croutons, caramelized onion, bacon, parsnips

Dogfish Head Raison d’Etre

Chocolate caramel tart with lemon-thyme chantilly cream

Rogue Chocolate Stout

Helping Women Choose the Right Beer

Too damned funny.

Too damned true.

Women deserve much better. Beer bars and craft brewers take note. And while you're at it, have a look at this (can't believe I'm actually linking to a PhillyMag booze article without wincing).

Why Don't You Drink Craft Beer?

I drink American "craft" beer most of the time when I drink beer. I'd say "almost every time," but I drink quite a bit of non-American craft beer, and I do occasionally wind up with something like a Michelob or a Guinness. But probably 70-80% of the beer I drink is brewed in America, and is not a mainstream-type lager.

I'm also a straight, white male; and I'm like a 0 on the Kinsey Scale straight, 100% German-Scots white. I am neither proud nor defensive about any of that, just laying it out because it's relevant in this context.

"This context" is the aggregate of craft beer drinkers, and if you haven't ever noticed before -- which would be tough, unless you're solidly non-self-aware -- the aggregate of craft beer drinkers is a white swordfight. It's guys, we're white, and we're straight: Straight White Males. The floor of a big fest, like the GABF, is thronged with them (this pic from the 2008 GABF shows about 12 women that I can see, I don't see any black folk, and, well, an Internet picture doesn't do gaydar). There are exceptions: plenty of women like craft beer, I know some black, Latino, and Asian folks that do, and I know a couple gay and lesbian craft drinkers (and yeah, there are probably more than I know). But work the numbers, and you're looking at a group that's almost 9 out of 10 white straight guys. (Craft brewers aren't too much different, looking at who was up on stage to accept GABF awards this year (and last year (and the year before...)))

How come? I know why I like the stuff -- no, wait...maybe I don't, but I for damn sure know I do like it, liked it from the first full beer I had, and liked craft beer almost as quickly. But I don't know why it's so exclusive to SWMs.

Thing is, with everything I drink -- wine, beer, liquor -- there are SWMs drinking "the good stuff," whether it's single malts, old growth zinfandels, craft beer, what have you. Without going into stereotyping, a lot more women drink good wine than drink good beer, gays and lesbians have similarly been known to enjoy good wine, and black folk have gone into cognac in a big way. My point: it's not a fear of flavor.

Is it us? Does the behavior, character, stereotypes of straight white men add up to something everyone else just doesn't want to be around? I do remember hanging with a black couple, friends of ours, at an Irish bar Cathy and I liked, and the guy asking, "What the hell is it with white folk, anyway? You get a couple Guinnesses in you, and you all start singing!" Is it that? (I'm pretty sure he was kidding...I am, mostly.) These days we all get along in the workplace -- pretty much -- so I'm guessing this isn't it, although interpersonal strain is a weird area.

Maybe it's something much simpler: nobody ever asked. A lot of conversation in craft beer aficionado circles (sounds so much better than "talk among the geeks") is about how to get other people to drink and like craft beer. They talk about it all the time over on BeerAdvocate. But it's always about "my brother" or "this guy at work." White guys talking to white guys.

I know I try to get women to drink craft beer, and I've had some success. But as for gays and African-Americans, these days, after doing this beer/booze gig full-time for 13 years...most of the gays and non-white-Americans I know, like most of everyone I know, already drink craft beer, and that's how I met them.

We need some diversity, for diverse reasons. First, it is always nice to get some variance of opinion and thought. As brilliantly illustrated here and here, and here, getting a view from somewhere other than SWM-ville is a good thing. The SWMs are cool, I love us, but we tend to group-think (as any other group does, and the more homogeneous the group, so goes the thinking). Break it up.

Second, different people bring different tastes, different desires. I've always said we need more kinds of brewpubs; we need more kinds of everything to do with beer. Bringing in new groups to drive that difference is good. Do I think that because someone is gay/female/black they would like something other than me? Not necessarily, but chances are better than zero that they might.

They're also more market. It is in every craft beer drinker's interest to get more people turned on to craft beer. (Well, except the snooty little snots who get off on liking something no one else 'gets' because it brings meaning to their life, and they can always worship some tiny output brewery, much like the cork dorks and their subscription-only grape juice.) The more folks who drink it, the more places they'll sell it, the fresher it will be, the better off and more stable the breweries will be -- kind of like we've been seeing in the past three years, only more so. Getting more people, more diverse people, turned on to great beer variety will help that process along immensely.

So...open challenge to craft brewers, to craft drinkers, to other beer bloggers. Think about how you can be more inclusive. Tweak your advertising? Recruit diversity? Get your SWM blinders off and realize that other people might like beer too? Get out into some places you haven't been before, and talk beer. You've got the SWMs, the people that put you in your comfort zone. Now stretch. Talk to people. It may not be easy, but it may not be as hard as you think. We've got an African-American president who likes beer, and drank craft beer, in a brewpub. Big wedge.

I'd love to see this happen. Because I really do believe beer will save the world -- not quite sure how, but it's got a lot of potential -- and the more people working with us, the better.

Kentucky Bourbon Festival: This is The End...

Not much more to be said. I got my tuxedo on (no, sorry, no pictures, and actually, there's no pictures from the whole night -- I left the memory card in the damned laptop!), basted myself in the air conditioner, and went outside to catch the shuttle -- no way I'm driving to the Gala. It was a gorgeous night, warm but not hot, some huge soaring cumulus clouds piling up in the east, catching the sun, Maxfield Parrish-style. The line, as always, was incredibly long, but moved well, and soon I was strolling the floor of the tasting "tent."

The first person I ran into that I knew was Heaven Hill president Max Shapira, who grabbed my arm and said, grinning, "Let me buy you a drink!" He did get me lined up right quick with a Henry McKenna BiB on the rocks (always grab that when I can), and we chatted a bit, just stuff, and then he passed me on to his marketing maven, Larry Kass. We got caught up, I thanked him for the great lead-in he gave me on my latest Mass Bev Biz story*, and he told me about the effect the Ryder Cup had on KBF this year: events sold out, but at a much slower rate. Why didn't they change the date? Hard to say.

On I wandered, shaking hands with friends in production -- Dave Scheurich at Woodford, Truman Cox at Buffalo Trace -- and press relations -- Susan Wahl at Heaven Hill, Angela Traver at Buffalo Trace -- and yes, a nice glass of Four Roses Single Barrel, damned nice whiskey. It was not long after that when I ran into Whisky Magazine's Gordon Dundas and my evening went down the tubes.

Well, kind of, and it certainly wasn't Gordon's fault. Gordon actually was good enough to let me know that our respective magazines, which were supposed to have been unboxed and displayed at the bag-check tables** on the way into the dinner tent by this time, were still sitting on a pallet in the back corner of the tasting 'tent.' Well, holy crap. He'd talked to Festival people about it, and they said once people had cleared out of the 'tent' into the tent (no, really; just think of them as two large spaces connected by a hall with restrooms), they would get the mags onto the tables. Well, okay, it would be impossible to do it while they were in the 'tent,' and people always take the mags on the way out anyway. We'll take a look mid-meal, Gordon proposed, and see how they've done on that. It sounded good, and we celebrated our collaboration with a Russell's Rye.

Then it was dinner time. The beef was quite good, the beans good, the rest of it...okay. Oh, the cake was quite good. After a bit, I went looking for Gordon, and couldn't find him. Hmmm...I gotta take action. I went out, and no mags were out. I went next door, and there was the co-chair of the gala, looking just wiped out, and I dumped my magazine problem in her lap. Oh, they'd completely forgotten, and they were sorry, and they'd get them out there. Can I help? Sure! So I started lugging boxes of magazines out the bag-check tables, as did the co-chair, the security guard, and a couple other folks. Gordon showed up shortly -- he'd been in line forever for dinner ("The Bourbon Festival seems to be all about queues," he said, with some asperity) -- and pitched in. We both wound up handling each other's mags, very co-operative. We had a lot of mags out in fairly short order, sweat like pigs, and decided it was time for more whiskey.

I hung out some more with the Buffalo Trace folks and some of the press guys I'd met at Beam yesterday, talked to Freddie Noe and Parker Beam a little, set up an interview appointment with Barton's Greg Davis (jeez, he whipped out his iPhone and starts saying, "Well, when's good, Lew?" Hell, I didn't have my damned calendar with me; guess if I'm gonna ask people for interviews, I should carry it!), and then decided I'd had enough. The free shuttle took me back here -- great idea, not sure who sponsored that -- and...that was it. I'm going to finish this, pack, and that'll be it for another year.


*Ask if it was a good year for straight whiskeys, and all you’ll hear about is the small batch bourbons, ultra-aged ryes, single barrel Tennessee whiskeys, and special Canadian bottlings, and that’s where the romance is, and that’s where the growth is, and that’s what’s driving the market! You don’t hear about the cases of flagship brands that continue to move things along every day.

Reality check, in the form of Heaven Hill’s marketing guy, the grinning, gravel-voiced Larry Kass. “Numbers can’t lie,” Kass said, dropping the facts on the table (he was checking the 2OO8 Adams Liquor Handbook). “The market is not driven by the super-premium whiskeys. It can’t be driven by super-premiums. They’re what, 75O,OOO cases out of 14 million? If you want to be generous? If you take just the top five brands [in the category], you’re talking about 72% of sales. There’s not a super-premium to be found among them, and there isn’t until you get down to Gentleman Jack, which is 12th, at 178,OOO cases.

“Look, there’s no doubt about it: the top-end brands are continuing to perform very well,” he said. “The supers continue to get a lot of the attention and that’s great, they have great stories to tell, they’re banner products. But the cases are in the meat and potatoes brands: Evan [Williams], Jack [Daniel’s], and Jim [Beam]. Those brands are continuing to grow very nicely. The distinguishing characteristic of the straight whiskey category is that the mid-tier brands are doing well, and that’s a feather in our caps.”

Pure Larry Kass: he has high-end whiskey, and he loves to talk it, but Evan Williams pays his mortgage. Well, actually, Burnett's Gin and Christian Brothers brandy pays his mortgage, but Evan Williams pays a good chunk too!

**When you get to the Gala, which you've paid $140 for the privilege of attending, you get a black cloth bag. Each distillery pours samples in their own glass, some of which are quite nice. And people (okay, women) collect them and put them in the cloth bags (sacks, they call them), 8 or a dozen. All too often, they'll just dump the whiskey out. And when they go into the dinner tent, they check them. They had to start offering this service because so many people were taking a dozen glasses into the dinner tent...and breaking them. Me, I put two glasses in the bag and handed it to the first determined woman I saw. Everyone's happy.

Beaumont Makes Predictions

Seems like I'm seeing a lot of Stephen Beaumont this year. We were in Miami at the Cheers Conference together, we're going to be touring Germany and Belgium in about a month, and he's coming to town for Philly Beer Week. I'm looking forward to it; Steve's a good friend and he's got an uncanny knack for finding good places to drink.

So you should see more of him, too. Specifically, check out his blog over at That's the Spirit.com, where he's just posted the last of five predictions about beer in 2008. The predictions are:

1. Wood-aging increases
2. More malty beers in response to the hops shortage
3. "Chicks Dig Beer" (nice note of my Portfolio column on that, thanks)
4. Premiumization: the trend to trade-ups will continue
5. Higher prices from a variety of pressures

As always, these are nicely reasoned and thoughtful, and make sense. Take a look.

Beer and women

My latest Condé Nast Portfolio column is up: "Half a Market Waiting." It's some New Year's resolutions for the brewing industry: try marketing to women, you dimbulbs. Women are estimated to be 25% of the American beer market, but you'd never know it from looking at beer ads (macro and craft, thank you).

Yet brewers run scared of wine and spirits taking sales away. Well, hell, boyo, you've pretty much rolled over on the whole female market, what do you think's gonna happen?! Who are these geniuses? Can I have their jobs?

Just kidding. I'm having too much fun with this one.