Category: BEER & HOMEBREWING

A Brief Word About Historical Terminology

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Just read a wonderful piece over at the excellent beer history blog Zythophile on the historical changes undergone by the terms “ale” and “beer”: I used to think that their merger into synonymity was pretty much complete in Georgian England at the latest, agreeing with the historian WH Chaloner, who wrote in 1960, reviewing Peter Mathias’s great book The brewing industry in England, 1700-1830: “By the end of the seventeenth century the terms ‘ale’ (originally a sweetish, unhopped malt liquor) and the newer ‘beer’ (a bitter, hopped malt liquor) had come to describe more or less identical products following the victory …

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Beer and the Habsburgs, Plus Lager Confusion

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In my recent post about the economics of brewing and the consolidation of breweries in London in the wake of the Gin Craze, I mentioned that I’m searching for sources on beer under the Habsburgs. I haven’t found all that much, but maybe that shouldn’t be a surprise: after all, wine was preferred in Habsburg Vienna, and the kind of taxation that marginalized wines in England only affected wine consumption in the Habsburg Empire more slowly… though the eventual stratification we see in England does eventually appear in the Habsburg domains as well, and for the same reasons: ‘Modest’ is …

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Rankings and Ratings for Beer: Lessons from the Classroom, and Lessons On the Classroom

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I posted earlier today on Facebook regarding the topic of ratings collection design systems for beer ratings websites like BrewAdvocate (below, referred to as “BA”), based on my experience designing grading rubrics for teaching and student evaluation purposes. I was posting in the context of others arguing that the ratings systems on various enthusiast rating websites were relatively less meaningful in the fine gradations; that a been with a 97% quality rating may not be “better” than a beer of a 95% rating. I responded as follows: Yeah, also because people’s rankings are affected by others’ rankings, and by reputation. I …

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If I Could Brew Now…

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Saigon doesn’t seem to be a great place to be a homebrewer. As far as I know, there’s nowhere to buy grain, yeast, or hops in the city, and while there is  and active community of homebrewers up in Hanoi, there doesn’t seem to be one in Saigon. I could be wrong–and if I am, I’d love to hear more about it–but that’s my impression from scouring the web. This is tolerable, for me, because I brewed a hell of a lot–to the point of exhaustion, and being a bit tired of brewing–by the time I left Korea, and because Saigon …

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On Building a Makkeoli Market

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Zenkimchi wants Korean promoters to stop calling makkeoli “rice wine” for the very obvious reason that it’s actually not a wine. Of course it’s not rice wine, it’s rice beer (or, yes, specifically “rice ale”), as any brewer can tell you. Of course, he sort of bolts past the point that is very obvious in this picture: If you look at that image for a moment, you’ll get why there’s not a hope in hell Korean makkeoli-promoters are going to consider branding makkeoli as “rice beer” or “rice ale.”

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