Tuesday, April 25, 2017

Ergonomics 101 at The Three Brothers

Back in my 'other' College days three of us [I think one of ‘us’ was ‘Thor’ - a giant Norse looking dude with long platinum blonde hair, the other was Justin - who hated all 'just in' puns] went to out to the pub - in Kenilworth - The Three Brothers Pub - it’s gone now - there was a Grocery Store opposite. It was right before a big exam.

The place was small and dark, and the bar itself was tiny. We had the whole place to ourselves and sat at a table near the front at a plate glass window, ordered a few beers and got into some serious discussion - I think it was about Descartes, and how it could be that thinking he was, was such a stellar achievement. Anyway, we’re having a second round and someone decides that they are hungry - we all are - so someone asks the bartender if he has pizza. Sure - he has pizza - how many slices? How about 6 slices? Bartender nods and head off into the back. Discussion on Descartes continues - he invented analytic geometry as an instrument of torture for school children. I think we all agreed on that point.

“Rene Descartes walks into a bar. The barkeep asks, would you like a beer? Descartes replies, I think not, and promptly disappears." Robin Williams.

I am busy watching a man that looks like our bartender’s twin brother - bright red shirt, stocky, dark brown hair cut close -- he’s walking into the Acme Supermarket across the street. I study him for a second - look back and see our bartender has not returned from the back, and we continue talking - this I remember - we are now dry and considering refilling our mugs directly from the tap. No sign of life in the place.

”There was this magnificent mathematical horse. You could teach it arithmetic, which it learned with no difficulty, algebra was a breeze, it could even prove theorems in euclidean geometry, but when you tried to teach it analytic geometry, it would rear back on its hind legs, kick ferociously neigh loudly and make violent head motions in resistance. The moral of this story is that you can't put Descartes before the horse." Ugh. That’s just as bad as an empty beer glass.

“Ale, man, ale's the stuff to drink
For fellows whom it hurts to think:
Look into the pewter pot
To see the world as the world's not.
And faith, 'tis pleasant till 'tis past:
The mischief is that 'twill not last.”
A.E. Housman

I am occasionally glancing out the window, and I see the bartender’s twin brother again, exiting the building, with what sure look to be two frozen pizzas in his hand. I point him out to the other guys - ‘Hey - that sure looks like our bartender. And he’s got frozen pizza.’ First reaction from Thor - ’Nah - the lombungr - I’ll bet my hammer…err...Odin's beard - that couldn’t be him - the guy wouldn’t just leave us here with the bar unattended.’ We keep watching - he’s headed to our right, crossing the street and….he’s out of our sight. He’s either our bartender, his twin, or we’ve entered the Twilight Zone. Having Thor with us isn't helping matters.

So another few minutes go by, and lo, our bartender emerges from the backroom with 4 paper plates, and hands us each a plate. He’s got one for himself as well. We get another round. Pizza doesn’t taste bad at all - just like the kind we have at home in the freezer actually. Hit it with the crushed red pepper flakes. Our conversation changes then to how much profit we figured the bartender made - including his free lunch. We even ask him, a bit too late, ’Hey - how much for the slices?” Doing the math - he made out well.

We were so thoroughly impressed with the service and the events of that moment that we bought T-shirts and changed into them before heading back for the exam - the T-shirts were light blue colored and said, “I just had a great time at Three Brothers Pub’ and featured an inebriated old man clinging to a lamp post. I remember we walked into the exam room and I grabbed the mic and belted out a line from 'Yes the River knows' by The Doors.

Free fall flow, river flow on and on it goes
Breath under water till the end....

Thor was already seated at a desk, trying to focus, but turning red and bursting out with some hysterical laughter. SHHHHHHH!!! [I was getting an A in the class no matter how I did on the exam] and I was chased away by a moderator to a desk with a blue book.

I had just had a great day at Three Brothers Pub studying ergonomics.

What did the the Zen Buddhist say to the bartender serving store bought frozen pizza at the Three Brother’s Pub? "Can you make me one with everything?" After paying, the Zen Buddhist said, ‘Hey buddy - I gave you a $20 - where’s my change?’

And the bartender replied, “Ah…change comes from within.’

Monday, November 30, 2015

Physical Graffiti Re-enacted

So once in awhile I like to create ideas for myself, and find things I can do locally in the greater New Jersey / New York area. I knew for many years that the buildings used in the album cover to Led Zeppelin's Physical Graffiti were located somewhere in Manhattan - but wasn't sure exactly where - I remember a friend telling me it was St Mark's but wasn't 100%. A quick Google search revealed the actual location: 96 & 98 St. Mark's Place.

Well I found the opportunity, headed over listening to the album, got a few shots - and immediately recognized a few challenges - my first was an excited tourist from someplace, pointing to a page of his tour guidebook with one hand, and waving at the building with the other, exclaiming, excitedly, over and over again, 'Beb Bebbelin! BEB BEBBELIN! BEB BEBBELIN!' I nodded, and said, 'Yep....Beb Bebbelin.'

Don't get me wrong, I was excited too - but even though he saw I was lining up the shot, he proceeded to stand directly in front of my camera for about 5 minutes taking selfies. If he'd have asked, I would have taken a shot with his camera phone, and send him one of mine. I decided not to include a photo with him in it, in case his wife ever found this blog post. Clearly a popular spot, many people came by while I was there to take a shot. Traffic, lighting, pedestrians, parked cars, selfies - some minimal workarounds.

Second challenge was going to be squaring off this photo - I couldn't get a better elevation, and I am literally up against the wall of the building opposite - so I relied on Lightroom to correct the tilt and gain square. I tried to shoot with as much elevation included as possible, knowing that I was going to lose quite a bit of real estate once I started in on correction. The sky was going to be cut anyway, so not a problem there.

The bicycles I decided would need to stay - I couldn't lose the sidewalk, and I couldn't shoot over them. They were interesting anyway, so why not leave them in.

That shot actually had great potential - really liked the dynamic action, but I ended up using a different one. Here's a crop of the doorway.

Third task was to make it gritty - like the album cover itself. To do that, I took multiple shots and created an HDR in Photomatix, which I further processed using Lightroom. Example here - this shot includes all 5 floors.

Note the shop on the ground floor - "Physical Graffitea." Someone was lucky to have scored a photo of Robert Plant standing outside the shop in 2014 - you can find that online.

Fourth challenge was that the buildings were too tall; the album had apparently removed the Fourth floor to make the album cover work for a 12x12 square. That was a bit tricky - as I was attempting to work out the vertical, horizontal and distortion and work out exactly where to trim to avoid too much of an obvious cut. I gave it a shot using PhotoStudio. The fire escapes were key to the alignment.

Fifth challenge, the album cover itself spells out the name of the album with letters on the window shades - I didn't have that luxury, so I used PhotoStudio again to put them in. This is one of the raw photos I used during the process.

Looked a bit of overkill - not the exact look I was going for as a recreation. I created multiple layers and blended them down to look more realistic. I also needed to trim for square and remove part of the facade. Really an amazing piece of architecture.

Here's the final....hope you like it.

"And if you feel that you can't go on
And your will's sinkin' low
Just believe and you can't go wrong
In the light you will find the road
You will find the road..."

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Thursday, January 16, 2014

Good Beer has nothing do with Hipsters

Higher quality beers and ales are [finally] becoming more popular and prevalent in drinking establishments across the nation. Instead of it being recognized that people were finally just fed-up with their typical 8 choices of weak flavored, yellow colored, carbonated water with a very low alcohol content - it's being perceived negatively as being associated with the 'Hipsters.' I still don't even have a firm grip on what a hipster is, but I do know something about beer.

Let's talk about beer.

What is beer?

The history of beer dates back thousands of years - maybe even so far as 9,500 BC. Here's an example of a liquor store receipt for beer which dates to 2,050 BC. Beer has been around for quite awhile - much longer than a hipster.

"6-Pack, cigarettes + tax = 11 shekels"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Alulu_Beer_Receipt.jpg

Beer is, first a foremost, a carbonated alcoholic beverage, created via a fermentation process, in which sugars transform over time into alcohol. It is the third most commonly consumed beverage on our planet, after water and tea.

Beer consists of several core ingredients, including: water, hops, grain, malt and yeast. How much / what kind of which ingredients, mixed over what period of time, conditioned at what temperature, produces a large assortment of choices of different kinds of beer.

In medieval times, with the lack of knowledge concerning germs and the proper treatment of drinking water, it was actually safer to drink beer.

On November 30, 1487, the Reinheitsgebot, or beer making purity laws, were decreed in Germany. It set the stage for ingredients, fair pricing, and competition with bakers -- for grains also needed to make bread. Those in violation of these German 'purity' laws could be fined, or have all of the barrels containing their beer confiscated without recompense. Make a note of that.

Beer is featured in a quite a few of the impressionist paintings from the 1800s by Edouard Manet, so I will plug them in here and again to add some color.

A good glass of beer - Manet

Beer making process

The process of beer making includes boiling a large amount of water, steeping cracked grain [the husks are soon removed], adding malt and hops over the period of the boil [>/= one hour], cooling and adding yeast, and then storing in a container of some sort while the fermentation process ensues [yeast consuming the sugars and producing alcohol as the by-product].

Water - is water. However, for the beer making process, it is normal to use water which contains whatever naturally occurring vitamins and minerals are contained - in other words, avoid tap water with it's added toxins fluoride and chlorine, but don't use distilled water either.

Grain - for the most part, for making beer, you are using barley. However, depending upon the type of beer you are making, you could also be using oats, wheat, rye or even corn [maize]. You wouldn't use rice - rice has almost no flavor, it's cheap, and it's more customary for making Saki in Japan.

Malt - without going into too many details, malt is an extract which is created from grain - normally barley. It's the sugar used in the fermentation process - the yeast is going to react with the malt and create alcohol. Malt can be used in a dry powered form, or in a thick, syrupy, molasses type state.

Hops - hops are the female flowers of the hop plant, Humulus Lupulus. They have an extremely pleasant aromatic smell - a bit like pine - or commonly expressed, like the scent of really good marijuana. Hops have been involved in beer making for centuries, and it is believed that this is more-so because of the stabilizing effect, preventing the beer from spoiling and also increasing it's alcohol content. There are many, many different varieties of hops - but they generally break down into three essential types, based upon their purpose in brewing - bitters, flavors and finishers.

Yeast - It's a microorganism classified as a fungus - you already know that. There are a few different types of yeast used in making beer - the most common is the same one used in making bread. Interestingly enough, back 500 years ago, people didn't know what yeast was and would simply allow this process to begin naturally, by leaving their large vats of beer open to the air, and adding their yeast by luck of the draw - also known as 'spontaneous fermentation.' This practice still exists today.

As a segue, the type of yeast and method of application largely determines what kind of beer you are making.

Types of Beer

While there are many, many different kinds of beer, they can essentially all be classified as one of two different types - Ales and Lagers. The difference between these two is largely the yeast and temperature of fermentation - Ales are top fermenting, Lagers are bottom fermenting. To give you an idea of how many different kinds of ales and lagers there are, here's a small list:

Ales - Ambers, Belgians, Alts, Bitters, Barleywines, Blacks, Browns, Darks, Reds, Blondes, Pales, India Pales, Lambics, Porters, Stouts, Whites and Winters.

Lagers - Bocks, Mai-Bocks and Pilseners.

All of these different types of beer have rich histories associated, and that history is primarily European in nature, dating back in many cases hundreds of years, coming from countries like: France, Ireland, England, Czechoslovakia, Holland, Germany and Belgium.

The beer drinkers - Manet

United States - 1980s

When I first started to drink beer, I discovered that I had no taste for any traditional American styled beer - I couldn't stomach it. I could only drink beer which was imported, primarily from Canada, Holland or Germany. Over time, and with the exploration of different liquor and beer stores, I was able to find a larger variety of choices, and try different beers from all over the world - Italy, Spain, Brazil, Mexico, Poland, Scotland, England, Czechoslovakia, India, Japan, and China to name only a few. 'Imports' as they were called back then, could traditionally be found in a certain section of your local liquor store - and that section was not traditionally very large, or very diverse, and they were always more expensive than domestic brands.

So let me be clear here - in terms of choices, it was limited. Maybe there were some 8 different kinds of beer available at your local bar, or restaurant, or liquor store - but they were pretty much all Pilsners, and they all tasted the same. 4% alcohol, yellow, and watery, with hardly any flavor. Your bartender or barmaid would rattle them off in staccato fashion, with their eyes turned inwards and upwards, reciting a litany of the same old crap - flavorless yellow carbonated water one, flavorless yellow carbonated water two, flavorless yellow carbonated water three, etc.

Hmm...is that a bottle of Bass Ale on the bar on the far left and far right?

A Bar At The Folies-Bergere - Manet

The King of Yellow Carbonated Water

Who said that yellow carbonated water was beer? How on earth were people so fooled? Well, marketing had a lot to do with it, as did power and money. Budweiser, Miller and a handful of other breweries dominated and owned the market [this was before Coors managed to launch a fleet of refrigerated trucks across the Country]. Plus I have to say, if you never traveled outside of the US, anywhere in Europe in particular, you would have been painfully ignorant as to what real beer was.

Edward McClelland of Salon says that from its inception, Budweiser was a "triumph of marketing over quality."

The quality was questionable: Adolphus Busch, the company's founder, called his beer “dot schlop" and preferred to drink wine and St. Louis drinkers were not fans of the drink either, but the Busch family still bought licenses and paid rent for bar owners in exchange for serving the product.

Budweiser had its glory days in the 1950s when Anheuser-Busch helped strengthen its national brand by sponsoring shows featuring Jackie Gleason, Milton Berle, and Frank Sinatra. It also promoted its beer by sponsoring sporting events and branding stadiums. By the 1980s, Budweiser was synonymous with American culture.

When Bud raised it's price, everyone raised theirs as well. They were the market leader for decades. And they did it primarily through marketing and shaping the brand, spending millions. Here's one notation to give you an idea, using just the SuperBowl alone, from 2002 to 2011, AB spent $246M.

http://247wallst.com/special-report/2012/02/01/the-eight-brands-that-wasted-the-most-on-the-super-bowl/3/

Not a Manet

Ignore the marketing - if the beer is good, you don't need it.

Let me expound upon a few things I said earlier concerning how beer is made -
The process includes boiling a large amount of water, steeping cracked grain, adding malt and hops over the period of the boil, cooling and adding yeast, and then storing in a container of some sort while the fermentation process begins.

Here are a few of the differences - to make cheap, watery, yellow colored carbonated beverage which is 4% alcohol by volume [abv], and make an enormous profit, what would you do?

1. Use more water
2. Use less ingredients
3. Expedite the fermentation process
4. Substitute cheaper ingredients
5. All of the above

If you were the 'King of Beers' you'd chose #5 - all of the above. This is about >50 years of a large corporation leveraging extensive marketing and market control to create the effective illusion that they have been producing 'beer.' It reminds me of an old Ivory soap commercial - while expounding on the many positive properties of the soap [it floats!] and why it is the best, a young girl chimes in with, 'I didn't know there was any other soap.' Hard to make a fair comparison without anything to compare with.

And even despite the recognition by the public at large concerning the perception of what is beer, and what isn't - there is still some sort of tradition and stigma around continuing to drink Budweiser, because it's part of being American - an age old American tradition. It's not even an American company any longer dummy! They blew it, and it was bought [ironically], by the Belgians in 2009.

The beer drinkers - Manet

The 1980s continued

There was a very small hole-in-the-wall type place in Greenwich Village - the custom was to buy a bottle of beer, the clerk would brown bag it, open it, and then you would wander the quaint streets surrounding Washington Square Park, enjoying a bottle of this or that style of beer. The cops left you alone - and no one asked how old you were. The selection in this one place - can't remember if it was on Sullivan or Thompson, was quite good, and it was built along the lines of singles, as opposed to 6-packs [oftentimes the experimental investment in a 6-pack of beer you'd never tried before could lead to disaster]. Open the cooler door, and there were some 100 brands to chose from - all single bottles. And it was here in 1983 that I had New Amsterdam Ale for the first time - cue the music.

New Amsterdam began in 1982, brewed in Utica, NY by the FX Matt's Brewing Company. It was amazing. It was as if someone had purposely attempted to go back in time and re-introduce the concept here in the Americas, of what beer was supposed to look, smell and taste like. It was like an explosion of flavor, and it went great with chocolate, which was odd.

And another great memory from those days was the Anchor Brewing Company, which had been in business here in the US since 1849, and their Liberty Ale, introduced in 1975. Note their write-up.

The champagne-like bubbles, distinctive hop bouquet, and balanced character of Liberty Ale® revives centuries-old ale brewing traditions that are now more relevant than ever. First introduced in 1975, Liberty Ale® is brewed strictly according to traditional brewing methods, and uses only natural ingredients — pale malted barley, fresh whole-cone Cascade hops and a special top-fermenting yeast, and water.

http://www.anchorbrewing.com/beer/liberty_ale

Within the US, Samuel Adams began to become popular around this time, and a renewal process began here in America, like a religious revival, as more of what was called 'Micro-breweries' began to emerge. People began to recognize two things - one, what real beer was really all about, and two, that they had been duped into drinking yellow water.

It was very slow to spread, however, and many times, the best you could do in any given restaurant or small liquor store was Heineken. This was the emergence of the era of the micro-brew, and it was a long time in coming. New beers were coming to market from all over the Country - and in the style of the traditional ales and lagers which had been around for hundreds of years! I found different places with larger selections, and started to collect the bottles of all of my favorites - I would amass a collection of some 200 or so different kinds of bottles, toss the entire collection into the recycling, and start over. Today I still know some 10 great locations to go to, and I'm easily in the thousands of different types of beer sampled.

In the cafe - Manet

The emergence of the Micro-brew and homebrew

So the micro-breweries began to emerge. Many failed over time and are no longer with us - and it's really a shame. Some were just too early for the curve - New Amsterdam, by way of example - now just a memory. With the emergence of micro-breweries also came a new term, 'Craft beer.' Rhymes with 'crap beer.' I don't know who created this term, but personally I think it sucks. There is actually a difference between the term 'Micro-brew' and 'craft beer'

http://cabmgmnt.hubpages.com/hub/The-Difference-Between-a-Craft-Beer-and-a-Micro-Brew-Beer

however, the trend at the moment is to ignorantly lump them all together and call them 'craft beer,' when in reality - they should all be called 'REAL BEER.' What's this got to do with Hipsters? Again - not a goddamned thing. In the beginning, there was beer. The United States beer market turned the concept of beer here into piss water. Beer is back. It's flourishing. Now when the bartender rattles off their list of beers it actually includes beer in the list.

Corner of a Café-Concert - Manet

Home Brewing

I am going to say it was in the 1990s that the home brew concept became popular. Again, a lot of it revolved around people that were interested in making real beer. Yes - there was the cool side to it, that you were actually making it yourself - there could be an economical factor to it as well if you paid attention to what you were doing, and like the Reinheitsgebot, there were laws - not concerning purity or ingredients, but around how much beer any homebrewer could legally produce in a given year. But in the 1990s, many stores opened up, creating a booming new market.

I was fairly early to the homebrew game. My first introducton to it came by way of a gift and I think it was 1992 - it was a DELUXE starter kit - containing two 6.5 gallon buckets, a 3 lb can of [pre-hopped?] malt, a packet of yeast, sanitizer, priming sugar, tubes, brushes, bottle caps and a capper.

You can still buy this type of kit, and a similar recipe can also be found - but now it is called 'American Lite Ale.' For laughs:

(Makes 5 gallons) A lite beer similar to the major American brands. Not much flavor, not much bitterness, not much of anything to tell you the truth. A good beer for general mass-consumption. Uses dry rice extract as part of the base.
This kit does not contain any grain, only Liquid Malt Extract and Dried Rice extract. No grain bag is needed.
Estimated Original Gravity: 1.035
Estimated Alcohol Percentage: 3-4%SRM (Color Range): 3.3

http://morebeer.com/products/american-lite-ale-extract-beer-kit.html

With only three pounds of malt, these other meager ingredients, and 5 gallons of water, I made weak flavored, yellow colored, carbonated water with a very low alcohol content.

Get it? Lot's of water + little ingredients and you get Budweiser. It's cheap, it's easy to make in mass quantity and it's not really beer - in the time of the Reinheitsgebot the entire plant would have been simply shut down and contents confiscated.

Horribly disappointed, but not discouraged, I went to a local brew supply store [at this time, I had three in my immediate area]. I went in and explained my experience to the store owner, who was quite busy brewing up a batch and testing it while we talked. He laughed at me. Three pounds of malt! Of course you made Budweiser! The standard for five gallons of water would be around SEVEN pounds of malt - more than twice the ingredients included with the beer making starter kit.

One point I missed until now - all of the traditional American yellow beers fall into an alcohol percentage by volume [ABV] of somewhere between 3 - 4%. That is great if you are on a diet, or want a light beer at lunch. Normal beer, as it's been brewed for centuries, as it's been made in Europe for hundreds of years, is going to be north of that - say, 4 - 6%.

The sad part to this story is that all of the home brew stores in my area eventually shut their doors. With the expansion of the internet, it made it unnecessary to travel to a store, when you could just as easily purchase a kit, or make your own, online.

One example I have used in the past is Midwest supplies.

http://www.midwestsupplies.com/

I began making beer in earnest, producing some 17 batches over the next few years. I made a red, a barleywine, a pale, a winter - but mainly, I made IPAs. And the ingredients didn't include rice. Normally I went somewhere between 6 - 9 pounds of malt [dry and liquid combined], and 4 to 6 ounces of hops, including bitters, flavors, finishers and sometimes fresh hop flowers to add to the batch as it fermented, in a method known as 'dry hopping.' It 'warnt' cheap. Some of my IPAs were quite successful, and I say this largely based upon the opinion of others. I still make an IPA on occasion, but to do it justice, it takes know-how, the right ingredients, money and time. You can't quickly churn out an IPA every 3 weeks, and you wouldn't want to - because 3 weeks is too short a period for a real beer like an IPA to condition.

At one point in time, Budweiser was promoting the 'freshness' of their beer, citing yesterday's date stamp on the packaging as the proof! Similar to wine, beer has a fermentation cycle, including a peak. Unlike some red wines, beer is not built to last for years and years and improve with age [with the exception of Thomas Hardy Ale and maybe a few others], but at the same time, it needs time to ferment and condition - as in, one month minimum. As a standard, I put aside a stack of 'testers' in 12 ounce bottles, and crack one every week to get an idea where I am. Usually you hit a nice peak somewhere after a month - and then to stop the fermentation clock, you refrigerate all the beer, and enjoy.

IPA - India Pale Ale

Let's go a bit more in-depth on one ale in particular, which is my personal favorite, the India Pale Ale. The first known use of the phrase in recorded history, as per Wiki, was in 1829, as an advertisement in the Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser.

While this style of beer was created in England during their occupation of India, the myth associated was that became a popular new style of beer due to the high amount of hops which were added to the barrels, in order to protect the beer from going bad during the long voyage from Britain to India - unfortunately, probably not the case. A quote taken from Wikipedia:

The term pale ale originally denoted an ale that had been brewed from pale malt.^[3] The pale ales of the early 18th century were lightly hopped and quite different from later pale ales.^[4] By the mid-18th century, pale ale was mostly manufactured with coke-fired malt, which produced less smoking and roasting of barley in the malting process, and hence produced a paler beer.^[5]

Among the first brewers known to export beer to India was George Hodgson of the Bow Brewery, on the Middlesex-Essex border. Bow Brewery beers became popular among East India Company traders in the late 18th century because of the brewery's location and Hodgson's liberal credit line of 18 months. Ships transported Hodgson's beers to India, among them his October beer, which benefited exceptionally from conditions of the voyage and was apparently highly regarded among its consumers in India.^[7] Bow Brewery came into the control of Hodgson's sons in the early 19th century, but their business practices alienated their customers. During the same period, several Burton breweries lost their European export market in Russia because of new tariffs on beer, and were seeking a new export market for their beer.

At the behest of the East India Company, Allsopp brewery developed a strongly hopped pale ale in the style of Hodgson's for export to India.

IPA is really the peak of beer making - introducing a strong, light colored hoppy styled beer. There are many, many fine examples of IPA, with a number of distinctions on the variety and volume of hops used. On the market today are hundreds of different kinds of IPA.

Recommendations

Here's a short list of some of the better IPAs I have tried

1 Heady Topper - The alchemist
2 Avery IPA - Avery Brewing
3 90 Minute - Dogfish Head

2x IPA - Southern Tier
Gemini - Southern Tier
Stone IPA - Stone Brewing
Barton Baton - Dogfish Head
Raging Bitch - Flying Dog
Jai Alai - Cigar City
Tupper's Hop Pocket - Tuppers
Terrapin Hopsecutioner -Terrapin
Hoppy Boy - Twisted Pine
Big Eddie Imperial - Leinenkugel Brewing Company
Hooker IPA - Hooker
Racer 5 - Bear Republic

If you've never tried an IPA before, may want to start off with one of these:

Hopnotch IPA - Uinta
Flower Power - Ithaca
Harpoon Ale - Harpoon Brewery
Goose Island IPA - Goose Island

One more recommendation, an American Pale Ale, which has a very solid mix of malts and hops, is 'Live' by Southern Tier.

Conclusion

People come up with bizarre and oftentimes stupid labels to identify larger trends - it's normal. The actual 'hipster' trend really began when the term was originally coined - back in the 1940s? As it stands today, it is so generic that people find it hard to even describe what a hipster is... Good beer, meanwhile, has been around longer than the fork - it's just been in hiding here in the US.

At first, the big US Dominated breweries failed to notice, or capitalize on this new trend. People were getting fed up with drinking piss - they wanted real beer. So they began to invest in small micro-breweries and in making beer for themselves. The big boys tried to cover - late to the game - creating new labels, new marketing, buying microbrews to rebrand - but they were too late. Their stranglehold on how they had defined, owned and controlled the concept of cheap yellow carbonated water as 'beer' had ended.

You can be a baby boomer, a Generation Xer, a Hippy, Yippie, Yuppy, Puppy - whatever it is that some clever moron came up with to look to try to ID and group a large population together with a label - it's not relevant. The emergence of the change in perception around what we know here in the US as 'beer' has been happening since the 1980s. I think that the real proof of this transition is obvious from the choices on the menu today in a restaurant and the selection you can find in your local liquor / beer store / supermarket, in addition to the failure of Anheuser-Busch to maintain it's market lead, and to remain a US owned and operated business.

Good beer doesn't discriminate against anyone that appreciates it - maybe as opposed to making hollow jokes, you ought to give it a try.

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Friday, January 10, 2014

Bit on Grant Wood's icon, American Gothic

When it's overly conventional and too well known, I'm typically not interested - but for whatever reason I decided to learn a bit more about the American Gothic painting, and it's artist, Grant Wood, so here below is a quick summary.

Born February 13, 1891, Grant DeVolson Wood grew up in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He is listed as having been born 'four miles east of Anamosa, Iowa' whatever the hell that could possibly mean. Here's a quick picture of the home he grew up in. I couldn't help but note the similarity to the house he later selected for his painting - in particular, the sharp peaks / gables.

Grant Woods original home 1

Grant studied art first in Minneapolis, and then the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His favorites styles included Impressionism and Post-impressionism and he made several trips to Europe in pursuit of the study of same. He had a keen appreciation for Flemish artist Jan van Eyck, and some of this influence can be seen in his work.

Portrait of a Man by Jan van Eyck, 1433, oil on panel 2

Grant ends up back in Iowa. It's 1930. In May of that year, he is given credit for his design, which is used in the stained glass window at the Memorial Building in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Not for nothing, but since he attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, he's probably seriously looking for a subject to enter into the annual show coming in October.

Memorial Building stained glass window in Cedar Rapids, Iowa 3

It's August, 1930. John Sharp, an art student at the University of Iowa, frequented the Little Art Gallery in Cedar Rapids, as did Grant Wood, and Edward Rowan.

John Sharp 4

Edward Rowan selected the town of Eldon, Iowa, for an experiment in bringing an art exhibit to a rural area - it's thought that he chose this location because of his association with John Sharp, who lived in Eldon. Grant Wood was invited by Rowan to attend, and he did so.

As the summer studio preparations continued, Sharp's parents agreed to serve among the local hosts for the event named the "Eldon Art Center," scheduled for August 1930. Rowan's plans called for renting a local building, offering rotating exhibits, providing art classes to young people, then concluding with music and art appreciation courses. Funding for the ambitious undertaking came from the American Federation of the Arts, the sponsoring body for the Little Gallery. Grant Wood, eager to assist the Eldon efforts, offered his talents and requested a local tour of the community. The young man who volunteered, John Sharp, made his mark in American art history with that decision, for it was Sharp who showed Wood (on a car ride) the iconic house, located in Eldon, that became the background for the masterpiece, American Gothic (1930).5

Seated at our left is Grant Wood, crouched in center is Ed Rowan. 6

The story is related that John Sharp took Grant with him for a drive one afternoon, where Grant Wood spotted the Dibble House, with it's out-of-place Gothic window. It's not clear if Sharp knew about this house and had it in mind to show Grant, or if Grant simply noticed it during their drive - I mention this because the actual location of the house is a bit off the beaten path. As it turns out, the gothic window itself was a Sears catalog mail order, but the reasons as to why the Dibbles had this particular style of windows is going to remain a mystery forever. Built in 1881, Charles and Catherine Dibble were it's original owners, but lost the house [year unknown] when it was sold to pay for their over due taxes. It's possible that a large window which opened easily and swung out was needed in order to move certain large sized furniture into the space, which had a very narrow staircase. 7

The Dibble House 8

Here's where it seems to get a bit confusing - Wood has Sharp pull over so that he can make a sketch of the house, which he does, literally on the back of an envelope. Now, either this sketch is sufficient, and Wood never returns to the house for the rest of his life, OR, he returns the following day and makes a better job of it, producing an oil on paperboard [seems a bit more likely]. At some point it seems he requests the permission of the present owners of the house at that time, Gideon and Mary Jones, who have owned the house since 1917, to use it in his painting. At some point in time, he requests a photograph to complete his painting.9

His earliest biographer, Darrell Garwood, noted that Wood "thought it a form of borrowed pretentiousness, a structural absurdity, to put a Gothic-style window in such a flimsy frame house."

At the time, Wood classified it as one of the "cardboardy [sic] frame houses on Iowa farms" and considered it "very paintable." 10

Grant Wood now has his background, so now his idea is to add the sort of people that he feels would live in this type of house. As models for his painting, he selects his sister, Nan Wood Graham, and his Dentist, Dr. Byron McKeeby. Nowhere can I find a reference which indicates any particular social roles Wood had planned for his models [eg, Husband and Wife].

Grant Wood's sister, Nan Wood Graham, and Dentist, Dr. Byron McKeeby

Wood asked his sister to stand in as the aproned woman with the hair pulled tightly back, save for a loose curl. His dentist posed as the farmer in overalls and a blazer. Wood finished the painting in a few weeks and then submitted it to a contest at the Art Institute of Chicago.11

It was the 43rd annual exhibit of the Art Institute, running from October 30th through December 14, 1930, and the painting won third prize - the Norman Wait Harris bronze medal [Norman Wait Harris was an American Banker that had started this award in 1902 - he died in 1916].

American Gothic, 1930, Oil on Beaverboard, 74.3 cm × 62.4 cm (29¼ in × 24½ in) 12

Again, things get a bit confusing here - according to a wikipedia entry [with a reference that does not lend much support or credibility], American Gothic may have initially been panned - allegedly, the judge deemed the piece a 'comic valentine.'

Allegedly [again], a museum patron convinced the institute to award the painting with a third place Norman Wait Harris bronze medal and $300 prize. This same patron, also convinced the Art Institute to buy the painting - whether the part about the patron is true or not, the Institute did buy the painting and has ownership to this day. I was unable to source any information to substantiate the identity of such a patron, or if this account is even credible.

Lore holds that judges passed over the canvas but that Wood found it discarded in a heap and persuaded the judges to award him third place. 13

Wow - well that seems unlikely, however, it is interesting to note that there are multiple claims that Wood's painting was not all that well received - possibly because it was thought to be a work of satire.

It appears that the image and story of American Gothic began to be published in newspapers, beginning with the Chicago Evening Post, October 28th, 1930. In that paper, it gave the description of the figures in Wood's painting as a 'farmer and his wife.'

The news about the painting went on to be carried by a number of newspapers and magazines, including:

       The Chicago Tribune, October 31, 1930
       The Art Digest, November 1 1930
       The Christian Science Monitor, November 8, 1930
       The NY Times, November 9, 1930
   The Boston Herald, November 14, 1930

Many Iowans were exceedingly insulted by the idea that American Gothic was some form of commentary, or satirical portrayal of them, particularly the Iowan women. Additional articles were written attempting to spin away the bad press, and notables of the day praised Wood's work - including Gertrude Stein and Christopher Morley [who unfortunately also were under the same impression that the painting was meant to be a satire of rural life in Iowa].

Grant Wood's sister Nan, who posed for the painting, took it upon herself to write an article, in which she made it clear that the intent of the artist had not been to make fun of anyone, and that the woman portrayed in the piece was intended to be the daughter of the man with the pitchfork, NOT his wife. You can read that article, as well as any of the others noted above, at the Iowa Digital Library, Grant Woods collection. 14

Nan Wood Graham posing with American Gothic 15

Grant Wood died in 1942, and his legacy includes one of the most iconoclastic, and well known paintings in history. His American Gothic is essentially in the same distinction and honorary class as The Mona Lisa, The Scream, Guernica or Starry Night.

Green Acres parody of American Gothic, 1965

For decades this painting has been parodied, right up until the present, and I am sure it will continue to be, particularly in 2030.

I don't think it's ever wise to judge any artist based on a single example of his or her work, so let's end this post with a few other examples of Wood's work - unfortunately, I don't know the dimensions or mediums used - I assume that these are all oil.