What Do We Use to Taste Our Food

I'm sure it will come as a shock to many of you that Riss and I started brewing our own beer about a year ago. (Well, Riss started brewing and I started occasionally helping her brew and occasionally being greeted when I got home from work on a Sunday with a statement like, “You like, kolsch, right?”) It has been a ton of fun and the beer has been fantastic. The most powerful taste experience I've had happened fairly early on when I drank one of our saisons. It was towards when I usually go to bed, I was a little peckish and decided to have a beer instead of a bowl of cereal. Beyond how great it tasted, drinking that saison felt physically good, as if it were biologically, bodily beneficial; as if the usually very abstract sense of health and nutrition materialized as an actual sensation of flavor. And, being me, rather than just enjoying it, I thought about it.

Beyond, perhaps an extra level of vitamin-B from the yeast, can we prove that home brew is, in fact, better than commercial beer? Could we chemically analyze the ingredients to determine if a certain kind of hops or malts or grains or yeasts produces different tastes when processed at different scales? Of course, as is natural, thinking about beer got me thinking about everything else. There is evidence that today's vegetables, for a whole host of reasons, have less nutritional content than vegetables from a generation or two ago, so does that explain why my farm share vegetables taste so good that store bought vegetables now taste like styrofoam that's punching me in the eye? Perhaps we simply underestimate the value of “freshness” with vegetables and the actual determining taste factor is the extra day between being picked and being eaten that all store bought veggies have. Maybe all those pesticides, no matter how thoroughly washed off, affect flavor.

The questions of taste and quality are, of course, compromised by all the various “brown bag” tests, that tend to show that, without the suggestion of the label, it is very difficult for most people to taste the difference between great wine and good wine, meaning the actual chemical difference, the actual physical interaction between the wine and your taste buds, what we actually taste is not meaningfully different; meaning that the bulk of what we taste, at least when we're tasting wine, is the idea of what the wine should taste like. If this is true for wine, is it true for organic farm share vegetables and home brewed beer?

Of course, advertisers have known for ages that the suggestion of a food experience is almost as important as the actual food in how the food is experienced. A McDonald's hamburger isn't really flavored with a cliff's worth of sodium and the mysterious greasy remains its brethren leave on the flat top; it's flavored by a gagillion dollar relentless advertising campaign abusing the cultural consciousness of the world into believing its food. The same goes for any food that is advertised, in any way. Food producers have discovered that it is more profitable to suggest their food tastes good, than to go through the trouble of trying to make sure their food is actually good.

One current in the interpretation of this phenomenon is to argue that there really isn't actual “quality” in terms of taste. For the most part, if you believe your are in a super classy restaurant that makes fantastic food, the majority of the classy fantastic-ness of your meal will come from you believing it will be classily fantastic and not from the food having any actual, provable class or fantasy. Of course, there is more to food than just taste, and too often this idea is used to apologize for destructive and unhealthy food practices. If we can't definitively, scientifically, empirically prove that say, a burger a Craigie on Main is better than a burger at McDonald's, than McDonald's is free to continue doing whatever it is they call “making a hamburger.”

Yes, it is important for food to taste good, but it is also important for food to not give us Type-2 diabetes, for our food system not to kill all the bees and help destroy the world, and for the way we prepare and eat our food to help us feel like actual fucking human beings and not just cogs in a vast capitalist system that need occasional refueling.

We taste with our brains. Our entire brains. We all know that food is flavored by our ideas of it and our memories of it—which is why there is such a thing as “comfort food”--but we can also taste with our politics, taste with our ethics, taste with our identities. If the vegetables I get from Steve also come with the knowledge they are not contributing to the destruction of civilization as we know it by pumping vast amounts of carbon into the atmosphere and thus changing the climate, while representing a scalable business model for a more just, more healthy, more community-based food system, why shouldn't they taste better to me than the vegetables that are part of a massive agri-business complex thriving through destructive and totally unsustainable monoculture? Even if chemically, even if the actual substances that hit my actual taste buds are not actually different, they are politically, economically, and socially different, so why shouldn't my primary sensory experience of them be radically different.

Though I doubt it, I suppose there is a chance that I cannot prove the beer that started this whole though is physically much different from a Bud Light (I mean, except for the whole one being a saison and the other being a pilsner, but I don't think there are any mainstream commercial saisons and that's not really the point anyway) but that beer and a Bud Light have different meaning in my life, so, of course I would experience them differently. In the end, we don't taste with our tongues, we taste with our lives.

Craft Beer and the Next Economy

Picture from Brewfest Link

A couple of Saturdays ago I went to the Hyperlocal Brewfest at the Somerville armory. It was a dozen or so area craft, micro, and other (the other being Sam Adams & Narraganset, which was nice because I'd been intrigued by the Sam Adams Porch Rocker, but wanted to try some before committing to a six-pack. Verdict: It'd be perfect if I'd just mowed a lawn, but I think I'll fill my fridge with other beers) brewers giving tall pours and unlimited samples of their wares. I tried beers from Cambridge Brewing Company, Watch City, Backlash, Idle Hands, Jack's Abby, Somerville Brewing Company, and Night Shift. The CBC, Jack's Abby (which I didn't realize was local) and Somerville Brewing Company, had the best individual beers, and the pims beer (which really tasted like a pims cup, meaning it was cucumber beer) from Cape Anne was really interesting, but the best beverage I had was a combination of Night Shift's Taza Chocolate Stout AND! Viva Habanero, a rye malt with habanero peppers. (For the love of peace and justice and the children and puppies, put that in a bottle!)

Of course, this is all part of the growing localism trend, the absurd belief that life is better when you give enough of a shit about the town or city you live in to shop in a way that supports said economy of said town. (Aside, I wonder how strong the locavore movement is in this small-town value-driven, um, towns, that people keep telling me are the real America. What? Wal-mart put all those stores out of business? OK then.) But with the national unemployment rate hovering around the 8s and looking like its going to stay there for awhile, and the growing concerns around global warming and climate change, I wonder if, more than just producing a delicious, delicious beverage, local-focused craft beer might be leading the way to the next American economy.

In general, locally owned businesses hire more people per dollar of sales than national and international businesses, at least in terms of retail. Part of this employment difference, of course, has to do with duplication of services. A thousand different locally owned businesses will all have their own marketing coordinator, personnel manager, receiver etc, while a large national chain will only have one or a small group meeting those responsibilities. (Part of this difference might also be that locally owned independent businesses don't usually have some rich asshole at the top demanding shmillions of dollars a year in earnings.) And, of course, the other benefits of shopping locally, such as tax revenue, property values, and general economic activity, are well documented, but I think the craft-micro-local beer industry might have even more to teach us.

What about an economy of small-scale manufacturing and production? When we think about restoring manufacturing in America, we tend to think about car factories, and other massive endeavors, the kind of industry that defined the, um, industrial revolution, but maybe the answer to our manufacturing deficit is to go small. Thousands of small operations around the country, hiring people with a productive level of redundancy and, perhaps, making high quality goods in an environmentally rational way at reasonable prices to boot.

Beer, of course, is the perfect product for sustainable small-scale production. You can start your business in your kitchen. If things go well you can be a tenant brewer as Pretty Things did, renting space in existing breweries to make your beer. And even if you end up owning your own brewery, you don't need a huge space for it. And there seems to be a range of economic sustainabilities in making beer; you've got your Sam Adams and Harpoon, and you've got your Peak, Notch, Cape Ann, Ipswitch, and you've got your Night Watch, Pretty Things, and Somerville Brewing Company.

In metro-Somerbridge, we're seeing a little bit of this, especially in terms of various food products, but is there a way to develop, small-scale clothing, appliance, home goods, electronics, and other manufacturing? Cities, towns, and state subsidize businesses all the time, usually through tax breaks and low interest loans, but nearly all of the time these subsidies go to big national chains. Wal-Mart walks into the local city council meeting promises adding 500 jobs by building a warehouse in the town and then casually hints they suppose they could build that warehouse in the next town over unless they don't have to pay property tax on the warehouse for ten years. (Then, because this is Wal-Mart, they deliver half the jobs they promised generally at a non-liveable wage, and if a few local businesses go out because of this, the city's tax base usually erodes even further, but I doubt I needed to tell you Wal-Mart is bad.) Millions or perhaps billions of dollars in local funds have been poured into massive and already successful and profitable businesses. It's kind of like the steroid era in baseball, the strongest are just getting stronger. (A couple places for all the data: The Institute for Local Self-Reliance and The 10% Shift)

But what if towns, cities, and counties, started subsidizing small-scale manufacturing and production? You would probably create more jobs for less money and, in terms of the city's investment, jobs that aren't going to up and relocate to Bangladesh. It would be investments in business owners who are themselves specifically invested in the well-being of the city. And this wouldn't have to mean the end of large-scale production.

Some products, cars, solar panels, wind turbines, etc. just can't be produced at the local level and that's fine. There can be room in our economy for the large-scale and the small-scale, the local and the international, the big and the small. The only reason we don't see more of a mixed economy is because big businesses tend to spend a lot of money on getting bigger, usually in the form of lobbying the shit out of Congress and local governments for tax breaks, subsidies, and lax regulation that gives them economic advantages. Or, they just take a 6.025% price advantage by not collecting and remitting sales tax. (AMAZON!)

But, as usual, it starts with beer. By making home brewing legal Jimmy Carter maybe have begun the process of the next American economy, a small-scale, sustainable, productive economy that creates jobs and lowers our carbon footprints. And delicious beer. Delicious delicious beer.

The Golden Age of American Beer

I decided to check out a new-at-the-time bar and meet Riss after work. I went early, got a seat at the massive horseshoe bar and had a few beers while I was reading Under the Volcano. (Yeah, that guy.) In the quiet couple of hours between about 3 and about 5 it was a pretty nice experience. Not much to distinguish it, but the beer was good, the bar had enough light to read by, and it had the quiet atmosphere of people grabbing a couple of early beers.

As soon as 5 o'clock hit, it was like the Army Corps of Engineers ignored the disrepair the levies had suffered and Hurricane Yuppie washed my peaceful city away. All bars have multiple personalities, so that shouldn't speak too much one way or the other for the bar in question, but ultimately, I ended up not being too fond of this particular bar. But that's not the point of this post, the point is that I found myself assessing the bar in question, thus, “It just seems like they have the same hundred beers as everybody else.” That's right. We have reached a level of beer in this country, and in the Boston area that having 100 plus artisan, craft beers on tap, does not necessarily distinguish a public house. To me, that sounds like a golden age.

The roots of the Golden Age of American Beer lie several decades in the past when a President of this great land, in an act of governmental restraint and deregulation, freed brewing beer from the tyranny of Federal oversight. And that president was Jimmy Carter. (In direct contrast to Reagan, who raised taxes, and spent shmillions on a complete science fiction of a defense system, while negotiating with terrorists, which I guess is how you get an airport named after you.)

Home brewing eventually lead to a cottage industry, that lead to the early successful small brewers like Sam Adams, Magic Hat, and Sierra Nevada. Add in some politics of sustainability, the growth in the importance of local products and production, and the fact that many Americans now have a decade or more between graduation from college and having children, and you've got the Golden Age of Beer. Though we can never be certain, the argument could be made that America is the greatest beer nation on earth right now. But rather than making some kind of big argument about beer in America and the world, or playing out the idea of a “Golden Age,” (why gold and not platinum and how really gets to decided?) I'm going to highlight some of my favorite things happening in beer right now.

Harpoon Hundred Barrel Series. Not unlike a movie studio that churns out a rom-com every six months in order to fund its art films, many bigger brewers do special series along with their more popular beers. Harpoon now brews 100 barrels of some different, experimental, interesting beer every few months or so. I've tried just about every one and they have all been fantastic. Sometimes they're takes on less common styles of beer. Other times, they add an atypical flavor. Sometimes it's a twist on something traditional. Whatever the stated goal, they've all been interesting, delicious, creative express of beer.

Pretty Things. If you're into beer in the metro-Cambridge area, you've heard of Pretty Things. You've probably heard a lot about Pretty Things. You might even be sick of hearing about Pretty Things. But every one of their beers is good. Some of their beers are fantastic. And their English India Porter “December 6, 1855 EIP,” a historical beer not unlike the kind of stuff that made Dogfish Head famous, was the best beer I've ever had. But more importantly, I like the fact that they are tenant brewers, renting spaces in other brewers to make their beer. It means there is a system in place, in brewing, for people with great ideas and great recipes, to start a business without necessarily needing a ton of capital.

Mayflower. My favorite even newer brewery, their seasonal Summer Rye Ale, might be the most convincing proof that American beer is in a special place right now, because it is a high quality porch beer. You know what generally passes for porch beer and though I have a special place in my heart for High Life and PBR, the Summer Rye Ale, hits all the taste expectations you have for cracking a cold one on the porch, but at, like 11, without being “at 11.” All their other beers are great too and if the only “craft” beer you've tried in your life is Sam Adams, Mayflower would be a great next step.

Bombers. $5-$14, 16-24oz bottles give you the chance to try a lot of different beers without filling up your fridge with six-packs of stuff you might not end up liking. Some of them might seem a little pricey but so are high quality steaks, or wines, or bourbons, or, well, really anything that people put a lot of work into. In fact, the bomber itself might be a driving force in the Golden Age of American beer, because it gives small brewers an economically sustainable, marketable product.

You Probably Have a Friend Who Makes Beer. In a lot of ways, the renewed quality of American beer, has lead to a re-resurgence of the home brewing that started this age in the first place. As with well, everything, from baking bread to making clothes, there's a kind of extra flavor with home made beer. Sure, sometimes you or your friend mess it up, but it's still yours and that means something. Furthermore, whatever is produced, is something no one else will have ever had. Which I think is really cool.