Jeg har i et stykke tid fulgt Jeff Alworths blog Beervana,
jeg læser hans artikler i All About Beer og da han i efteråret udgav bogen The
Beer Bible var den et naturligt og fornuftigt indkøb fra min side. I dag
skriver han så for Stovt når han svarer på spørgsmålene i Poesibogen. Det skal
han have tak for at gide. Vi stiller om.
What is your favorite beer?
The process of writing The Beer Bible ruined me for favorite beers. When you tour 50+ breweries with a master brewer, spend a couple hours learning how he thinks about and brews beer, and then spend time in a country's pubs drinking those beers, they get under your skin. Pretty soon you feel like all beers are your favorite. When I was doing media for the Beer Bible, this was the most frequent question I got, and so I started picking from among my grab bags of those beers, usually looking for slightly unusual ones. Drie Fonteinen Gueuze or Boon Mariage Parfait, Rodenbach Grand Cru, Fuller's London Pride, Schlenkerla marzen, Mahr's Ungespundet, Únětický 10, Budvar Tmavý Ležák, Fruh kolsch, Uerige altbier, Saison Dupont, Zyweic Baltic Porter, Ayinger Celebrator, Orval...
Well, you see, the list can go on and on...
What is your favorite beer type?
Another impossible question for me. I sometimes ask people what their five favorite styles are to see where their preferences lean. But I'll confess I've never actually answered the question myself. Even five styles is too few. I like saisons, Czech svetle lezaks, gueuze, saisons ,German helles, hoppy American ales, dark ales, saisons, rauchbier. Oh, and saisons! I may have missed a dozen or two.
Where do you buy your beer?
I drink most of my beer on draft (unusual for an American), and of the bottled stuff, I tend to buy most at a bottle shop with a great selection near my house. But grocery stores also have good selections and I shop there, too.
What has been your greatest beer experience?
Writing the Beer Bible exposed me to insanely cool experiences, and it would be very hard to choose between my long visit at Fuller's with Derek Prentice and John Keeling, visiting the rare and reclusive Samuel Smith's, or any of the other stunning locations like Rodenbach, Cantillon, Boon, or Orval, Budvar (which I did by flashlight [torch] because the power was off), Schneider, Uerige, Schlenkerla. If you had some terrible, devious device that would remove one of my memories of all but one of my brewery visits, I think I'd ask you to leave me with Olivier DeDeycker at Dupont in Belgium. That was a jewel among jewels.
What makes beer so great?
I think what people sometimes fail to appreciate is that beer, like cuisine, is a reflection of the people who brew it. You can make beer taste a lot of different ways, so why do the people of Dusseldorf make it taste like altbier? Why do some people in Brussels prefer lambic? When you hold a glass of beer, you hold a series of choices--almost always conditioned by history, national brewing practices, cultural preferences, and sometimes surprising influences like war, famine, and tax codes. Beer doesn't just contain a wonderful diversity of flavors, if you know how to decode beer. it contains entire civilizations...