This is a preview of the labels I’m making for my Heather Ales. I made four 10 gallon batches of Heather Ale, using heather flowers, bog myrtle, and a little hops for their acidity (not flavoring). Each batch is slightly different.

I’m creating these for two different events: The Mythical State of Jefferson exhibition at Southern Oregon University’s Schneider Art Museum and the Open Engagement Conference in Portland Oregon (both are in May, 2010). The Jefferson show is about Northern California’s secession movement, democracy, and the idea that you can take political matters into your own hands. The Open Engagement Conference is focusing on the ins and outs of socially engaged art. I was mostly interested in the history of this beer. The ingredients were banned in 1707 by the Act of Union when Scotland was made part of Great Britain. The recipe was mostly lost until someone had it translated in 1986. The beer has helped usher in a huge interest in extinct or nearly extinct beer styles. It is also a great example of the diversity that geography brings to beer. This is part of the reason I see drinking quality craft beer to be a form of activism, and not just consumerism; by drinking craft beer you are saying no to mass produced, tasteless beer that relies on chauvinism to sell its products and instead you are turning to a drink that celebrates local business, geography, complex tastes, quality, and embraces a longstanding human tradition.

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I just read a review of the movie Beer Wars over at The Brew Dude. It’s the first review I’ve read that gives some criticism, albeit quite constructive-criticism. The Dude’s main complaint is that “more (smaller than Dogfish) craft brewers could have been included in the story to help with the realization that the community is so huge but so small & collaboratively driven at the same time.”

As an observer of the craft beer industry and a consumer of their wonderful products I have very much felt the collaborative nature of these businesses. It often seems like local brewers aren’t out to get each other and steal the market; they just want to make quality products and share them. This collaborative economy makes customers feel a part of the community and it grows interest so that no market stealing is necessary.

As far as the movie goes, everyone has given it a thumbs up, including the Brew Dude so don’t be deterred. It likely raises some important questions about the way industrial beer corporations do business and whether or not you, the consumer, want to support them. I also read this article, What Budweiser Can Teach You About Innovation, and I can’t tell if it’s a joke or not but it helps solidify my thoughts that the only innovative thing that’s happening in mega beer corporations is manipulative marketing.

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Today I saw an interesting post over at A Good Beer Blog. Taking a quote from Zythophile, he thought through it’s meaning and wrote a few nice paragraphs. Go check it out. Here’s the quote:

“It’s not said often enough in this argument: we drink because we enjoy it, and the overall happiness that brings to society, I would suggest, vastly outweighs any disbenefits.”

And in reply:
“…If we are thinking about good beer we should also take an interesting in increasing and sharing the benefits while reducing easily identifiable harm – including those harms short of full bore alcoholism. When I think about this blog writing and the thousand of you who I am told read my posts every day I sometime wonder if I have encouraged anyone into a habit that is harmful rather than convivial. I am not satisfied to think of the statistics…”

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Last night I attended the Scottish Pub Sing, led by the Portland Revels, at one of my favorite breweries, Lucky Lab in Portland, Oregon. It was beautiful hearing everyone sing songs while we all drank together. We sang love songs, sad songs, and outrageously fun songs about sharing homebrews, making you feel at home, and drinking the city dry. Having a group of people sing together like this reminded me very much of church and just further solidified in my mind that the pub is really a wonderful social center, and good beer is an important element in bringing people together. Lucky Lab is on my list of places that are doing beer and community right. What a wonderful night!

The brewery had a whole load of new specials so I had to try out a few. I ordered the sample tray and had two different Alts, a Scottish Ale, Barleywine, an Amber, an IPA, and a Cascadian Dark Ale (Black IPA).

Here’s the chorus of one of the songs I don’t remember hearing, but I imagine would have been a good one:

OLD DUN COW
There was Brown, up-side-down,
Moppin’ up the whiskey on the floor.
“Booze, booze,” the firemen cried,
As they came knockin’ at the door.
Don’t let ‘em in ’till it’s all mopped up
Somebody shouted, “Macintyre!”
(Everyone shout) MACINTYRE!
And we all got blue blind, paralytic drunk
When the Old Dun Cow caught fire.

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Greatest Sips from Hot Knivez on Vimeo.

This is a video from Hot Knives, a group of bloggers devoted to elevating vegetables and drinking good beer. They’ve put together a book that has 21 or so of their favorite writings from their blog. It looks like a pretty nicely packaged book and it comes with a URL where you get a mixtape of music that “goes well with the beers.” A pretty exciting package I think, combining good design, craft, and beer. They even have a review of the 20th anniversary Heather Ale from Williams Brothers on their site (which is one of the beers I most look forward to on an upcoming art trip to Glasgow), and it seems like their logo was inspired by Scotland’s BrewDog Micro Brewery.

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This is by no means a comprehensive look at good beer in NYC. I went to New York because I had some art up for the Incidental Person Exhibition at the Apexart Gallery. I was showing documentation from the Portland Art & Beer project. I figured that while I was in town I better find some good, and most importantly, local beer.

My time was very, very short so I had a big list of things I wanted to see and didn’t get to most of them. This is often what happens when visiting NYC and I’ve learned before it’s best not to try to cram it all in, I just tried to enjoy where life brought me. Ahead of time I found four bars online that looked worth checking out: The Blind Tiger, The Ginger Man, D.B.A., and 4th Avenue Pub. I only made it to the Blind Tiger and it seems no one that I talked to knew about the 4th Avenue Pub. I was specifically looking for beer from Sixpoint Craft Ales, Kelso of Brooklyn, and  Captain Lawrence Brewery.

The first and only bar on my list I was able to make it to was The Blind Tiger, as it was relatively near the gallery where I spent most of my time. They had a list of about 30 beers. They had the Sixpoint IPA, so I ordered one of those. It was a well-balanced NW style IPA that would earn respect here in Oregon. They also had a good list of Winter Belgiums so I tasted a few of those. I’m a little upset at myself for not sampling the He’brew RyePA on Cask, but beer is very expensive in NYC. The nice thing is that the microbrews are just about the same price as the bad stuff. I liked The Blind Tiger, although the neighborhood was lame, it was surrounded by expensive clothing stores. I would not normally find myself in this part of town.

I was able to visit a couple other bars that friends invited me to. Each place had a handful of local beers, always one from Sixpoint (either the IPA or the Otis Stout, which is also good) and usually the Ommegang Witte from Cooperstown, NY which I very much enjoyed. Friends brought me to a place called Union Hall in Brooklyn which has an indoor bocce ball area. There I sampled the Kelso of Brooklyn Dark Lager and was very happy with that beer. Although the bar was just a little too noisy for my taste. I headed north where another friend took me to a place where I finally saw a Captain Lawrence ale on tap! I ordered that immediately. It was their Liquid Gold beer, a super friendly tasting Belgium Ale. I’m sure they make even better beers, but I knew I could go home happy after that.

On my last day I visited the Sixpoint brewery. They told me that an excellent beer bar in town is Spuyten Duyvil but I was never able to make it to that one. All my friends had heard of it though when I mentioned it. The Sixpoint guys said that directly across the street from that bar is a restaurant that sells their Vienna Ale, which they make exclusively for that place. The visit to the Sixpoint Brewery takes some time. It’s in a part of town called Red Hook and requires a lot of subway transfers and then about 30 minutes of walking. But it was worth it. Check this place out:


The guys in the brewery were very hospitable. After showing me the brewery they took me upstairs to sample their beers. They sent me home with a bottled Wheat primed with honey, and a Wormwood Ale. Looking forward to that. They don’t bottle commercially though so you do have to go to NYC at this point.

Turns out these guys are running at full capacity and are looking to expand. It’s easy to see why. There are millions of people in NYC and only a handful of places making good beer. Sixpoint was easy to find but the other beers weren’t as easy. I think there is a room for a lot more beer in NY and I’m surprised that it’s not brimming over with beer. If Portland, with 2 million people can have 30+ breweries with 7-10 more opening up soon, then NY can handle a few more as well. The great thing is that opening new breweries is not necessarily a competitive business move, it really gets the locals further interested in local beer and helps grow a more sustainable and local-minded community.

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I found this image when a friend recommended I look at the work of artist Stephen Hendee. Hendee’s work is laced with sci-fi influences, especially dystopian and doomsday genres. I’m very excited about this find and went straight to the blog to share it with you.

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Last night I watched an amazing movie by Werner Herzog called Encounters at the End of the World. It takes place in Antarctica, but Herzog assures us upfront that it is not a fluffy penguin movie. Instead we see the people and the industry of a small settlement and we are introduced to people who feel they have no ties to the rest of the world. In one scene we see someone that is related to the ancient aztec royal family. In another we watch scientists listening to the sci-fi sounds of mammals underwater. In another still we see the cafeteria where soft-serve ice cream and slushi’s are chilled and served. Apparently there is widespread panic when the soft-serve machine goes down. Another time we see a man in a heat-conditioned office with a nice new computer looking out the window to the frigid cold. The eclectic mix of interviews and documentations do serve a purpose.

The movie is technically not a science fiction, but really it fits right in. It is both a pre and post-apocalyptic look into our world. Herzog asks questions about why humanity feels the need to control other animals and nature and to put our fingerprints on everything in the world. He assures us that, according to popular theory, nature will not allow humanity to live on this planet forever.

In another scene we see someone who used to be a linguist. This person says that it is possible that 90% of languages will be extinct in our lifetime. (I actually have a friend who, as an art project, teaches people the alphabet of a dying language – her website is at Daikons.com). Herzog says, “In our efforts to preserve endangered species’ we seem to overlook something equally important. To me it is a sign of a deeply disturbed civilization where tree-huggers and whale-huggers in their weirdness are acceptable, while no one embraces the last speakers of a language.”

At one point Herzog has researchers watching the doomsday creature-feature “Them” (the one with the giant ants) saying the film “express[es] grave doubts about our long-ranging presence on this planet. Nature, [the movies] predict, will regulate us.” In the very next scene we see images of single-celled creatures found by Antarctic divers displaying what Herzog calls a display of intelligence.

This movie was challenging in a way that I’m not sure I can describe yet. It is quiet and simple, yet in its simplicity it is haunting. There are, of course, beautiful landscape and underwater shots, but the movie is more about the actual infiltration of the last remaining wilderness. I highly recommend it for any science fiction lover.

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Here’s a few cool things I’ve seen done with beer bottles for Christmas.

And don’t forget the beer bottle Christmas tree:

I found these images at the design blog Inhabitat.com. Apparently the designers used 1000 full beer bottles.

And another

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Beerandscifi.com now has a twitter account at twitter.com/beerandscifi. I’ll be updating twitter as a supplement to the larger stories here.

I’ll be reading through 2 books and posting my thoughts on Twitter. Please follow me and forward me to your friends.
The books are:
1. (Science Fiction) The Best Short Stories of J.G. Ballard
2. (Beer) Fermenting Revolution: How to Drink Beer and Save the World by Christopher Mark O’Brien

The Fermenting Revolution I will review on this blog after I’m done reading it. I should be clear that the book was donated to me for review. I asked the publisher for the book because, from what I could tell, the content seemed to match my thoughts that I express on this blog (but not always so succinctly) that good beer is an agent of social change and that good, local beer inspires greater community and helps builds interest in small business. I look forward to reading it and I will be fair in my review.

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For Christmas I’m giving a couple people a 6 pack of my homebrewed beers. I haven’t made any specific Winter Ales but I’ve decorated the bottles quite appropriately. I’ve got a couple Ginger Porters, a Nut Brown, a couple Pale Ales, and a Double Dry Hopped IPA.

Now, for a tangential note (this may seem random but I think I need to start talking about it):

I’ve been calling my little homebrewing adventure “Slow Beers” but am not totally certain about this name. I don’t want people to confuse it with the Slow Foods Organization but I do like the name because it subtly encourages leisure, rest, and relaxation as a form of social productivity. We’ll see how it goes. I consider the homebrewing to be a part of my field research into Oregon beer culture, something that I participate in quite frequently. I’m very interested in how Portland has established itself as this mega beer city, with 30+ breweries and brewpubs in the city-proper. and 9 more breweries opening up in the next few months. I’ve made recent visits to California and while they are most definitely brewing outstanding beer there, the beer community is not as obviously connected and close as it is here. And we have breweries doing some pretty amazing things: all the organic breweries in town, the theater pubs, Upright recently made an oyster stout, we’ve got breweries making beer from old and rare recipes, we just had the yearly Holiday Ale Festival which has 60+ beers made specifically for the festival, Lompoc released 7 winter beers a couple weeks ago and there’s much much more happening. I mean things are booming here and it doesn’t seem to be slowing down.

I’ve been exploring Portland’s beer culture with many of my art projects and I finally have many of these up on my main website at ericmsteen.com. As a professional artist I’m interested in the ability beer has to create and grow communities and groups of people, how it affects local business, and how it brings people into a greater understanding of their city or locale as a rich social site. What happens when a large number of breweries begin promoting their beers but aren’t asking their customers to get drunk, what happens when a whole city establishes local pubs as social centers, and what happens when people gain a greater understanding of a drink that has been a part of mankind’s history (in various forms) for thousands and thousands of years.

Homebrewing is one avenue of exploration for me. I have a small group of people that show up to learn about beer making with me (not that I’m an expert, we learn together) and we taste different beers and we participate in Portland’s offerings. Group members buy the beer for $1 bottle which is just a little more than cost so I’m actually paying for what I’ve called my field research. I encourage all artists to find ways to get sponsorship of some kind because research and exploration can become expensive in any field (painting, sculpture, etc). My group “buys-in” becoming supporters of my art and research and yet receive a gift for about the same price as (and often less than) the cost of buying beer in stores.

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From Cottage Link Magazine:
John Steinbeck wrote that redwoods, once seen, “leave a mark or create a vision that stays with you always – from them comes silence and awe.” As we walked among them in several groves along the 31-mile long “Avenue of the Giants”, we could only echo Steinbeck’s emotion. It ‘s one thing to walk among the ruins of civilizations gone millennia ago amidst noisy shutterbugs and souvenir hawking vendors – it is another to touch the tallest and oldest living things in creation in a peaceful green gallery and feel time itself.

This is exactly what I feel when I visit these forests. My times in the Redwood Forest are some of the most memorable and inspiring I’ve ever had. When I am there I become quiet, realizing that my busy-ness and my striving to become important is not as important as I perceive it. My place in this world is not the center, and I am much less important than I have thought. But this is not a bad thing, it brings me to become less selfish, more caring, and more compassionate of a person. The joys of Friluftsliv.

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Am I the first person to ever have The Double Abyss?

2009 Abyss in one hand, remote control in the other. The other night I paired Deschutes Brewery’s The Abyss beer with The Abyss science fiction film. It’s The Double Abyss! So, do the two go together? The movie does indeed bring you to a dark place, well below the surface of the earth where there is no light, just dark. You get a sense of being claustrophobic as you watch it. The Abyss beer does provide some of the darkest, thickest beer, you can find but the flavors open up up as you sip it, revealing layer after layer of rich complexity – quite the opposite of claustrophobia. Drinking the beer may actually help relieve your claustrophobia. The movie makes you cold, knowing the people are so far down underwater that there would be very little heat. The beer is 11% alcohol, an imperial stout, if my memory serves me, so it warms you right up. That’s a good combo. The movie is a very long one so if you wanted to drink a full beer you would need to sip it. And the beer is definitely made for sipping, but I can’t imagine drinking the whole thing in one 3 hour sitting. I would say make sure a couple friends are with you and sip very slowly. But a beer with such high alcohol volume just serves to increase your tiredness during a slow movie, so by the end of the movie you will likely be asleep. If you’re wanting to watch the full movie, I recommend a different beer. If you’re not worried about watching the whole thing, this beer would make a great choice.

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For those who want to see more science fiction playing out in their daily lives:

Leonid Meteor Shower -

Time to start practicing your Friluftsliv. In the next few days the earth will be passing through some cloud dust that was left in space by the Comet Tempel-Tuttle in 1466 and 1533 AD. Get out of the city, leave your houses, run for the hills, the night is going to light up! According to this article at RedOrbit, the peak hours will be this Monday night (actually Tuesday morning 11/17/2009) in the wee hours of the morning (about 1am PST). That’s not going to work! It’s Monday night, I work the next day! Quit thinking like a robot, participate in humanity and do this because this is what will improve your quality of life – enjoy the meteor shower.

Sam Adams Utopia -

This article from Beer Advocate talks about Jim Coch, founder of Sam Adams, and the creation of a beer that invites drinkers to explore new possibilities for beer drinking. The Utopias beer is supposed to redefine beer with 25% alcohol, with huge amounts of flavor, very experimental brewing and aging techniques, and extremely nice packaging. The bottle itself looks like a brew kettle, but to me it also looks like a yert. It is possible that Sam Adams is indeed helping push the limits and boundaries of beer, and also presenting the world with a business model that takes independence and craft as a primary focus. I have never had the Utopias beer, that seems seems to be a symbolic representation of the growing craft brewing movement, because the bottle costs $150 (the aged bottles are on eBay for a lot more – see picture below). While I applaud Sam Adams for their success and great beer, it does seem that this Utopias beer is purely for the beer connoisseur and those with money to spend. I don’t think that’s a bad thing, I just wanted it to lead up to the next down-to-earth-sci-fi topic: Jefferson State Brewery.

Jefferson State Brewery -

This brewery was started in 1998 and only lasted 2 years. The images and text that make up their beer labels and beer coasters seem to be utopian in their vision. Jefferson State Brewery calls for democracy, community, and freedom through their beer. Through the name of the brewery, it’s location, and their visuals they have clearly identified themselves with The State of Jefferson – a secession movement that would have parts of Northern California and Southern Oregon break off to form the 51st state. They believe their values, economy, and landscape are so far different from the whole of mismanaged California they should no longer be associated with it. They are essentially a working micronation, utopian in vision, but wholly committed to seeing their vision carried out. Many of the business and households in the designated area gladly display their support by hanging State of Jefferson signs. It’s too bad the brewery didn’t work out.

Science Pub -

Our last little bit of down-to-earth science fiction comes from the collaborative efforts of McMenamins (those masters at expanding our idea of what is a pub) and OMSI (Oregon Museum of Science and Industry). For those of you near Portland, they have created the Science Pub, a venue for drinking beer while learning about science. I visited the “science of beer” lecture but they’ve also had lectures about the science of why we are afraid of spiders, and a lecture about earthquakes and tsunamis in the Pacific Ocean. Upcoming lectures include “How Gecko’s Stick and Why We Care” and then in January they’ll have “Hitchiker’s Guide to Cyber-Science.” Sounds good doesn’t it? In my opnion, and I’ve alluded to this before, Science Pub should be offering degrees and provide a recognized alternative to University education which costs too much and schools rarely allow beer on campus.

If you stuck around for the picture of the Utopias beer on eBay, here you go:

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I picked up this book at Powell’s yesterday. It’s a signed copy of History by the Glass: Portland’s Past and Present Saloons, Bars, & Taverns by Paul Pintarich. It looks pretty good. There’s about 33 chapters and each is devoted to a drinking spot in Portland’s history. There’s a chapter on Horse Brass, The Alibi, Goose Hollow Inn, Produce Row, and others. The foreword was written by Bud Clark, one of Portland’s past mayors and owner of Goose Hollow, and he talks a little about the creativeness of pub owners since Prohibition. Whether the book will be a fun read or not I have yet to experience, but you may see evidence of the reading here in this blog. I am excited to read it.

I did want to say that it seems like it may be time for someone to do an updated version of this book. There is no mention, outside of Produce Row, of anything the McMenamins brothers have done, which makes me think that this book must have been published before the opening of the Barley Mill Pub. But even the Bagdad Theater and Kennedy School have some great history (before and after it was McMenamins) that could be shared. Afterall, the McMenamin’s fought Oregon legislation and opened Oregon’s first legal brewpub. Also, there’s nothing about Belmont Station, Moon and Sixpence, My Father’s Place, The Basement Pub, Eastburn, the loved/hated Henry’s Tavern and loads of other places. I don’t want to see just a basic overview of what the tavern feels like though, I want a nice history lesson! You know what else I want to know about – The Candlelight on the PSU campus. That place is bumping at night, and not with PSU students…turns out it’s quite the old jazz club and people occasionally show up in zoot suits. So, it sounds to me like a more comprehensive book is in order, although I appreciate this for what it is and when it was made. Maybe there’s one I don’t know about. If someone knows, please tell me.

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