Beer Notes - 1 September 2008

Last Wednesday I wrote about the possibility that The Malt House may carry some unhopped beers in the future. A couple days later, the Madison Beer Review wrote a nice piece about such brews. In it, the author noted that Fraoch Heather Ale and Alba Scots Pine were two uhopped brews commonly found here in the Madison area. On Saturday I went to Steve's Liquor and found that the Fraoch was all gone, though some Alba remained. Did MBR cause a rush on the heather ale? Hopefully. This would indicate that there are some adventurous drinkers out there.

Via my fellow beer-drinking blogger Oz comes a few ditties. First is the news that Leine's is changing both their holiday and spring seasonals. No word on the vernal brew but the holiday suds are going to be Fireside Nut Brown – a lager, apparently. Also courtesy of Oz is a link to this page which is a nice interactive wall of beer. Click on a bottle and you can find out how long the beer has been brewed and who is the current owner.

I recently discovered that there's a new brewery in Wausau - Bull Falls. Any readers ever sample their suds?

In addition, I also recently read that Bull Falls, along with some of Wisconsin's other microbreweries have formed a co-op to grow barley and hops since the price of both has gone up dramatically in recent months. Although the endeavor won't be certified organic, the crops will be so. Plus the malting will be done by Breiss Malting up in Chilton. Wisconsin used to grow more hops than you could shake a stick at back in the 1850-60s but the hops market bottomed out in 1867 just as nearby Sauk County became a leader. Hopefully this turns out well for everyone involved.

We Wisconsonians know that our fair state leads the nation in drunk driving. My alma mater, the UW-Madison, has been a leading party school for ages. There is indeed a culture of drinking here in Wisconsin which Gannett newspapers says makes our state no. 1 for alcohol's impact on lives. Driving under the influence has been a hot topic as of late here and the latest salvo comes from a magistrate up nort, Harold V. Froehlich, who recently penned an editorial in which he called for "limited prohibition":

Upon conviction for a second offense operating while under the influence of alcohol, the offender would lose the right FOR LIFE to enter a tavern or liquor store. The offender would lose the right to purchase alcoholic beverages FOR LIFE.

Concomitant to the debate here in Wisconsin is the suggestion by a group of college and university presidents under the nom de guerre the Amethyst Initiative, to lower the drinking age. The Madison Beer Review come out in favor of the idea while people like Darshak Sanghavi at Slate disagree.

How can Wisconsin change its culture of drinking? Would it help if parents drank with their kids to take away the alluring mystique of the illegal? Maybe introduce them to John Barleycorn via a low alcohol session beer and a micro to boot?

A few points from Sanghavi:

1) When the drinking age in this country was raised, instances of underage drinking dropped.

2) Concomitant to this, a decrease in fatalities from drunk driving amongst young adults also occurred, with a likely causal connection.

3) A 2004 report notes, "As the committee demonstrates in this report, countries with lower drinking ages are not better off than the United States in terms of the harmful consequences of youths' drinking."

4) "Impressively, states that severely restrict the promotion of alcohol and its purchase in large quantities—for example, by requiring registration of keg sales, restricting happy hours and beer-pitcher sales, and regulating advertising like billboards—have half the college bingeing rate of states that don't."

5) "Alcohol consumption mirrors its price."

I've noticed at various forums and blogs a problem when discussing the issue of underage drinking. It is almost always seen as a problem on college campuses. Certainly when college presidents make the statement that a debate about the drinking age is warranted, campus is where conversation is going to start. However, underage drinking is not limited to institutions of higher education.

Similarly, many discussions I've read about drunk driving here in Wisconsin focus on public transportation and taxis as methods for curbing the problem. Good ideas but they only work in urban areas and Wisconsin is still a very rural state. Where I lived up nort, taverns were 10 miles north in Eau Claire, 10 miles south in Eleva, or 9 miles east in Foster. (Improbably, I don't think Cleghorn had a tavern.) Simply put, buses and taxis aren't going to work in areas like the one in which I lived so something more is needed.

Anyone wanting to cut down drinking & drunk driving in Wisconsin should probably: A) push for a sharp increase on beer & liquor taxes; B) seek to increase the penalties for breaking the law – drunk driving and selling to minors; and C) try to impose more regulation on advertising and the ability to buy large quantities of alcohol.

Admittedly, inviting government taxation and coercion won't be popular with a lot of people and would no doubt elicit cries of a "neo-Prohibition". In addition, such changes have the potential to negatively affect our state's brewing as well as its nascent distilling industries. They could also have the effect of hurting our tourism industry as well since fishing, snowmobiling, and the like are often done with drink in hand.

An uphill battle, to say the least.