Capital to Fire Up the Pork Rocket Tonight

From Capital Brewery's Twitter feed:

Tonight @The_Side_Door try some bacon infused Maibock and mint infused Dark Voyage. Also you can enter to win Bockfest tickets for this Sat

Hopefully putting bacon in a hop rocket for bacon-infused beer will not become a trend. Why ruin a perfectly good maibock?

German Culture Making a Comeback in Milwaukee

The food and drink part, anyway.

Above is the shiny, new dining room at Cafe Bavaria which opened in Wauwatosa earlier this week. It is the latest German food establishment to open its doors in the greater Milwaukee area recently and join fixtures like Mader's, Karl Ratzsch's, and Kegel's Inn. Cafe Bavaria is a more contemporary and upscale place than the mainstays. You can get schnitzel but also Bavarian pho. (?!)

The beer menu looks good. You've got your typical helleses and weissbiers but also two Kölsches (one on tap that you can get in the proper - .2L – sized glass), an altbier, a radler, three rauchbiers, and even a German pale ale. To their credit, there is also a selection of Sprecher and Lakefront brews as well.



The north side's Estabrook Beer Garden, a public bier garten like those in Munich, turns three this year. Estabrook is a sister establishment to the Old German Beer Hall in Milwaukee which opened back in 2005.



And that's not the end of it. Also planned is another bier garten in Bay View's Humboldt Park which is, interestingly enough, just a block from a friend's house. And in suburban Glendale the former Bavarian Inn will be turned into an official U.S. Hofbräuhaus outpost. The Hofbräuhaus will brew on premises so patrons will have fresh bier.



In addition to restaurants and bier gartens, we have the Milwaukee Pretzel Company which opened last year and makes Bavarian-style pretzels.

I wonder why there is this resurgence in German food and drink. Perhaps it's simply a case of what's old is new again. I found this article about Milwaukee rediscovering its German heritage but it really doesn't have an answer beyond the possibility of people just looking back at their and Milwaukee's past. I guess it's a task for an aspiring sociologist.

Concomitant to this, I noticed last month that an upscale contemporary German restaurant has opened in Chicago - The Radler. They even have a couple haus biers including a radler.

Public Subsides for a Public Market in Madison Is an Idea Whose Time Has Come...To Die

I discovered this morning that Mayor Soglin is directing Madisonians to a survey in order to find out what we want in a public market. I began the survey but didn't find a space for indicating that the city shouldn't be spending any money on the project and quit.

Remember when former mayor Dave Cieslewicz lamented that Madison was behind "in the race for coolness" because we lacked a public market? If not, here he is at schilling for Richard Florida:

Many major cities and most of our competitors in the race for coolness have built or are planning to build a public market. Toronto, Minneapolis, Seattle, Milwaukee, Vancouver and a host of other smaller cities have markets.

I thought about this when I read this article about the Governor's Conference on Economic Development which was held last week. One of the speakers was Morris Davis, an associate professor at the UW and its James Graaskamp Center for Real Estate and this bit stood out:

Speculating on what makes Minnesota more attractive than Wisconsin, Davis said it could be that Minneapolis is a bigger draw than Milwaukee. Investing in Milwaukee might help, he said. “We need a place where they’re going to want to live. I think Madison is that place; I don’t think Milwaukee is,” Davis said.

Milwaukee, as our former mayor noted, has this place:



Despite the presence of (a rather nice) public market, it seems that the young and the cool are choosing poor old Madison, sans public market, over Milwaukee. Will someone please tell this to Messrs. Soglin and Cieslewicz? Somehow despite not having a public market, Madison continues to thrive and be the choice of many young, cool folk. Somehow despite not having a public market, Madison continues to, in Cieslewicz's words, conduct community.

Going back to Mr. Davis:

He said Wisconsin should aim toward getting young people in Illinois and Minnesota to relocate here. Michigan’s college grads are also a good target, he said. Every year, 90,000 people leave Michigan, Davis said.

That's a lot of people leaving Michigan and many of them go to Chicago/Cook County. In fact, 56% of new Cook County residents come from Michigan. Does Chicago have a public market which makes it so "cool" to attract that many people? A recent look at census data shows that Milwaukee County is the top supplier of in-migration to Dane County. People are leaving a city with a public market?! Number two on that list is Asia. Presumably neither the Chinese government nor the U.S. government officials that approve H-1Bs are warning immigrants that Madison doesn't have a public market.

Cieslewicz asks, "So, why should millions of your tax dollars go for a market?" and the answer is they shouldn't. If it is true, as two recent studies indicate, that young people are driving less, then perhaps those millions of dollars could be sent over to Madison Metro. As the article linked to above says, "They consider public transportation the best option for digital socializing and one of the most likely ways to connect with the communities they live in." (See, Mr. Cieslewicz, public transportation is also about community building.) Madison Metro is looking at BRT and needs a new maintenance facility. And however nice apps are for tracking your bus, they don't change headway times or add routes to underserved areas. (Plus I'd love to see better signs at bus stops.)

A public market would be a nice piece of middle class bling and if someone like Curt Brink can find millions of dollars from private investors to build one, then I say more power to him. City officials should be helpful and accommodating. But if it's public money that's needed, put it to better use, a use that can benefit all Madisonians.

How Can Madison Attract More Entrepreneurs?

Over at the Atlantic Cities blog Richard Florida writes about a report on what entrepreneurs seek out in cities where they would locate their companies. The report was done by a group called Endeavors Insight did surveys and interviews with the founders of fast-growing companies. The results were interesting.

For one, size matters. These top business-creators gravitated towards cities with at least a million residents in the metro area. This offered the scale and diverse array of offerings needed to attract talent.

A city also needs to be able to appeal to the young and the restless. The entrepreneurs surveyed were a highly mobile bunch when they first started out...But eighty percent of respondents had lived in their current city for at least two years before launching their companies, meaning that cities had to catch them early. And once they started their first company, these business leaders rarely moved. So attracting this mobile group at an early age is key.

The top rated factor by far was access to talent. Nearly a third of those surveyed mentioned it as a key factor in their decisions for where to live and work (many specifically prized access to technically trained workers). Entrepreneurs explained that they proactively sought out the places that educated and ambitious workers want to be.

The study found that two other key factors in the location choices of entrepreneurs are major transportation networks (like airports and highways that can connect them to other cities) and proximity to customers and suppliers.

Can Madison learn anything from this?

We are not a metro area with 1+ million people. A strike against us. But Madison surely does have some appeal to the young and the restless. We have bike lanes, farmers markets, and a good cultural scene for a city our size, though it cannot compete with that of larger metros. (On a side note, I will say that I met a gentleman at last year's Gamehole Con from out of state who said that Madison has the best cultural scene in the Midwest outside of Chicago.) I would think that the UW provides a good pool of technically trained workers but perhaps they all leave after graduation because Madison is not large enough.

The whole customers and suppliers part isn't really something I can comment on since I don't know enough about those factors. But the transportation bit made me think. We've got the highways that lead to Chicago, Milwaukee, and the Twin Cities in addition to much smaller cities. While we do have an airport that offers some direct flights, it shuffles many people off to larger cities where airlines have hubs that can take them onto their destination. While there is just no way for Madison (nor any city in the entire Midwest) to compete with Chicago here, might it still be possible to leverage the Dane County Regional Airport to our advantage?

Recall the report by the Progressive Policy Institute which was released last autumn. It ranked Dane County 9th in growth of tech/IT jobs from 2007-2012. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article on the report quoted a Madison computer science professor and entrepreneur named Paul Barford who said, "There's no direct flight between Madison and San Francisco. If we could get that, it would unlock amazing opportunities in the state."

When I first read that I thought, "Well, Mitchell Field in Milwaukee has direct flights to and from San Francisco." Then I heard that the state of Indiana was subsidizing direct flights between San Francisco and Indianapolis in order to bolster the latter city's tech sector. Even the state's Republican governor was in favor of the subsidy. Given the Endeavor survey results, the testimony of one entrepreneur here in Madison, and the desire for such flights from Indianapolis' tech community, it is certainly something for us to look into. Has the Madison tech community approached the governor and/or the WEDC about a similar setup here? In another article, which I cannot locate the moment, someone from Indy was criticizing the the times of the service offered there. He maintained that they need an earlier flight to Indy as apparently venture capital likes to get in, get down to brass tacks, and then head home that same day. So it's worthwhile to keep an eye on how things go down in Indianapolis.

The Endeavor report also noted, in Florida's words:

At the very bottom of the list were taxes and business-friendly policies, which are, unfortunately, exactly the sorts of things so many states and cities continue to promote as silver bullets. Just 5 percent of the respondents mentioned low taxes as being important, and a measly 2 percent named other business-friendly policies as a factor in their location decisions.

I have to wonder just how much common ground tech entrepreneurs in Wisconsin have with the "old guard" WMC members. The former group is asking for an educated workforce, infrastructure, and quality of life while the latter is seeking tax cuts and supporting politicos who cut education, seem to ignore infrastructure if it's not a road, and don't seem to care much about quality of life issues because taxes must lowered at all costs.

And I can't help but tie this into Madison's preternatural preoccupation with having a public market. The article at hand doesn't mention it but it can surely be argued that it falls under quality of life for attracting a talent pool. But does it really help all that much? The last time I wrote about this subject, local tech entrepreneur Phillip Crawford left a comment saying, "We don't need a public market. That's a boondoggle. High speed internet _everywhere_ which would have been just as amazing 10 years ago as it would be today, would be great." I don't mean to imply that Mr. Crawford's opinion prevails amongst his peers but I do think that pitching a public market by saying that it is a big quality of life factor to attract young tech people is a claim to be skeptical about. In light of the Endeavor report, perhaps investing in high-speed internet access would be a better use of public money.

Thank you, Doug Hurst, for our daily liquid bread: Generator Doppelbock by Metropolitan Brewing

Here in the depths of winter it's always nice to have a stronger beer to help get you through the chilly nights. Doppelbocks are a good choice for me. These beers date back to the 17th century when the Paulaner monks in Munich brewed a "double bock" to sustain them through Lent. Mind you, in these days of double/trippel/quad/imperial madness, one might think that doppelbocks traditionally were gigantic beers but they were only slightly higher in alcohol than normal bocks, landing the realm of 7% A.B.V. The monks had their monastic duties to attend to, after all, and the abbot wouldn't take too kindly to his sheep showing up at vespers all shitfaced. Still, it's not unheard of for some varieties to hit double digit A.B.V. The Paulaner monks eventually named their liquid bread "Salvator" and the practice of adding –ator to the names of doppelbocks caught on.

The folks at Metropolitan Brewing in Chicago released their take on the style, Generator, back in December, if memory serves. I am unsure if this marks the brewery's first doppelbock but I do believe that it is the first time they've bottled one. I am also fairly certain that Generator is their first winter seasonal to be bottled. At 8.2%, it's perhaps a bit more boozy than tradition dictates but it will certainly keep you warm and provide enough sustenance until Metro's spring seasonal, Iron Works Alt, is released.

Considering the vast quantities of malt that go into this style, it should be no surprise that Generator pours a deep, dark sepia. And even my lousy photo reveals that it's clear. I got a nice tan, pillowy head which lasted a goodly while which I found surprising since I thought that alcohol tended to 86 foam. My glass was left with a modicum of Schaumhaftvermoegen. Doppelbocks are about the malt and Generator smells nice'n'sweet. I detected honey and stonefruit along with some black licorice and even a hint of grassiness from the hops.

Generator is sweet on the tongue as well - I caught toffee flavor as well as bread – but it's also clean. All of those fruity flavors were lagered away. It is a smooth beer and, considering all of the malt that went into it, it had a much lighter body than I thought it would have. Indeed, this stuff goes down easily – perhaps a bit too easily. Also surprising was the hop presence which is stronger than in most doppelbocks I've had. Here the spicy hop flavor is fairly intense veering near to black pepper and while it doesn't outdo the malt it does a yeoman's job in trying.

This is a very fine doppelbock. It tweaks the liquid bread formula a little bit with some extra hops but doesn't stray too far from the tried and true doppelbock legacy. It is also deceptively drinkable with a lighter body that means it'll go down easily for a while before the alcohol catches up with you.

Junk food pairing: A big beer like Generator demands spicy pork rinds.

The Last Express Now Available for iOS and Android

One of my favorite video games of all-time, 1997's The Last Express, is now available for iOS and Android devices. In the game, you take on the role of Robert Cath, an American riding the last run of the Orient Express before World War I breaks out. Your friend Tyler Whitney, whom you were to meet aboard the train, is dead in his compartment and it's up to you to figure out what happened.

As Cath, you've got to work around the conductor to sneak into other compartments and search for clues. Your fellow passengers all have their own secrets and part of the game is to listen to their conversations, at least the ones in languages you can understand. You do all of this in the game's wonderful art nouveau look which was achieved by rotoscoping live-action sequences. The creators even hunted down a car from the original Orient Express itself for added verisimilitude.

There is some action/fighting to be done but mostly you need to poke around the train for clues and piece together what happened to Whitney and the other stratagems unfolding aboard the train.

The Revenant Brew: Baderbräu Chicago Pilsener

Baderbräu bills itself as "Chicago's Original Craft Beer" and, while it may not be wholly accurate, its trademark Czech pilsner was first brewed in 1988. Michael Jackson famously called it "the best pilsner I`ve ever tasted in America". Unfortunately, the company ran into financial problems and went bankrupt in 1997 whereupon the name was bought and then resold to Goose Island. GI brewed the beer until 2002. Fast forward to 2010 when the Baderbräu trademark was bought by a couple of investors who brought the brand back from the dead. They contracted with Argus Brewery on Chicago's south side and the resurrected beer finally returned to taps in 2012 and bottles shortly thereafter.

The beer pours a light golden color and is clear. There were lots of bubbles streaming upwards towards the generous, pillowy head from the bottom of the glass. And the foam stuck around for a while too leaving some nice Schaumhaftvermoegen. Certainly a pretty beer but I thought it was a bit darker in color than most pilsners I've seen. It smelled really nice. It had a biscuity aroma along with a mild grassy hop scent. Curiously, there was some slight sweetness to it as well – reminded me of raisins.

The flavor was a bit more like bread than, say, crackers and there was a definite stonefruit sweetness. Not particularly strong but definitely noticeable. This gave the beer a slightly heavier body and wasn't quite as crisp as I was expecting but it remained medium-light. Mouthfeel was similar yet still on the light side and smooth. It was also nice and effervescent so you had that tongue tingling sensation and I think this helped give the beer a lighter feel. Oddly, it didn't taste as hoppy as I had expected either. To me, Czech pilsners are well-hopped with that Saaz goodness up front but here the spicy hoppiness was a bit further in the background than I was accustomed to. Still, it managed to balance the maltiness very well.

It finished dry with some nice bitterness and a lingering grassy-herbal hop flavor.

Despite being a smidgen heavier and sweeter than I was expecting, Baderbräu is some very tasty stuff. The malt and hops were balanced nicely and, at 4.8% A.B.V., it is fairly sessionable. Not being as sharp and light as some of its peers, I probably wouldn't make Baderbräu my go-to beer for the bowels of summer when it's 90 degrees out but it sure did the trick after work one day when it was below zero outside.

Junk food pairing: Pair Baderbräu with Buffalo Wing Goldfish Puffs. They're light enough not to enhance the beer's malt profile too much and have some zing to them to provide contrast on the tongue.

More Than Meets the Eye: Magnetron from Metropolitan Brewing

Chicago's Metropolitan Brewing is one of my favorite breweries. They brew tasty beers and refuse to populate their line-up with IPAs like a bunch of lemmings. Instead Metro offers fine beer of a more Teutonic nature. Last year they tweaked their line-up and started bottling seasonals with Magnetron, a schwarzbier, being the late autumn/early winter entry.

As far as I can tell, the difference between a schwarzbier and a Munich dunkles is that a schwarzbier goes easier on the malt and isn't as sweet as a dunkles – a milder dunkles, if you will. The thing is, I've had beers that are considered to be schwarzbiers that had had more malt flavor than some dunkles. The line between the two styles is a bit blurry for me. For instance, Sprecher's Black Bavarian is categorized as a schwarzbier yet it emphasizes the malt more than Capital's Munich Dark which is, taxonomically speaking, is a dunkles. Methinks only a trip to Germany can solve this conundrum. Since that's not going to happen in the near future, I will have to content myself with domestic brews like Magnetron.

Magnetron looks black from afar but closer inspection of the narrow part of the glass reveals it to be clear and a very deep reddish brown. I didn't get much of a head on my pour which may very well have been my fault. What foam I did get went away fairly quickly. The nose was fairly sweet – like apricots or plums – along with a bit of coffee from the roasted grains.

The beer tasted much like it smelled with some stonefruit-like sweetness sitting alongside the roasty chocolate and coffee flavors. Don't get me wrong here. These flavors are present but not strong. What we have here is very much like a pilsner – clean and restrained – but with some bonus features. The body is medium-light – a bit heavier than a pilsner yet lighter than something like an amber lager. You can taste the bubbles here so the mouthfeel is smooth and sprightly. There isn't much hoppiness to be had until the finish which was dry and featured a little bit of spicy noble bitterness.

While the Magnetron's dark color mirrors the short winter days, it's nothing like a stout or porter. It is not heavy, there is no burnt grain taste, and no single flavor towers over the others. This beer balances malt sweetness and roastiness in a smooth elixir with a bit of noble hops thrown in for good measure and a classic lager finish.

Junk food pairing: Drink Magnetron with Snyder's Bacon Cheddar pretzel pieces. This is a German style of beer so you are basically obligated to eat pretzels with it. But here you have bacon flavoring to complement the roasty grains and cheddar because, well, you pair beer with cheese, right?

The Zero Theorem Trailer

Terry Gilliam's latest movie looks to be a hoot. I love the use of short lenses here. Appears to have been shot in a style akin to that of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Unfortunately I've read that no U.S. distribution has been obtained yet.

Trailer for Under the Skin

An alien is sent to Earth to pick up hitchhikers to have them sent back to her planet to be a delicacy. Sounds wonderfully odd. The trailer surely is.

A Fine Example of Teutonic Food Preparation

If You Listen to Fools: Blood Orange Tea Weizen from Mobcraft

Madison's Mobcraft bills itself as the world's first crowdsourced beer company. Giotto Troia, Henry Schwartz, and Andrew Gierczak started Mobcraft with the Internet-age idea of having customer submit recipes or ideas for beers. After the wheat is separated from the chaff, those that remain are put up for a vote via social media sites and the winner is brewed. These crowdsourced beers are released once per month and brewed over at House of Brews by brewmaster Page Buchanan.

I recently found a bottle of crowdsourced batch #2, Blood Orange Tea Weizen, over at Trixie's Liquor and figured I'd give it a go. I like weizens and blood orange and tea sounded like interesting additions.

My beer photos are usually pretty crappy and this review will be no exception. The usual spot for my photographic disgraces, the dining room table, was occupied by two cats so it was off to the kitchen where harsh white was the order of the day making it look like I took the snap at a hospital. The beer looked really nice – take my word on this. It was clear a deep amber, perhaps more of a golden brown. My pour didn't produce much of a crown and the beer didn't have much in the way of bubbles either.

A caveat here: my nose was fairly stuffy when I drank this beer. That aside, I mainly smelled grass and citrus when I took a whiff. There was just a bit of sweetness in there as well which was bready to my stuffy proboscis.

I found the taste to be very similar to the nose. On the tongue, this beer is very smooth – almost velvety – with a medium body. The blood orange comes first followed by a bit of the grassy tea flavor. I didn't taste much carbonation but did catch a faint hint of what I thought was bubblegum. The beer got a bit sweeter as it warmed up, mainly citrus-tinged sweetness. The finish was grassy and bitter. I believe that the tea became a bit more discernible and that there was a bit of hops in there as well.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if the lack of a nice, pillowy head, a trademark of hefeweizens, was due to something brought in by the tea or fruit. Not really a big deal. The beer wasn't cloudy like a traditional hefeweizen nor was it as light on the tongue. Again, not a big deal. What is a big deal, however, is that I couldn't taste much of a hefeweizen here. It really tasted like blood orange iced tea but with more body than tea delivers. Aside from a fleeting hint of what I think was bubblegum, there's none of the phenols or esters giving the typical banana and cloves flavors. Hefeweizens generally have a lemon-like flavor to them and I thought the blood orange would complement that. Similarly, the style is not usually very bitter but green tea can add a little grassy bitterness to the proceedings. It's not that this is a bad beer but I was expecting/hoping for the citrus and tea to complement the flavors I enjoy in a hefeweizen instead of beating them into submission.

Junk food pairing: Munch on some lime chili tortilla chips with this stuff.

"They're just trying to kill you with hops"

Like my current pet peeve is—and here we're definitely talking about First-World problems—over-hopping of craft beer. Hops are a very aromatic, bitter compound and I suspect that they're being used by incompetent brewers to cover up defects in the taste of their produce. I've been trying this experiment lately: If you go into a microbrewery type of place and ask them for their "least-hopped" beer, they either can't even answer the question or they seem pretty seriously taken aback. They're just trying to kill you with hops.

Neal Stephenson

The guy writes great books AND is knowledgeable about beer.

While I continue to hope that the IPA craze will begin to blow over this year, it doesn't look like that's going to happen. I still maintain that the style has jumped the shark. I mean, when breweries change the names of their beers from being ales to IPAs, things have gone too far. Both Flying Dog and Odell waved their magic wands last autumn and suddenly their pale and red ales, respectively, became IPAs: "Flying Dog renamed its Double Dog Double Pale Ale to Double Dog Double IPA earlier this year. Earlier this week, Odell Brewing confirmed that it would rebrand its Red Ale to Runoff Red IPA."

At least that's not as bad as naming your IPA "Mouth Raper" which, although a pretty tasteless name, no doubt stands as truth in advertising.

Sam Adams has a new IPA coming out, if it's not already on shelves, called Rebel IPA. Here's the label:



Notice how the brand's namesake is nowhere to be found. Apparently someone in the marketing department thought the label needed to be buzzword compliant, hence it looks "edgy" and says "IPA" on it. (That and it resembles a certain label by another brewer.)

And check this out:



The "craft" division of MillerCoors is now brewing a session IPA. Who'da thunk it? Recall how Third Shift's first brew was an amber lager. An amber lager and then a session IPA? I think they're copying the Wisconsin Brewing Company's playbook. A regular American IPA and porter can't be far behind.

I see that Sierra Nevada has three new IPAs coming out soon (Harvest Single Hop Mandarina, Nooner Session, and Snow Wit White) and Wisconsin brewers are doing their darnedest to keep up with their West Coast counterparts.







New to the Madison area are Utah's Epic Brewing and Hawaii's Kona Brewing. Kona will be pushing their Backwash pineapple IPA and Gnarly, a macadamia nut Russian imperial stout, on us. Wait. OK, no. Instead they will foist upon us their Big Wave Golden Ale and (gasp!) Longboard Island Lager. How odd for a brewery to begin distribution in a new state with nary a pale ale. They are doomed. Pele will have her imperial IPAs!

Epic, on the other hand, doesn't look to be making that mistake. From what I've seen, they're basically going all-out with most of the craft beer trends in the book - a couple of imperial stouts, multiple IPAs, and saisons – now with more brettanomyces!

Also new to the Madison area is beer from a brew outfit in Waukesha - 4 Brothers. The schtick here is that they offer beer admixtures. Beer is contracted brewed by Sand Creek and then the "blendmaster" puts them together in his lab. Sibling Rivalry contains blonde, brown, and red ales; Relative Madness is a blonde ale mixed with a porter; Prodigal Son features an IPA and a cream ale (you knew there just had to be an IPA here somewhere); and Whipper Snapper is a blend of American wheat, helles, and amber brews. Not sure if that's an amber ale or amber lager, though.

The company's website says the beers are available in Madison at Madison's on King Street while Riley's Wines of the World recently posted a photo of six packs on its Twitter feed.

On the one hand, I am intrigued. There may very well be some good beer to be had here. On the other, this comes across as sheer novelty. Granted, not novelty like a doughnut maple bacon ale, but a novelty nonetheless. Can't barrel age, can't add brett, and perhaps don't want to get involved in the IPA horserace so what do you do? It is certainly a unique selling point.

We can now all sleep easier at night knowing that Corona is going draft. I know there was a big Corona tap handle hole in my liver. The funny part is what Robert Sands, CEO of Constellation Brands and owner of the Corona brand, said:

Think about the craft business, okay? You're talking about tiny little brands that nobody's ever heard of outside their city...

How very odd. No one's ever heard of Sam Adams outside of Boston? No one in Chicago has heard of New Glarus and crosses the Cheddar Curtain just to buy it? Sierra Nevada isn't known outside of Chico? Fat Tire is a secret known only to the friendly folks of Fort Collins? To take a local example, you've got House of Brews that is certainly a tiny little brand that's mostly unknown outside of Madison but it seems to generally be on tap at places that don't even have Bud Light on tap, places that don't have many customers clamoring for Corona in bottles, let alone on draft.

Perhaps because I am not a CEO, I just don't understand Constellation's strategy. The company is not going to get tap handles in craft beer bars. Are they looking to knock off a token craft selection at taverns that are otherwise populated by Miller and Bud taps? If so, then that token craft brew is probably going to be Sam Adams or another craft brew that is certainly well-known outside of their city. I just don't understand what kind of establishments carry tiny little craft brews that would give one up for the chance to put Corona on tap.

Some random observations to finish the post:

1) I had my first Pecatonica beer last month – a Nightfall Lager. It was absolutely terrible. The beer had little body and was cloyingly sweet. It tasted a bit like wort.

2) A fairly recent visit to Trixie's Liquor revealed that they carry House of Brews' Rickhouse Bourbon Barrel Stout, MobCraft's brews, and Hydro Street bombers as well.

3) Ale Asylum will be bottling more this year. In addition to a TBD seasonal, 1 April brings Unshadowed, a weissbier. What happened to Hathaweizen?

4) Karben4 will be bottling in the near future. This is good news as it'd be nice to grab some NightCall to bring home while I'm out shopping.

This Beer Has Not Aged Well: Appleanche from Capital

I first tasted Capital's Appleanche last year at a pre-Great Taste event. Appleanche is an apfel (apple) doppelbock and it sounded like a tasty preview of autumn. I didn't really care for it all that much on that hot summer day but on a chilly winter night, I revisited it.

One of our cats photobombed my picture but I think that she did it in a rather artistic way by framing herself in the glass. A very naughty katze. Her presence and my shoddy photography don't do justice to the beer's wonderful gold-light amber color. Appleanche is clear and my gentle pour produced only the slightest head. The Schaumhaftvermoegen was minimal with a bit of foam clinging to the sides of the glass only briefly before sliding into the beer.When I opened the bottle, I caught a big whiff of fresh apfel. Sweet but no overly so. More like a Granny Smith than a Red Delicious. This brew smells great. After putting the glass to my nose I caught that sweet apfel scent again plus a little bit of bready malt.

The predominance of the fruit carried into the flavor. Immediately upon hitting my tongue I tasted the apfel. Mostly sweet but there was some tartness there as well for balance. But it isn't long before the bottom falls out and the apfel flavor disappears and it replaced by that warm alcohol flavor. While 7.7% A.B.V. makes for a fairly hearty brew, I wouldn't think I'd taste the booze. Almost as soon as that slight burning flavor arrives it dissolves into a herbal hop taste which lingers on the palate giving a dry, slightly bitter finish. Mouthfeel is smooth although the carbonation and the hops keep it from being syrupy.

Sadly, Appleanche was exactly how I remembered it from back in August - disappointing. While the fresh apfel aroma and luscious counterpoint of sweet-tart flavor are truly wonderful, I failed to taste any of the malt which was present in the nose. I drank half a bottle of it trying to discern the defining flavor of the doppelbock but failed. Perhaps it's part of the sweetness at the front end of the sip but the apfel was dominant. Quite aside from that boozy middle act, the flavors here just don't meld and instead come in waves. I just failed to taste the apfel und malt pas de deux and the hops were left on their own at the finish instead of balancing the expected sweetness.

Capital's webpage gives me the impression that Appleanche is to be a permanent late-summer fixture in their line-up. Hopefully this August's batch will do a better job of letting the bready sweetness of the style shine through and integrate it with the fruit and hops. A failure, perhaps, but a beer certainly worth getting right.

Junk food pairing: I suspect Appleanche would go well with Lay's Barbeque Ham potato chips. The smoky, porky goodness would surely be tasty along with the apfel flavor in the brew.

The End of a Chapter in the Madison Blogosphere

Back in the mid-2000s blogs were becoming a big deal and the folks at madison.com sought to capitalize on the trend. There were, if memory serves, a couple of experiments to integrate bloggers with Madison's daily papers. The one I recall is POST, a section of their website which provided a curated list of local blog posts. POST became a weekly paper which (gasp!) paid local bloggers to have their material appear in the tabloid. Isthmus too had a section devoted to daily highlights from Madison's blogosphere. In 2005 Dane101 began as a "collaborative news and arts blog for Madison and Dane County, Wisconsin".

POST came and went while Isthmus ditched their quotidian round-up in favor of hiring a small stable of bloggers to contribute. Dane101 lost much of its news component but remained a good source for arts coverage and it maintained Dane101.net, a feed of local blogs headlines.

In November the proprietors of Dane101 announced that the site would go out of business on the 27th of this month. Dane101.net had been dead for a while and they were unable "to create a self-sustaining model".

In June of 2012 The Onion's A.V. Club Madison shuttered its virtual doors. About a year later some of those A.V. Club alumni started Arts Extract, a blog and podcast devoted to "reporting and comment on the arts in Madison, WI". About a week ago the site announced that it would not make it into 2014. I've not heard an explanation for AA's demise.

It would seem that most of the promise of blogs from a decade or so ago never came to fruition. To be sure, there is a cadre of bloggers who get some nods from the media establishment to have posts sit along newspaper editorials from around the state but, by and large, the grand experiments that sought to meld news from below with news from above have failed. If you want arts coverage for Madison, you are, generally speaking, left with the same options you had prior to the experiments - Isthmus and Madison Newspaper's 77 Square.

So what's next for the Madison blogosphere? Time will tell but I hope that someone starts up an aggregator because it would be nice to have one place to go where I can discover what's out there.

Immigration Laws Affect Madison

Last month Juliana Kerr from The Chicago Council on Global Affairs was in town to discuss immigration. She met with Mayor Soglin who "convened a roundtable with city council members, Hispanic and Somali immigrant community leaders, and several youth" in addition to the Madison Committee on Foreign Relations, a group of "civic, business, and academic leaders" who meet once a month to hear presentations and discuss global issues. Sadly I could find no mention of Kerr's meetings in Madison newspapers. Luckily Ms. Kerr blogged about her day in Madison.

When most people discuss Wisconsin’s stake in the immigration debate, they think of the migrant workers in the dairy industry. And with reason: forty percent of Wisconsin’s dairy farm workers are immigrants, and yet, the current U.S. immigration system doesn’t offer a low-skilled year-round visa to legally employ them long-term. Add to this the fact that some policymakers want to focus on enforcement-only bills first—including mandatory e-verify—and the entire dairy industry could be threatened.

What may be more surprising, however, is that the lack of immigration reform is also affecting Wisconsin’s urban areas, not just rural ones. During my recent visit to Madison, Mayor Paul Soglin convened a roundtable with city council members, Hispanic and Somali immigrant community leaders, and several youth. They immediately asked when the DREAMers (young unauthorized immigrants brought to the U.S. as children) would be able to go to college and pay in-state tuition. Or have the right to apply for citizenship. Or stop fearing deportation at every turn. One boy pleaded to learn more about rumored tracking devices being placed on the ankles of unauthorized immigrants facing deportation. Brought to the United States as young children, they know of no other home than Wisconsin. Why are they being punished? Do we not want them to be educated and successful members of our society?, they asked.

The Mayor is compassionate for their situation and mindful of the changing demographics of his city, noting that while Madison’s overall population has grown from 170,000 in 1980 to 233,000 in 2010, the minority population grew by over 57 percent from 2000-2010 alone. In 2010, minorities made up 18 percent of the total population compared to 13 percent in 2000. The Hispanic population almost doubled from 13,400 to 26,400 during the same period.

But he is also at a loss of what he can do from his office in the absence of federal immigration reform. Even offering driver’s licenses or in-state tuition for unauthorized immigrants are decisions that can be made at the state level, but not municipal. (Ironically, I had also reached out to the governor’s office for a meeting with any willing body but was told that since immigration is a federal issue, no one in the office dealt with it.) The Mayor does what he can, such as supporting grants that go to social service organizations for immigrant communities and welcomes guidance from other cities that are developing creative immigrant integration policies while waiting for Congress to act.

I found this very interesting as, although I was familiar with the large number of immigrants working on dairy farms here in Wisconsin, I really didn't know much about how our immigration laws affect the ever-growing number of minorities here in Madison. While Madison is not a large metropolis by any means, what people think of as "urban" problems are no longer relegated to Milwaukee alone anymore.

In addition to being unable to find any example of Madison's newspapers reporting on Kerr's visit, it is also disappointing that Mayor Soglin didn't mention it on either his personal blog or his mayoral one. What the mayor says and does is news simply by virtue of his office. Madison mayors, like all politicos, are happy to point out their attendance at ribbon cuttings and to announce the formation of committees to study problems but they rarely maintain a vocal presence to keep issues of importance in the public eye. Soglin should be blogging, holding press conferences, etc. much more often to keep important topics on the front burner. Instead of waiting for Congress to act, he could publicize his meeting with Kerr and community members to start the process of taking immigration off the back burner. Perhaps he can do something with Milwaukee mayor Tom Barrett to further publicize the issue. Simply by being mayor every word Soglin utters and every word he types is de facto newsworthy. He has the power to begin and foster civic conversations yet he seem fairly reluctant to do so, which is a shame.

Frederick Wiseman on At Berkeley

Frederick Wiseman is an American institution. He's a pioneer of documentary cinema and, at age 84 (Today is his birthday, in fact. Happy Birthday, Mr. Wiseman!) he is still making movies. His latest is At Berkeley, a look at UC-Berkeley filmed in 2010 as the campus saw students protesting tuition rates in the middle of The Great Recession.

Wiseman is known for making documentaries about institutions using a style known as "direct cinema" which involves the camera being unobtrusive and simply observing events as they unfold. There's little or no narration. He and his crew embed themselves in an institution and document the interplay and dynamics of the people in it and with others who interact with them. Over the 40+ years of his career he has documented America like no one else.

Senses of Cinema has a really nice conversation with Wiseman in their December issue. It's not super-film geeky and it is quite interesting. Wiseman talks a bit about his style, the making of At Berkeley, and the issues his movie brings up, amongst other things. At one point he says, "It’s much better to see it projected...I’m hoping the film gets booked in state universities because the issues are the same everywhere."

Thanks to UW-Cinematheque, the movie will screen here in Madison on Saturday, 1 March.

Quest for Fire

I enjoy spicy foods. I developed a taste for them back in the days when I cooked for a living. Our breakfast cook, Johnny, would occasionally bring in bottles of hot sauce and we always had a stash in one of the coolers. Someone somewhere would breed a new chili and Johnny would bring in the resulting hot sauce. During a slow time, we'd throw some chicken wings in the fryer and use them for our testing purposes. Hilarity always ensued.

There was the time that one of the dishwashers, a raunchy, fun-loving black woman from Alabama who kept trying to introduce me to the joys of dark meat, came over and saw the wings and a bottle of hot sauce. She grabbed one of the wings and applied a liberal dose of the sauce. Now, this stuff wasn't the the kind of sauce that would put you in the hospital but you were guaranteed an endorphin rush. We warned her that the bright red stuff wasn't Frank's RedHot but she brushed aside our admonitions. And she paid for it. The look on her face was priceless.

Another time Johnny came to work with a bottle of datil pepper sauce. None of us cooks had heard of it but we were game. A co-worker pulled the bottle out of the box and gave it a shake only to have the cap fly off and some of the sauce shoot into one of his eyes. I immediately dragged him over to the eye wash station. After what seemed like an hour of rinsing his poor eye, he looked like he'd just had a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster. Needless to say, he didn't get much work done the rest of that day.

Back in those days it seemed like most chilies were just creeping above the habanero in hotness. Yeah, you had sauces that could kill you but they were basically just tomato paste with pure capsaicin added. These days, however, there is a capsaicin arms race afoot. The New Yorker published a piece in November called "Fire-Eaters: The search for the hottest chili". It documents the endeavors of people who seek glory in entering the Guinness Book of World Records for having bred the hottest chili on the planet. According to the author, these people are "are mostly American, British, and Australian guys. (There is also a valiant Scandinavian contingent.)"

At the moment, there is no definitive claimant to the title of world’s hottest pepper. Lacking a central authority, the chili community finds itself embroiled in a three-way schism. In June of 2011, a group of Australian growers captured the Guinness record with the Trinidad Scorpion Butch T (1,463,700 SHU). Less than a year later, Bosland’s Chile Pepper Institute issued a press release: “When it comes to bringing the heat, there’s a new king of the hill.” Bosland claimed that a C.P.I. chili called the Trinidad Moruga Scorpion had exceeded two million Scoville units.

Then, in August of last year, Ed Currie, of the PuckerButt Pepper Company, of Fort Mill, South Carolina, unveiled a new contender. Currie announced, “The PuckerButt Pepper Company has raised the bar for hot pepper heat intensity by producing an amazing hot pepper, the Smokin’ Ed’s Carolina Reaper, which surpasses the current world record holder, the Butch T Trinidad Scorpion.” The Carolina Reaper’s recommended uses, according to PuckerButt’s Web site, included hot sauces, salsa, and “settling old scores.” Steven Leckart wrote in Maxim that eating one was “like being face-fucked by Satan.”

2,000,000+ Scovilles?! The article details the obsession these guys have with chilies and breeding the hottest on the planet. They make for good subjects of a Werner Herzog movie. Now, I like a good burn every so often but chilies that hot are ridiculous. You can find videos on YouTube of people eating them and then proceeding to have their faces go red before vomiting.

In addition to the profiles of men who bicker over who has the hottest chili, I learned a bit about the history of the Scoville scale. I've known about it for a while but never knew who developed it or what exactly it measured. It was created by one Wilbur Scoville in 1912. Scoville was a pharmacist and he measured chili hotness by "how many drops of sugar water it would take to dilute the heat of a chili". Presumably it now measures parts per million of capsaicin or some such thing.

On a local note, are any of these mega-maxi-hot chilies or hot sauces made from them available in Madison? For a good burn here in town, do try the pickled habaneros at that Mexican restaurant that shares space with Pan Y Pan Bakery on Milwaukee Street. They grow and pickle the chilies on premises.

The Day Max Headroom Interrupted Doctor Who

Chicagoans of a certain age recall the day in 1987 when some goofball in a Max Headroom mask hacked into the signal of WTTW Channel 11's broadcast of Doctor Who. I recall hearing about it and the incident became a piece of local lore as authorities never figured out who dunnit. Recently Vice posted a lengthy piece called "The Mystery of the Creepiest Television Hack" about the affair which included a look at the FCC investigation, something I'd never read about previously. It was interesting not only to read about why the FCC never caught the perpetrator but also to realize that I'd forgotten that the same person also hacked WGN's signal earlier in the day.

In these days when having one's credit card number stolen is fairly routine and hackers & hacking have a mainstream presence, this look back at the days before the World Wide Web seems almost quaint.

Right up until 9:14 PM on November 22nd, 1987, what appeared on Chicago's television sets was somewhat normal: entertainment, news, game shows. That night, as usual, Dan Roan, a popular local sportscaster on Channel 9's Nine O'Clock News, was narrating highlights of the Bears’ victory over the Detroit Lions. And then, suddenly and without warning, the signal flickered up and out into darkness.

In the control room of WGN-TV, the technicians on duty stared blankly at their screens. It was from their studio, located at Bradley Place in the north of the city, that the network broadcasted its microwave transmission to an antenna at the top of the 100-story John Hancock tower, seven miles away, and then out to tens of thousands of viewers. Time seemed to slow to a trickle as they watched that signal get hijacked.

A squat, suited figure sputtered into being, and bounced around maniacally. Wearing a ghoulish rubbery mask with sunglasses and a frozen grin, the mysterious intruder looked like a cross between Richard Nixon and the Joker. Static hissed through the signal; behind him, a slab of corrugated metal spun hypnotically. This was not part of the regularly scheduled broadcast.

Finally someone switched the uplink frequencies, and the studio zapped back to the screen. There was Roan, at his desk in the studio, smiling at the camera, dumbfounded.

“Well, if you're wondering what’s happened,” he said, chuckling nervously, “so am I."

My Final Beer Post of 2013

I've been sick lately and haven't been drinking much beer. I have also been neglecting new releases and so here are some new and newish beer labels. Some of these are already on store shelves.











I have a bottle of this sitting in my cellar. Are chili-infused beers a new trend? Locally, Capital's Eternal Flame this year is also an imperial stout with chili and The Great Dane had a trio of chili pilsners in the autumn. Perhaps it's just local breweries getting around to adding the capsaicin to brews.







Madison's MobCraft, billed as the world's first crowdsourced brewery, is finally bottling their beers. I've not seen them myself. Do liquor stores carry them yet? Or are they only available at the brewery?



Lakefront is apparently resurrecting their Beer Line label as they brewed a Beer Line barleywine for their 10th anniversary.



Capital continues its decent to the dark side with their third IPA.





Lakefront's My Turn series has really impressed me. The Baltic porter and rauch helles were fantastic. I've got a couple others in my possession waiting to be tasted. Considering that the dunkles is one of my favorite beer styles, I am very excited to try this brew.



A braggot, eh? Interesting. A braggot is a mead-beer hybrid. I've really enjoyed the ones I've had - Viking used to brew a couple of them - so I am looking forward to this one.



A German wheat porter? This is the next entry in Schneider Weisse's Tap X series which features limited edition brews in 750ml bottles. It would appear that the German brewing scene is a-changin'. More below.





The transmogrification of Berghoff continues. I, for one, certainly didn't expect this.



Hey Sam Adams, how about using the Polish name for a Polish beer style? It's Grodziskie, not Grätzer.

Yet the primary name for this beer style must be Grodziskie. The common belief that the Polish language is “difficult” and “exotic” is a troublesome remnant of Prussian colonization policies that sought to eradicate our language and culture. These policies manifested in name changing (applied to place names -- hence, Grodzisk became Graetz -- and people’s names) and banning the use of Polish in education and in public spaces. If you choose to prioritize the German name of Grodziskie and classify it as a German beer style, you will be subscribing to the legacy of colonization and unwittingly re-enacting its symbolic violence in the twenty-first century.

Being of Polish decent, I emailed Sam Adams about this and never heard back. Not even a form email. I guess this isn't surprising since Sam Adams is now a very large company. On the other hand, Scott Manning of Vintage will be changing the name of his brew to Grodziskie next year.





I believe the Generator was bottled earlier this week or last. I shall have to get some when I go to Chicago next month. I brought some of their Magnetron schwarzbier back last month and it is tasty stuff indeed.



To celebrate the 30th anniversary of their pilsner, Schell is coming out with a limited edition variety pack consisting of four beers: the original recipe from 1984, the current iteration, a pils made with rye, and a pils made with a new variety of German hops called Mandarina Bavaria. The Mandarina hop is known for its tangerine flavor. These beers are due in February with a similar celebration of the 30th anniversary of Schell's hefeweizen coming out later in the year.

It would seem that German brewers are adopting new hop varieties like the Mandarina. I found an article called "German brewers hop on to new fruity flavours" which describes the trend:

German small-batch brewers like Schoppe have increasingly used so-called "flavour hops" to impart notes of orange, grapefruit or peach while still following the country's cherished 16th century purity law, which restricts other flavourings.

Until recently, Schoppe had to import special hops from the US, where craft brews have an established niche in the market.

This year, German growers, moving to capitalise on growing demand, harvested the country's first commercial-sized batch of newly developed flavour hop varieties.

I've not yet read anything to indicate that the German equivalents of AB-InBev and MillerCoors are jumping on this bandwagon which means it's still early days. But things are definitely afoot in the German brewing scene. I did find a German pale ale in Chicago but have never seen any of these newer German brews here in Madison.

Robin Shepard of Isthmus has a couple looks ahead to 2014 for the area's brewing scene: Part One and Part Two.

Among the highlights is The Great Dane's Bockfest which will feature 10+ bocks. "Early this past autumn, several of the Great Dane's brewers traveled to Germany for a week of research." Right. I can just imagine the "research" that was done in various biergartens.

Unsurprisingly, Kirby Nelson is committed to a maibock for the spring.

Valkyrie is now distributing in Madison. I noticed a bottle of Rubee in the singles section of Woodman's east a couple of weeks ago and then four-packs last weekend. Unfortunately there was no Hot Chocolate but they did carry War Hammer, a coffee, oatmeal, milk porter; Rubee, their flagship red lager; Big Swede, a Swedish-style imperial stout; and Abby Normal, an abbey tripel.

Last month Shepard reviewed Capital's Dark Voyage which is replacing Hop Cream. In that review it was revealed that Capital will be releasing a white IPA next year. It's unknown whether the new white IPA will come in bombers or be an annual. If the latter, presumably Munich Dark or Special Pilsner is next on the chopping block. That will make four IPAs (plus U.S. Pale Ale, an APA). According to Brian Destree, Capital's brewmaster, IPAs are where it's at. "It's where new sales are, it's the biggest craft beer by style by far, and the fastest area of growth." Presumably we can look forward to Capital brewing a session IPA, a Belgian IPA, an IPL, and whatever the latest iteration of the style is in the near future. I can see it now. Keel Hauled, an IPA brewed with buckwheat and a rare variety of Bulgarian hops that taste like quince and then aged on a bed of cubebs in slivovitz barrels.

I think you could feed a monkey grapefruit for a week and then use its shit in a beer that has "IPA" on the label and the BA crowd would go nuts. "I really love the fecal-citrus aroma!"

Chris Drosner, a.k.a. - The Beer Baron, of the Wisconsin State Journal thinks that the embrace of the IPA by Wisconsin brewers is one of, if not the, top brewing story of 2013. To me, 2013 is the year the IPA jumped the shark. To wit:



Hops added to cider so it has "crisp citrus" notes.



An IPA-style mead.



Whiskey "framed by citrus-laden hop character".



"...it occurred to Ted that he should set out to create the perfect smoker’s complement to his favorite IPA."

Locally, Madison Sourdough has a Hops and Malt "Beer Bread" that has no beer in it. But it does have whole leaf hops and goes well with "a tall glass of India Pale Ale." Ian's Pizza can't be far behind with a Mac & Cheese Hop pie.

Lake Champlain Chocolates made a chocolate bar with hops. Need hoppy condiments? Pompey Mountain has you covered with hop-flavored BBQ sauce, ketchup, and mustard.

When you're drowning in hop gluttony, you'll need to bathe. Luckily you're covered.





Before you head out into the cold, be sure to apply some double IPA lip balm.



All of these are things I'd expect to find in the Archie McPhee catalog next to the St. Gambrinus action figure. This is what the craft beer scene has mutated into? The fetishizing of a subset of a particular ingredient used to add flavor to beer? Craft beer used to be about a fermented grain beverage but now it sometimes feels like it is simply a generic liquid medium for the transmission of alpha acids and citrus notes. Hopefully this trend will not go beyond beer. I'd hate to walk into an Italian restaurant and have the chef proudly proclaim her minestrone the saltiest ever made or that the red sauce was dry-basiled and has one million units of linalool in it.

Hopefully 2014 will be the year that this IPA craze begins to blow over.

Some festivals of note:

The Great Dane's Bockfest is on 4 March.

Capital's Bockfest is on 22 February.

Capital is also throwing a Starkbierfest on 15 March. "Starkbier" is German for "strong beer" and, to my knowledge, refers to bocks of all sorts and their full, malty profile instead of alcohol content. Should be interesting to see what's on tap that day.