In the Beer World, Chocolate and Spice Rule

Jun 14 2010, 1:12 PM ET

There are lots of great beer styles available right now, but you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s all about imperial stouts. They count for 16 of the top 25 beers on beeradvocate.com and 17 of the top 25 at ratebeer.com.

The style originated in 18th-Century England, reputedly as a gift to the court of Catherine the Great—hence its original name, Russian Imperial. In recent decades American brewers have been crafting their own version, often called “double imperial.” Confusingly, the newer, American style is often called simply “imperial stout.” Take that, Anglo-Russian Entente.

Both styles pour like motor oil; they’re high in alcohol, between 7 percent and 12 percent, with strong chocolate and malt notes. But Rocky Balboa would be proud: American doubles are even bigger than Russians—they’re sweeter, more alcoholic, and much hoppier. And many American doubles bring a little something extra to the table: they’re often aged, sometimes with vanilla beans, sometimes in whiskey barrels. Other times, they’re brewed with coffee.

Imperial stouts are about as far from pale lagers as you can get. Which, in fact, may explain their popularity. They’re the crowd-pleasing Cabernets of the beer world—heavy, boozy quaffs with popular flavors like chocolate, caramel, and spice. Think German chocolate cake in a bottle, doused in alcohol. High-alcohol beers of all kinds are hot right now, and the popularity of imperial stouts may come partly from the fact that, at 10 percent alcohol by volume or higher, all those flavors are needed for balance.

Imperial stouts resemble wine in another way. Any beer with ABV above 9 percent or so can be stored, and some—particularly imperial stouts—actually need a few years to mellow in the bottle. As a result, people collect, store, and sell them, just like they would fine wines. In some ways, they’re even better than wine: for the price of a cellar-quality wine, a collector could buy a six-pack of an imperial stout, then drink one a year to see how it changes over time.

But there’s something else going on with imperial stouts. They’re not just highly regarded; they inspire cult-like behavior among their fans. That’s in part because, like a Trans Am, imperial stouts are easy to customize. Brew them with cherries, age them in Scotch barrels, throw in some coffee beans from a prize-winning roaster, whatever you want. Release them in a limited edition, and suddenly people who might buy just a bottle or two will want one of each. Goose Island, in Chicago, has got this figured out: not only does it make Bourbon County Stout, aged in Heaven Hill whiskey barrels, but it makes hard-to-find varieties like Bourbon County Brand Coffee Stout, brewed with Intelligentsia espresso beans, and Bourbon County Stout Rare, aged for two years in barrels that formerly held 23-year-old Pappy Van Winkle, among the most expensive bourbons on the market.

Then there’s the beer’s extreme characteristics. Sure, you can do a keg stand, but are you man enough to down an entire bottle of Dogfish Head’s World Wide Stout, at 18 percent ABV?

Then again, you’d be stupid to chug an imperial stout. Not only are they among the most expensive domestic beers, but they’re also among the hardest to find. It takes a lot of skill, time, and resources to make a barrel-aged beer, something only the better craft brewers can handle. And despite imperial stouts’ popularity, they’re hardly session beers, and they’re no fun on a hot summer day; as a result, most brewers limit their production to seasonal runs, producing limited amounts for a limited amount of time.

For reasons I’ve never fully fathomed, some of the best imperial stouts are released just one day a year. Like hajjis to Mecca, fans will travel to places like Portsmouth, New Hampshire, home of Portsmouth Brewing’s Kate the Great, or Munster, Indiana, home of Three Floyds’s Dark Lord, to get their hands on a few bottles.

At first glance, this makes no sense. Why would a brewery so severely limit the output of its best-known product? Most folks, even most beer lovers, will never taste a drop of Kate the Great. Then again, that’s a great way to make sure everyone wants to try your beer.

http://www.theatlantic.com/food/archive/2010/06/in-the-beer-world-chocolate-and-spice-rule/58122/

Here is a very helpful post about the anger of the Tea Party movement from the perspective of philosopher J.M. Bernstein:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/the-very-angry-tea-party/

He is interested in what is truly motivating this anger.  Here are some highlights:

Sometimes it is hard to know where politics ends and metaphysics begins: when, that is, the stakes of a political dispute concern not simply a clash of competing ideas and values but a clash about what is real and what is not, what can be said to exist on its own and what owes its existence to an other.

When it comes to the Tea Party’s concrete policy proposals, things get fuzzier and more contradictory: keep the government out of health care, but leave Medicare alone; balance the budget, but don’t raise taxes; let individuals take care of themselves, but leave Social Security alone; and, of course, the paradoxical demand not to support Wall Street, to let the hard-working producers of wealth get on with it without regulation and government stimulus, but also to make sure the banks can lend to small businesses and responsible homeowners in a stable but growing economy.

My hypothesis is that what all the events precipitating the Tea Party movement share is that they demonstrated, emphatically and unconditionally, the depths of the absolute dependence of us all on government action, and in so doing they undermined the deeply held fiction of individual autonomy and self-sufficiency that are intrinsic parts of Americans’ collective self-understanding.

Tea Party anger is, at bottom, metaphysical, not political: what has been undone by the economic crisis is the belief that each individual is metaphysically self-sufficient, that  one’s very standing and being as a rational agent owes nothing to other individuals or institutions.    The opposing metaphysical claim, the one I take to be true, is that the very idea of the autonomous subject is an institution, an artifact created by the practices of modern life: the intimate family, the market economy, the liberal state.  Each of these social arrangements articulate and express the value and the authority of the individual; they give to the individual a standing she would not have without them.

The great and inspiring metaphysical fantasy of independence and freedom is simply a fantasy of destruction.

This is the rage and anger I hear in the Tea Party movement; it is the sound of jilted lovers furious that the other — the anonymous blob called simply “government” — has suddenly let them down, suddenly made clear that they are dependent and limited beings, suddenly revealed them as vulnerable.  And just as in love, the one-sided reminder of dependence is experienced as an injury.  All the rhetoric of self-sufficiency, all the grand talk of wanting to be left alone is just the hollow insistence of the bereft lover that she can and will survive without her beloved.  However, in political life, unlike love, there are no second marriages; we have only the one partner, and although we can rework our relationship, nothing can remove the actuality of dependence.  That is permanent.

In truth, there is nothing that the Tea Party movement wants; terrifyingly, it wants nothing.  Lilla calls the Tea Party “Jacobins”; I would urge that they are nihilists.  To date, the Tea Party has committed only the minor, almost atmospheric violences of propagating falsehoods, calumny and the disruption of the occasions for political speech — the last already to great and distorting effect.  But if their nihilistic rage is deprived of interrupting political meetings as an outlet, where might it now go? With such rage driving the Tea Party, might we anticipate this atmospheric violence becoming actual violence, becoming what Hegel called, referring to the original Jacobins’ fantasy of total freedom, “a fury of destruction”? There is indeed something not just disturbing, but frightening, in the anger of the Tea Party.

Among other things, the internet is a medium for communication.  Blogs are one of the those outlets for communication.  I have been reading blogs for the past 7 years, and I have had a blog for the past 6 years.  One thing I love and hate about blogs are blog comments.  I love them because they are opportunities for good discussion, interaction, and information.  I hate them because sometimes the comment threads never end and people simply go back and forth debating with very little accomplished.  Then, when comments are shut off on posts, people begin to think that blogger isn’t open-minded or has something to hide (it’s a power move).

Most often, bloggers don’t shut off comments because they are not open-minded, but because the comments have gotten ugly.  After having ignored comments on so many posts and articles that I have read online and then returning back to read them selectively, it occurred to me that blog posts can reveal our hearts in profound ways.  Duh, call me “Captain Obvious” for this “stunning revelation”.

As someone who is trying to understand what motivates people, I’ve simply ignored blog comments as a window into this because I often don’t like what I see.  Friction-filled blog comments (and reality shows) have had a repulsive effect on me.  Why?  Do I think I am better than these people?  Is it because I don’t feel that I have an answer?  Is it because I do feel that I have an answer but won’t be heard?  Most of the time I simply can’t stand the poor ways in which some people communicate with each other.  It is ugly, and I don’t like to look at ugly things.

Of course, without any voices narrating the comments, I am left to narrate them the best I can.  Either way, blog comments are reactions, and reactions are large windows into people’s souls.  So if we care about what motivates people, we have something to learn – especially when it gets ugly.  So if you have time, perhaps keep this in mind the next time you see a long comment thread.