FOOLCiRCLE

BeerAdvocate Magazine Issue #10, is the first of the BA mags (I think) that doesn’t have a title, and if it didn’t have any beer reviews I couldn’t think of another way to improve it (joking, . . . mostly).

Honestly, one of the best magazine covers I have ever seen.

First, lets talk about this cover – WOW! – comes close to summing it up. This is a drawing (touched up on a computer) of a famous black & white photo of Michael Jackson the Beer Hunter. Not only did the artist do a great job rendering the photo into a piece of art, I feel as though he captured the color that did not exist before. Plus, to have a guy who died just over a month ago (August 30th) already on the cover of a magazine (released first week of October) is very fresh, and very current. Most magazines don’t work in that close of a time-frame to reality. I bet most of the other beer magazines (BYO, All About Beer, Zymurgy) won’t have large cover articles on Michael Jackson until next month. OK, so the article inside the mag wasn’t that large, the cover says it all. If BeerAdvocate or the artist ever decided to make prints of this cover I’d buy one, maybe with the proceeds going to Parkinson’s Disease, even better. Below is a copy of what I believe is the original B&W photo this drawing is based on with a doctored B&W version of this cover next to it for comparison.

In the Beer News section there was neat little article on a new program the Brewer’s Association is putting together, the Cicerone Certification Program. Essentially it wants to be the equivalent of the Sommelier Certification Program for wine, but for beer. It sounds like there will be different levels of certification from Certified Beer Server, Certified Cicerone and Master Cicerone. To me this is exciting news, especially if it is widely excepted throughout the industry. For the first time since the magazine came out I wasn’t overly impressed with the 9 Steps to Beerdom section. I think it probably had to do with the fact that I didn’t previously know this brewer, Tod Mott from Portsmouth Brewery, but the article on him was still interesting.

There was an interesting article in the Innovation section about how some breweries are trying to find ways to turn waste product into usable product, specifically waste water to electricity and usable water again. This article focused on Foster’s in Australia and how they have received  some grants and help to install equipment to convert used brewing water into electricity and “fresh” usable water again. They called them microbial fuel cells and explained how they have filters and bacteria in them and that is the super condensed way on how they work. Sounds expensive, but sounds way cool.

The feature article was one I was looking forward to reading, it was titled “Beer a Beacon of Light in the Dark Ages” by Horst Dornbusch. This dude is a serious beer historian/writer and I have always loved reading his beer history articles on BeerAdvocate’s website and have always wondered when they were going to bring that type of dynamic to the magazine. It’s a neat article that talks about things in the Dark Ages from a different perspective, from the perspective of how beer got better and why.  A lot of it has to do with the European monks (and nuns) and the fact that they made their own beer, were educated men, and welcomed outsiders onto their estates for drink, food, and rest. With the spread of the monks to different missionaries so spread the education of good beer. And as the missionaries grew from small pit-stops, to full “hotel/tavern” environments, to even larger establishments that could be described as campuses so did the need for beer, and the monks had the good shit.

For me that was the bread and butter of this issue, the cover, the Cicerone Certification Program, the beer to electricity article, and the beer history lesson about the Dark Ages. Sure there were plenty of articles I didn’t even touch on this time, but that’s OK, they were mostly better than fluff but not as good as what has already been mentioned. I say keep up the articles from Horst Dornbusch, one of my favorites so far.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 24th, 2007 at 11:57 pm and is filed under Magazines. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.