By Steve Rhodes
An occasional look at the magazines laying around Beachwood HQ.
Beer Me
I’m thinking Beachwood Beer is next.
“Gasparine wasn’t much of a wine drinker, but he had become something of a beer geek,” Burkhard Bilger writes in The New Yorker. ” (His thick eyebrows, rectangular glasses, and rapid-fire patter seem ideally suited to the parsing of obscure beverages.) A few years earlier, he’d discovered a bar in downtown Baltimore called Good Love that had several unusual beers on tap. The best, he thought, were from a place called Dogfish Head, in southern Delaware. The brewery’s motto was ‘Off-Centered Ales for Off-Centered People.’ It made everything from elegant Belgian-style ales to experimental beers brewed with fresh oysters or arctic cloudberries.”
Mmm, cloudberries . . .
*
“Calagione is thirty-nine. That day, as on most days, he was wearing flip-flops, cargo pants, and a threadbare T-shirt, and looked about as concerned with liquidity as the customers bellied up at the brewery’s bar, drinking free samples. When tour groups visit Dogfish, they’re greeted by a quote on the wall from Emerson’s essay on self-reliance: ‘Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist,’ it begins. ‘Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind’.”
Ah, beer.
*
“To give you some context for why it’s so distasteful to me,” Calagione said. “At the same time that they’re making this relatively hoppy wanna-be craft beer that exists only to confuse the consumer – so that they can be culture vultures.”
And all you yipsters out there, don’t forget: Pabst is a marketing company, not a brewery.
*
“It starts out as a stimulant and only later, when you’ve had a lot, becomes a depressant. Calagione laughed. “Does it work that way for you?” he said. “Because it doesn’t for me. I never get around to the depressant part.”
You will.
You Call That A Knife?
“Bob Kramer is one of a hundred and twenty-two people in the world, and the only former chef, to have been certified in the United States as a Master Bladesmith,” Todd Oppenheimer writes in the same issue of the New Yorker.
The world of knives. Who knew?
*
“One sold for forty-eight hundred dollars.”
How good can a knife be? Apparently, very good.
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“Curiously, while this is the world’s largest blade show, only a handful of the makers there produce kitchen knives. Most make sport and high-tech ‘tactical’ knives (partly in pursuit of contracts from the military, which still regards a knife as the soldier’s ideal all-purpose tool, and the weapon of last resort).
Aha.
“The result is an annual spread of staggering lethality: pocket knives of every design (and price) imaginable, sheath knives smaller than your little finger, and medieval cleavers longer than your arm. At table after table, big men with thick fingers showed off knives with such intricate patterns that one would think they were made by a diminutive Old World jeweler.”
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“The surge of interest seems partly due to the Internet, which not only has made once obscure items suddenly accessible but has also spread knowledge about the craft behind these items to a younger generation. ‘The guys just starting out today, their knives are as good as the best makers’ fifteen to twenty years ago,’ Steve Shackleford, the editor of the magazine Blade, told me.”
God bless the Internet.
Economic Indicators
“The American economy may be weak and getting weaker, but not all businesses are suffering,” Failure magazine reports. “Rice, beans and macaroni & cheese are all selling well, and sales of beer are also strong, no doubt because legions of the unemployed are drowning their sorrows in alcohol.”
And, quite possibly, knives.
Posted on November 24, 2008