ASK Biblitz about Beer.

WELCOME!

Biblitz, how do they get the beer to bubble so splendidly?

Biblitz replies:

Like so:

Just kidding! Canadian poet Al Purdy, a giant, galumphing old song-and-dance stevedore, offers several compelling insights into the ancient, magical brew in a poem he used to end just about every reading with:

At the Quinte Hotel



I am drinking
I am drinking beer with yellow flowers
in underground sunlight
and you can see that I am a sensitive man
And I notice that the bartender is a sensitive man too
so I tell him about his beer
I tell him the beer he draws
is half fart and half horse piss
and all wonderful yellow flowers
But the bartender is not quite
so sensitive as I supposed he was
the way he looks at me now
and does not appreciate my exquisite analogy
Over in one corner two guys
are quietly making love
in the brief prelude to infinity
Opposite them a peculiar fight
enables the drunks to lay aside
their comic books and watch with interest
as I watch with interest
A wiry little man slugs another guy
then tracks him bleeding into the toilet
and slugs him to the floor again
with ugly red flowers on the tile
three minutes later he roosters over
to the table where his drunk friend sits
with another friend and slugs both
of em ass-over-electric-kettle
so I have to walk around
on my way for a piss
Now I am a sensitive man
so I say to him mildly as hell
"You shouldn ta knocked over that good beer
with them beautiful flowers in it"
So he says to me "Come on"
So I Come On
like a rabbit with weak kidneys I guess
like a yellow streak charging
on flower power I suppose
and knock the shit outa him and sit on him
(he is a little guy)
and say reprovingly
"Violence will get you nowhere this time chum
Now you take me
I am a sensitive man
and would you believe I write poems?"
But I could see the doubt in his upside down face
in fact in all the faces
"What kind of poems?"
"Flower poems"
"So tell us a poem"

I got off the little guy reluctantly
for he was comfortable
and told them this poem
They crowded around me with tears
in their eyes and wrung my hands feelingly
for my pockets for
it was a heart-warming moment for Literature
and moved by the demonstrable effect
of great Art and the brotherhood of people I remarked
"the poem oughta be worth some beer"
It was a mistake of terminology
for silence came
and it was brought home to me in the tavern
that poems will not really buy beers or flowers
or a goddam thing
and I was sad
for I am a sensitive man.

'Tis

Hardcover
By Frank McCourt

Mr. Campbell Groel who owns Port Warehouses isn't too sure if he wants to hire me, that I might be too scrawny. Then he looks at Tom Clifford who is smaller and scrawnier and the best worker on the platform and if I'm half as strong and as fast I have the job.

The platform boss is Eddie Lynch, a fat man from Brooklyn, and when he talks to me or Tom he laughs and puts on a Barry Fitzgerald accent which I don't think is a bit funny though I have to smile because he's the boss and I want the seventy-five dollars every Friday.



At noon we sit on the platform with our lunches from the diner on the corner, long liverwurst and onion sandwiches dripping with mustard and Rheingold beer so cold it gives me a pain in my forehead. The Irish talk about the drinking they did last night and they laugh over their great sufferings in the morning. Italians eat the food they've brought from home and don't know how we can eat that liverwurst shit. The Irish are offended and want to fight except that Eddie Lynch says anyone in a fight on this platform can go looking for a job. (-- pgs. 130-131)

Galahad at Blandings

Hardcover
By P.G. Wodehouse

To Sam the place (Market Blandings) had appealed aesthetically immediately on his arrival, and on the following afternoon, as he sat with pad and pencil in the garden of the Emsworth Arms, he found its spell was being of great assistance to him professionally. It is a fact well known to all authors that there is nothing like a change of scene for stimulating the powers of invention. At Halsey Chambers Sam had had no success as a chronicler of the adventures of Pinky-Poo the kitten, but now he found the stuff simply flowing out. It was not long before he was able to write 'The End' with the satisfactory feeling that, provided the editor was not suffering from softening of the brain, always an occupational risk with editors, a cheque from Wee Tots was to all intents and purposes in his pocket.

His task done, his thoughts, like those of every author who has completed a testing bit of work, turned in the direction of beer. At dinner on the previous night and again at lunch he had tried out that of the Emsworth Arms and found it superb. Rising, he replaced pad and pencil in his room and made for the bar. ... (From Chapter Five, pgs. 71-72)

Sweet Thursday

Paperback
By John Steinbeck

"Beer," said Doc. "Two quarts."

"Coming up," said the Patron.

"Is Mack around?"

"Sure. I guess so."

"Tell him I want to see him."

"Tell him who wants to see him?"

"Tell him Doc is back."

"Okay, Doc," said the Patron. "This kind of beer all right?"

"Any kind of beer's all right," said Doc. (From What happened In Between in Steinbeck's classic Cannery Row follow-up, p. 4)

An appropriation a la Biblitz of Jasper Johns' appropriated beer cans in his 1958 work, Target, a collage and oil on canvas commemmorating beer, that most refreshing libation of summer barley and flowering foam.

Saveur

The Saveur 100
A Celebration of our favorite food, people, places and things.
January, 1999

30 Devilishly good Belgian Brew

Some great beers refresh, others satisfy - but the strong (8.5 percent alcohol) Duvel Belgian Ale, made with Danish summer barley, does both. Ballooning its snowy foam in the glass, it has a delicate, lightly pearish bouquet. On the palate, it's pleasingly dry, rewardingly rich, intensely drinkable. The name means "devil" and it's a hell of a beer. -- Stephen Beaumont, (-- p. 66)

THROB
Number Two

a magazine of suppurating poetry edited by F.A. Nettelbeck and published whenever there is some money on the table - hopefully quarterly by The Horseheard Nebula Press, mailing address: 15930 Kings Creek Rd., Boulder Creek, Calif. 95006 - 75 cents a copy, $2.50 per year's subscription, (be a patron for $50.00, fucker!)
Summer-Fall, 1971

Charles Bukowski Answers 10 Easy Questions

More classic Buk.

("10 Easy Questions" shall be a regular feature of THROB and will envelop a different poet each issue. We hope to give you the clearer, more defined picture of the poet and his "excuse" and will continue with more bemusing questions in the future) ...

10.) What would you say is the best brand of American beer on the market today?

Beer was much better before world war 2. It had tang and was filled with sharp little bubbles. It's wash now, strictly flat. You just do the best you can with it. Beer is better to write with and talk with than whiskey. You can go longer and make more sense. Of course, much depends upon the talker and the writer. But beer is fattening, plenty, and it lessens the sex drive, I mean both the day you are drinking it and the day after. Heavy drinking and heavy loving seldom go hand in hand after the age of 35. ...

Heavy drinking is a substitute for companionship and it's a substitute for suicide. It's a secondary way of life. I dislike drunks but I do suppose I take a little drink now and then myself. Amen. (-- p. 59)

Lexus

You've got ale

Bike riders and other eco-friendlies in Colorado beer country

By Thomas Bedell
Quarter One, 2008

... The bicycle is both a corporate metaphor and a real-life symbol of New Belgium's beginnings. While biking in Belgium in 1986, Lebesch, an electrical engineer, had an epiphany about the glories and idiosyncratic flavors of Belgian beers, which led to his home brewing efforts to replicate Belgian styles. He and Jordan, a social worker, married in 1990. As she recounts it, once they decided to go professional they formulated a four-part strategy: "To have fun, to make world-class beers, to proceed on a sound environmental basis, and to promote good beer culture." ...

The brewery promotes biking in a variety of ways, like its Tour de Fat, a funky 12-city roving music-and-bike festival that raises funds for local cycling groups. On Thursday evenings in summer, New Belgium has been known to arrange bike-in cinema nights where locals peddle on over to sip beers and watch films outdoors on an inflatable screen. And at the company, it is the bicycle that is the first of several career milestone markers: every NBB employee receives a bike after a year. (The tour of Belgium comes after five, and a fruit tree planted in the brewery orchard after ten.) ...

Many breweries have long recycled spent grains to local farmers for use as feed. Others, such as Sierra Nevada Brewing in Chico, Calif., and Great Lakes Brewing of Cleveland, are also making innovative waste reduction efforts. But few can boast of a sustainability director, like New Belgium's Jennifer Orgolini. She began on the company bottling line in 1993, but has moved through a variety of positions, including chief operating officer. ...

NBB's laundry list of efforts to reduce its energy footprint can fill pages, but includes more efficient brewing vessels, lighting from fluorescent bulbs and passive solar tubes, desks fashioned from recycled paper and cardboard, a brewhouse constructed from reclaimed timber, and even tasting room seats made from old bicycle rims.

In general, one of the heaviest footprints in brewing comes from the wastewater used largely in cleaning bottles, barrels, and production tanks. Brewing efficiencies vary, but an industry standard is to expend about five barrels of water in brewing one barrel of beer. "We have that down to a 3.9-to-1 ratio," said Brandon Weaver, New Belgium's lead process water technician. "Our goal is to reduce it to 3.5-to-1." The on-site water treatment facility moves wastewater through a series of anaerobic and aerobic ponds, where bacteria munch away on the organic wastes, cleaning the wastwater and simultaneously producing methane - which in turn can proudce about 15 percent of the brewery's power needs.

Transforming waste into a commodity is a good thing, although to the discriminating beer drinker, it's what is in the glass that counts. If the brews concocted by NBB were mere bellywash, there wouldn't be much hullabaloo. But its regular and seasonal lineups of beers are among the best in craft brewing, and the line often lets its hair down with imaginative ingredients - kaffir lime leaves, crushed coriander, gogi berries. (-- pgs. 27-28)

A parting glass:

from an old dog in his cups ...

ah, my friend, it's awful, worse
than that - you just get
going good -
one bottle down and
gone -
the poems simmering in your
head
but
halfway between 60 and
70
you pause
before opening the
second bottle -
sometimes
don't
after 50 years of
heavy drinking
you might assume
that extra bottle
will set you
babbling in some
rest home
or tender you
a stroke
alone in your
place
the cats chewing at
your flesh
as the morning fog
enters the broken
screen.
one doesn't even think of
the liver
and if the liver
doesn't think of
us, that's
fine

but it does seem
the more we drink
the better the words
go.

death doesn't matter
but the ultimate inconvenience
of near-death is worse than
galling.

I'll finish the night off
with
beer.

From You Get So Alone At Times That It Just Makes Sense by Charles Bukowski, the old sinner, pgs. 268-269)

Favorite beers or beer facts worthy of a mention?

Don't keep 'em to yourself, for goodness sake. Be a pal and share! All contributions - tips, gambles, cash, cases of beer you wish to promote - most gratefully received! If you prefer, e-mail me at leo@askiblitz.com and read me the Riot Act. Yes, you can teach an old dog new tricks. Woof!