So Epic Pale Ale, but Epic ‘Mayhem’, if you follow.
1 Broadly - though there are exceptions early on as the pattern developed, and sporadically throughout as I either forgot my own practice or thought of some now-lost rationalisation for a variance in some particular case - it’s like this: beer names are all capitals in the pen-and-paper form for easier cross-referencing, but otherwise just regular Title Case, with single-quote marks around a beer’s name when it’s a name, in the proper noun sense rather than a style descriptor. Over the decade I’ve been taking handwritten notes of my beer-drinking experiences, I have inevitably developed an idiosyncratic Style Guide. Few of us would be keen to visit a hospital that followed Sixteenth Century standards of hygiene.Ĭontinue reading Reinheitsgebot’s last birthday → That may seem pedantic, but it’s a healthy reminder that old laws and not necessarily good laws. Almost all of the original 1516 decree concerns the price of the product, 5 not its process, and its list of only three permissible ingredients renders brewing impossible since it predates the discovery of, and therefore omits, yeast. I say “mythology” because the law is vastly overhyped, misunderstood and of basically no relevance to a properly broad view of beer. It mandated that “the only ingredients for the brewing of beer must be Barley, Hops and Water” 3 and its mythology has proven so strong that it’s still not uncommon 4 to see breweries in New Zealand namedropping it in marketing material and referring to it as part of their mission or philosophy - half a world and half a millennium away. This year marks the five-hundredth anniversary 1 of a surprisingly-short text 2 that came to be known as Reinheitsgebot, the (‘Bavarian’ or ‘German’) Purity Law. To compensate, the annotation and uploading was undertaken while drinking beers that firmly had their thumb in the Purity Law’s eye. The latter was a complete coincidence, only realised in hindsight. For the record, the original text was written entirely under the influence of Kraftwerk and Reinheitsgebot-compliant beers. If you need more Bonus Material, I’ve ranted down these lines before. If I had the coding skills to better-emulate the famous footnotes for David Foster Wallace’s The Host, I’d do that. I wrote the below for the most-recent edition of SOBA’s Pursuit Of Hoppiness magazine but have added back in a few asides that had to be cut from the print version for space and/or tone. Here’s my contribution to the teetering pile of Reinheitsgebot-related reckons that are surfacing around the thing’s putative 500th birthday ― which is being celebrated despite the old law no longer being in force, the new law not being so old (obviously) nor so simple, and the whole thing being colossally pointless in the first place. “It’s the Reinheitsgebot that fuels our creativity” - according to a ludicrous ad campaign from a group of German brewers (brought to my attention by Bryan Roth)
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