Lynn Hoffman

Here are a few links that I found that could help understand the beer scene in Ireland:

What’s up with Irish beer?

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2055438754

Is Ireland trailing in the microbrew revolution?

http://www.xs4all.nl/~patto1ro/irlbrew.htm

How do taxes effect your choices in Ireland?

http://www.beveragedaily.com/Industry-Markets/Irish-microbrewery-tax-cut-recognises-beer-trend

What’s the homebrew scene like in Ireland?

http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=homebrewing+ireland&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

Are there brewpubs in Ireland?

http://www.xs4all.nl/~patto1ro/index.htm#ireland

And of course, every respectable Irish beer-drinker has a copy of The Short Course in Beer . . . 

It’s probably much too late to hope that we could ever get over the impulse to reduce every experience to a set of scores. The tendency to rank the unrankable is both undefensible and deeply set in our conversation. You can Google The Ten Best Symphony Orchestras or find numerical comparisons between wines from Tuscany and ones from Bordeaux. The world of beer is full of the same suds. You can rate beer at Ratebeer.com or advocate for your favorite at BeerAdvocate.com.

Maybe it’s wrong to enable this sort of thing, but the conversation has started, so maybe we can do something to make it a bit less silly. One of the oddities about comparing beers is that we customarily drink them under vastly different conditions. How do you compare a drink that’s supposed to be served at the freezing point of water to one that’s at its best coming from a cool cellar?

One provocative answer comes from beer writer Mark Denny, author of the immensely entertaining little book Froth!. Denny suggests that you pour out about six ounces of beer, cover it and allow it to go flat and come to room temperature. Taste it without its chill or its bubbles. Good beer, Denny says will still taste good when it’s flat and warm. Bad beer will display all its faults after the masks of temperature and gassiness are removed.  Denny concedes that without foam, beer loses it’s refreshing character, but he’s not out to make you happy here. He’s trying to offer up a tool for evaluating beer by removing some of the distractions.

It’s easy to see one objection to this idea: each beer is designed with a serving temperature in mind, so what’s the point of evaluating-and comparing-beers under conditions that weren’t what the brewer had in mind. We wouldn’t start an ice cream tasting by melting all the samples first or serve portions of pizza at body temperature. Closer to home, we've all tasted the unpleasantness of wine served too cold or too warm.

And yet there’s something appealing about the simplicity of the Denny Good Beer Test. We know that human taste buds start to lose their efficiency when tasting liquids below 40F (4C) and we may suuspect that all the emphasis on super-chilled beer is just a way of covering up some pretty foul stuff. Denny suggests that if we were able to look past the distractions (serving temperature), we could at last see the essentials (the ingredients and the brewing techniques).

I'm more curious than sceptical. I think he might be on to something even though I'm not sure what that something is. So I’d like to ask you to give the Denny Good Beer Test a try. If you can bring yourself to sacrifice a few ounces of beer for the sake of discussion, pour some out, let it sit and give it a taste. I’ll be doing this myself  and I look forward to hearing your results and publishing them here in a few weeks.

(And in the meantime, Philadelphia is the #1 rated beer town in the country. You could look it up.)

Lynn Hoffman, author The Short Course in Beer

Making it the Easy Way

People in the food and drink business like to talk about how hard their business is. Teachers (and textbook authers) agree: after all, if it weren’t difficult, why would anyone need us? So it’s refreshing to be reminded from time to time that the business doesn’t always have to be a struggle and that it’s possible to build a beautiful life around it.

In 1953, a young Italian orphan named Cosmo Fospero bought a dilapidated builiding and the bar on the ground floor. The sign outside the bar said Sam’s and even though the place eventually became known for its new owner, Cosmo never changed the sign. “It’s too expensive”, he explains.

Geneva is a college town and within a few years, Cozzie’s had built up a small following of college students and locals. His customers weren’t the regular college types and they weren’t the usual small-town folks either. The crowd at Cozzie’s on a weekend night was always a bit, shall we say, off-center.

I use the word ‘crowd’ advisedly. The bar was always full, hardly ever packed. A few years after he opened the bar, he shut down the kitchen- “A pain in the neck” -and replaced it with a few loaves of bread and some pepperoni. Hungry? He ‘d cut you a piece of each. Nobody seemed to mind.

If the bar wasn’t busy, Cozzie would ask a newcomer’s name. he’d chat for a bit, then maybe make an introduction. If you were a college kid, he was likely to introduce you to a mechanic from the water department. If you worked at a garage, you’d likely be talking to a professor of anthropology. Being accepted at Cozzie’s meant handling the experience well.

Cozzie’s glassware could be politely described as assorted. Sometimes on a busy night, he’d run out and if you insisted on a glass, he’d suggest that you wash one in the bar sink. He didn’t make mixed drinks beyond a few well brands with soda or juice. Most of the business was in bottled beer. The general rule was that, if you were a regular, you walked in, got your beer from the case and kept track of what you owed. Cozzie figures that over the years, a few people took advantage of him, but many more overpaid. (incidentally, academic research on ‘honor system’ billing bears him out)

The place was deliberately obscure. There was no phone number listed. There was a pay phone on the wall and its number had been obscured with tape. You had to have been there a few times before anyone would tell you the number. People who were mean or quarrelsome were asked to leave. He also gladly ejected people who seemed to be slumming or people he just didn’t like. If he was moved to pick up the guitar and sing, he didn’t serve anybody at all until he was done singing. Cozzie didn’t advertise, but because he felt an obligation to the college students who supported him, he took space in college student organization publications. His ad read:

Grade school, High school, College
Prices now stabilized.
Illiteracy prices still tend to fluctuate.

That was it. No address, no phone, no hours. If you knew, you knew. There was another motto posted over the bar.

We don’t cater to weddings or bar mitzvahs.
In fact, we don’t cater to anybody.

With a minimum of maintainence, no employees and a customer attitude that violated everything you’ve ever learned about service, Cozzie kept a thriving business going for over fifty years. A visit to the bar in 2005 found it covered with post cards from ‘alumni’, people who felt that they may have graduated from the college across town, but that they got their real education at Cozzie’s.

Keys to success

• Marketing: Cozzie’s was a place with a tough, rejecting exterior and a warm fuzzy inside. It made the customer feel that he or she was part of a club-the little clan who know how to navigate

• Crowd control: Cozzie simply didn’t serve people who weren’t pleasant to other people. So the level of social anxiety was very low. Even if a customer didn’t know a soul in the bar, she knew she was among friends.

• No labor costs: having no employees also meant that Cozzie never had to worry about employee theft.

• Minimal overhead: Cozz owned the building and his maintaince was restricted to what was mechanically necessary. Aside from an occasional coat of paint, no cosmetic maintainence was done.

• Minimal inventory: Cosmo understood that he was not selling drinks. The line of bottle that you see in the photos was his whole distilled spirits inventory. There was one reach-in filled with beer and a jug of red wine.

Cozzie's is still there. You can check it out at:

Portrait: Cozzie’s
26 Tillman St.
Geneva, New York

for more about the business of beer, check out: The Short Course in Beer by Lynn Hoffman

The Short Course in Beer gives you the Why and How of getting in on the Beer Revolution, so it seems only fair to continue by telling you Where. Going on the road for your pleasure, my first stop is Toronto.

The Beer Bistro 18 King Street East Toronto

Beer lovers are very fond of the compound adjective ‘well-worn’ and so the truly great beer bars in the world seem to exude patina. The décor- the wood, the leather, the mirrors, even the light itself tends to suggest that it’s all been there forever and that somehow, it wishes you could be too. In this respect as in several others, The Beer Bistro is radically different. It is a place that’s designed to challenge and change the way people think about beer
The main room is high-ceilinged with huge light-gathering windows and an air of shininess. In an architectural translation of the house style, the bar is separated from the dining room by no more than a line of banquettes.
The menu nods to some traditions, but it’s a brief nod indeed before chef Brian Morin takes off on some inventions that explore the possibilities of beer as an ingredient in food as well as an accompaniment to it. The whole conceit is pulled off with exceedingly good humor and not a hint of pretension.
You can get the feel of the place by ordering the corn dog. For those of you who haven’t been to a state fair or a boardwalk lately, the corn dog is a hot dog dipped in corn meal batter, fried and then put on a stick to be eaten out of hand. At the Beer Bistro, the pair of corn dogs are made from molded duck leg confit and served with a pineapple mustard and a house-made cherry beer ketchup. Put aside the fact that pineapple is the lover that mustard has been waiting for all these years and that the ketchup begs to be eaten with a spoon. Concentrate on the richness of the duck and the crispness of the batter and the heightened sensitivity that these little condiments create in you mouth. Try to remember to breathe, sip your beer.
Salmon sliders are strips of salmon, house-cured in beer served on blinis with a capered cream cheese and micro-thin slices of red onion. The blinis are just firm enough to be a foil for the moist fish and the whole combination of taste and texture is just crying out for a beer to make it complete. The house suggests underchallenging them with a belgian wheat beer, you could just as easily confront the taste head-on with a pilsner.
Mussels are pretty much old-hat in a beer bar, but baked mussels florentine open up a whole new field. Without subverting the firm, oceanic character of the mussels, baking opens up a whole realm of possibility. In this case the shellfish are topped with cubes of beer-cured bacon, three cheeses, sauteed spinach, arugala, shallots, and garlic butter. The menu urges you to try Saison Dupont and that seems just about perfect.

You expect beer bar service to be friendly and casual-after all this is beer which even at its most elegant is somehow easy, effortless and available. At the Beer Bistro, you get that and a little more. Listen to manager Kathleen McGinn: “Our staff feels like teachers. We want customers to be confident that if they have questions, their server has answers.” The wait staff goes to regular on-premise beer school and they are more than just knowledgeable, they understand that the point of all that knowing is for you to end up drinking something wonderful.
Then there’s the matter of beer ice cream. (I'm having a hard time believing that I used those words together in a sentence.) You’ll just have to try the one made from Jamaican stout and chopped candy bar.
The owners of The Beer Bistro describe the place as worldly, casual and elegant, just like you and me. They also say that everything is made from scratch, no shortcuts, no premix. They bake their own bread, cure their own bacon and salmon, smoke their own short ribs. They are the first of their kind in this large, exciting city and unlike most pioneers, they seem to have found exactly the right path. It’s time for the rest of the city-and maybe the rest of the world- to play catch-up.

from Killing Philly

There was this moment when I decided to kill Mr. Philadelphia. It was almost noon on a Monday morning after a long Columbus Day weekend. I celebrated Columbus with three days of drinking , cursing and pissing on my shoes. By Tuesday I was way past drunk and well into poisoned; if Congress had proclaimed Columbus Week instead of Columbus Day, I would have drunk myself to death.
On the Friday before the festivities, I turned in two restaurant reviews ahead of deadline. I wrote the foreword for somebody else’s book of recipes, sent out some queries about a winery in Graz, Austria and edited this week’s tasting notes. Then I put my work away and started drinking: whole cedary, scratchy, dirty bottles of dark red wine. By Sunday I was sure I was dying. Someplace in the sour-smelling little vestibule in front of drinking-yourself-to-death, I saw my mother’s face, pinched and staring. The face didn’t look at me or move its lips, but I heard her voice saying “You’re not the one who should die.” Then I heard my own voice saying the name of the one who should.
Deciding to kill Pifkie was the best thing I did all day. Oh sure, it was the same day I screamed obscenities at my oldest living relative and threw a wine bottle at a male prostitute. And I almost bit a fat lady on the saggy flesh at the back of her neck. Drooled all over her in fact. Good stuff, highlights film stuff. But none of it was half as satisfying as deciding that I was going to kill Jim Pifkie.

When I was a kid, Columbus Day was special. My father-Solomone Cardoso- came to this country one Columbus Day in the early 1950’s. My mother-a sweet Catholic girl who converted to Judaism to marry him- let him name me Emanuel. My dad never said he ‘immigrated’, he always said he ‘discovered America’. In our family, Thanksgiving was the Dry Bird Festival and Christmas was just a day off, but Columbus Day was our Easter, our day of Resurrection.
We always had a big family party and after dinner, my father would dance. When he danced, his face danced with him. The dances felt like little stories and you could feel the narrations in the vibrations of his feet, imagine the characters at whom he was smiling and frowning and clicking his tongue. His eyes fluttered and his lips took a hundred different poses below the wide ledge of his moustache. I was five years old when I began to memorize his little smiles and smirks and pouts and purses. He swirled and dipped and his eyebrows could make a wave of their own, like a string of corks on the ocean. He would stamp his foot just softly enough not to upset the phonograph needle or the neighbors. His jaw would go down and out, lip-smacking the air to fill in the sound his heel barely made as he brushed it along the wooden floor.
I was a few years older when I discovered the rest, learned that the stories were about confiscations and late-night escapes and heroes and sick goodbyes and death. But those were just details. Everything that mattered was there in his dancing, all the feelings and all the ghosts.
Sometimes he would jig a handkerchief at my red-haired, freckly mother and she would take the bait, pinching her end of the cloth and following him around the room. Her movements were as compact as his were expansive; her hand just outboard of her hip, fingers splayed out suggestively, elbow thrown back. Her dancing was economically lewd, frugal, not stingy. It gave the scratchy middle eastern music everything it deserved. When he danced with her, his story changed. In this chapter, he was playful, then macho, then silly then desperately wanting. Sometimes at the end of a dance, he would tremble and when I was little, I thought it meant he was cold.
My mother moved as if she were a seed blown on the wind. Her dance seemed to cost her no effort but that of willing it. My father perspired when he danced. It should have been grotesque and it was beautiful. To this day, I am not especially moved by the people they call charismatic - I was raised by a man who could dance in tongues.