It's Memorial Day weekend in the USA and I am celebrating. Mainly because I've been sick since the middle of last weekend's Victoria Day long weekend up here. Being in a border town it's not a great stretch even if I can't get over to witness one of the glories of the western world, a small town US parade. Eat a hot dog this weekend, woudja?

This beer was launched just a few weeks ago and arrived in a mixed 12 pack care of my Wisconsin mule - oddly by way of a village in north western Quebec. It gives off the aroma of peaches and apricots at an alarming level. It pours light burnished gold with an actively sustain pure white foam. On the swallow, theres a wall of pale malt sweet graininess with black tea hop with a weedy floral overlay. The finish is a bit tea, a bit bitter green with a squirt of juicy malt right at then end. Yum.

Structurally, it's quite singular - a overly perfumed kolsch? And at 5% its a reasonably sessionable beer but I bet it could be rolled back to 4.4% with reasonable integrity. BAers got the love thang.

I think I find this weirder than I might if I ran a pub or a CAMRA local branch but it seems to me that there might have been some unwritten unspoken arrangement between pubs and CAMRA not that far from CAMRA’s national administrative centre in St Albans, Hertfordshire if the pub owners quoted in the Morning Advertiser today are to be believed:

...the Harpenden Beer and Cider Festival will take business away from pubs. They questioned why CAMRA is getting involved in showing football. The Festival takes place at the Harpenden Public Halls from Thursday 10 June until Saturday 12 June, when England play the USA in South Africa. Last year’s event drew a crowd of 2,800. “We had a pubwatch meeting yesterday and all the members agreed that it was going to have a negative effect on pubs,” said Grant Hollier of the town’s Plough and Harrow pub. “We are saying that we support CAMRA because they support beer, but they are taking trade away from us.”

You know how you get my beer money? You do the best job earning it, that's how. I hope that idea is also on the agenda for most "pubwatch" meetings and not just "tips for better collusion" and "keeping an eye on those CAMRA guys" and such stuff. What really grates is that the World Cup is a national and international phenomenon that should rise above who gets how many bucks because, frankly, everybody is going to get a hell of a lot of bucks out of it.

Me? Who has the greater moral right to sell me beer during an event like this? Probably the place who treated me right on a boring Tuesday lunch back in February.

I came across an extraordinary bit of beer business advice in PMQ which I take in this context to be "Pizzaria Marketing Quarterly"¹ Read this and let me know what you think:

...It’s also important to know how many servings you should get from a keg. For example, most owners know there are 1,984 ounces in a 15.5-gallon domestic keg, and they know they pour 16-ounce pints, so they assume 124 servings per keg. However, with the evolution of the 14-ounce pint glass (in combination with ½” head), they should expect closer to 155 servings per keg. At $4 per serving, that adds up to $124 per keg in lost revenue!

Because you've shorted your customer by 12.5%! That's not you lost "revenue" - that is other people's money! The bizarre thing is that the bit of sage advice sits at the end of an article entitled "Managing Your Draft Beer" in which the issue of lack of controls in retailing draft beer is discussed. Apparently, an average of 20% of draft beer does not make it out of the keg and into a paying glass through spillage, giveaways and other forms of shrinkage. Good thing to know but, as always, a good diagnosis does not mean you are going to get the right prescription.

Don't get me wrong. While I have no sympathy for the circumstance described illustrating how losses can be caused by bad apple bartenders, I think the author goes way too far. Frankly, I find the claim to 20% loss unlikely. If that is the average then 50% of pizza shop owners are dunces. And I am especially disgusted that controlling loss is tied to the idea that bars and restaurants should short pour their clients. A bad employee represents the failure of duties under a contract. But the sale of a beer to a customer is also a contract and a fair measure at a fair price is what the customer expects. So, if your menu states that the measure is 16 oz - or whatever implies that measure - you better serve a full 16 fluid ounces. Not head. Not 14 oz of beer and 2 of additional glass weight. Otherwise, it is a failure of contract just as bad or worse than the bad apple bartender. Sounds like it is time we all renewed our vows with The Honest Pint Project. Time we armed ourselves with beer gauges.

This sort of business writing illustrates nothing so well as the absence of a meaningful beer consumer advocacy environment in North America. Maybe it's an illusion but you have the sense that within CAMRA's jurisdiction armies of large bearded sweatered men with notebooks would pounce on any operator who acted in the manner suggested in this piece. Nothing less would be deserved... even if the prospect is rather distasteful.

¹... and not for me the short form of "Post Married Quarters" or suburbs on Canadian armed forces bases. I lived in military towns growing up.

I hate not getting to get the BBQ going even if I am sick. And no, in true Canadian style, it wasn't really a BBQ even if I smoked the rib steaks for the last bit of the grilling. As our dinner guests took the hint, it was more of a pity 'que. Just a man, briquettes and meat. At least it wasn't a turkey wienie on a hibachi or whatever else my countrymen call a BBQ. I had to. Watching a mid-80s weekend happening just right out there, beyond the picture window can drive a man mad. Even if you have the voice of Barry White. OK, a sniffly Barry White.

It's no fun when the taste for beer disappears as it has this Monday replaced by an urge for club soda and Sinutabs. I did get to try that sample of Vrienden wit by Beau's while on a break from gardening in the first half of the weekend. It was lovely, substantial. None of the too frequent "lemonade in disguise" for this wit. Big body from the unmalted wheat as well as complex, fresh waves of herbs and citrus. I had a very good selection from Charlevoix as well - the tripel, double and ESB. Old Canada has been showing itself proud with these beers. So it hasn't been an entire wasteland of used Kleenex and over the counter cold remedies. It has, however, left me with a certain sympathy for Jay's question posed to us all: "What is beer?"

Gaffel Kolsch has shown up in the LCBO after, my guess, a 15 year absence. I used to get this up in the Ottawa Valley when the LCBO used to do things like stock beer preferred by local communities. My part of the Ottawa valley had an army base which included a lot of former residents at German posts. I picked it up because Ontario's famed Beau's has asked me to share what knowledge I have with some of their staff. As you know, I like to help.

My idea is to have a series of sessions after work on Friday in my backyard using the old "compare and contrast" approach. Beau's flagship beer is a kolsch-like thing and so the first compare and contrast I am thinking of is to try it next to a Gaffel to see if there are commonalities. So I've stocked some away. Then I think I will move to a common helles, then a Czech pilsner and on through a few beers that are seemingly similar but then not as close as you might think if you had one of each in hand.

Does this make sense? I see this taking a number of months and, heck, could go on forever if it makes sense. What other sorts of methods could I use? I was thinking that I will lean heavily on the methodology in The Naked Pint but am happy to take on any ideas. Any thoughts on what you would do?

The 24th of May does not need to fall on the May two-four weekend for it to be a holiday even if this year Monday will really be the 24th. As this food feature in the National Post implies, this holiday has become something of a celebration of beer for Canada. "Two-four" is our slang for a 24 bottle pack of beer - what I gather they call a "slab" in Australia. Moosehead beer reports a 15% jump in sales this time of year.

Officially called Victoria Day, as we move more and more away from associating ourselves as a nation with the monarchy, the holiday has become more and more associated with ourselves, relaxation and the gateway to the summer to come. Here in Ontario, it is also called Firecracker Day the combination of cottages, lots of beer and cheaply made recreational explosives adds a note of anarchy to this time of year. Cops are busy as they always have been. Campgrounds get accosted. Doesn't sounds all that Victorian, does it.

Writing about beer writing is both boring and interesting. Mark Dredge, a young lad in London, poses the occasional enjoyable question of this sort and I have to admit they draw me in. Here is his latest post about the propriety of describing having had too much to drink and this was my response:

"...a disservice to beer..."? I have no idea what this means. What I take from the disassociation of drinking from , you know, the obligatory effects of drinking is that if it is discussed somewhere a consultant loses out. Forget the distinction between being barfingly blotto and merrily drunk, you would think that most drinks weigh in at "-2%" if you rely on the way they are described by beer writers. Given that few beer writers are not otherwise involved in the trade's cash box (or positioning to be) why would they not create and adhere to taboos of those realities that make brewery accountants in ill fitting suits uncomfortable?

I could have put that last it better: "given that few beer writers are not otherwise involved in the trade's cash box one way or another (or positioning to be) why would they not be subject and adhere to taboos related to those realities that make brewery accountants in ill fitting suits uncomfortable?" That's better. The trouble with and / or reality of beer writing is that it is the playground of the tippler who is often aware of the business end of the tipple and is attracted to it equally well. This is reasonable and maybe unavoidable.

First, like all pop culture writing, it takes an interest in the topic to get involved at all. You don't have to like or be in the government to write well about it, you don't have to have cornered Wall Street to analyze business. But if you have not had enough evenings at the bar or popped enough Belgian corks you have little chance of understanding what you are on about.

Second, it make your brain a different place to be. Is it a dirty white lie that many beer writers probably have degrees of dipsomania? It's such a modern idea, the objective and disengaged experience of a mood altering drug. It implies that there are clubs of perfectly satisfied ale smellers. That beer fans use spittoons.

Third, I do think money colours all this. When asking a shop owner in a US college town how they deal with underage drinking, there is the knowing smile. When one reads the exploits of beer writers reporting from shadowy marketing meetings, on PR junkets, of the event that they are at that just happens to be sponsored or another fest where they meet all their friends the brewers for hours of clinky clinky and you can, too... well, why not? It's not only the free samples that friends envy not to mention the ad money - but the role of being that bit nearer to the beloved fluid so as to earn favour. The idea that beer gives back or even pays for itself is a dream for so many.

We need to face facts. Beer makes you chummy and chummy sells. Therefore, you can't talk about chumminess in ways that potentially turns off chum. Like talking about how chumminess sells. Chum is literally the agent that gathers. So, there is a contradiction: we can't talk about the two things we like about beer and writing about beer - chums and benefits. Or, as Pete noted today, the fact that it turns people into this:

I think Mr Big Laugh was paid for his part. And this one, too. We like it. We like the whole overlapping messy business because we like buying beer and having beer and thinking how nice it was that we were able to buy that beer and feel this way and all the better when beer pays for your beer. Because beer makes you feel like you wish you felt when you did not have a beer. Someone else wrote that. Might have even been paid for being clever enough to come up with it, one way or another.

I am fairly old school. I have red wines, a bottle of Plymouth gin, black rum, sweet Cinzano, Pernod, bourbon, various sherries and the Pimm's added today. When I think of it, Kingsley Amis would not get lost amongst those bottles. I also have Angostura bitters, cans of club soda and tonic water. Lemons and limes. Down at the back of the beer stash I even have a slowly growing collection of vintage ports and Hungarian tokays but I plan to only open those in my retirement years.

Old man's selection? I admit it. But is this so wrong? Here's what I can put together and what I depend upon to get me and mine through the hot weeks ahead:

• Gin and Tonic,
• Manhattan,
• Cinzano, soda and lemon juice,
• Mint Julip,
• Pink Gin,
• Pernod and water, and
• Pimm's experimentations.

Do I need more than this in my life? Maybe I do but I don't know when I am going to notice. If you are sufficiently disturbed you may suggest what else I could add or what you depend upon. If you are sufficiently creative, you may see what else I could make with the available ingredients.

This must be the best value in Baltic porters on the planet at $7.99 a 750 ml at 10%. Dated and "grand reserve", too. I don't know what "grand reserve" means in this particular case as I picked it up at Marche Omni and it didn't come out of a deep dank cavern but...

The beer pours inky brown with a deep dark mocha head. The aroma is licorice with pumpernickel and even a sort of candy thing. In my mouth there are layers of dark things accentuated by fine light carbonation - dates, coffee grounds, dark cocoa, milk chocolate, stone-esque minerally things, children's chocolate biscuits - all with a smooth sweet background that makes me question whether this from the empire of Baltic porter or the empire of milk stout. Does it matter? No. I like it a lot but have a look - it earns abiding BAer love.