Sunday, December 31, 2000

Beer: Author’s view of the world is seldom ‘flat’

By Bill Whitaker
Reporter-News Staff Writer

Good taste in beer and ale can be surmised easily enough these days.

If the name Michael Jackson immediately brings to mind the hit video “Thriller,” then your idea of good beer is probably Pearl Light, Coors Light or Bud Light.

But if Michael Jackson conjures up a globetrotting existence spent in pursuit of malt and hops in their most glorious state, your idea of good beer is surely sipping Mackeson Stout at 55 degrees Fahrenheit or nursing Noche Buena during the holiday season or setting aside Samuel Adams Triple Stout for several years before drinking.

There’s just enough of these latter drinkers to keep the world’s most famous beer hunter, London-based Michael Jackson, busy as an author, magazine writer and host of his own Discovery Channel/PBS series.

The latest evidence is Jackson’s newly released Great Beer Guide: 500 Classic Brews (Dorling Kindersley Press, 544 pages, $16.95), issued by the ever-innovative DK press just in time for New Year’s Eve. But it’s not for those who think beer is for quaffing or overindulging.

Or for those whose idea of a great beer is Pearl.

“Many of the world’s best-known beers are almost tasteless,” Jackson writes in his introduction. “Their sales may be huge but, like many popular products, they are not memorable. To produce a tasteless brew from barley-malt and hops is difficult but a dubious achievement.

“If it tastes like soda-pop with added alcohol, it is not a great beer,” he adds. “It is a means of delivering alcohol to the brain without the intervention of taste.”

Jackson’s most recent book — or, for that matter, his existence for many years now — is devoted to the increasing number of fans of quality pilsners, ales, porters and barley wines, all of which offer far greater complexities than fine wines.

Great Beer Guide: 500 Classic Brews is perhaps Jackson’s most readable book yet. Each of his top beers is sharply photographed by bottle and glass, then engagingly laid-out and summed-up with a succinct passage touching on brewery history and why the beer ranks so strongly.

Beers chronicled range from Newcastle Brown Ale (which next year will be sold without the word “ale” since promoters feel the term is old-fashioned) to such oddly named beers as Portland, Ore.’s Bridgeport Old Knucklehead, which each year has a different knucklehead on the label, always drawn from townfolks living where it’s brewed.

Some might be amazed Jackson has carved out an existence almost totally dedicated to writing about beer, breweries and brewpubs. Others who know better simply envy the 58-year-old journalist, whose work has been published in everything from Playboy to the Washington Post.

“I started work at 16 as a gofer/reporter on a small-town weekly in the North (of England) and still see myself as a hungry young reporter,” Jackson told the Reporter-News. “I later worked on metro dailies, on Fleet Street, on magazines and on television.

“In the early to mid-1970s, I started to write odd pieces about beer, and later whiskey. A decade later I realized that I was no longer writing about anything else.”

If anything, the world of fine beers is certainly more exciting than that of wine. For instance, the locally available Young’s Double Chocolate Stout uses real chocolate in the brewing process. And Mackeson’s, also available locally, was once used on ice cream at Abilene’s Green Frog Cafe, and to great success among its college-age clientele.

Recent times have given rise to beers with increasingly odd names, such as Fish Tale Mud Shark Porter or Harvey’s Tom Paine Strong Pale Ale, honoring the iconoclastic American patriot but brewed by Britons. How about MacQueen’s Nessie, which honors the Loch Ness Monster — and is not to be confused with Tomintoul Nessie’s Monster Mash, which also honors the elusive beast.

And the flippant name given by a Belgium-based brewery to its strong golden ale, Delirium Tremens — which essentially translates to “Eat, drink and be merry” — was just enough to get it banned from the U.S.

Jackson spends his existence chasing all these down. Currently, he spends half of his time on the road “and this means I am in a mess all the time.

“I have always either just returned from somewhere and am writing about a trip, or about to leave for somewhere,” he said. “A lot of the time, I am in a hotel in Alaska trying to write a story about Tasmania three trips ago for a magazine in Japan before catching an early flight to the Czech Republic.”

Jackson doesn’t expect the fascination for tasty beers to go flat anytime soon, even though he acknowledges that some small breweries have sprouted up way too quickly — and with too little attention to quality and taste.

“The growth of small breweries has run wild, but we can never go back to the old days,” he said. “Once you have developed a taste for flavorful beer, you just can’t go back.”

Contact Bill Whitaker at 676-6732 or whitakerb@abinews.com. Check out our Web site at www.reporternews.com.