Volume 21 Issue 6
January 2001 Column 1

jackson's journal BY MICHAEL JACKSON Tasting Beer Under the Sea

Anyone who has ever been in a half-decent bookshop knows that the staff has a tendency to look like wine-drinkers. Nothing too expensive, you figure, just a fresh, fruity, unpretentious, slightly oaky chardonnay.. In my experience, it does not generally occur to bookstore managers to barricade the checkout with volumes on beer, rendering it impossible for even the most casual browser to escape without buying a substantial number of copies of the latest Michael Jackson (or Roger Protz, Charlie Papazian, Ray Daniels, Stephen Beaumont, etc.). With the help of my unusually hip British publisher, I recently took part in an exercise to educate booksellers toward this end. We invited them for breakfast. And lunch. Dinner, too. And a few beers. The breakfast was served on a train. My publishers PR lady, may St. Arnold bless her, booked two carriages and installed a bookstore owner or manager in every seat (apart from hers and mine). The biggest logistical problem was quite simple: how to get breakfast and two beers down before the train went under the water. That is to say, the sea. The English Channel. Or the French Channel, as the people on the other side have an equal right to call it. They dont. They call it La Manche, meaning The Arm. Very un-French of them not to insist that it is theirs, but what are we to make of people who cannot tell a sea from an arm? As you may be aware, there is a railroad tunnel under the Channel. From the English viewpoint, the train starts from a station called Waterloo, on the south side of the River Thames. It then trundles through the south of England, eventually entering the Chunnel. It emerges in France, then faces a decision. One line stays in France and goes to Paris. The other heads north across the Belgian border to Brussels, and that was our intended route. Waterloo station was named long before these services were introduced, and its name seems tactless today. Waterloo was a battlefield where the British were on the winning side, against the French, on a site that is now in Belgium. Things are more peaceful today, at least in the absence of English soccer fans, French farmers or Belgian truckers. Breakfast on the train is pretty good. Eggs, bacon, mushrooms, tomatoes and black pudding (blood sausage). I especially like the last item, but I wanted the booksellers to scoff their food so that we could get on with some beer drinking. That is to say, tasting. They needed a lot of education and no time was to be lost.

Stout for Breakfast Wishing to emphasize that the world is full of great local breweries and that beer always tastes best in its own habitat, I planned to start with a south London beer. There was an ideal candidate. The famous Youngs brewery is in south London. It makes a sweet stout, which is a traditional London style. Better still, its example is a variation on the theme, employing chocolate. We could segue perfectly from the fried part of the meal to a popular breakfast item sold at coffee stands in British railroad stations--a bread known by the French name, pain au chocolat--and wash that down with the stout. Pain au chocolat has the texture and flavor of a croissant but is not crescent shaped. It is like a cushion of bread studded with chocolate chips. I can reveal that it makes a sensational breakfast if you combine it with stout. The problem was the time it took to serve the fry-up, the pain au chocolat and the stout. Once everyone had the stout, I was keen to tell them something about it. Given that bookshops have coffee bars and often serve items like brownies and chocolate-chip cookies, I did wonder whether I might persuade one or two to provide stout for their more bibulous bibliophiles. I remember a cartoon in The New Yorker showing people drinking beer in a bookshop. It was meant to be a joke, an absurd notion. In fact, Kramerbooks in Washington, DC, has for some years had a beer bar. Unfortunately, it is more celebrated as the source of a gift from Monica Lewinsky to President Clinton. In discussing the chocolate stout, I gave proper credit to Brooklyn Brewerys Garrett Oliver for having created the style. He uses only chocolate malt to achieve, superbly, the character he desires. I suppose some people might imagine that this is malt dipped in, or sprayed with, chocolate. It is not. The chocolaty flavors arise from the barley as it is dried in the procedure of malting. Youngs uses both the malt and actual chocolate. With this in mind, its product is called Double Chocolate Stout. Connoisseurs of either beer or chocolate may have encountered this Eckhardtian combination, but it is not widely known or understood. Some of the booksellers looked a bit nervous but, perhaps surprisingly, others were already familiar with it. I suppose I should have been pleased with the latter, but they slightly spoiled my intention to surprise or shock. Nobody complained about the beer. I think they liked it.