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TOP FERMENTATION January, 2008
Over the years Belgium has produced hundreds of different styles of beer and one recording artist with a hit that reached the top of the charts in The United States. In 1963 Jeanne Deckers, a.k.a. Sister Luc-Gabrielle, a.k.a. Soeur Sourire, a.k.a. The Singing Nun, released the song "Dominique," which not only made it to the number one spot, but was also the second best selling single for the year, right behind "Sugar Shack" by Jimmy Gilmer & the Fireballs. It finished ahead of "He's so Fine" by the Chiffons and "Blue Velvet" by Bobby Vinton; and way ahead of records by Stevie Wonder, The Beach Boys, Nat King Cole, Peter, Paul and Mary, Ray Charles and Elvis, among others.
When Sister Luc-Gabrielle recorded "Dominique," she was a Dominican nun at Fichermont Convent in Belgium. She left the convent in 1966 after assigning all her royalties from the song to the Dominican Order. She disagreed strongly with the Church's position on birth control and recorded a tribute to oral contraceptives titled "Glory Be to God for the Golden Pill," which did not sell anywhere nearly as well as "Dominique." Ms. Deckers subsequently encountered financial problems that eventually drove her to suicide in 1985.
"Dominique" is a paean to St. Dominic, the founder of her order. Among the many flattering things it says about him is, "Dominic, our father, fought against the Albigenses," referring to the followers of the Albigensian heresy. Indeed, there's no doubt that Dominic's charismatic preaching helped curtail the spread of Albigensianism. But another reason for the disappearance of Albigenses was their belief that procreating children was sinful. And perhaps the most important reason of all was the Albigensian Crusade, launched by Pope Innocent III in 1209, in which an estimated 200,000 people were killed.
How many of these 200,000 were card-carrying Albigenses is a matter of ongoing debate. Supposedly, Arnaud-Armaury, the Abbot of Citeaux and spiritual adviser to the crusade, told crusaders who asked how they could identify the heretics, "Kill them all. God will know his own." While many historians dismiss this quotation as apocryphal, one way or another Albigensianism was effectively eliminated in Europe by the end of the 14th century.
In addition to the role of their founder in fighting Albigenses, the Dominicans have accomplished a lot in the past eight centuries. For example, it was a Dominican Pope, Pius V, who in 1566 instituted the practice of Popes' wearing white robes, following the custom of his order. More recently, it was Dominicans who established the Aquinas Institute of Theology, which sponsors Theology on Tap, a discussion series at The Schlafly Tap Room.
This is not to be confused with a similar discussion series at Schlafly Bottleworks organized by the Reverend Darrin Patrick, the senior pastor of The Journey, which has ties to the Southern Baptist Convention. Theology at Bottleworks has been immensely popular in St. Louis and was even featured on NBC's "Today" show in a report titled "Beer and Bibles: New Churches Lure Young Members." But not everyone is pleased with its success.
One of the most strident critics of the series is Roger Moran, the leader of the Missouri Baptist Laymen's Association. A vigorous opponent of alcoholic beverages, Moran has described The Journey as "dripping with error" because it conducts theological discussions in a setting where beer is brewed and served. Inflamed by what's happening at Bottleworks, Moran recently prompted the Missouri Baptist Convention to adopt its 12th resolution denouncing alcoholic beverages and those who drink them.
He's not the only theologian who has a bone to pick with the brewery or me. Father Larry David McCormick, an alert reader (AR) who is a professor of theology at Fordham University, wrote to chastise me for referring to "Reverend Jerry Falwell" in a recent column. As the Reverend McCormick pointed out, I should have referred to "the Reverend Jerry Falwell." He was absolutely right and I hope he noticed that I got it right in referring to "the Reverend Darrin Patrick" two paragraphs back.
Another AR wrote to rebuke me for something else I wrote in the same paragraph as my solecism involving Jerry Falwell. William Connett, who, like Father McCormick, has a PhD, sent in a blistering critique of my syntax. This attack was painful for several reasons. First, Bill is a retired professor of mathematics. Given that I majored in English in college, writing is supposed to be my forte not his. Second, he's my cousin and ought to show some deference to his family. Lastly, like Father McCormick he was right. In his e-mail message to me Cousin Bill pointed out that I had "eschewed the subjunctive in referring to certain allegations about Glenn Poshard." Ouch. My dear cousin added that he expected better from a man with my "Latinate background." Mea culpa.
In my own defense I must say that not every criticism from an AR is valid. Terry Culver (TC) is a very patriotic reader (VPR) who complained about the failure of many institutions to fly the American flag at half-staff on Veterans Day. With an approach similar to that attributed to Abbot Arnaud-Armaury, TC the VPR denounced all those who failed to show proper respect for America's veterans on November 12, the day on which Veterans Day was observed in 2007. He admitted that he didn't know if we flew flags on a daily basis at our breweries (we don't); but he was ready to damn us for not following proper protocol if we did.
A few minutes later TC the VPR called back with a mea culpa of his own. According to the official guide published by the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the only days on which American flags are to be flown at half-staff are Peace Officers Memorial Day (May 15), Memorial Day (until noon), Patriot Day (September 11) and Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day (December 7). According to the VFW, American flags are to be flown at full-staff on Veterans Day, as they are on several other holidays throughout the year.
With all due respect to the VFW, I think there's another day on which flags should be flown at half-staff, January 16. It was on this day in 1920 that the 18th Amendment to the United States Constitution took effect and Prohibition became the law of the land. If bars and saloons don't fly their flags at half-staff on this date, perhaps they should at least observe a moment of silence in memory of the livelihoods that were lost and the rights that were curtailed on that dark day.
Eighty-eight years later another crisis is looming for beer drinkers. For a variety of reasons the prices of hops and barley are escalating dramatically. Brewers around the world are scrambling to find the ingredients they need and are being forced to pass these cost increases on to consumers. The effects of this shortage will be especially pronounced in Belgium, where the per capita rate of beer consumption is significantly higher than in the United States. Luckily for the nuns at Fichermont Convent, they still have the royalties from "Dominique" to help pay higher prices for their beer.
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Alert readers (ARs) of Top Fermentation know that I welcome their feedback, which sometimes finds its way into subsequent issues of The Growler. Most but not all of this feedback relates to the style, syntax, opinions or factual accuracy of this column. Communications on more substantive matters, such as how our beer tastes, tend to find their way to Dan Kopman, our vice president and chief operating officer.
So it was that several months ago Dan received a three-page, handwritten letter from an incarcerated reader (IR) who was proposing a joint venture between himself and Schlafly Beer. The IR wrote that he had developed a great recipe for jailhouse hooch, which he made from a secret blend of different types of jelly and candy. He said that his hooch had been very well received by some very demanding critics (his fellow prisoners) and he was barely able to keep up with the demand. He also reported, "I ended up getting caught and going to the hole for 45 days." Not wanting to be responsible for the IR's return to the hole, Dan and I decided not to disclose his real name, his nom de guerre on the street (which is creative and colorful) or the jail where he currently resides.
Just as the IR's brewing process was somewhat unconventional, so too were his grammar and spelling, thus putting him in some pretty lofty company. Consider that on September 4, 2007, The New York Times published an editorial titled "A National Disgrace," deploring the "corrupt and dysfunctional school system" in the District of Columbia. The Times bolstered its position by noting, "the District's children fair [sic] worse at school than children in other big cities."
The Times isn't the only distinguished institution that spells as creatively as our IR. On September 11, 2007, the Official Web Site of Yale University Athletics announced that the Bulldogs would open their 2007 football season in the "Nation's Capitol [sic]." For most ARs (as literate a crowd as ever existed) it's probably superfluous to point out that the Yale football team opened its 2007 season in Washington, DC, the nation's capital, but did not do so in the Capitol, which has never hosted a college football game as far as I know.
In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that the Bulldogs traveled to the nation's capital to play Georgetown, my alma mater. In the interest of even fuller disclosure, I need to add that Yale beat the Hoyas on their home field by a score of 28 to 14. Not being given to bitterness, I commend the Bulldogs for a completely honorable win. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of every football team from New England.
As we now know, The New England Patriots and their coach Bill Belichick, who have long been suspected of cheating, were recently caught red-handed and punished by the National Football League. St. Louis sports fans, who remember all too well the 2002 Super Bowl, when the Patriots beat a heavily favored Rams team by a score of 20 to 17, can only wonder whether cheating provided the margin of victory for New England in that game. Belichick's Patriots made it through the playoffs that season with some very close wins that look extremely suspicious in retrospect.
The football field isn't the only place in society where one encounters cheating. It can also be found in the groves of academe. Glenn Poshard, a former member of Congress and the President of Southern Illinois University, is currently fighting allegations that dozens of passages in his master's and doctoral theses were plagiarized.
Not having read either of the dissertations in question (and not being even remotely tempted to do so), I have no way of knowing whether Dr. Poshard should have used more quotation marks or footnotes when he wrote them. I can say, however, that even if the allegations are true, Dr. Poshard's conduct is definitely not the most bizarre behavior I have witnessed on the part of a doctoral candidate. That distinction belongs to a woman, currently working on her PhD at a local university, who refused to attend an event at The Tap Room because she was positive I had spoken at Reverend Jerry Falwell's funeral.
I am not making this up. Although I have never been anywhere near Liberty University or Lynchburg, Virginia; and although I have an airtight alibi for my whereabouts on May 22, 2007, when Reverend Falwell's funeral was held, the student was unwavering in her opinion and refused to set foot on premises bearing my name. On the one hand, I have to admire the student's tenacity and courage of her convictions. On the other hand, I have to confess major doubts about the quality of her scholarship.
Keep in mind that Reverend Falwell was strongly opposed to the brewing industry. Students at Liberty University can be punished severely for drinking beer or for associating with beer drinkers. Does anyone seriously think that the owner of a business that Reverend Falwell considered sinful would be invited to speak at his funeral? I guess so.
If, by some chance, I had been invited to speak at Jerry Falwell's funeral, I would have quoted what he had said seven years earlier, "I'm glad now, at age 66, that I never used alcohol…and I've buried a lot of friends who…used alcohol." I would have pointed out that there are a lot of Schlafly Beer drinkers much older than 73, the age at which Reverend Falwell died without ever having known the great taste and salubrious effects of good beer.
Before leaving the subject of academia, I want to report some important research at the Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research in Gatersleben, Germany, where scientists are mapping and sequencing the genome for barley, an important component of beer. Interestingly, with five billion bases the barley genome is almost twice the size of the human genome.
I should hasten to add that I did not come up with this information on my own. Lest I fall into the same trap as some very distinguished academicians, I must note that I read it in the August 24, 2007 edition of Science Magazine. I must also confess that I am not a regular reader of this learned periodical and the article in question was sent to me by Dr. Kenneth Smith, an AR who formerly taught at the St. Louis University School of Medicine.
As long as I'm on the subject of ethics, I want to make a few points for the record. First, unlike the New England Patriots, we have never spied on any of our competitors or taped their operations. Second, unlike some dissertations, none of Top Fermentation is plagiarized. (Frankly, I doubt that very many people other than yours truly would admit responsibility for much of the content of this column.) Finally, if we ever brew a beverage comparable to the IR's jailhouse hooch, I promise to give him full credit both by his real name and his street name as soon as he's out of jail and it's safe to do so.
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The European Union currently spends close to $1.8 billion per year subsidizing the wine industry. Nearly $700 million of this amount is spent on distilling unwanted wine into industrial alcohol. From this side of the Atlantic it would appear that European winemakers are getting a pretty good deal. I'm certainly not holding my breath until the United States government starts buying extra beer from us in order to turn it into ethanol.
Some French winemakers, however, aren't satisfied. The Comité Régional d'Action Viticole (CRAV), a committee of viticultural activists based in the Languedoc-Roussillon region in southern France, wants even more governmental assistance. In order to generate support for their cause, members of CRAV have engaged in various acts of violence, such as bombing public buildings.
When I read about CRAV's reign of terror in the terroir, I realized that beer aficionados had once again dropped the ball in not founding The Beer Drinkers Party. While we've spent a lot of time solving the problems of the world over pints of beer at the bar, viticulturists in France have been getting ready to storm the Bastille again because the subsidies they get for making wine that no one wants to drink aren't high enough. If wine people can get subsidies for wine that no one wants to drink, why can't we get subsidies for beer that people do in fact want to drink?
While I was ruminating about The Beer Drinkers Party, I got an e-mail from an alert reader (AR) in Fayetteville, Arkansas named Pati Chamberlin Mitchell. Mrs. Mitchell informed me that she was the granddaughter of John McLean Chamberlin, who had been elected mayor of East St. Louis after campaigning on a promise to make the city "a little more like home and a little less like hell." It then struck me that this would be a good slogan for The Beer Drinkers Party. Eschewing the winemakers' tactics of destroying infrastructure, we would promise to make America more like home and less like hell. We would accomplish this goal by using our billions of dollars of government subsidies to help people mellow out by buying them pints of beer.
I also learned from Mrs. Chamberlin that her grandfather knew my great grandfather. According to an archive that she found, August Schlafly, the president of Union Trust Bank in East St. Louis, personally lent the city $70,000 in 1914. Moreover, Mrs. Chamberlin did not find any record of this loan's having ever been repaid. Can you imagine? The City of East St. Louis probably owes August's descendants $70,000 plus 93 years of compound interest. Even if I have to share the money with my cousins, there would still be enough to provide The Beer Drinkers Party with a big political war chest for the 2008 elections.
One of the features of East St. Louis that made it hellish in the opinion of Mayor Chamberlin was widespread prostitution in "The Valley," a series of brothels on 3rd Street between Missouri and St. Clair Avenues. Despite the best efforts of reformers, The Valley thrived until the Second World War, when it was said to be responsible for giving Scott Field (now Scott Air Force Base) one of the highest rates of venereal disease in the United States armed forces. Under pressure from Lieutenant Colonel Dorrin Rudnick, a medical officer at Scott, The Valley was shut down prior to the end of the war and was never revived.
Unlike East St. Louis, contemporary Japan has a fairly permissive attitude towards prostitution. Until fairly recently thousands of Japanese bordellos were known as torukoburos, or Turkish baths, i.e. bathhouses that offered massages with lots of extras. This nomenclature, however, offended a number of Turkish visitors to Japan who resented having their nationality used as a code word for lascivious recreation.
Turkish Ambassador Nurver Nures issued a series of formal protests to the Japanese government, which in turn put pressure on The All-Japan Special Bathhouse Association to persuade its members to change their names. In the interest of good international relations, the torukoburos agreed to rebrand themselves as soopurando, or soapland.
I was fortunate to be able to visit Japan last summer. While I never made it to a soapland, I did in fact leave my wife behind on one occasion when I went out for a night of male bonding. Tomy Naruo, my Japanese host, was kind enough to take me to a baseball game between the Tokyo Giants and the Yokohama Bay Stars. It was a great evening despite the fact that the hometown Giants lost.
A few days later I met two men who worked for the Sendai Eagles, another Japanese baseball team. My wife and I were on the bullet train from Tokyo to Kyoto when I realized I had left my cell phone in the taxi we had taken to the train station. It was our great good fortune to discover that the man directly across the aisle from me was the interpreter for the Eagles, who were playing the Kobe Buffaloes that evening. Having studied strength and conditioning at The University of Iowa – he was also the strength and conditioning coach for the Eagles – he spoke flawless English. Within a few minutes he telephoned the taxi company, confirmed that my phone had been found and turned in, and arranged to have it shipped to our hotel in Kyoto. I came away from the experience with an enhanced admiration for the honesty of Japanese society. I never thought I would see the phone again and fully expected to find hundreds of thousands of yen in charges on the bill. I also came away as a committed fan of the Sendai Eagles. My only regret is that I never learned the name of the interpreter who saved the day for me.
During my two weeks in Japan I got the distinct impression that baseball is even more popular there than it is in the United States. It dominates the sports pages, which devote extensive coverage not only to the Japanese leagues, but also to the Japanese players on Major League teams, including the Cardinals' So Taguchi. More significantly, wherever we went I saw kids playing baseball. Whenever we passed a playground or park we were almost certain to see a baseball game in progress. By contrast, most of the baseball diamonds I passed in St. Louis over the summer seemed to be unused.
Unlike baseball, which was brought to Japan by an American professor named Horace Wilson in the 1870s, shortly after Tokyo became the capital, sumo wrestling has been around at least since the eighth century, when the capital was still in Nara. With roots in Shintoism, sumo still involves a lot of religious ritual and prayers. Sumo also involves athletes who can each weigh upwards of 600 pounds, which is more than the collective weight of most major league outfields.
Becoming a yokozuna, or grand champion in sumo, requires years of rigorous training and a diet that includes lots of chanko-nabe (a special stew rich in protein), rice and beer. Considering the importance of beer in the diet of sumo champions, perhaps we should find a yokozuna to serve as a spokesman for The Beer Drinkers Party.
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