Beer: Drink, Drank, Drunk

Welcome to Cincy Beer Me!  http://twitter.com/CincyBeerMe.  This week and for the next couple month's we welcome our guest local beer bloggers at Hoperatives, an awesome local beer blog.
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There are those who say the only reason to drink beer is to get drunk. There are also those who say the only reason to have sex is to get pregnant. There's a pretty good chance these are the same people, and they probably own two minivans. Out of necessity.

Prohibition ended in 1933, but there's a part of its psychology that lives on to this day. The zealots of the Anti-Saloon League and the various Temperance Unions did a pretty effective job selling the idea that drinking alcohol was a moral failing. If you took one drink, they argued, you might as well pack up your wife and kids and send them to the poorhouse. That's where they were going to end up anyway. Brewers, distillers and winemakers never managed to unite behind a common response. Brewers tended to portray drinkers as bucolic Germans in biergartens, but there was this kefuffle called World War I going on, and in America -- even German Cincinnati -- the Germans were The Bad Guys™. It didn't help.

Benjamin Franklin never said "Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy." He said something similar, but he was talking about wine. I think old Ben would agree, though, that it's a benevolent Providence that decides what the planet needs is a one-celled creature that eats sugar, craps alcohol belches CO² and then reproduces. Kind of like a pick-up bar on a bad Saturday night. I'm sure there's a perfectly rational evolutionary argument for why yeast does what it does, but I don't know what it is. Being happy is reason enough for me. It's not going to help you pass that biology final, though, so I suggest you pay attention in class.

It's all fun, games and burping yeast until the alcohol hits your bloodstream. Alcohol interferes with the functioning of the central nervous system. I'd go down the list of all the physiological effects of being drunk, but really? Do I really need to? Sufficed to say, you don't need to get behind the wheel of a car if you've been drinking. You pretty much need to stay away from anything requiring rational judgment. The thing is, alcohol enhances the flavor of beer, too. It extracts flavors and produces a mouthfeel that can't be duplicated any other way. Beer doesn't have to have a lot of alcohol to be good, but it's not going to taste like beer without it.

There are two ways to describe the amount of alcohol in beer: Alcohol By Weight (ABW) and the more common Alcohol By Volume (ABV). Alcohol By Weight describes the percentage of a beer's mass that's alcohol. Some states use it as the basis for calculating taxes on beer, but ABV is by far the most popular measure. Let's face it: you don't normally buy beer by the pound so ABW probably probably doesn't mean much to you. We think of liquids in terms of volumes, so ABV is more intuitive.

Calculating ABV is actually kind of geekily cool. Most of beer is water, and water has a known density. Add malted grain and other sugary substances to that water and it gets denser. Why wouldn't it be denser? There's more stuff in there. The ratio of the sugary liquid's density to the plain water's density is referred to as the "Starting Specific Gravity." (Why "specific gravity?" Google works as well for you as it does for me, look it up yourself.) Anyway, you add yeast and they eat the sugar, crap the alcohol and burp the CO². It's what they do. Alcohol is less dense than sugar, so the ratio of the final liquid's density to plain water is lower than the one you started with. The difference between the starting Specific Gravity (usually denoted 'SG') and the final Specific Gravity ('FG') provides the information you need to know to calculate how much sugar was converted to alcohol. That's why beers with a lot of alcohol are called "high-gravity" beers: they started out with a lot more sugar than they ended up with, and most of that was turned to alcohol.

Beer festvals like the Cincy Winter Beefest are magnets for brewers who like to make high-gravity beers and for beer drinkers who like to try them. Try more than a couple and you're not going to be in any shape to drive. Plan to go with a designated driver or, better yet, support the local economy and get a room downtown. Keep yourself hydrated, and pace yourself. Enjoy the beer. And enjoy the next day, too. Then, and only then, have you justified the sacrifice made by all those little yeasts.