How NOT to pour champagne

Yesterday the paper ran an article (which you can read here) about a pair of French researchers who have discovered that the best way to preserve the bubbles when pouring champagne is to keep it cold and pour gently down the side of the glass.

My response to this? Well, duh!

Beer people have known this for years. We are well grounded in the art of manipulating carbonation during dispensation – how to minimize head, how to build a big rocky head, how to dampen an over-carbonated beer and how to preserve the last vestiges in an under-carbonated one. Yet when a couple of wine researchers release the results of a study, this is news?

Clearly photographers don't know how to pour beer...

Now, I know it is the week between Xmas and New Year’s and newspapers are desperate for copy space, but if I put out a study showing that if you pour beer down the side of the glass, only straightening it near the end to create a finger or two head, not an editor in the land would cover it. In fairness they did write about the study that examined the flow pattern of bubbles in Guinness (here is one link) which was pretty cool, but generally beer stories get shorter shrift than wine and spirit stories.

The core reason goes back to mainstream perceptions of beer and wine. Wine is refined, consumed by middle class professionals who are fairly discerning and therefore it is worthy of appreciating the detail (anyone who has seen Sideways can attest to this). Beer on the other hand remains the drink of the overweight working class guy(can you say Norm from Cheers?) and the frat boy looking for a quick drunk (can you say Animal House?), and therefore the less said about it the better.

We all know these stereotypes are not true, and the actual perceptions of the two beverages is more nuanced than that. Plus I really do believe that the image of beer is changing, and fairly quickly. That said, I think those core frames remain a driving force behind the average person’s perception. I can’t tell you how many times someone has expressed surprise that I don’t have a huge beer belly (give it time, my spouse says, give it time…), or looks wide-eyed when I inform them there are 80 plus sub-styles of beer. No one would express such skepticism to a wine geek.

Wine simply gets more props from the media than beer. Such is our beer-y burden. However, times are changing, and here is to hoping 2011 continues the trend of mainstream recognition of the respectable delights of beer.

Happy New Year, regardless of whether you are popping champagne, a nice effervescent Belgian Tripel or a hearty barley wine!