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Beer Review: Flying Dog Dead Rise Old Bay Summer Ale

May 21, 2014 · by Oliver Gray

Wooden mallets strike claws, sending fissures through crabby chitin, exposing the sweet, seasoned flesh beneath. Soft hands meet sharp shells, poking, probing, splitting, snapping; a modest labor for a morsel of meat. Twelve spices form a homogeneous cocktail with light lager and briny boil, resulting in a liquid unique to the summers of the Chesapeake watershed. The crustacean covered newspapers lining the tables tell a new story now, a story that to the outsider sounds like barbaric ritual, but to the native sounds like hallowed tradition.

Despite my international birth, I’m a Marylander. All of my education – from Jones Lane to Johns Hopkins – unfolded in the Old Line state, and I’ve called the marshy lands north of the Potomac home for nearly 25 years. There are those in other parts of the country who don’t understand Maryland’s insistence on maintaining a unique identity; those who find such cultural fervor from a small state cute, or quaint, or some combination there of. But the people of Ocean City, Baltimore, Annapolis, and Salisbury don’t just mindlessly crab and boil or Raven and Oriole, they hold high their state standard, proud that 9th smallest state boasts one of the biggest personalities.

A veteran of the picking art shows a tourist where and how to lift the plate to get at the blue gold in the body, like the master teaching the neophyte who reached the peak all the simple secrets of life. A little girl takes her time, building a mini-mountain of crab to eat all at once, while her older brother yanks white chunks out of cartilage lined crevices with the only tool he needs: his teeth. Corn on the cob sits cooked but idle, waiting for the pile of dusted red delight to give up the spotlight.

Maryland suffers from poorly built sandwich syndrome; its thin landmass pressed between the top bun of Pittsburgh, Gettysburg, Lancaster, and Philadelphia, and the bottom bun of DC, Shenandoah, Richmond, and Norfolk. New York City is only a 4 hour drive from our naval-steeped capital, and a brief jaunt south would have you in North Carolina before the sun fully lowered itself into a western bed. There’s a lot of artisanal bread for Maryland’s meat to contend with, and it knows it needs to taste damn good to get any attention when someone takes a bite of the East Coast.

The notes that haunt the humid air are distant but familiar – bluegrass, country, possibly Jimmy Buffet. The giant stock pot – already full of potatoes and garlic and onions – sits on open flame, slowly rising to boil as a bushel awaits fate. On the shore, seagulls have taken note of the feast, and caw their dinner bells to nearby friends, hoping to snag some scraps after the lungs, mustard, and empty shells have been tossed. As the sun begins to set, the hiss of bottle cap sighs fade into the backdrop of ten thousand cicadas.

You might expect a beer brewed with Maryland’s favorite crab seasoning to be nothing more than a well-marketed gimmick. But Flying Dog, after moving to Frederick after a few years in Denver, is one of the oldest functional breweries in the state. Like Heavy Seas and their nautical flair, Flying Dog understands what it means to be in this state, but also what it means to live in Maryland. What it means to wear purple during football season. What it’s like to contend with a parade of transient traffic as I-95 shuttles people to states external. What it’s like to pay a tax on rain.

Deposits of seasoning get stuck under your fingernails. Little cuts from shards and spikes sting when hands meet soap. The entire process means a lot of work and a lot of clean up, but the rewards, tangible and tantalizing, make the effort seem minor. Those who partake in the rituals of the bay go to bed satisfied, dreaming of food and friends and family and future.

The beer isn’t perfect; the smell hits you like a fishy breeze off of a populated wharf, and the Old Bay spikes a flag into your tongue, marking its savory territory despite the summer ale’s crisp attempt to quickly wash it down. But Maryland isn’t perfect either. It’s a hodgepodge of DC politicians and career fisherman, a swampy land swarmed with mosquitoes and mariners. Its weather can be extreme and unpredictable and relatively slow speed limits lead to some of the worst traffic in the country. But it’s a state that knows who it is, where it stands, and what it likes, by virtue of geographic necessity.

Flying dog tried to brew and bottle Maryland itself. Did it work? That ship’s still at sea. Either way, it’s a flattering homage, and I’m willing to bet a lot of Old Bay junkies just found the perfect partner for a summer romance.

“Have you ever watched a crab on the shore crawling backward in search of the Atlantic Ocean, and missing? That’s the way the mind of man operates.” – H. L. Mencken

The Session #79: A Patriotic Expat

September 6, 2013 · by Oliver Gray

Here’s my entry for the seventy-ninth iteration of “The Session,” this one hosted by Ding of Ding’s Beer Blog. The topic: USA versus Old World Beer Culture -aka- What the hell has America done to beer?

The first noises I ever made echoed down the hallways of the maternity ward in Wythenshawe hospital, just outside of Manchester, England. The stay in my birth country was short though, as my father’s career packed us up and flung us far, like some kind of vocational catapult. We landed first in Dallas, Texas, but after a brief stint with lax open-container laws and seemingly mandatory shotgun purchases, we moved to establish deeper familiar roots on the Maryland side of Washington, DC.

This put me in an odd position as a child. My parents were decidedly from England, accents and charms and all, and I was not.

By day I was exposed to the US via my peers: immersed in boy-band pop-culture, linguistic idioms, and all the ingrained bravado that America seems to unabashedly instill in its youth. I pledged allegiance to flags that were not mine, I wrote essays about fathers who founded a country I was not a citizen of, and listened to teachers disparage the beautiful red coats of my people, all because of some minor disagreement over taxes.

By night I used words like “knackered” to express how trying my day had been, ate digestive biscuits and drank concentrated Ribena, and memorized lines from Faulty Towers and Blackadder, laughing maniacally at jokes that many of my friends claimed “were not funny.” I played football (the kind where you use a round ball and your feet) and my first tastes of brew were Boddingtons and Bass, not Budweiser and Billy Beer.

I became a hybrid. British by nature, American by nurture. I have no accent, but do pronounce things oddly. I appreciate the opportunity that the US represents but also pine for the pomp and erudition that can only come a country who, for a while there, refused to let the sun set. I retained the British sense of humor, but adopted the American “#@%& yea!” approach to taking on the world. It offers me unique perspective. I can experience the best of both cultures by adoring the tradition while embracing the progress.

I’d like to think that the cultural syncretism that made me who I am is reflective of the state of American craft beer (we can all agree to leave the macro mess to the Nascar legions). There is a growing part of the populace who actively wants to enjoy good beer, and they are raging against the longstanding influence of piss-water-pale-lager. Their tongues and hearts are in the right place, and they’re doing things the only way they know how: the way of the USA.

It’s impossible to ignore the much older, much more practiced pedigree of the Brits and the Germans and the Belgians, and their influence on even the basics of our brewing processes. No American brewery would be producing beer as we know it if not for our European buddies. Hell, none of the styles found in the States are unwaveringly “American,” but are instead domestic recreations of beers born oceans and centuries away. People can tack “American” in front of “wheat beer” all they want, but that doesn’t make the origins any less German. We can say that America has adopted the IPA as its craft beer mascot, but its history can never be extricated from English brewing lore.

But that’s not new. America loves to adopt things from other countries, and has never just co-opted an idea and let it be. One need only look at what we’ve done to Italian and Chinese food, or all the crap we add to make “coffee” to see how we arrived at “Imperial” versions of everything.

America always goes big: cars, homes, portions, debt. Why would beer be an exception? The American people don’t just want a pale ale – a nod to the perfunctory perfection of our island-dwelling forefathers – they want a triple-hopped, dry-hopped, back-hopped tongue destroyer, so bitter and spilling with lupulin you can almost see it wafting off the head in cartoon-like waves. Americans don’t want to appreciate a product that was refined over generations of beer-making, they want up-in-your-shit flavor, complexity, and ABV. They want beer drinking to be an exercise in pushing the proverbial envelope. It’s the American dream to live extreme.

And I’ll be the first to say that it isn’t a bad thing. This country was founded on breaking tradition, on escaping overbearing ornately fashioned rules, and that sentiment echoes noisily in almost every corner of the culture, no matter how niche. It is a land where people have the freedom to do what they want, succeed or fail, tradition respectfully acknowledged or wantonly cast aside. If American beer was more English, adhered more to the rules of another country just because, it wouldn’t be American. It doesn’t mean either culture (or product) is better or worse. They are just different, and built on a different set of principles. To try and claim one is superior is to ignore (whether willfully or ignorantly) the social, economic, and artistic minutiae of the other. Preference, even from an established expert, is not enough to prove objective superiority of one style over another.

America has done to beer what America has done to the world: moved it forward, for good and bad. This beer culture evolved from the old world culture, but it’s important to remember that evolution does not always equate with improvement. Evolution is adaptation, changing to best suit the environment, morphing to fit a set of ever-changing subjective rules in order to survive. I was raised on and will always love good English beer (or at least what my dad drank and was imported in the 90s) but I’m also not afraid to say that many American beers are just flat out enjoyable. They both have a place in my fridge, for totally different reasons.

For every Honey Boo Boo, there is a Patrick Stewart. For every Spice Girl, there is a Foo Fighter. For every Bud Light Lime there is a Sam Smith’s Oatmeal Stout. For every Carling lager, there is a Pliny the Younger.

Just be glad we live in a world where we’re drowning in options and can indulge the eccentricities of our palates almost infinitely. It sure as hell beats the opposite, regardless of what country you live in.

A Child of Fantasy

February 8, 2011 · by Oliver Gray

I spent the majority of my waking childhood doing one of three things: reading books, playing soccer, or playing video games. It was a simple existence in which I put fun, fantasy, and anything surreal ahead of the mundane and every day. As a child, I was indulged; my wild imagination a wonderful thing that was fostered and encouraged by pretty much every adult I encountered. My mind danced with thoughts of magic, adventures across improbable landscapes, and a life of constant adventure and excitement.

This mentality continued into young adulthood, but my fantasies became more elaborate and vivid, opening up new vistas of possibility and entertaining strangeness. The books I read were more sophisticated, their language and concepts twisted and unreal, feeding my desire to experience the impossible. The games I played evolved with graphic engines, creating more realistic representations of monsters, castles, and the prior’s nonstop siege of the latter. I was able to indulge my insatiable imagination more than ever. Even my soccer became a calculated game of strategy; the physical exertions of the sport had become trivial and I enjoyed analyzing the war-like breakdown of an unfolding game just as much as I loved scoring a goal.

In college, I was free to indulge to an almost ludicrous extent. While still in high school I had been limited by my parents influence and observation. On my own, I could flood my mind with weird and archaic literature and play copious amounts of games to the maximum extent I could absorb them. I was not just free, I was unchained. My mind went into overdrive, seeking to experience any bit of fantasy I could get my hands on (or mind around) and I would often find myself reading a book, watching a movie, and playing a game simultaneously. I loved the freedom of overindulgence despite the mental and physical ramifications.

My success in college was simply a byproduct of this fantasy-lust; I just so happened to study a field that benefited from mental flexibility and rampant creativity. I actually enjoyed reading the things I read and writing the things I wrote, which I am sure not many college students can say with a straight face.

I never stopped to think that my obsession with fantasy was unhealthy for my development and perceptions. I always considered it normal, just a hobby like any other. I knew many who were as fanatical or even moreso, and figured I was a functional, social being somehow unaffected by something that consumed me so wholly.

The effects were subtle. I did not devolve into a schizophrenia where I thought I was actually a wizard casting spells in my cubicle. I did not dodge imaginary dragons while driving my car. I didn’t even consider myself particularly fantastic, despite constantly being awash in the genre.

I did however build a massive repository of expectation, preconceived notions, and overly exaggerated perception. Any time an adult described something to me, I gathered every tiny piece of information about the topic and began to construct my imaginary idea of what this thing would be like. With emotions I aggrandized what it would actually feel like, expecting it to be as obvious as cold water on a hot day. With events, I expected wondrous celebrations; wildly yet surreptitiously planned and executed. Sensations were not spared either; I always imagine alcohol to taste like candy, having a job being a daily adventure in a hip environment, and various achievements literal milestones that I could tangibly see, touch, and remember with pride.

This doesn’t sound bad. I had very, very, very high expectations for things. This meant I had a powerful curiosity and tried almost anything I could. Exotic foods, various athletics, even sources of altered states, when the opportunity presented itself. I was not out of control, but I was certainly hedonistic for a period, in an attempt to reach that exalted pinnacle of emotion that I had built in my mind. In college I played the role of hedonist to an extreme at times, hoping to get a brief taste of what seemed so ordinary and accessible to others.

When I didn’t feel these things, I was confused. For a bit, I considered myself a sociopath, incapable of feeling the gamut of the human psyche. But one day, I had an epiphany about my life and all my experience. If I remember correctly, I was reading the introduction to Walden for the 4th time. I had not not felt the various emotions and sensations I sought, I had felt them in a way completely polar to how I had expected to feel them.

I had been in love, I had been truly angry, I had felt spirituality, pride, honor, grace, humility, aggravation, embarrassment. Unlike physical pain and pleasure, these feelings were impossibly ethereal, only felt in wisps and tickles. A lifetime of fantasy immersion had made me brace myself for these feelings hitting me; instead they tapped me one the shoulder and passed right on by without me even noticing.

The result: a general disillusionment. I am nowhere near unhappy, in fact I love where my life has meandered and am proud of the things I have accomplished thus far. I have big dreams and am taking steps to realize them, and feel, for the most part, satisfied. But I am admittedly two dimensional in my emotions, mainly because I never felt what I thought I should feel, when I expected to feel it. I had to force myself to say, “Oh, so that is what X feels like”, where “X” equals any emotion normally recognizable by a person.

I had to spend some time realigning what was reality and disconnecting it from what fantasy had taught me was reality. While this sounds absurd, it was actually quite difficult, and I still find myself underestimating certain emotions and events. I didn’t walk at my college graduation because the entire event seemed washed out and banal to me; to this day I could tell you why I thought that. I also had to acknowledge that I have experienced many, many things that I had simply overlooked, and take time to appreciate them for what they are, not what they might be.

I would say that fantasy ruined my mind, but that would be an oversimplification and overreaction. It certainly altered my judgements and made me expect more than I think is reasonable for the world we live in. But it also taught me to never take anything for granted, and instilled in me a sense of dedication and stoicism that I might not have had otherwise. Because I “missed” many emotions and feeling when they first manifested themselves, I have developed a very placid demeanor; it takes a lot of consistent frustration to push me over the edge. I am passionate, but only to a certain extent, and I do not easily get carried away.

All this as a result of many hours of Tolkien, Asimov, Lovecraft, and Sierra, Blizzard, Bioware.

I do not regret it, as with all of the above confusion about the world comes a few, dominating positives. I find fun in the mundane, by being able to project frivolity and fantastic scenarios on what would otherwise be a total snoozefest. I also have high mental dexterity; I attribute my problem solving skills and fast-thinking to the years of synapses firing over which monster to take down first. I also have developed an immense database of historical and folklore knowledge that often aids me in conversation and in writing; both of which I find myself doing quite often.

I only write this because I know there must be others like me out there who have not come to terms with why the feel (or don’t) the way they do. Others of my generation who played just as many games, read just as many books, and otherwise smothered themselves in science fiction and fantasy surely must have similar sentiments to mine.

If so, fear not. There really is a wonderful world out there, filled with amazing scenery, people, experiences, and yes, adventures waiting for you to discover it. There is sorcery abound in human interaction and pure magic in a lover’s touch. As much comfort as there is in your digitally or scholarly created worlds, they will not serve you indefinitely. I do not suggest complete removal of the thing that has defined you and that you love so dearly, just an active recognition of which world is actually real.

"Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition. " Isaac Asimov

A Matter of Tradition (and Privacy too)

July 12, 2010 · by Oliver Gray

I am a gamer. I openly admit this to anyone, as I am quite passionate about my hobby and excitedly follow the play-style and design trends that permeate this often misunderstood culture. I have played a little bit of everything, dating back to the early 90s; obscure 8-bit NES titles, pre-GUI text adventures, modern first person shooters, Jap-RPGS…you name it. I was even heavily involved in the poorly understood Compact Disc Interactive (CD-i) movement of the late 90s, but that is fodder for another post.

I love to discuss gaming, whether it be the nuances of game design philosophy, overarching lore that hearkens back to some of my favorite literature, or sharing stories of the sheer fun and challenge of playing against people online. I’m pretty much always up for a gaming conversation, assuming the present company is equally interested, or noticeably tolerable. But my favorite thing to discuss is the societal trends of gaming and the industries impact on how we socialize and entertain ourselves. I will defend gaming as a legitimate hobby until the day I can no longer accurately use WASD.

Gaming from its onset, was solitary. Early consoles required you sit within a cords-distance of your TV. Games were designed with one, possibly two, gamers in mind. The term “single-player” did not exist, only “one-player” or “two player”. But as technology became more sophisticated, it became easier to include more than just a few gamers. Arcades allowed up to 4, 6, 8 players at once, which led the industry towards a social gaming movement. Remembering the 6-person X-Men arcade game of the late 90s (Colossus was my favorite), it was not difficult to see that the future of gaming involved multiple people playing simultaneously.

Our modern systems have embodied this idea perfectly. The Wii is social gaming at its very finest. In fact, the “single-player” component of the Wii is severely lacking. Even the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 heavily rely on multi-player gaming, assuming the majority of players seek human interaction in their gameplay. Not even PC gamers are safe; MMOs have taken over the RPG market with only BethesdaWorks titles like Elder Scrolls: Oblivion and Fallout 3 holding it down for the single-player crowd.

This is not necessarily bad. In my college days, I gamed online for arguably unhealthy periods of time. It was my relaxation, my escape from the sometimes boring realities of being a student. I played Starcraft and Diablo 2, Unreal Tournament, Counter-Strike and most importantly for this discussion: World of Warcraft. I was hardcore; gaming hours every night, raiding with 39 other people, running a section of my “guild” and loving every second of it. WoW was my first foray into the dark, mysterious land of MMOs that I had always figured was not for me.

But I was wrong. Something in the magical combination of story, character development, accessibility, strategy, challenge and social interaction hit every primal and intellectual urge I had ever tried to fill when playing a game. It turned out that the thing missing from all those single-player console RPGs was other people! Traditional RPGs like the the Final Fantasies and Breath of Fires will always hold a special place in my heart, but after a certain point, you want to share your accomplishments with friends; something not so easily done when you have to invite them over to your house to check out your characters.

It also gave me an avenue to stay in touch with some of my closest friends, without the need for awkward “update” phone calls or expensive and lengthy trips. We could hang out, albeit in another alien world. We could work collaboratively towards something exciting and abstractly tangible. We could have all the fun we used to have sitting in someone’s basement in high school, all while dong our own thing as we explored our collegiate careers. It was mainly this aspect that kept me involved. Exciting stories and exotic fantasy lands helped, of course.

I had companies like Blizzard to thank for their beautiful creations. Their creativity let me maintain a social life with those who meant the most to me while subsequently fulfilling my every possible wish for content and playstyle in a video game. I commend them for creating what I could argue is the best video game I have ever played. I am normally one to support their ideas, as they often lead to fresh trends in the gaming industry that other companies can’t help but adopt if they want to stay competitive. Their history of successes is testament enough to their design philosophy, so I do no quickly dismiss public announcements of their new ideas.

RealID at a glance seemed like a brilliant concept. Tie in the “real-life” social aspect of gaming so that players could easily meet up with their friends to play a game. For someone like me, this was incredible. I could see if my friends were playing, and if so, what game, and was even given the tools to communicate with them across platforms to organize a mutual session. If only it had stopped there.

Digital privacy is a sensitive topic, and many social networks take heat for any slight aberration of information sharing policy. Social networking is opt-in, but even people who choose to partake expect some level of data privacy. On sites like Facebook, you can offer as much (or as little) information about yourself as you would like, and even set decently strict parameters about just who can see that information. While your digital security is at risk by posting anything about yourself online, at least social networking sites offer some level of protection.

A recent development suggested that Blizzard would be using RealID in a capacity that no one expected – or more importantly – wanted. Their brilliant plan was to have all official forum posts include an identifying title, to make gamers accountable for their thoughts and language. While tame in theory, the problem entered when they disclosed that the identifying title would be the gamer’s real first and last name. Needless to say, the throngs of nerds were unhappy that their privacy, no matter how minor, was being breached.

The defenders of the idea argued that everyone knows your full name; the government, your employer, your friends and neighbors. They also claimed that many who were upset with the change were hypocrites who embraced other forms of social networking. The main distinction is that social networking sites are generally benign. People are not openly inflammatory for fear of social repercussion, and “dramatic” flame-wars on the likes of Facebook are over esoteric nonsense that has no real impact on the world. Sure, people get divorced and fired due to things said on Facebook, but they openly offered that information and actively allowed it to be associated with their name; they were never forced.

The idea of being forced was the problem with RealID. Many gamers do not wish to associate their everyday existence with something that carries such a social stigma. It is a sad fact that we as a culture are more harsh on gamers and the accompanying alt-lifestyle than we are on the degenerate swarms of morons that clog our TV channels during prime time hours. Steve from finance might not want his coworkers to know that he exists as a powerful mage after hours, just like your project manager might not want to let slip that he too enjoys to unwind in a 3v3 ladder match.

Couple these kind of privacy issues with the intrinsically competitive nature of gaming, and you have a recipe for an article on Fark. Facebook promotes e-stalking, but it rarely invokes enough passion in a person for them to seek physical confrontation with another person. Gaming however, can lead to unbelievable fits of “nerd-rage” (yes, that is exactly what it sounds like) where many already socially damaged individuals could easily lose control over an online loss. Displaying names gives these people an extra resource, should their online bloodlust follow them offline, adding an unnecessary risk for all gamers. The last thing I need is “DeathRogueX” pounding on my front door because in his opinion, I cheated my way to victory in a perfectly legitimate competition.

The above theoretical scenario only needs happen once, to some poor sap, and online gaming would immediately be hit with a wave of uneducated opinions about its safety. It would inescapably become the scapegoat for all things evil, and take even more of the brunt than it currently does as an excuse for adolescent violence. If the above scenario happened to a girl or child, we may see the entire gaming world shift radically; and probably not for the better. It has already happened on smaller scales in other countries, so all it needs is one mainstream US exposure and we all as gamers, take one huge step backwards.

Regardless of these obvious flaws in the plan, the one thing that bothers me is that Blizzard, a flagship of the gaming industry, ignored one very important piece of tradition in gaming culture. Almost everyone I know that is an avid gamer, goes by a handle. Mine for example is “Rumbeard”, but also includes mutations like “Rum” and “Rummy”. Very few people know my actual name, nor I theirs, and this is perfectly acceptable. Handles, tags, aliases and guises are inextricably tied to the basic fun elements of gaming. Some choose to be witty with their names, others edgy, others downright weird. We take pride in our alter-egos and are given a clean slate to be who we want to be, completely separate from who we are. Gamers want that disconnect from the ordinary, it lets them escape and enjoy, in whatever capacity they choose.

Why Blizzard was oblivious to this is seemingly obvious, given their recent deal with Facebook. They did not forget it at all, instead they made a greedy grab for a popular tie-in and attempted to force social networking onto gaming, when almost all gamers did not want it. The two functions are not mutually exclusive despite whatever superficial similarities they might have. The entire world of gaming relies on anonymity, at least from your true earthly identity.

If gamers are comfortable identifying themselves, it should be their choice to do so, not the discretion of the company who makes the game. As seen by the events of the past few weeks, companies will lose massive amounts of players (and in turn money) if they try to so radically change a paradigm that has been around since you could enter the name of your character at the beginning of an RPG. Digital privacy is important, nay paramount, in the gaming culture and to betray that idea is to forcefully shake the foundations of the industry.

Seeing that they decided not to use real names, some of my faith in Blizzard has been restored. My copy of Starcraft II is still pre-ordered and I will still gobble up any details I can about the future projects from Blizzard. I do however hope that this RealID fiasco is enough to prove to companies that they need to listen to their customers. Some of them are warlocks, after all.

This post requires more Vespene Gas.