Travels with Barley by Ken Wells

aspirin, helping to thin blood and reduce clotting and arterial plaque, thus helping to prevent heart attacks and strokes.
    Dr. Kaplan, though, was willing to go out on something of a limb for beer. As for beer’s specific virtues, he cited two recent large-scale studies: in one, a look at 70,000 female nurses showed that those who drank moderate amounts of beer had less hypertension than did nurses who drank either wine or spirits. He also pointed to a survey of 128,934 adults in the Kaiser Permanente managed care system. It showed that male beer drinkers among the group were at a statistically significant lower risk of coronary artery disease than were men who drank red wine, white wine, or spirits.
    Dr. Kaplan said new evidence also suggests that beer, because of mechanisms that “are not all clearly understood,” may help raise by 10 percent to 20 percent the so-called good cholesterol levels in some people, thereby helping to ward off coronary heart disease and related afflictions such as dementia. Beer is also rich in B vitamins and folates (an enzyme also found in green leafy vegetables), both of which help keep homocysteine blood levels in check. (Homocysteine is a chemical that, in elevated amounts, has been linked to an increased risk of heart disease.) For those reasons, said Dr. Kaplan, “beer drinking has equal or perhaps more benefit” than its rivals, wine or spirits.
    Of course, before the Joe Six-Packs of the world rush out to quaff a few in celebration, the researchers offered a major caveat. They generally define moderate drinking as one drink a day for women and two a day for men (a drink itself being a 12-ounce beer, a 5-ounce glass of wine, or 1.5 ounces of distilled spirits). Conversely, studies show that binge drinking—considered the consumption of six or more drinks in a day—not only obliterates the benefits of moderate drinking but puts drinkers at increased risk for obesity (the notorious beer gut being one manifestation) and certain types of cancers, liver failure, and stroke.
    And there are statistics—generally published by anti-drinking groups—that tend to dim this bright news about beer. The Public Health Institute affiliated with the University of California-Berkeley, for example, published a report in 2000 that estimated that 10 percent of beer drinkers account for more than 40 percent of all beer consumption. Though the beer industry disputes this as wildly inflated, it acknowledges the existence of a preponderantly young, male group of consumers who don’t exactly fit the profile of moderate drinkers.

    As appetizer-sized servings of gravlax with beer and cilantro arrived, followed by the beer-braised chicken and salad with Corona Beer dressing, the question of whether drinking beer was good for you was easily replaced by the conclusion that it was certainly fun. The beer in the gravlax dish turned out to be Budweiser, and the beer Daniel Bradford asked us to take from the ice buckets at our table and open turned out to be Bud’s fancy brother, Michelob.
    This just showed you how catholic this event was. Of the ten beers we were to sample, eight of them qualified as craft brews. But Michelob and Corona are popular light lagers, and not of a style in favor among the Ale Heads who predominate in Bradford’s organization. The Ale Heads represent a return to pre-lager America before the 1870s, when lager began to predominate, and they pay homage to Britain and Belgium, the only two countries in the world where ales still predominate over lagers. Ale Heads believe that ales, brewed from feisty yeast strains that ferment at higher temperatures than do lager yeast strains, have more character and range than do lagers and their derivations such as Pilsners, bocks, and Märzens. Most Ale Heads think lagers, even the good ones the Czechs, Dutch, and Germans make, are boring. (An eloquent counterargument on the merits of lager and the cool-loving,