Travels with Barley by Ken Wells Page A

bottom-fermenting lager yeast appears later in a chapter exploring the beer yeast underworld.)
    At any rate, we popped open the Michelob and everyone poured a couple of fingers into crystal wine goblets.
    â€œNotice the great aromatics in this,” Bradford intoned, nosing his glass. “It’s light and very delicate … Do you get a kind of tingly taste in the back of your mouth? That’s the hops.”
    I have to admit I’d not drunk Michelob in years and hadn’t in the past nosed it, or spent much time noticing its hoppy aroma. But I dutifully sniffed my glass and concluded he was right. And the salmon appetizer marinated in Bud and cilantro was good, too, though it seemed to be there wasn’t much beer taste in it. But maybe that was the point. Beer in food, Chef DeLucie would later explain, wasn’t supposed to be the main show but to act pretty much as oils and spices do, helping to enhance flavor.
    I was wondering what Bradford would say about Corona, these days a light lager most consumers know for the slice of lime you’re supposed to force down the bottle neck, and its advertising affiliation with the pop rocker Jimmy Buffett. I’d drunk a lot of it on a few beach trips to Mexico and I found it pleasant on a hot day, but it seemed something of an odd pick for a fancy beer tasting.
    I also knew that Corona had gotten its U.S. start in the 1960s as a kind of cult beer, winning word-of-mouth endorsement from young American adventurers who had discovered it while surfing in Mexico. From there, it had grown into an import juggernaut, in 1997 racing by Heineken to claim the spot as America’s number one imported beer (startling, given that Heineken had held that spot since 1930). In fact, as of this writing, Corona was, by sales, the sixth most popular beer among all beers sold in America and the fifth most popular in the world .
    This seems all the more astonishing given that in the late 1980s, the brand, owned by Mexico’s Grupo Modelo (and now part-owned by Anheuser-Busch, which in 2000 bought a 50 percent nonmanagement stake), withstood one of the most bizarre smear attacks in corporate history. Salesmen for a Nevada Heineken distributor, jealous that Corona was taking business from its brand, began spreading the word that brewery workers urinated in the beer before it was bottled. The entire affair was the subject of a Wall Street Journal feature story in 1987 and ended when the distributor, sued for $3 million in damages by a Corona importer, retracted the slander and apologized. Talk about rebounds: in 2002, Corona sold 90 million cases of beer in the U.S.
    Bradford seemed to agree with the growing hordes of Corona drinkers, calling the beer “refreshing and tasty with a hint of citrus” and, using a wine analogy, “easy to drink, just like a zinfandel.”
    I was wondering if Bradford was perhaps just being politic. So I later asked another certified Ale Head, Jim Koch, at Boston Beer, what he thought of Corona. He was surprisingly complimentary, too. “It does have its own unique flavor—kind of a grape soda-pop fermentation ester. You wouldn’t mistake Corona for Miller or Bud. It’s somewhere between a Bud and a Heineken.”
    I perhaps understood this a bit better when Fritz Maytag at Anchor Brewing, the dean of craft brewers, told me, “Well, you know, once beer drinkers try Corona, usually there’s no going back to Bud.” Or put another way: the craft beer folk take a reasonably charitable view of most imports, considering them to be the portal through which Bud, Miller, and Coors drinkers, if they are ever going to cross over, are drawn to microbrews. This is kind of like the argument that pot leads to heroin—except the spin (if you’re a craft brewer) is positive.
    Bradford then moved on to more exotic beer: Goose Island Hex Nut Brown Ale (Chicago); Samuel Adams Boston Stock Ale (Boston); Anderson Valley