The International Food Name Conspiracy: The April 1st Post

I’m looking to inject this blog with more nationalism and xenophobia in order to court controversy and consequently increase web traffic. I would consider a “diplomatic incident” the pinnacle of achievement in this regard. So, without further adieu delay, here are some examples of other countries’ attempts at misleading American citizens into seeming stupid/eating something gross. (My conception of geopolitical machinations approximates rival frat houses having a prank war. If you happen to work in international politics and have a better understanding, or know anything about it, please send me an email.)

German chocolate cake: In an act of sabotage lacking the subtlety of our craftier foes, the Kaiser planted a deep cover operative on our soil in the 1850s. His name was Sam German. (Such a pseudonym confirms that espionage was not the Kaiser’s strong suit.) Using his own baking chocolate recipe, German created a unique chocolate cake with more layers than a spy thriller. His employer, Baker’s Chocolate Company, named a new baking chocolate in his honor: Baker’s German’s Sweet Chocolate. Germany’s gambit was successful: 162 years later, and most people ascribe this delicious confection—an American creation— to our erstwhile ally. Well played, Germany, well played.

Refried Beans: In an effort to deprive us of a (clearly beneficial) second frying, the conniving chefs of Mexico called their bean concoction frijoles refritos, knowing, I’m certain, that we would mistranslate the name. Where I come from (AMERICA), when you attach “re” to something, that means you’re fixin’ to do it again. Apparently, they do things a little different down south: in Mexican Spanish, “re” means “well,” or “very.” Thus, “well-fried beans.” The rub here is that these beans are often baked, not fried. Well played, Mexico, old chap. Or should I say “replayed?”  

Sweetbreads: Picture a fluffy cinnamon-infused dough, glazed with cream cheese icing and sprinkled with candied almonds. Now take that picture and set it on fire. “Sweetbreads” have less to do with sweets or bread, and more to do with thymus glands and calf pancreas. England is our oldest enemy (temporary alliance notwithstanding), and it’s fitting that England is a frequent culprit when it comes to naming foods in a purposefully misleading manner. This one goes deep: some 12th-century rascal decided the word for “flesh” or “meat” should be brǣd, and so shall the unsuspecting expect scones and receive gullets for all time. England: 1. Guy hoping for biscotti and getting pancreas: 0.    

Oranges: Geolurēad doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. But before circa 1512, that’s the monstrosity you would have uttered in the English-speaking world when referring to the color nexus between yellow and red. Presumably embarrassed, the English language quickly sought something else to call the color. It found a solution in a tangerine-pomelo hybrid that the French were already calling orenge. The name was a mutation of the Arabic naranj, whose descendants can be seen in such words as the Spanish naranja. So the fruit name came before the color name. That this is a vast international conspiracy designed to humiliate the United States is proved by this simple fact: “oranges" grown in exclusively tropical weather are green, not orange. Green! Cold weather causes the chlorophyll to retreat, not unlike the sensation one has when jumping into a freezing pond.

Baby carrots: The name, “baby carrots,” is not misleading unto itself; baby carrots are, indeed, the infantile offspring of adult carrots, brought each spring to the carrot patch by an intrepid stork. What’s deceiving is the myth that baby carrots are simply large carrots, cut to less-intimidating specifications. The product resulting from that process is called a “baby-cut carrot.” “Baby carrots” are immature carrots, bred specifically for their diminutive size and sweeter taste. “Baby-cut carrots” seek to ride the tiny orange coattails of their legitimate cousins. I wish I could pin this on a foreign government. Alas, this is the work of good ole American marketing.

Canadian Bacon: The mendacity of Canadians generally is well-known, but never is their innate deviousness more apparent than when ordering Canadian bacon in Canada. What you and I, and every other red-blooded patriot, call “Canadian bacon” is either A) ham, or B) “back bacon.” While ham needs no explanation, back bacon, if you didn’t know, is a slice of pig which includes both belly and loin. This is a leaner bacon than the fatty belly bacon America calls its own. In a blatant display of Canadian culinary insanity, Canadians’ actual signature bacon—peameal bacon—is a cut of pork loin rolled in… peameal? No. Cornmeal. Typical.

Colonial goose: Not, in fact, goose, but rather lamb—coated in breadcrumbs and bacon. I suppose this is the sort of bait-and-switch we might expect from Australia, considering its somewhat… ahem… unsavory colonial origins.

Bear Claw:  This may sound like something one would wear around the neck to intimidate a village one is pillaging. Sadly not the case. An invader with a bear claw around his neck would likely be laughed back into his longboat, as the bear claw of modern times is an almond-flavored pastry. The shape, I suppose, resembles the the mighty paw of a dangerous apex predator, in the right light. But I still feel swindled. If you're struggling to find the scapegoat here, kindly recall that bear claws are a subspecies of Danish. 

Gunpowder Tea: This tea’s misleading name led to a very anticlimactic Fourth of July for this patriot. Do not be misled: this tea from the Guangdong and neighboring provinces of China will not explode, no matter what. It is so named for the small pellets into which the tea leaves are rolled, resembling coarse black powder. Or is it? The Mandarin phrase for “freshly brewed” is gāng pào de (剛泡的). Say this quickly in English and the origin of the tea’s name becomes less certain. Another conspiracy.

Tune in next April 1st, when I shall unmask further clandestine treachery in the world of food!

What Villains Eat

Frankenstein’s monster is in great shape, considering. Building muscle mass as a vegan requires care and planning. And working individual muscle groups is especially difficult if your muscle groups are from different individuals. Frankenstein's monster is straight up-ripped for a reanimated vegan. He’s also not real, so this may not be a good model of health to pursue. But it did get me thinking about what villains eat.

Before you get all professorial on me—I know the doctor is “the real monster in Frankenstein.” The monster seems to be a fine fellow, generally. He’s a sensitive sort, and seemingly an ideological vegetarian. I like him, and so did his creator. A little insight into Mary Shelley’s era tells us how much. The iconic monster’s abstinence from meat was likely a product of Shelly’s own “radical inclinations.” In 1818, vegetarianism was just finding purchase in circles where reading a lot and eating salad were “totally extreme.” Vegetarianism was revolutionarily weird, decried by the conservative establishment, and a crucial part of Shelley’s countercultural scene. In A Vindication of a Natural Diet, Mary’s husband Percy Shelley asserted that a vegetarian citizenry would not have "lent their brutal suffrage to the proscription-list of Robespierre." (Maximilien de Robespierre was a politician during the French Revolution... although calling Robespierre a "politician" is like calling Sauron's orcs "a group of disgruntled laborers.") So the monster’s vegetarianism brands him as the Good Guy, according to his creator.

This fact of the monster’s (invented) diet reminds me: the “villains” to which I refer are not real. So investigating their dietary choices requires oscillating between two (sometimes conflicting) judgemental paradigms: 1) Assessing villains as real people/creatures, subject to the logic and morality of the fictional universes they occupy, and 2) Assessing villains as constructs/pieces of art/folklore.

 As constructs, villains are often drawn with broad strokes. While a hero may have a long list of defining traits, exploits, powers, and the all-important tragic flaw, villains are usually simplistic, out of narrative utility. Villains, in the classic sense, have no analogue to the “tragic flaw,” no “fortunate virtue.” They do not necessitate having any redeemable facets, incidental interests, or defining backstories. Surely many villains do have these things, and I’d argue the most memorable ones all do. But these ancillary facets are part of the villain’s cover letter, not his resumé.

And yet, within the logic of any story, all villains must eat. They may eat caviar, or plankton, or simply worlds, but eat they must. Many of our classic villains prefer the most cunning prey imaginable—that of mankind. If protagonists are proxies for the reader/viewer’s identity, or vessels into which we pour our perspective, then villains are the opposite. They are resistance and obstacle made flesh. They are the antithesis of our most lauded ideals. The villain is an avatar of all that is other. If one harkens back to humanity’s earliest days, our chief concerns were a scant few: eat, make more of us, don’t get eaten. The fact that so many villains enjoy humanity as their dish of choice should not be surprising. What is a more instinctual threat than something higher up in the food chain?

Tigers are apex predators, but few would consider tigers immoral. They exist outside morality, and therefore outside “villainy.” But they are cunning, lethal, and have aims that may interfere with yours, were you occupying the same room. But we don’t blame the tiger, even if it invites questions about its fearful symmetry. If said tiger prowled along the periphery of civilization, picking off stragglers and livestock, we may kill it, but we would not condemn it. After all, look at its claws and jaws; It’s doing what comes naturally.

This is what makes judging the English language’s oldest villain difficult. Grendel, of Beowulf fame, is a bipedal beast who generally stalks vikings and eats them. The vikings outsource some muscle in the form of the Geats, who are basically like vikings who have been exposed to gamma rays. Beowulf, the Geats' leader, confronts Grendel and (spoiler alert) tears off Grendel’s arm. Though my knowledge of Old English is...rusty, I don’t believe Beowulf says, “Disarmed!” or “Need a hand, Grendel?” or anything like that. A wasted opportunity. But Beowulf does make a point of facing Grendel unarmed, since Grendel is unarmed (especially later! Tee-hee). This is a sort of chivalric honor that one would only extend a fellow warrior; concerns regarding “fair fighting” would not apply when fighting a tiger, for instance. So Beowulf, ultimately, sees Grendel as more man than beast.

Physically, though, Grendel falls firmly into the beast camp. Scales, claws, enormity—he’s rocking the beast style full-on. He is clearly designed with the bloodiest sort of life in mind. Eating vikings, AKA “evil,” chose him, not the other way around. Aims that conflict with humankind’s are intrinsically “evil,” since we made up the word and get to decide its meaning. We do not condemn the tiger. But we might if it walked upright. We would if it had the vocabulary of a five-year old, despite the case the claws make.

So the English language’s first villain remains a unique and compelling entry among those villains who feed on man, if only due to reasons of imperfect taxonomy.

"What exactly makes a mimosa a 'girly drink?'"

Dexter, of the abysmally-concluded Showtime series, is almost Grendel. He is compelled by a nature incomprehensible to most people. But, unlike Grendel, his sociopathic escapades serve no purpose—they do not put food on his table. His meal of choice is steak, as rare and bloody as possible. This steak can help us cast Dexter as a complex apex predator, or we can see bloody steak as a predictable, pat choice made by a writer, only meant to induce a smile. The same could not be said of his Smith and Wesson kitchen bar stool, which distracts from the scenes in which it's framed. But it still must take a back seat (see what I did there?) to food when it comes to insane relationships between nefarious characters and recognizable brands.

While it may be laughable that James Bond would ever use a low-rent paperweight like the Sony Ericsson C902 issued by MI6, it’s nowhere near as mind-shattering as watching the Joker shill for Snickers in this (obviously not American) commercial.

I suppose, when you’re selling food, there’s (almost) no such thing as bad publicity. (Almost. The film Se7en (1995) probably didn’t move a lot of spaghetti sauce.) At first, it seems that the rule regarding “embedded advertising” is simply that your food must be promoted by a character that is charismatic, powerful, or hip; said character’s moral alignment is simply not part of the equation. That seems true, but it’s not. It turns out that context is hardly even a factor in product placement.

You know how, about thirteen minutes into Fritz Lang’s 1931 classic M, you’re simultaneously feeling vexed about the the child murderer at large, but also inexplicably craving the fresh, long-lasting taste of a good spearmint gum? That’s because there’s a big Wrigley banner stretched over the action. Because nothing says “fresh” like a mob frantic about a child’s disappearance. (If you watch this scene without subtitles, and don’t speak German, it looks like you’re watching the most volatile product rollout in the world. There’s a guy who keeps pointing at the Wrigley banner and shouting. He probably just quit smoking. Good for him.)  

So what we learn about what some villains eat is that they eat what they’re told, which not only drains their mystique, but renders a philosophical inquiry about their culinary habits empty.  

At least we can mock icons of darkness as they become shills and spokesmen for fast food. I can imagine a snarky entertainment show quipping, “For a CEO of sorts, Darth Vader’s ‘golden parachute’ was pretty meager. Gorbachev selling Pizza Hut is the pinnacle of integrity compared to these Dark Side burgers.”

Television and movies create a sort of shotgun wedding between art and commerce. Product placement, both as intentional mechanism of advertising, and as incidental prop, can color a story’s mood or tell us about a character’s sympathies. But are villain's culinary predilections ever telling in an era of inescapable advertising?

While Vader is certainly a villain (he might be the villain of 20th century pop culture), his 11th hour redemption and complex, if poorly expanded-upon, backstory contains elements of the “anti-hero.” Vader being an ultra-popular villain is no accident—it’s due to his anti-hero nature. As soon as people realized that anti-heroes are like heroes, except interesting, that’s all we got on cable serial dramas. For instance:

Don Draper (Mad Men); Walter White (Breaking Bad); Tony Soprano (The Sopranos); Nucky Thompson (Boardwalk Empire); Ray Donovan (Ray Donovan); Frank Underwood (House of Cards); Everyone (Deadwood); Everyone (Rome); Omar Little, and also Everyone Else (The Wire).

The moral ambiguity in cable dramas is fascinating from a culinary perspective, because anti-heroes actually eat.  Since they are not strictly villains, and we spend lots of time with them, we get to see more of the minutiae of their lives, more humanizing and incidental choices they make. Their food selections are less iconic and more “real.” But since fiction isn’t real, and television isn’t real life, these are still choices that someone else is making. There is no “default setting.” Someone still has to decide that Jack Torrance wants Triscuits and not Oreos. (Is Jack Torrance not the anti-hero of The Shining? Huh… well, you’re entitled to your opinion.)

This new breed of anti-hero and likable villain is so far from the archetype of Snidely Whiplash, and all his mustache-twirling predecessors, that we find their eating choices simply natural consequences of their era and environment. Avon Barksdale is a great BBQ chef, Augustus Caesar eats stuffed quail. Such is the fictional culinary landscape as the stories we tell ourselves tend toward authenticity. Meanwhile, the cackling top-hatted villain of antiquity is left to survive via photosynthesis.

I suppose it's all right if we can’t pinpoint what Snidely Whiplash ate, since we have Daniel Plainview. Besides an almost psychotic enthusiasm for milkshakes, the oil man of There Will Be Blood (2007) favors (again) steak and whiskey. As a hyper-capitalist caricature, Plainview is a sort of apex predator, and this is reinforced by his choice of meal. I struggle to think of a better nexus between hyper-masculine predation and affluence than steak and whiskey.

And affluence is a big part of modern villainy. You don’t see a lot of paupers/homeless people with top hats and waxed mustaches. (I don’t mean to assume too much about your life, dear reader.) The classic villain archetype bears an uncanny resemblance to the classic robber baron/railroad magnate/ rich guy operating the levers of the machine in which you are simply a cog. Lex Luthor, King Joffrey, and Monty Burns all enjoy things delivered on silver platters. And since we’ve absorbed this socio-economic projection of villainy into our cultural mythology, the food choices of our classic villain template tend toward caviar and away from a nice fruit salad.

This is ironic when considering the origin of the word “villain” itself. If you were tilling the soil for your livelihood during the Dark Ages, you would be doing so on a farming compound, or villa, naturally. This would make you a “farmhand,” or vilain, in the Old French, from the Late Latin villanus. This meant that you were not a knight, not bound by the strictures of chivalry, and therefore likely to commit heinous, villainous acts. (My experience with moderns farmers implies that this is no longer much of a concern.)

So “villainy,” as an etymological construct, is intrinsically bound up with fresh, local, organic produce. While this doesn’t mean that you should wear a stab-vest in the produce section of Foods For Living, it’s worth noting how the concept of "villainy" was historically sanctioned by the affluent, until an emerging literate middle class decided to vilify them through fiction. These distinctions may have been obliterated by the explosion of fictional perspectives in every medium over the last hundred years, but the underlying class tensions are (obviously) going nowhere. (Many thanks to Aerosmith for reminding us.)

It makes me wonder: On what shall tomorrow’s villains dine? What will that say about their creators? 

A SCIENCE Info Table at Article's End

 

Stimulus                  Your Feelings      A Psychopath's Feelings

Getting Promoted          Excited, proud     Apathetic, detached

Making a successful 

joke                      Proud              Apathetic, detached

Having a child            Grateful, proud, 

                          joyous             Apathetic, detached

Doing something           Horrified,         Really pumped

violently psychotic       regretful,                  

                          disoriented

Eating some great food    Content,           Content, stimulated

                          stimulated on      on a basic visceral

                          a basic visceral   level                                          level               

                                                             

Pint/Counterpint: Beer, Beards, and Taxonomy with Lansing’s Most Interesting Brewer

by Greg Teachout

Leaving one’s house occasionally is good, I’m told, so I caught up with Midtown Beer Company’s in-house brew maestro, Brandon “Father Time”¹ Cook recently, and pinned him down on his ideas about beer.

Saying “I caught up with” my interview subject is a time-honored media cliché, but in the case of Cook, the phrase becomes literal: he is a driven, methodical person holding down three jobs. If you need to meet with Father Time, he pencils you in.

When I finally ensnare Cook at the MBC brewpub on S. Washington, he bursts out of the back room and gives me the best sort of handshake—one that fills my proffered hand with a beer. He skips “hello” and tells me to try it, so I do.

He tells me the beer—”Uncle Scrooged”— contains cinnamon, nutmeg, vanilla, cranberries, and ginger. I tell him I’m here to talk beer, not scones. I love unusual food, but this sounds overwrought, even repulsive. (This I think and do not say.)

The beer is wonderful. Really, really good. It tastes like a Belgian, but that’s just the clove coming through. Yes, he also added clove, since five wacky additions were just not enough. Apparently, Frankensteining a spice rack into a beer is genius, because this is the most unique and delicious draft I’ve had since exhausting Jolly Pumpkin of their on-site La Roja supply.

    

The plans for my moon base are almost complete.

Cook and I slide into his pet booth near the kitchen for the interview. If the ghost of the defunct Michigan Brewing Company still haunts these rooms, it does so in a Bruce Willis-in-the-The-Sixth-Sense fashion.² Everything is identical, down to the sweet potato fries, with the lone exception of Cook and his unusually ideological brewing process. A window into this process is splayed between us— his notebook contains boiling formulae and yeast figures for something Cook is calling the “Elvis.” This is a peanut butter and banana beer. I suddenly have the feeling of having finally found Colonel Kurtz.

What looks like a classic blue and white composition book filled with algebra scrawlings is actually Pandora’s box, ready to unleash its twisted majesty on the world. This is for our own good, he'd assure you. Cook will show me his vision of brewing, and why this is the way it must be, and I will be transformed.

Cook is an intense guy, perhaps a true alpha; he seems refreshingly devoid of any instinct to posture. He sports a notable beard; he’s opted for volume over length. He seems to be in great shape, though he refuses a Body Mass Index pinch, so I can’t be certain. His vaguely blacksmithish presentation is offset by glasses that radiate “science” above “style."
I’m a bad interviewer, so I come right out and say the first thing I’m thinking.

GT: What do you think about the crossover between beards and brewing/people who are generally involved in craftsmanship? With carpenters and blacksmiths, for instance, all throughout history, big beards, full beards abound. You have a nice full beard.

Cook: Thank you.

GT: Sure.

Cook: “Magnificent” is the word most commonly used to describe it.

GT: I don’t doubt it. I see a lot of brewers, people from Stone, Lagunitas, Dark Horse, and they all look like they could be in ZZ Top. So what is it? Does it reflect that, as a brewer, you’re owned by no one?

Cook: I’ve been able to try a lot of different looks, facial hair-wise. I’ve tried out a lot of different looks over the years.. I like variety—that’s what I’m about. If you notice the stuff I brew, I’ve brewed a wide variety in the short time I’ve been here. Something like 40 different styles have been on tap here with my name on it. As far as the beard: back in late spring, it was brought to my attention that I might look good with a full beard. I’ve done the goatee, the handlebar—for a very short period of time—

GT: Of course.

At this point, we’re interrupted by a young lady from the kitchen who wordlessly offers a cup of hot sauce for Cook. He dabs it, not undaintily, and says, “You could make it hotter.” Then he continues.

Cook: I’m also a sound guy, that’s also another subsection of people that really embraces facial hair.

GT: You’re a free agent with a lot of skills.

Cook: Yeah, I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that as a free agent, you’re a manager of your own time. And your time doesn’t always cater to the necessity of shaving your face. With a full beard, I can wake up and just leave, most of the time.

GT: You Lothario, you.

Opening with seemingly idiotic questions is a dangerous gambit. One runs the risk of seeming like, well, an idiot. But my favorite people always build a bridge of their own back to something substantial, and this bridge is often more telling than its destination.

Cook is wearing a baseball cap emblazoned with the logo of Brazilian thrash/tribal luminaries Sepultura. Wait—I know what you’re thinking. But fear not! It’s a capital “S,” replete with thorns, from the Roots era, not the anemic post-Max Cavalera embarrassment of today. So Cook is keeping it real.

GT: I’d hazard wearing this sort of “metal” hat is more common among brewers than most professions. I’ve noticed craft beer culture embraces [the musical genre of] “metal.” There’s always been a relationship between music and beer, obviously, but there’s an amazing amount of “traditional” metal and—I’ll say it—Dungeons and Dragons-style imagery, and Satanic and/or “evil” iconography utilized by the craft beer scene. At this point, it seems natural by repeated exposure. But it’s not necessarily intuitive on the level of combining peanut butter with chocolate to just put a demon or a gargoyle on your beer. You’re wearing a Sepultura hat as we speak. So...what’s up with that?

Cook: I consider beer to be art. Music is art. I don’t know how much it intersects with metal; I know the guys down at Dark Horse are really into metal, but the guys down at the Hideout are into some metal, but they’re also into folk music…

GT: But do those other genres make it into their artwork? Because the guys who love metal really seem to weave it into their labels, their names, and their brands.

Cook: At the Hideout, not at all. Dark horse, yes. The logo of a Double Crooked Tree? Menacing! It’s awesome; it’s what attracted me to that beer in the first place. Seeing that label...it’s just so dark. It just looks dark. And I knew nothing about the beer, the first time I had it. Then that was that. For me, I kind of have to get into metal a little bit, to talk about it.

GT: This is a safe place. Go ahead.

Cook: To me, metal is a genre of music that has more subgenres than any other.

(Note: this is true, with the possible exception of modern “electronic music.” Trying to measure the subgenre birth rate in either case suggests Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.)

Cook: And it is meticulously broken up into those categories. Fans of metal will, more often than not, will say “that’s Industrial, not Goth.” Or, “that’s Pop Metal, that’s Power Metal, while that’s Operatic Metal—not necessarily Power Metal, but almost a subgenre of that.”

GT: Hardcore, grindcore, digital hardcore…

Cook: Exactly. You got it. There are so many subgenres, and a lot of that same level of categorization happens in the beer world as well.

You don’t just have an IPA, you’ve got rye IPAs, you’ve got Belgian IPAs, you’ve got black IPAs, you’ve got sour IPAs now, you’ve got India Pale Lagers. Even though it is technically different than an ale, India Pale Lager happened because of how big IPAs are. You’ve got all these different styles, and they’re so different. The common, or average beer drinker, or music listener, would say, “Oh, that’s just metal. Oh, that’s beer, I don’t like beer. Oh, I don’t like metal.” And I say, “Well, I’m pretty sure you just haven’t found the right metal.” And I’ll tell people, “I’m pretty sure you just haven’t found the right beer.” They’ll say, “No I’ve had a lot of them,” and I’ll say, “No, you probably haven’t, whether you actually realize it or not.”

At this point, the kitchen girl arrives again. Cook dabs and tastes. He stares at the sauce again. The girl says she feels like it can’t get it any hotter. Cook is skeptical.

“It’s missing the slow burn it had before.”

“I know,” she says pointedly.

“Do you have peppers in there?”

“No…”

They settle on adding some crushed red pepper, and Cook continues.

Cook: People who often make those claims, they often just haven’t found the right one yet. People who say they don’t like dark beer—that’s a broad generalization. To say you don’t like dark beer, define dark beer to me. Are you saying dark in color? The Huma Lupa Licious I’m about to drink is a really light-colored IPA, but it’s super bitter. (Editor’s note: At 140 IBU, Short’s IPA is up there, even for IPAs.) Are you associating “bitterness” with “darkness?” Because I’ve had a lot of cream stouts that are dark, but they’re sweet, by nature. So it’s a matter of people just being misinformed. Uneducated, uninitiated.

"Father Time" speaks like a cross between a prophet and a car salesman. He’s simply sure that after you’ve heard the Good News, he can find the right model for you.

GT: I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but it sounds like you feel like an emissary, or an ambassador, by bringing people who thought they didn’t like beer something they actually find palatable?

Cook: Yeah, yeah, a little bit. I’ve been asked repeatedly here to brew a straightforward IPA. I’ve danced around it. A lot! I have done it; it was a very small batch, and it was everything that they wanted.

As he explains this, Cook begins speaking slowly and with an edge, the way you would to a child who just stuck his toy train in your supper. The memory itself seems to try his patience. This is when it truly clicks for me that Cook is no simple mercenary. He has an artist’s soul, of the sort that chafes at being wrangled.

Cook: At that point, I said, OK, I’m going to move forward with this other IPA, because it’s more fun for me to brew. And I’m not saying that it’s necessarily unique, or that nobody had ever brewed this before, because, much like music, somebody has probably tried, or done something very close.

GT: But the innovation sounds important to you. You’re pushing at the fringe as much as you can.

Cook: Yeah, kind of a happy medium between pushing it to the fringe and being socially palatable. I don’t just want to be something people expect and know. If I can be a little outside of that box, while still being able to market it, then my job’s accomplished.

GT: I think that taste, next to smell, is our most animal sense. A person’s reaction to food and drink is often visceral, or involuntary. Taste culture ultimately doesn’t get as much respect, even if it gets as much press, as the visual arts, or music. But it seems like true gourmands and craft brewing culture provide a nice counterpoint to that. It sounds to me like you’re interested in forcing people into acquired tastes for their own good, ultimately.

Cook: Yeah.

GT: Fascist.

Cook: (Laughs.) I’ve got a variety of different wheat beers. I started brewing here, they said, “We want something light, something dark, something different. Well, they want something light primarily for the people who don’t know any better. Or the people who are cautious about getting into something dark. Because they’re afraid of it.

GT: The three-foot end of the pool.

Cook: Exactly. I already  knew it was going to be a wheat beer, most likely, but instead of going with your typical “American Wheat,” in the style of...well, Blue Moon is technically a Belgian-style ale, but… basically, what Oberon has become. Not to badmouth Oberon, but...something like Leinenkugel Sunset Wheat. It’s sweeter, and associated more with its garnish than with it being a beer in the first place. The orange, the citrus peel, things like that. I wanted to avoid conforming to that very rigid box and do something different with it, so the first thing I did was brew a German Hefeweizen, where it’s all about the wheat, and the ester from the yeast, you know, something that’s really going to breathe, but that’s still exceptionally drinkable.

G: What was that called?

Cook: That was the Weisen of Eden. When it came to finally do an American Wheat, I brewed something straightforward, and accentuated the spice, the coriander… not terribly inventive. But I took part of that batch, and went a different way with it. People always associate lemon, orange, with those beers, but I went lime. I made a lime wheat with coriander, and it was delicious. It came out back in October. The Cal Cadaver. I coordinated the release with the week of Halloween, alongside our pumpkin ale. The pumpkin ale was for Halloween, but the Cal Cadaver was for Day of the Dead.

Cook puts all his beer on Untappd, the beer social network. He says most have gone over well, notwithstanding the occasional lambasting by a Big Beer loyalist who—mystifyingly—utilizes Untappd.
  
GT: Do you have any personal favorites that have been universally panned? Something where nobody else is along for the ride, but you know in your heart it's delicious?

Cook: Nothing I’ve put out here has been universally panned. I’ve got a pretty solid batting average. I’m not going to say they've all been home runs. At all. But they start off pretty drinkable, and my process has gotten refined, so the beer has stepped up in quality a lot. The only one that got a straight up poor rating was actually the Scottish Ale that came out.

G: Interesting.

Cook: I thought it was great. Most people here thought it was great. But sometimes the people online they can be brutal.

GT: That’s B-R-E-W-tal?

Cook: (Laughs.) Yeah.

GT: Has anyone done that already?

Cook: I don’t think so.

GT: You can have that.

Cook: Thanks. I’ll name a beer after you.

GT: Thanks. Same to you.

Cook: What?

Catch up with Brandon “Father Time” Cook at:

Midtown Beer Company

402 S. Washington Square

Lansing, MI 48933

(517) 977-1349

<sup>1. "Father Time" is evidently a poker nickname. His ceaseless dedication to watching the game clock and announcing imminent increases in blinds earned him the handle and probably lots of friends.

2. I'm not really sure what this means either. Like a ghost that is present without being obnoxiously poltergeisty, I guess.</sup>