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What’s up, beer geek! This is The Beer Scholar 6-Pack weekly newsletter, a short clean email featuring 6 bulleted links with brief descriptions for each.

Sup, beer geek! This week I began recording the very large Keeping & Serving section for my upcoming Beer Scholar Online Course for the CC Exam. It's the one section for which the USA, Canada, International, and UK syllabi have major differences, which makes it even more work. We're talking ~70 video lessons total! The full course is going to be VERY comprehensive! 

As always, here are 6 dope links for your Friday 6 Pack. Enjoy.

TBS 6-Pack

 IS FAT THE 6TH TASTE?

Should Fat Become the Sixth Taste? by Kelsey Tenney for Science Meets Food. We all know the 5 basic tastes. Here, Kelsey goes through the scientific criteria for what exactly constitutes a “taste” and shows how fat probably makes the cut but would also expand what we think of as taste. She also offers this interesting tidbit — scientists have drawn a “correlation between individuals with high BMIs and lower sensitivity to the taste of fat.” Meaning people who are less sensitive to fat may therefore tend to over consume it. 

ADULT PICKY EATERS

When the Picky Eater Is a Grown-Up by Emily Dwass for the NYT. Kids are often picky, but why do some people get over it while others do not? One author who has worked to get over her picky eating, in part by learning to cook, notes that, “There’s a lot of shame involved. There’s not a lot of empathy for picky eaters.” I’m a picky eater when it comes to certain things, so the science is interesting to me (also, f**k bananas, why do people like those things?). I am well accustomed to the annoying intrusiveness of the trite, “c’mon and try it, it’s delicious,” comments. I wish I was one of those “I’ll eat anything” people like Anthony Bourdain (a still beating cobra heart, anyone?), but sorry, not sorry, it’s not about you [shrug]. 

ARE ENGLISH CASK ALE STYLES THE NEXT BIG THING?

Firkin FriYaY by Doug Veliky for Beer Crunchers. When I was planning Old Devil Moon, my bar in San Francisco, I knew I'd have Real Ale on cask at all times. As I expected, it quickly found a fan base at ODM, some regulars come just for the cask. The moment may be here — people want something different, whether a Czech lager from a LUKR faucet or an English Bitter pulled through a sparkler. As someone who has been managing and selling cask ale for years, I second the tips in the linked piece. Breweries — please offer pin size casks & do Real Ale rather than simply filling a cask from a bright tank. Bars — don’t mismanage the cask, sell bad beer, and turn people off to Real Ale, educate your staff. Shout out to the wildly underrated Redwood City-based Freewheel Brewing, who have made 99.9% of the English cask ales we’ve poured on ask at ODM. Support your local English ale brewer!  

WHY USE HORIZONTAL LAGERING TANKS?  

The Lager: so laid back it’s horizontal. Basically, the answer is that when you’re going to lager a lager you want: 1) less hydrostatic pressure on the yeast, which can cause them to die and autolyze; 2) more surface area for contact between the yeast and the beer so the yeast do a better job of cleaning up compounds like diacetyl and acetaldehyde during secondary fermentation; and 3) it takes a lot less time for the yeast and other compounds to precipitate to the bottom of a shallow horizontal tank, thus clarifying the beer much more quickly. 

DALL-E MINI WILL DRAW YOU ANYTHING

It’s a matter of time before AI takes many of our jobs. DALL-E is an AI that will draw literally anything you ask it to, like “a purple mouse exploring the moon in the style of a 1990s cartoon.” This publicly available Mini version of Open AI’s DALL-E isn’t quite ready to replace human graphic designers, but give it a few years. The full on DALL-E 2 on a super computer is getting pretty close. DALL-E Mini is fun to play with but it messes up people’s faces on purpose so it can’t be used to make deep fakes (yet). Definitely worth a minute to try out. 

UNDERWORLD

Remember that epic track from the movie Trainspotting? I’ve been listening to electronic goodness from Underworld again lately. My go to classic albums are A Hundred Days Off and Everything Everything (Live). Underworld is still cranking out loads of material and doing music for Danny Boyle movies. Anyway, if you give a sh1t about electronic music and are not familiar with Underworld, you should give them a listen. They’re a huge influence on the genre.

Have a lovely weekend, y'all!

Chris