Matthew Zimmerman

From: San Paolo, Brazil
Type: "Beer Style Pilsen"
Price: $2
Alc. Content: 5%

As I began my tour of beers from around the world, I was in a good mood. I went to Starbucks that evening with a friend and wrote almost a page of a paper I've been working on. If a page doesn't seem like a lot to you, my guess is you haven't been in grad school, 'cause I walked out of there feeling like I was Captain Productivity.

I got back home about 10 PM, and pulled out the first bottle from my shopping spree at Wine Warehouse, a Brazilian beer called Skol. This one seemed a little more accessible to a beer neophyte such as myself; it was relatively cheap, it had a screw top (there's even a little logo of a bottle opener with a line through it on the back), and didn't have insanely precise directions about how it should be served (as do many of the others). The label said it's a "Beer Style Pilsen", which I can't find described anywhere, but after a little bit of poking around on Wikipedia I decided that "Beer Style Pilsen" is poorly-translated Portuguese for Pilsener.

Skol is a very light beer, like a good Pilsener should be. (Apparently, at least, according to Wikipedia.) It didn't seem very "hoppy" to me, but I say that admitting that I don't really know what hops taste like. I once smelled a vat of hops in the Coors brewery when I was 15 and I remember thinking that was the most horrible stench I ever encountered. So now I automatically associate hops with horrible taste, with little to no evidence to back up my claim. I'd probably deny the presence of hops in a good-tasting beer just on principle, which was probably what I was doing here. In fact, the label said that this was brewed with "rice choicest hops and best barley malt". Hey, I don't know what those are but they sound pretty good.

Skol is also unfiltered, which freaked me out a little as I poured it into the glass. But the cloudy appearance and the little bits floating around in the liquid didn't affect the taste at all. This was a light, slightly sweet beer that tasted pretty good, if a little bland.

Things are getting pretty hectic at work, so I'm going to have to postpone my 'crystallopgraphy for dummies' project for now. I'll come back to it soon. For now, here's that beer-related project I was talking about.

For my birthday, my friends Brantley and Sarah gave me a gift certificate to Wine Warehouse here in town. And at first I was conflicted. I do like wine, but I spend a lot of time alone and don't live with big drinkers, so I don't exactly go through the wine very fast. It even gets worse when the wines are especially expensive or of high quality, because I tend to save them for "special occasions", which usually means "years from now". I have a bottle of Chianti I brought back from Florence which will probably never be opened.

Perhaps noticing my hesitation over the gift of another bottle of wine I'd never open, Brantley made a point of telling me that they also had beer, which suddenly made their gift all the better. I do like beer, and unlike wine, I drink it regularly[1], because the smart people who make beer had the brilliant idea to put the stuff into single-serve containers.

The trouble is, despite the fact that I've claimed to be a beer snob, I am in reality a beer neophyte. Yes, while I do avoid the Buds, Miller Lites, and Pabst Blue Ribbons of the world, I find myself buying six-packs of the same few brands I've liked (Sam Adams, Corona, and Yuengling) over and over again. Furthermore, I don't actually know anything about beer. I can't tell a lager from a hole in the ground. And what the heck are "hops", anyway?

Well, no more! It's time for me to go out and explore the wider world. I went to Wine Warehouse and selected 11 bottles of beer and ale of all kinds from all over the world, and now I plan to drink each one and then write about them. So stay tuned, and watch the self-education of a beer connesieur in the making.

[1] At this point, I should note that there may be people out there, possibly related to me, who don't know that I drink. So, um, I drink. Not a lot, mind you! But yes, John Wesley probably wouldn't be happy with me. Sorry.

I am a big fan of Penelope Trunk, a business writer of all things, who writes a column called the "Brazen Careerist". Yes, I know that I don't work in business. (Yet.) But I think she always has interesting things to say about how to get ahead in one's career. And I do have one of those. Okay, maybe I don't have one of those, but I want one.

Anyway, she wrote a column a few weeks ago about how regular, focused blogging is good for your career. Some of her arguments are frankly a stretch, but she makes a good point overall. Alas, my own blog is neither regular, nor really focused on what I (plan to) do for a living, so I fail on both counts.

In fact, I'm not sure I've really written about what I do in my blog at all. I have a little biographical blurb on my main page, but that's it. Long story short, I'm a graduate student in Biophysics, trying to finish up my Ph.D. on a topic relating to macromolecular crystallography. I have been in grad school for a long time. If you've ever read the comic Piled Higher and Deeper, I am essentially Mike Slackenerny, save that I am more suspicious of free food. Read some of the comics he's in; that will give you a healthy dose of what my life is like.

I do honestly enjoy what I do. The work is interesting, and I spend the vast majority of my time doing it. It's just that I often fail the "dinner party" test. I can explain what I do to laypeople, but not always quickly enough before they get bored and wander off in search of more hors d'oeuvres. Since I suspect that the vast majority of you out there in readerland aren't biophysicists, I hesitate to go into the topic.

But I do want to find my focus, and so I'm going to try to talk a little more at a layperson level in this space about the kind of research that I do. Don't worry; the rants aren't going away, and I have a beer-related project I'd also like to talk about in upcoming posts. But I hope you'll bear with me as I conduct a little experiment.