The Anti-"Beer Review," Westbrook Gose: The Session #84

Photo by the author

"You're going to run lactobacillius through your brewery's canning line‽"*

"Ah, so you can make an obscure, German-style sour wheat ale? Of course that makes sense."

You might know this bacteria from yogurt, where it causes a sourness and tang that may cause your jawbone to tingle, not unlike some tannins in red wine. Briefly, here's what happens when lactobacillius gets introduced to beer: taste those aspects yogurt in your mind, and apply it to beer. Getting thirsty? Dooug, kumis, and kefir are drinks that use lactobacterial fermentation as well.

Lactobacillius belongs to a group of bacteria that is "regarded as most harmful for brewing industry and are the cause of most of bacterial spoilage incidents." (Sakamoto, 4). Indeed, one kind of lactobacillius, brevi, was, as of 2002, responsible for more than half of all bacterial beer spoilages. (5)

Most hazardous for the brewing industry are those belonging to the genera Lactobacillus and Pediococcus. In the period 1980-1990, 58-88% of the microbial beer-spoilage incidents in Germany were caused by lactobacilli and pediococci (Back et al., 1988; Back, 1994). Also in Czech all beer-spoilage bacteria detected in the breweries belonged to lactic acid bacteria (Hollerová and Kubizniaková, 2001). The situation in other countries seems to be similar although for commercial reasons little statistical information has been supplied. These lactic acid bacteria spoil beer by producing haze or rope and cause unpleasant flavor changes such as sourness and atypical odor. (Sakamoto, 4) 

Now picture a brewer introducing this bacteria on purpose, and then running it through a canning line, risking infection in other beers.

But, you say, aren't hops somewhat antiseptic and antibacterial? Don't they act as, in part, a mechanism against spoilage? You'd be right, except that lactobacillius brevi is particularly resistant to hops, and the style of beer being made at Westbrook, Gose (pronounced go-suh), isn't heavily hopped, registering just five International Bitterness Units (IBU).**

Westbrook goes (puns!) through all this trouble to make a beer that didn't exist for two periods of the last century. Between the end of World War II and 1949, nobody in the town of Goslar, from which the beer gets its name, or Leipzig, where the beer became locally popular, brewed Gose. It vanished again in 1966, only to come back in the mid-1980s, according to Wikipedia's admittedly problematic page. But thanks to a new generation of German brewers and Americans looking for the next "thing" in craft beer, Gose is back. How does the beer taste? Look at the description on the can.

What did you just read? Oliver J. Gray thought it would be a good idea for people to review a beer without actually reviewing the beer.

So for my turn hosting The Session, I ask all of you to review a beer. Any beer. Of your choosing even! There’s a catch though, just one eentsy, tiny rule that you have to adhere to: you cannot review the beer.
I know it sounds like the yeast finally got to my brain, but hear me out: I mean that you can’t write about SRM color, or mouthfeel, or head retention. Absolutely no discussion of malt backbones or hop profiles allowed. Lacing and aroma descriptions are right out. Don’t even think about rating the beer out of ten possible points.

Blame him. This has been

To prevent infection and contamination, brewers run boiling water through their lines, killing bacteria.

Sakamoto, K. (2002) Beer spoilage bacteria and hop resistance in Lactobacillius brevis. University of Groningen dissertation.

* Yes, of course that's an interrobang.
** The relationship between hops and bitterness is more complex than this, but it is now not uncommon to see double or imperial India Pale Ales that exceed 100 IBU. Apologies for the bad science all the same.

Elsewhere on this site:

What America Has Done to Beer: The Session

On Local Beer and Regulation, Part I: The Session #61

From Here to Discovery

The following is a presentation given at the 6th Annual "Bridging the Spectrum" Symposium, hosted by the Catholic University of America's Library and Information Science program. More information on the Symposium here.

Abstract: A discovery service is a single and unified index of a library’s holdings across multiple media. As more academic libraries are implementing a discovery service as the primary online face of the library, library websites have evolved with them. Website changes, however, are relatively unexamined. This briefing reports on one library’s experience with a discovery service, EBSCO’s EDS, and the effects of the discovery service on the library website. It compares these changes to those made by other academic libraries. It answers the question of whether there exists a set of best practices for academic library websites upon implementing discovery services, and addresses what happens to online public access catalogs (OPACs), individual databases, and other items frequently found on academic library websites. It also discusses how to market and promote website changes to academic communities.

From Here to Eternity, by James Jones.

What is Discovery?

It is not two French robots that play disco.

Daftpunk Robots from http://daftrobots.tumblr.com/ 

Single searching across databases, with results ranked by relevancy

• The ability to sort said results
• Full text
• Features for end users

Via Hoeppner, A. (2012) The Ins and Outs of Evaluating Web-Scale Discovery Services. Infortoday.com, http://www.infotoday.com/cilmag/apr12/Hoeppner-Web-Scale-Discovery-Services.shtml Accessed 29 January 2014

From http://www.librarytechnology.org/discovery.pl 

Our library chose Ebsco's Discovery Service (EDS) in large part because we found it the "least bad." EDS' use of metadata to retrieve relevant results seems to be more robust than the other options we examined, Primo and Summon.

Via http://www.dotnetfox.com/Terms-and-Conditions.aspx

In addition, librarians judged the results returned by EDS superior to those returned by other discovery services, though this study is not without its methodological issues.

“On the quantitative benchmarks measured by this study, the EBSCO Discovery Service tool outperformed the other search systems in almost every category.”
- Asher, Duke, and Wilson (2013) Paths of Discovery: Comparing the Search effectiveness of EBSCO Discovery Service, Summon, Google Scholar, and Conventional Library Resources. College & Research Libraries. 74(5) 464-488. http://crl.acrl.org/content/74/5/464.full.pdf+html

This is our first semester using a discovery service, so we're eager to see what happens.

You've seen this gif elsewhere on the site, astute reader. Via Reaction Gifs

Though people have many goals using discovery services (some more realistic than others), including promoting local collections, replacing Google as the primary place people do research, and expanding the universe of available resources, among others, our main goal is to reduce friction for people who use our library website.

From Reddit. 

With that in mind, here is our lovely library website. Keep in mind thanks to unfortunate protocols in academic information technology, we at the library are somewhat "locked in" to this format. We use WordPress throughout the university.

Please note our mission statement front and center, because of course when people go to a library website, that's among the first things they want to see.

When I see a mission statement on the front page I’m like

Via Reaction Gifs.

We have some "stuff" on the left-hand side of the page that is rather important. A goal is to get this stuff front and center.

Let's take a closer look.

Note that we're trying to use plain, natural language. Regrettably, at the moment we're not able to do that with our discovery search box, but we are very open to suggestions here.

Here's our current search box, along with another friction point that applies to off-campus users.

Here's what will replace it, the discovery search box.

Again, we're trying to take the stuff from the left-hand side, and put it front and center.

Here's our old online public access catalog (OPAC).

See, I made a meta-funny. Right now our community searches our catalog, doesn't find something, and then clicks on a link to search the catalog of the consortium we're partial members of (like Facebook says, "it's complicated.").

And here's what it's going to look like.

Note where our consortium is circled on the right. If you do a keyword search in our catalog, it will trigger a keyword search in the consortium catalog, displayed on the same page. If you search by author, that consortium widget will do an author search as well, and so on. 

Our databases move from the left-hand side to the center.

As do our subject research guides, our in-house version of LibGuides.

We're trying to reduce friction here, get people where they want to go on our site, quicker.

Via Reddit and DatGif.

One of the things I'm most proud of about our move to discovery is the open access (OA) search feature.

That definition comes from the Budapest Initiative, by the way. I don't expect this feature to get much use, however, I do think its presence is important. I want it to jump-start conversations, to provoke thought around issues of access to information, academic publishing, and scholarly communication. In short, we want to create a discursive space for these issues.

Here's what the OA search output looks like.

Note not only the consortium widget, but also a Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) widget.

The OA search is the primary reason why we've taken so long in implementing discovery. We really wanted to push Ebsco, our vendor on this, and to their immense credit, they responded. I know that I'm sometimes guilty of painting the library-vendor relationship as adversarial, but that's not always, and even not often, the case. As far as I know our library is the only one out there to ask for this from a vendor, but there's no reason why your library can't do this, too. This is how collaboration is supposed to work.

Via Giphy. 

As presently constructed, our library sits between full collection discovery and full library discovery. In the former, libraries use discovery services to promote their collections. In the latter, the discovery search not only encompasses collections, but also locally hosted items that are on the library website, but are not part of the collection. Think room reservation forms, requests for materials, and the like.

We're going to market discovery services in several ways, chief among them, perpetual beta.

Post Perpetual Revolution by Patrick Camut, Photo by Alison Reken.
http://www.pcamut.com/revolution/. 

We'll also use library instruction one-shot sessions to talk about discovery, as well as table toppers in the dining hall, and I'll make a few appearances there as well, armed with a computer and a projector to promote the services.

We're going to dive right in and make mistakes. We'll tinker with it, and solicit feedback. We may tweak the relevancy rankings to excludes newspaper articles and reviews... or we may not.

A current debate among proponents of discovery is how best to express search results.

3 ways libraries try to help improve search results in discovery services.
Musings About Librarianship.

Villanova, above, and North Carolina State University, below, both use what's termed a "bento box" model of search results output.

3 ways libraries try to help improve search results in discovery services.
Musings About Librarianship. 

Note that the results are compartmentalized, broken down and presented using controlled vocabulary.

Via Giphy.

At present, we are not using bento. This is because our community is familiar with Ebsco's blended interface, in which the results are presented as a list, ranked by relevancy based on the available metadata. Moreover, bento, to me, looks a lot like Yahoo!'s hierarchical website organization structure, whereas the native Ebsco interface looks more like Google's. Rhetorical question: which of those won out? (Pause.) That's what I thought.

Discovery is not without its critics, and they are justified. They are aimed more at undergraduates than at faculty, graduate students, and librarians, so these three later groups may not like it as much, as they are more advanced searchers who will use individual databases to find what they want. With that in mind, we may not want to "throttle" results by filtering out things like newspaper articles and reviews, as those are important parts of the research process for undergraduates.

The metadata that Ebsco uses in its databases is privileged in its discovery service, so Ebsco resources are promoted, sometimes at the expense of a better resource from another, rival database.

We've asked Ebsco to play nicer with other vendors here, in terms of metadata integration, as Primo and Summon have, and there are some encouraging signs.

One study found that a custom Ebsco search box, trawling only Ebsco databases, would be nearly as robust as EDS, again, because of how Ebsco's metadata brings their local results to the top.

Would an custom EBSCO search box do pretty much the same thing as EDS?
- Calvert, C. (2015) Maximizing academic library collections: measuring changes in use patterns owing to EBSCO Discovery Service. College & Research Libraries. Anticipated Publication Date: January 1, 2015. Manuscript#: crl13-557. Available from http://crl.acrl.org/content/early/2014/01/17/crl13-557.full.pdf 

In some sense, are we just spending money for the sake of spending money? It's a cynical question, but a valid one all the same. Often times we librarians don't get an increase in funding unless we ask for something shiny and new that will improve our communities, as opposed to increasing funding for existing initiatives. In this sense, it almost doesn't matter whether discovery works or not, because it represents a semi-permanent budget increase.

The Tim and Eric Show, via Reaction Gifs.

In sum:

Be empathetic

• Use the language of the user
• Reduce friction

Via Giphy.

Clear goals and outcomes

• work toward them, or
• backwards from them.

Via Giphy.

Is your goal to improve the user experience, to promote your holdings and databases, to expand the searchable universe...? Different goals require different strategies and tactics.

Mistakes are okay

• If you fix them quickly
• We are in an academic library, not dealing with nuclear launch codes. The far majority of mistakes one might make can be easily corrected and fixed.

Via Giphy.

And that, my friends, is the end of the presentation. Thank you.

Two very useful sites on discovery services:
Aaron Tay, Musings About Librarianship and Unified Resource Discovery Comparison.

Related, on this site:
On Failure: "Elizabethtown: Embedded Librarianship as Overreach."
A Rant on Library-Vendor Relations
Copyright for Educators
A Modest Defense of QR Codes in the Library
UPDATE, July 8th post: More Thoughts on Discovery, Plus a Poster 

Yes, Libraries Are Oppressive. So What Now?

 Two questions:

1. Are libraries designed to create and perpetuate inequity?
2. Does the answer to the above question matter?

Two answers:

1. Kind of.
2. No, because regardless of intentions, libraries are oppressive.

I wish I knew the source for this, but I don't, so... fair use. 

"the library, as an institution, isn't that oppressive or designed to create and perpetuate inequity."

There's an out of context quote for you, taken to provoke maximum outrage, since

"the founding of a large public library could be motivated by multiple reasons, some of them perhaps contradictory."

The source for these quotes is Wayne Bivens-Tatum's "Libraries, Neoliberalism, and Oppression." In his book, Libraries and the Enlightenment (again, via Library Juice Press), he writes.

Harris and DuMont are quite critical of the admittedly stuffy movement in nineteenth century libraries to Americanize immigrants through education, arguing that Ticknor and others merely wanted to suppress dissent and the rising ideologies of socialism and communism. Even if Ticknor and other conservatives were motivated by a fear of, say, communist demagogues convincing the undemocratic masses to revolt, or whatever the fear was, this does not undercut the fact that they did indeed seek to educate people and to provide them with the means to educate themselves throughout their lives. That the founders of the Boston Public Library were not trying to educate revolutionaries does not take away from their accomplishment. We could just as easily interpret their actions as an early stage of progressivism. (p. 114)

Yet it seems there is a tension in his writings because of how he reconciles, or does not, the contradictory origins of public libraries.

The library is an institution, which has policies to define who is and is not a member, channels to resolve disputes, as well as feedback mechanisms. These structures intentionally legitimate some behaviors, and just as purposefully discriminate against others.

Many libraries deliberately practice social exclusion. Exclusion may also be an unintentional consequence, along with the illusion of community expertise where there is none.* The library is not unique or alone in this. Every institution has ways to include and exclude. Whether these actions and practices are intentional or unintentional is in many ways besides the point. Libraries, and librarianship, are implicated and often strengthen them. As I was saying: "libraries, and librarianship, are both radical and conservative; simultaneously perpetuating and undermining neoliberalism."

Indeed, Bivens-Tatum has written about this topic as well.

The best I can hope for is that we think globally and act locally, which requires understanding the larger context behind the specific challenges to the public good while doing what we can to fight against those challenges. 

R. David Lankes, David Shumaker, and others, are attempting to separate librarianship from libraries.

One of the principles of embedded librarianship is that librarians are important whether they work in libraries or not. In exploring the landscape of embedded librarianship, I've encountered embedded librarians who are part of library organizations (but spend a lot of time away from a library space), and others who are not part of a library organization at all. 

My focus on this principle makes me hyper-sensitive to rhetoric that over-emphasizes the institutions and minimizes, de-values, and depersonalizes the professionals. I think this happens a lot, subtly, in our professional literature. (Source)

Given this formulation, while libraries are implicated in neoliberalism, maybe librarianship doesn't have to be. Thoughts?

* Both links in this paragraph via Cecily Walker, who worked on alerted me to the project.

Related, elsewhere on this site:
Libraries and Postmodernity: A Review of Radical Cataloging
Toward of Unifying Field Theory of Librarianship
Exit, Voice, and Loyalty in Academic Librarianship
The Adjunctification of Academic Librarianship
More Thoughts on New Librarianship
Data and the Surveillance State
Libraries as Structures, Libraries as Agents, Late Capitalism Edition

The ALA Midwinter 2014 Post #alamw14

Thanks to an extensive campaign of unrelenting peer pressure, I will be at the American Library Association's Mid-Winter meeting in Philadelphia on Saturday, January 25th. I'm taking the bus up from DC early in the morning and taking whatever the equivalent of a red-eye bus ride is back late that night. I'd love to see you, dear readers, and if you'd like to see me, here's where I'll be.



10:30 to 11:30am - I hope I'm not late to this, but I'll be at the Copyright Discussion Interest Group in room 303 AB. I'd like to get some tips and strategies on how to best promote awareness of copyright, fair use, and maybe open access issues on my campus.

Lunch thereafter, may-haps at Reading Terminal Market?

1:00 to 2:30pm - GameRT Forum in room 103 A so I can finally meet (IRL) and provide moral support to this guy.

Mid-Afternoon - Mainlining coffee, socializing, and wandering around the Expo Hall, picking up swag and office supplies.

4:30-5:30pm - Challenges of Gender Issues in Technology Librarianship in 201 C. This is the main reason why I'll be attending Mid-Winter. More on why I'll be at this panel here. And maybe drinks with some of the panelists afterwards.

There's also a tweet up on Saturday night that I might make an appearance at, but I also heard something about music, and loud music is not conducive to conversations.

Get off my lawn! Clint Eastwood in Grand Torino, via Giphy.

Philadelphia is a great city to eat and drink in, and Drexel's Tom Ipri has many suggestions here.

I hope to see you there. If you'd like to meet up, let me know below, or via twitter.

Libraries as Structures, Libraries as Agents, Late Capitalism Edition

But what *is* their place within a larger socio-political and economic structure designed for inequality and oppression?
— nina de jesus (@satifice) December 27, 2013

The "their" in question above is libraries, which are a creation of the above socio-political economic system, often termed neoliberalism, "an ideology that rests on the assumption that individualized, arms-length market exchange can serve as a metaphor for all forms of human interaction," (source). How complicit are libraries in this system? Plenty, argues Nina De Jesus, convincingly. To wit:

when libraries were shifting from private institutions to institutions designed for the ‘public good,’ the notion of who, exactly, was considered part of the ‘public’ was radically different than today. Indeed, when you look into the rhetoric of why public libraries became a thing, it was a middle-to-upper class initiative enrich and ‘better’ the working class, so that they’d have something to do with their free time other than realize just how crappy this new economic system was for them. (Source)

The offset excerpt above illustrates a Gramscian take on how this is the case; libraries co-opt lower classes, staving off class consciousness. In Gramscian thought a socio-political economic system exerts influence unconsciously. The fact that it goes unnoticed, assumed, and taken for granted by most is proof of its effectiveness. The first step to challenging a hegemonic superstructure such as this is realizing that it exists.

LIS = a fine balancing act. Support the poor w/o making the erstwhile middle class feel the library's no longer all about them+their tastes.
— Myron G (@Bibliocracy) December 29, 2013

Further, De Jesus writes that, "And I've seen very few people take a critical and sincere approach to analysing how the library, as institution, is actually oppressive and designed to create and perpetuate inequity."

That is, the public library as we know it was designed in no small part to prevent revolution and class revolt. Can we measure the "success" of the library by the lack of open class warfare? Or, do libraries exist to give people a lottery ticket, a way out; and is that the best we can hope for given that we are all products of the socio-political and economic system, and even strengthen it by our participation?

Those of us w/ t/t jobs benefit from #adjunct exploitation, just like those of us w/ Macbooks benefit from sweatshops. We're implicated.
— Roger Whitson (@rogerwhitson) January 1, 2014

However, the critiques of libraries as neoliberalist institutions implicate everything, thus said critiques run the the risk of losing any explanatory power and effectiveness. They cannot be directionless, as Fredrik deBoer points out. Are libraries any more, or less, implicated that other structures, agents, and organizations, and if so, why? And and where do we librarians, archivists, and other information professionals go from here? The library, as always, is a good place to start. Chris Bourg, an Associate University Librarian at Stanford, has compiled a list of resources, with more on the way. Her twitter timeline is also a good place to start.

Love this press. 

Really, love this press. 

Per Barbara Fister, libraries, and librarianship, are both radical and conservative; simultaneously perpetuating and undermining neoliberalism. We librarians should be conscious of this, and try to do more of the latter and less of the former when and where possible.

Mostly baffled that a profession that constructs knowledge + has so little critical to say about the construction of knowledge. - Emily Drabinski, on twitter (https://twitter.com/edrabinski/status/422090892733054976 and https://twitter.com/edrabinski/status/422090947280003072)

Some ways that libraries can combat neoliberalism, and offer an alternative, come to mind.

First, library and information science programs can offer courses that make future LIS professionals aware of neoliberal issues they'll encounter in the workplace. As the state has abdicated and markets have failed to provide shelter, child care, and job application centers, these tasks, and others, have fallen to public libraries. LIS curricula should spend some time discussing these challenges for LIS staff. Courses on academic librarianship should discuss the political economies of higher education and publishing, and how they influences libraries and library management.

Second, the relevant bodies, comprised of LIS professionals, can rework assessment regimes, changing the conversation from return on investment and measurements of efficiency to those of values. Both Bourg and Fister are excellent resources here.

Third, when librarians are in the classroom, they can foster awareness of these issues. The same is true of the library website. More about that here.

And yet neoliberalism cannot be a deus ex machina or scapegoat for libraries, museums, and archives. Neoliberalism is not a "thing," it is not static. It is a process, an evolving and moving target that is a product of a particular place and time. Locating neoliberalism in the Enlightenment throws a very important baby out with the bathwater, though no doubt the seeds of the former are found in the latter.

Beyond the links above, the following are good reads on the effects of neoliberalism and neoliberalist practices on and in education:

On Precarity  

Vulnerability, Contingency, Advocacy 

The Neoliberal Library: Resistance is Not Futile - Bourg's talk at Duke University. (Update, 1/16/14) 

Teachers in Lee, MA Return Merit Pay - This is what resistance looks like in practice. 

Related, elsewhere on this site:
Libraries and Postmodernity: A Review of Radical Cataloging
Toward of Unifying Field Theory of Librarianship
Exit, Voice, and Loyalty in Academic Librarianship
The Adjunctification of Academic Librarianship
More Thoughts on New Librarianship
Data and the Surveillance State

Beer and Music, Music and Beer, 2014 edition

One of the better songs of the year, or any year

The backstory: Every year this guy and I trade top ten, or fifteen, or whatever lists and then make fun of each other. I usually spend the mornings with National Public Radio (and I donate to this station) on in the background, then switch over the music in the afternoon.

Here's a taste of what I spent last year listening to:

Sigur Ros - Kveikur: This band spent the last two albums in the wilderness, mistaking pretty sounds for cohesive, coherent records. Perhaps shedding a band member provoked an identity crisis. Like a grade school student trying on new personas, wondering where they want to try to fit in, Sigur Ros cuts an album that shows they spent the ‘90s listening to the pop-industrial stylings of Nine Inch Nails and Smashing Pumpkins. The band drops its most aggressive record to date, polished to a slick studio sheen as if Mutt Lange was behind the boards. Heavy percussion, prog-metal tendencies, and actual verse-chorus-verse song structure, albeit at 6/8 time, make this perhaps the most accessible Sigur Ros record as well as the most unexpected. This is as tight, compact, and mainstream as this band will get, and the result is their only album you could credibly play on a road trip.

Savages - Silence Yourself: Politicized without being political, Savages are a thrash band that happens to play post-punk in the vein of Siouxsie and the Banshees and Pornography-era Cure. Jagged, angular guitar riffs, a tight rhythm section, and a snarling beast of a lead singer add up to one of the better debut records in recent memory. 

Deafheaven - Sunbathers: It’s black metal. It’s post-hardcore. It’s shoegaze. It’s post-rock. It’s screamo. It’s walls of guitar noise, piercing Neil Young-style solos, blast-beat drumming and then…. silence. It’s gravity-defying and earthbound. One of the best explorations of musical space from the new breed of smarty-pants metal groups out there. But mostly it’s uplifting.

Kanye West - Yeezus: Let’s get this out of the way right now: Kanye is the GOAT. There’s no one better, past or present. He’s not on the next level, he is the next level. There’s enough going on here to write a dissertation on, and I suspect that people will try.
Yeezus is an album full of self-loathing that reminds me of the controversy around Guns ‘n Roses’ “One in a Million;” Kanye’s misogyny says so much more about him than it does about anything else. “Dude misses his mom and lashes out” is the pop-psychology take I subscribe to. “The plan was to drink until the pain’s over, but what’s worse, the pain or the hangover?” he asked on his last album. We still don’t have an answer.
He writes some of the most fascinating lyrics around: “She Instagram herself like ‘bad bitch alert / the Instagrammers watch like ‘mad bitch alert’” sums up so much of 2013 in terms of race, class, celebrity, and gender, and the cultural tourism that stems from those cleavages. But there’s more. The trappiest, trunk-rattlingest, DJ Khaled- est, “We tha Best-est” song on the album, the one you’d like to bump the loudest? It features a Nina Simone sample about lynching.
Elsewhere, dancehall menacingly interrupts songs, beats drop out, and the most soulful song on the record, “Bound 2,” was the subject of an embarrassing video/home movie leak. Absolutely fascinating, and the album spawned some of the best music writing of the year. To wit:
http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/9395729/kanye-west-yeezus-fatherhood
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/06/how-kanye-wests-i-yeezus-i-is-like-i-sgt-pepper-i-or-i-kid-a-i-or-i-riot-goin-on-i/277087/
http://thetalkhouse.com/reviews/view/lou-reed
http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2013/06/18/yeezus_samples_stream_a_mixtape_of_samples_from_kanye_west_s_new_album.html 

Vampire Weekend - Modern Vampires of the City: The greatest trick VW ever played was their first, applying African compositions to preppies and being in on the joke while too many critics weren’t. Now they’ve gone and made their most challenging album, both musically and lyrically. A mediation on growing old that shouts out my late night falafel joint and borrows from Souls of Mischief’s “Step to My Girl.”

My Bloody Valentine - m b v: An album that has no right to exist that sits comfortably alongside the rest of their cannon, twenty years after the fact. “Touched” and “To Here Knows When” from “Loveless” are the precedents for this album, which is less “pop” than their others.

Posted in full right here.

Photo by the author. 

A word about beer: I strive to list only beers that are new for 2013, or first reached the Washington, DC area in 2013. Here goes...

Franklins Munton Chuck Porter - A single malt, single hopped porter, flawlessly executed. Beer terroir.

Otter Creek and Lawson's Finest Liquids Double Dose - The latter makes a cult double India Pale Ale called Double Sunshine and this is as close as we'll get to that. It was still a magnificent beer three months after bottling. Mangoes, nectarines, corn syrup, and grass. Is there malt in here? Does it matter? White pepper spiced through the middle. A soft water finish with a bit of mouth-coating stickiness and tons of grapefruit and lemon pith. Dangerously drinkable for such an unbalanced beer and immediately in the higher tiers of DIPAs.

Andechser Doppelbock Dunkel - The first time in the US for this beer, the platonic ideal of what a dopplebock should be. Dark breads, like rye & whole wheat, a good amount of carbonation, but the bubbles are delicate. Massive sugars, caramel, toffee, & molasses. Plum & figgy pudding. A hint of noble hops give it some straw, hay, & grass. Finishes sweet, & the bread & sugar linger, but there's enough dryness from the carbonation to keep you going back for more.

New Belgium Hop Kitchen French Aramis IPA - Green apple, toasted walnuts, apricots, clementines, grass, crackers.

Allagash FV-13 - American Wild Ale - Like balsamic vinegar run through strawberries and cherries, and then the liquid is oaked.

The Bruery's Bois (strong ale), Smoking Wood (smoked, barrel-aged porter), and Sour in the Rye (American Wild Ale).

Terrapin Side Project 19 Mosiac Rye - A single-hopped pale ale.

3 Stars Harvester of Sorrow (barrel-aged saison) and Zombie Date Night (imperial porter with raspberries and cocoa nibs)

Goose Island's Bourbon County Brand Stout (barrel-aged imperial stout) and Gillian (barrel-aged saison).

Westbrook Gose, because if they want to run lactobacillus through their canning lines, then I'm all for it.

Birrificio del Ducato Brett Peat Daydream - I have no idea what style this is. It's an ale refermented with a strain of brettanomyces yeast, then aged in Scotch whisky barrels.

Devils Backbone Striped Bass Pale Ale - A new classic.

Adroit Theory B/A/Y/S (Ghost 003 batch) Imperial Stout ages on chestnut staves.

An additional cheers to

• DC Brau's On the Wings of Armageddeon Imperial IPA, as now we have our first DC-made "whale" beer.
• Stillwater Classique, a sessionable hoppy farmhouse ale from an interesting brewery.
• Evil Twin Bikini Beer, a 2.7% ABV IPA that is essentially a "lite" beer. Too hoppy and bitter to properly session, but great to have one or two on a weeknight or afternoon.
• Heurich Lager, a collaboration between the Heurich Museum, homebrewers, and DC Brau. More on that here.

Bonus: Bluejacket has been open for less than three months and has already made thirty beers in that time. I'm partial to

• Mexican Radio - A lower gravity take on what appears to be a new sub-style, stouts made with chocolate, chilis, and cinnamon.
• Forbidden Planet - a Kolsch-style ale dry-hopped with Galaxy.
• The Panther - A hoppy black lager that pairs well with red meat.
• Birds of Prey on cask - A strong India Pale Ale that uses Falconer's Flight hop pellets, a la DC Brau's IPA mentioned above.

For more on what I liked last year, head over to DCBeer.com, where my colleagues and I discuss our 2013 favorites and reflect back on the year that was. A sample of the latter:

I was very impressed with all the Craft Brewers Conference collaborations [More on the CBC here]. I usually view those as gimmicky, but the rye lager from DC Brau, Devils Backbone, and Brewer's Art; Yonder Cities from Brau and Union; and the rye gose from 3 Stars and Oliver Ales were all beers I'd love to see again.

The January, 2013 edition of this post
The January, 2012 edition of this post
The January, 2011 edition of this post

All beer coverage on this site available here.

What I Saw, What I Heard, What I Read: On Codes of Conduct

I have two stories to tell, in chronological order.

First, my then-girlfriend turned down a graduate school program in the sciences in no small part because she was tipped off by female graduate students that the program was hostile to women, and that multiple influential faculty engaged in sexist and harassing behaviors.

Second, I saw male tenured faculty members target female graduate students during a dinner, after hours at a political science conference when I was also in grad school. The faculty divided up the grad students before sitting at the table, isolating each woman. Looking back on it, it seemed like wolves hunting in a nature documentary.* I talked over and around the faculty members closest to me in an attempt to stay in contact with the women. Some seemed to just want the attention of a younger woman. Others may have wanted more. The two targets of this behavior now have PhD's and tenure-track jobs; I hope, and am somewhat confident, that this incident only took place at dinner, with no repercussions in the form of silencing, gaslighting, and the like. We three graduate students reported this to our Graduate Studies Director, and that was the last I heard of it. The next year, at another political science conference, one of the perpetrators stared more than a little too long at a female companion while in the elevator.

So when you see me retweeting pieces about the American Library Association's Statement of Appropriate Conduct at ALA Conferences, boosting signals, the stories above, and others that either I'm not ready to tell, or aren't my stories to tell, are why.

Lisa Rabey has more stories, both hers and others, here (especially on page two). Some of those are below, loosely in the order they were tweeted, since Will Manley's piece was published and then deleted. If I missed any, please both accept my apologies and let me know, either via the comments, or twitter.

Why ALA http://t.co/tZcRfzWvVK via @GaviaLib // On conference codes of conduct #libraries
— Jacob Berg (@jacobsberg) January 3, 2014

The above link mentions race as a factor in harassment as well, which is a cleavage absent from many of the others for a variety of reasons, chief among them that librarianship and Masters of Library and Information Science programs are overwhelmingly white.

#libtechgender: conference codes of conduct as seen from your world & mine http://t.co/mslYE6kIMM via @ThatAndromeda // Best take I've seen
— Jacob Berg (@jacobsberg) January 3, 2014

Creating safe spaces vs. freedom of expression http://t.co/SYAhtAP6lk via @librarianmer // On the Code of Conduct
— Jacob Berg (@jacobsberg) January 2, 2014

RT @himissjulie: George Carlin, MLIS http://t.co/p5pDyzhn0T
— Jacob Berg (@jacobsberg) January 2, 2014

That ALA Code of Conduct: http://t.co/3L2KlwtgRr via @wawoodworth
— Jacob Berg (@jacobsberg) January 2, 2014

The ALA Statement of Appropriate Conduct: a FAQ http://t.co/CiSJVWyRPo via @ThatAndromeda
— Jacob Berg (@jacobsberg) January 2, 2014

Why ALA Needs a Code of Conduct | Backtalk http://t.co/3vE2aFigt2 via @LibraryJournal @ThatAndromeda
— Jacob Berg (@jacobsberg) January 2, 2014

Accentuate the Positive http://t.co/2VNmYaI5HA via @himissjulie #libraries
— Jacob Berg (@jacobsberg) January 2, 2014

RT @satifice: on the 'don't do bad things' maxim http://t.co/0XyuD1JLho
— Jacob Berg (@jacobsberg) January 2, 2014

RT @GaviaLib: New post: In which the Loon endorses anti-harassment codes of conduct http://t.co/S3kYtf6YEi
— Jacob Berg (@jacobsberg) January 1, 2014

RT @DanielCornwall: I endorse the ALA Conference Code of Conduct http://t.co/HJzyB4iQUH
— Jacob Berg (@jacobsberg) January 1, 2014

Sadly accurate, via @satifice http://t.co/MDsTVcz7Um #libraries
— Jacob Berg (@jacobsberg) December 31, 2013

Well said RT @ashuping: Thoughts on bullying...: cc licensed via:http://t.co/5WHeG17NrF is probably... http://t.co/zmc07wdTjN
— Jacob Berg (@jacobsberg) December 31, 2013

RT @MagpieLibrarian: My Reaction to Will Manley's post: Codes of Conduct, Freedom of Speech, and Male Privilege http://t.co/rkgDUqUoPw
— Jacob Berg (@jacobsberg) December 31, 2013

RT @librarianwilk: Libertarianism, dignity, and the ALA Code of Conference Conduct http://t.co/3ytOtburas #libraries
— Jacob Berg (@jacobsberg) December 31, 2013

Fully backed, on the ALA Code of Conduct, et al. RT @satifice: so vague http://t.co/cyafRtRCkK #libraries
— Jacob Berg (@jacobsberg) December 31, 2013

RT @librarian_kate: New blog post: in which I draw parallels between the ALA Code of Conduct & the Supreme Court. http://t.co/nvDU8JTdzM
— Jacob Berg (@jacobsberg) December 31, 2013

So there RT @mciszek My thoughts on Will Manley's critique of the ALA Statement of Conduct at Conferences: http://t.co/QwOcfNY1jV #Libraries
— Jacob Berg (@jacobsberg) December 30, 2013

* And yes, the aggressive male, the prey... that is an awful, harmful stereotype. And I felt it all the same.

Elsewhere on this site: An Open Letter to Male Librarians.