In my frequent tirades against high growler prices, I make the claim that the cost of filling a growler with beer should be in the ballpark of the price of a six-pack of similar quality. They serve the same end, namely taking some beer home. Thus was born the six-pack equivalent, or SPE: a way to wrap your mind around the cost of filling a growler.
Even though no one would expect beer consumed at the point of sale to be priced similarly to a retail six-pack, the six-pack equivalent is still a useful way to compare prices in a situation where the volumes offered are different. For example, in writing up PGE Park, I compared the SPE of PGE's 12 and 20 ounce cups ($45 and $29.70 respectively). Or you could compare the price of imperial pints at Bailey's Taproom with that of cheater pints nearby at Henry's, and see who gives you a better deal.
To that end, here is a six-pack equivalent calculator (below). [Update 2011/01/01: My neighbor Lindsey has now turned this into an Android phone app! Fitting, because he originally inspired the SPE by comparing growler prices with single-bottle prices. Further update: Now there are also two iPhone SPE apps.]
It helps put a lot of things into perspective. For instance, I was surprised to find that my $11 bombers of Mirror Mirror cost me an SPE of $36. Compare Sierra Nevada Bigfoot for about $11/six-pack at the 7-11. Or consider that Full Sail Session -- because of the 11-ounce bottles -- has an SPE of $6 for an $11 12-pack. Not as good as the $5.50 if the bottles held 12 ounces.I was just guessing about how much actual beer is in 20- or 16-ounce glasses, figuring you lose about an ounce for the head on the beer. Anyone have any scientific data?
Also, let's have a round of applause for those establishments with a fill line marked on the glass: Brewers Union, Deschutes, Belmont Station, and Hopworks.
Give the calculator a whirl. Find any interesting bargains or rip-offs?
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Monday, June 8, 2009
Faultline Brewing, Sunnyvale
I spent last week at my company's headquarters in Sunnyvale, California. We have a teenage fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer
in our house, so we jokingly refer to Sunnyvale as "Hellmouth" -- the vampire conduit that Buffy's town of Sunnydale sits atop. If you're a Portland beer snob the South Bay is indeed a kind of beer Hell. San Jose is the third-largest city in California, twice as big as Portland, and it sports a measly four brewpubs. Sunnyvale is relatively lucky, with two brewpubs, and a Tied House location nearby in Mountain View. How is it that Palo Alto has no brewpubs? I thought Stanford was full of geniuses. All right, forget brewpubs, there should be some good beer bars.... Tacky Irish pubs seem to be about as good as it gets, which isn't so good.
The saving grace in the area is Faultline Brewing, just off 101 in Sunnyvale. They have a decent selection of regular beers, nitro taps and a cask engine, and interesting seasonals. The Maibock seasonal was too strong at 7.2% for session purposes last week, so I stuck to the cask Pale Ale and the Best Bitter on nitro. The Pale is perfect for dinner and conversation, floral but not too bitter. The cloudy cask-conditioned version was a little more flavorful than the regular tap.
Not to belittle the beer, but what's even better is the food at Faultline. It's not cheap -- $18 to $25 dinner entrees -- but it's wonderful. The portions are embarrassingly large, which is an embarrassment I'm always willing to endure. Sometimes large portions mask an inattentiveness in the food quality, but that's not the case at Faultline. The seafood gumbo was dense with fish, shrimp, and sausage, and threatened to spill over the brim of its large plate. The Macadamia-Crusted Tilapia was perfectly crisp, and similarly huge. I'm racking my brains trying to think of a Portland restaurant to compare it to. Maybe a cross between the big plates at Deschutes and the interesting menu at the harborside McCormick and Schmick's, with higher quality than those two put together.
in our house, so we jokingly refer to Sunnyvale as "Hellmouth" -- the vampire conduit that Buffy's town of Sunnydale sits atop. If you're a Portland beer snob the South Bay is indeed a kind of beer Hell. San Jose is the third-largest city in California, twice as big as Portland, and it sports a measly four brewpubs. Sunnyvale is relatively lucky, with two brewpubs, and a Tied House location nearby in Mountain View. How is it that Palo Alto has no brewpubs? I thought Stanford was full of geniuses. All right, forget brewpubs, there should be some good beer bars.... Tacky Irish pubs seem to be about as good as it gets, which isn't so good.
The saving grace in the area is Faultline Brewing, just off 101 in Sunnyvale. They have a decent selection of regular beers, nitro taps and a cask engine, and interesting seasonals. The Maibock seasonal was too strong at 7.2% for session purposes last week, so I stuck to the cask Pale Ale and the Best Bitter on nitro. The Pale is perfect for dinner and conversation, floral but not too bitter. The cloudy cask-conditioned version was a little more flavorful than the regular tap.Not to belittle the beer, but what's even better is the food at Faultline. It's not cheap -- $18 to $25 dinner entrees -- but it's wonderful. The portions are embarrassingly large, which is an embarrassment I'm always willing to endure. Sometimes large portions mask an inattentiveness in the food quality, but that's not the case at Faultline. The seafood gumbo was dense with fish, shrimp, and sausage, and threatened to spill over the brim of its large plate. The Macadamia-Crusted Tilapia was perfectly crisp, and similarly huge. I'm racking my brains trying to think of a Portland restaurant to compare it to. Maybe a cross between the big plates at Deschutes and the interesting menu at the harborside McCormick and Schmick's, with higher quality than those two put together.
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
Blast from the Past
When I was 7 years old, the big excitement was to bike over to the Quik Trip or the Git-N-Go to buy a pack of Topps Wacky Packages -- stickers that lampooned various national brands of consumer products. The baseball-card company sold these hilarious stickers with pink rectangles of their brittle, tasteless chewing gum. The bad attitude was right on the money for television-addled kids our age.A couple months ago I found a picture book
at Counter Media showing all seven series of Wacky Packages stickers published in 1973 and 1974. Turns out that the instigator of the Wacky Package project at Topps was Art Spiegelman, who went on to more intellectual glory as the author of the graphic novel Maus
. In the preface to the Wacky Packages book, Spiegelman reveals that he recruited other comics authors to make up gags for the stickers, including Bill Griffith, the author of Zippy the Pinhead.The only beer Wacky Package that came out in the 70s was the Blast Blew Ribbon sticker pictured here. Today it would be surprising if collectors cards for kids had even one joke about alcohol, but the reason I'm surprised there is only one is that there were no fewer than nineteen stickers mocking brands of cigarettes or cigars -- not to mention a breakfast cereal called Super Cigar Crisp, with a cartoon bear puffing away on the box. It looks like Topps has been selling Wacky Packages again the last few years, but I'll bet the alcohol and tobacco references are now taboo. The book does come with a Schmutz Beer sticker from back in the day that was never released, as well as a variant of the Blast Blew Ribbon one shown here.
It's one of the ironies of Portland that Pabst is so popular here. Do you suppose the sticker is correct, that the original flavor used to taste different?
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