Michael Jackson “The Beer Hunter” drank wine

We are so wine-centric here in the wine country that we forget the famous Sonoma Valley winemakers’ expression that “It takes a lot of beer to make good wine.”
That belief may have led the Benziger boys to take a stab at making fine artisinal beer, but they were ahead of their time and the wine and beer worlds just weren’t ready for them, yet.
Personally, I don’t drink beer, but I do enjoy that first sip, the one that leaves a wee foam mustache on the upper lip and seemingly stimulates every corpuscle in one’s mouth, inspiring the classic expression of ecstasy, “Aaaaahhhhghh!”
Michael Jackson, “The Beer Hunter,” lived for beer. But he also drank wine.
Jackson, who “Time Out” said knew “more about beer than anyone on earth,” finally wafted his last pint and lost a fight to Parkinson’s disease a few weeks ago, having won the James Beard Award this year for his book “Whiskey.”
The world-famous British beer, wine, spirits and travel writer spent his professional life trying to hoist his friendly beer to the esteemed level of fine wine or whiskey and extolled fine beers’ virtues as he paired them with fine foods.
Called “the world’s leading beer critic” by the Wall Street Journal, this expert often answered an obviously pesky question with the quip, “My name is really Michael Jackson, but I don’t sing and I don’t drink Pepsi.”
His ever-growing “beer belly” attested to democratic samplings, even as he hosted a six-part television series called – surprise – “The Beer Hunter,” and wrote of beer as his passionate love for publications from the London Independent and Playboy to Food & Wine magazine and the Washington Post.
A special fan of Belgian beer, Jackson lectured on his favorite subjects everywhere from Oxford and Cornell to the Suntory Food Business School in Tokyo.
Apparently Jackson’s truck driver father’s ancestors were Lithuanian Jews and his mother was a stickler for her version of “the Queen’s English” and was an excellent Yorkshire-area baker. Attributing his language and writing skills to his mother’s influence, Michael Jackson quit school at age 16 to help support the family, working as a junior reporter at his first job, and rising through Fleet Street to editing KLM’s in-flight magazine, developing a great thirst as he went.
A “rock star” in his own field, Michael Jackson once told the Times of London that “I drank partly because I knew that great writers drank and I wanted to be a great writer, partly to see if (bartenders) would serve me.”
Following the success of Hugh Johnson’s wine books, Jackson answered with his “The World Guide to Beer,” of which there is a house copy at Sonoma’s Murphy’s Irish Pub.
Murphy’s manager Steve Ney clearly respected Jackson, keeping his books right at his fingertips behind the bar. Ney commented, “He really was the ‘father of the microbrewery movement.’ We don’t carry any of the Belgian beers he loved, but we do feature ‘guest beers’ from microbreweries, and we certainly have loads of imports to try,” in case anyone wants to work toward filling Jackson’s esteemed role in the beer world.
In his book, “Michael Jackson’s Beer Companion,” Jackson said people asked him, “‘Do you ever drink wine?’…as though beer were a prison rather than a playground. A day may pass when I do not drink wine, but never a week. Whatever is argued about other pleasures, it is not necessary to be monogamous in the choice of drink. Beer is by far the more extensively consumed, but less adequately honored. In a small way, I want to help put right that injustice.”
Cheers!
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