Considering Bush’s decision-making style, and what many perceived as a reckless, ham-fisted approach to policy, it’s no wonder that the press is scrutinizing Obama’s style very closely.  And already, people are cautiously sizing-up Obama’s poised, deliberate way of addressing questions and problems.

Cambridge author Joan Hoff was recently interviewed by The Chronicle of Higher Education about his “professorial” style during discussions.

“He seems to be reflective when directly asked a question,” says Joan Hoff, a research professor of history at Montana State University at Bozeman and author of A Faustian Foreign Policy: from Woodrow Wilson to George W. Bush (Cambridge University Press, 2008). While academics might find that style of speaking “calming and reassuring,” she says, it might come across as too wordy to the general public.

For Hoff, Obama shouldn’t “overdose on deliberation.” I guess I might fit into the “academic” category, and yes, “careful” and “deliberate” are words I’d use to describe my ideal president’s decision-making. But hordes of people didn’t flock to see Obama the professor.

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Rick Kleffel is an independent producer with NPR, and has interviewed a remarkable range of figures, and reviewed a massive amount of books. You can view his work here.

He recently sat down with Charles Bamforth for a very long interview — a great bonus for beer geeks the world around. Get the full scoop on Grape vs. Grain, on early brewing history, and get Charles’ entertaining wit as a bonus.

Listen Here!

And vote in our first blog poll below.

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Joshua M. Bernstein of Gourmet recently did a Q&A with Charles Bamforth, touching on something that I find to be among the “funny-because-it’s-true” characteristics of wine and beer.

JMB: How else do wine makers and brewers differ?

CB: Brewers tend to use unappealing terms like catty, grainy and burnt, while wine guys tend to use more charming terms, like fruity. If brewers can learn some of the lexicon, we can make some of the terms more appealing. For instance, I don’t think catty is very attractive. When beer ages, it can develop a tomcat-urine flavor. Instead of saying, “This beer tastes like tomcat urine,” perhaps we can substitute the more appealing and equally accurate, “This beer tastes like black-currant buds.”

The kitty pee.

I’ve alluded to it in other posts, but this is something that somehow keeps coming up. The San Francisco Gate’s lovely wine flavor wheel (below) places the stuff in the “It Depends” category.

Yes, I agree. I haven’t tasted it so much in sauvignon blanc, as I’m supposed to, but in a really crisp pilsener, like Victory’s, yeah. It’s there. And somehow, it’s part of a great package!

I also must admit that I am a die-hard fan of beer with a barnyard flair; i.e. sour lambics.

Anyway, read the full Gourmet Q&A session with Bamforth >>

Yep. There it is. North American multinationals selling less and less beer, with Europe and the rest of the world stealing the share.  This comes from Teresa da Silva Lopes’ Global Brands, a handy piece of business history on alcohol branding. With the InBev purchase, how far further will that North America bar shrink?

Or is it A Case of Global Beer?

So InBev, the giant Belgian brewing conglomerate, is buying Anheuser Busch. What does that mean for both companies? It can be hard to fathom for the average beer drinker, since many of the brews we enjoy come from companies larger than we ever imagined. Meanwhile, as Brookston Beer Bulletin points out, this makes Sam Adams the largest American-owned brewer! Teresa da Silva Lopes sounds off on what this means, why, historically, breweries have moved in this direction.

“Like World Series baseball, for too long Budweiser thought being big in America made it a global brand. It now gets to compete in the ‘world cup’ of beers and not just the World Series.”

Teresa da Silva Lopes

THE recent acquisition of AB by Inbev is the most recent tsunami in the waves of global merger and acquisitions that have been shaping the brewing industry in the twenty first century. The internationalisation of leading brands such as Stella Artois, Brahma, Heineken, Carlsberg, Miller and Bass previously domestic or regional but not global, has transformed brewing into a highly competitive and concentrated industry, where to succeed you need to compete on a global stage. Budweiser, historically the world’s leading beer brand in value terms, has had its position threatened in recent years mainly because it remains so concentrated in the US market. Its internationalisation only started in the late 1990s, and despite being sold in a more than 60 markets, more than 80 percent of its sales are in the US market.

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