The IPTV revolution is apparently just around the corner, according to Om Malik, but as I’ve said before I think the form of the revolution is going to be quite a bit different than people are expecting.

The real boom will have less to do with the mechanism of content delivery and more to do with the content itself. I’ve mentioned Basic Brewing Video before as a poster child for what I mean, and I am still confident that BBV and its ilk are the real future of IPTV. Here’s why I think so:

IPTV, as described in the GigaOm article, is simply another method of conveying the same content we’ve always had to the consumer. It is another alternative to traditional broadcast television and joins a crowded competitive field with players that have been striving for years with one another. There don’t appear to be compelling features being delivered in IPTV via-corporation that aren’t already available from cable providers.

What sparked the revolution in cable television was the arrival of entirely new forms of content, previously unseen before. Premium content, pay-per-view content, clear signals regardless of weather were what sold consumers on cable. The real IPTV revolution will be all about interesting “niche” content that uses the accessibility and low cost of Internet distribution to lower the barriers to entry. Home brewers will be able to latch onto communities of very specialized interest. Skate boarders will have their own community distribution channels that are exclusively their own. Programmers will feed their own content channels.

And this will all be outside of the traditional commercial structures that content distribution companies, who themselves sit on top of the cable, satellite and broadcast companies, currently operate within. The revolution is already on, it’s been going on for years, and while it’s going to peacefully coexist with its traditional neighbors, the consequences are going to catch everybody by surprise.

Everybody be on your best behavior. There’s a pastor in the house!

A pastor who drinks home brews and jams rock ballads on the axe shouldn’t be so intimidating, actually, so everyone just relax. Welcome to “In The Narrative” - the Wi family continues to grow and rejoices at our new arrival. Pretty soon we’ll have half the bloggers on the Internet, if not half the traffic. Now on to the post!

I’ve been surprised by two things since I started brewing my own beer. First, I’m surprised that pretty good results can be achieved by an amateur. Granted, I’m not going to be threatening the Busch family any time soon, but my brews have been judged pretty tasty by those who’ve tried them. This leads me to the second surprise, which is how social brewing can be.

That’s not to say that I’ve got 14 dudes hanging out in the kitchen when I’m brewing, trying to lend a hand in scrubbing out the pots - simply that drinking beers becomes a profoundly different activity when the beers are homemade rather than store bought. There’s a level of interest in and enthusasim for craft that emerges when the product being consumed isn’t of the mass-produced variety. People will make it a point to come over for home brews - not so much for a six-pack of Busch Lite.

Given the ability of home brewed beer to be a magnet for social activity, it makes me sad therefore that the modern Protestant church in America has tried to distance itself from beer, beer making and other such crafts. All caveats about the evils of alcohol considered (and rejected, so long as a reasonable amount of moderation is exercised), there is a vast amount of untapped potential for the church in beer, if exercised judiciously.

The monks of Europe figured this out. Throughout the Middle Ages monasteries made a fortune for themselves and became focal points in the community because they produced tasty, high quality brews. A little reliability, in the Middle Ages, went a long way. Now, I’m not saying that the Protestant church in America should seek to fund itself through the sale of alcohol (though that might be pretty cool). Rather, the church could do itself a service by recognizing the role that “domestic” production of a popular beverage could have in the general population, and it could exploit it. As the monks became focal points in the community as a result of their craft’s excellence, why not so in our modern age?

So here’s my vision: I foresee a future with Protestant bachelor monks (not bachelors forever, mind you, cause that’s for the birds - but for a time, like maybe in college or something), living several dudes in a house, making brews. That would be awesome, and would no doubt result in some tasty brews.

I know not all pastors drink beer. But I do and here’s why.

I like beer. I once had someone tell me that I shouldn’t drink beer because beer’s a sin. But honestly, truth be told, beer’s not a sin. Cheap beer–now that’s a sin. In fact, there is not one biblical citation that demands total abstinence from alcohol; not even for pastors. (There is that little bit about some people in the Old Testament who took “Nazarite vows”; but that vow was to abstain from the “fruit of the grape”. So even a Nazarite could drink but they’d have to opt for… beer! — a non-grape beverage.)

And sure, we should be careful. But care is not the same as being goofy.

Not one culture other than 20th century American culture has ever preached the heretical doctrine of total abstinence (Okay, I’ll give you some “desert fathers” of old, but they were fringe, very fringe). It wasn’t until the rise of fundamentalism that anyone ever preached an abstinence heresy. Until then, all Christian cultures enjoyed varying forms of adult beverages, in moderation, of course. What’s more, the abstinence heresy is localized in the U.S.; it’s an American phenomenon. Or maybe we should call it what it really is: one American sub-culture’s Johnny-come-lately tradition. That is all.

One of my favorite abstinence-heretics of all time was a man by the name of Charles Welsh. In the late 1800’s (the height of American fundamentalism) Chuck invented a special kind of unfermented grape juice that he and his fellow fundies could drink in good conscience during our sacrament called Communion. We still enjoy Chuck’s grape juice to this day, it bears his name: Welch’s. I still prefer a Sonoma County merlot, but hey, to each his own.

But back to beer. Can one in good conscience seriously eat crabs or watch football without it? Not really. Not in earnest. Not with passion.

I like beer. One very powerful reason I like beer is because once you’ve tasted great Pilsners like Mr Interested’s homebrew, you can never go back to root beer. And who could forget the great ales of the ages? I’m reminded of Martin Luther and Wittenberg ale; and yes, served up warm.

So that’s one pastor’s view on beer. And I think you should let me come over to your house to watch football on your HD flat panel and drink your beer.

Invite me…

My latest batch of beer is now carbonated. I really enjoy brewing so I thought I’d take and share some pictures of my achievement.

The first picture is of the beer right after the pour. I sent the beer right down the middle of the glass in order to get the fullest head possible. The glass is a 20oz glass, and you can see that the beer and head from the 12oz bottle nearly fill it up. Click the pictures for the full sized version.

The next picture shows the beer after it had set for a few minutes. The beer had spent the night in the refrigerator and while I had found the beer to have clarified well while aging in the basement, the beer turned cloudy when it reached the refrigerator. This is a common problem with home-brewed beers called chill haze. The simple explanation of the problem is that proteins in the beer that are clear at room temperature become cloudy at cold temperatures. Here is a more in depth explanation.

I fermented the beer for 6 days before bottling. I didn’t do any secondary fermentation for clarification. The bottles have been aging for one week so the beer is very immature. Tasting the beer confirms this. My beer is not a true pilsner, but has the characteristics of one - in other words it has a very pronounced Saaz hops aroma and strong hoppy flavor. While I love hops in general, the raw-ness of the hops in this very young brew was a little too much for me to suggest to just any random beer drinker. The hops will become more moderate as the beer ages. I’m looking forward to enjoying this beer as it gets better and better.

I found Basic Brewing’s vidcast yesterday and I think these guys set the standard for what I talked about in the previous post. They are distributing very nicely produced audcasts and vidcasts that are informative, entertaining, and interesting (though perhaps only to a narrow portion of the population). They use their ‘casts to promote their DVDs and books. This is a perfect resource to be included in a broader network that has ‘casts pertaining to all manner of do-it-yourself topics.