'Pope of Foam' video needs your vote!

by Dave Jones
November 21, 2013

He’s the “Pope of Foam,” Charlie Bamforth, a UC Davis professor, the star of The Art & Science of Beer, a video that is up for a 2013 Taste Award. It’s a viewers choice award — and your vote can help make the Bamforth video the winner.

The UC Office of the President produced the video as part of the university’s Onward California campaign earlier this year. The campaign featured more than two dozen videos made by the Los Angeles-based Department of the 4th Dimension, a company that specializes in multidimensional storytelling.

Bamforth, who holds the Anheuser-Busch Professorship in Malting and Brewing Science, is featured in two Onward California videos; the other one is Beer: A Beautiful Artistic Symphony.

He gets top billing in The Art & Science of Beer, with a title card that reads “featuring the ‘Pope of Foam’ Charlie Bamforth.” The video’s Taste Award nomination is in the category of best mini film or documentary (5-10 minutes long). You can vote here.

The Taste Awards, also known as the Tasty Awards, in their fifth year, “honor the world’s best” in the “lifestyle entertainment industry,” according to the awards website. Winners of selected awards are due to be announced Dec. 3, but the viewers choice awards won’t be announced until the Taste Awards Red Carpet Celebration, scheduled for Jan. 16 in Hollywood.

Bamforth isn’t a Hollywood star, yet, but he’s a UC Davis star, smart and funny as he leads his viewers on a tour of the beer making process — from malt to mash to wurt, from brew kettle to fermenter, and, finally, into the bottle — in the August A. Busch III Brewing and Food Science Laboratory at the Robert Mondavi Institute for Wine and Food Science.

He’s all about the science, figuring out the “why” of beer, rather than leaving it to chance as beer makers did long ago. “If you go way back, there were no thermometers, so how do you work out the right temperature? It’s whether they could see their face in the steam, whether they could put their thumb in it — the rule of thumb.

“Particularly in the last 100, 120 years, people have worked out the science of brewing, and now we say, ‘Hey, that’s why.’”

And he’s all about the lore: “This is how beer saved the world,” he said while pointing out a brew kettle. “For the longest time, people had no idea about bacteria, so they drank the water and got sick, and they found when they drank the beer they didn’t get sick, and the reason is, when you make beer you boil it and so this kills off all of those nasty, unwanted organisms.”

He concludes by opening a bottle of beer and pouring a glass — “pour with vigor” — and summarizes the science: “So you’re basically producing all this wonderful foam, you’ve got all the color, and the yeast having converted those sugars into alcohol, produced all that carbon dioxide, beautiful little bubbles. You’ve got the proteins from the grain, the bitter acids from the hops sticking together.

“That’s just nectar.”