The news Sunday that Martyn Cornell has died was a gut punch. Friends filled Bluesky with small stories, including links to many of his blog posts. Rereading one of my favorites — “In which I give more badly written beer history a good kicking” — I couldn’t help but smile for a moment. It was a sentence after sentence takedown, and should have made any writer happy to have Martyn not review their work.

JUST WONDERING

ABI’s Years of Craft Strategy Whiplash Are Catching Up With It details Anheuser-Busch InBev’s failures over the years to sell enough beer that customers would rather drink than the ones their closer-to-home breweries back. In the story, Dave Infante mentions “big craft” (which he puts in quotation marks). If I read it correctly, I think he means “craft-like” (my quotation marks) beer from breweries that do not meet the Brewers Association’s definition of craft brewery.

Which I think is different than the big craft Alan McLeod has been referring to for at least a dozen years (scroll to page 7). McLeod might correct me, but he has been referring to breweries such at Sierra Nevada (1.1 million barrels produced in 2024), and perhaps even ones such as Fiddlehead Brewing (108,143 barrels).

This raises several questions. ABI big craft, after all, is made up of breweries that used to qualify to be members of the Brewers Association. How is Goose Island pre-2011 different than Goose Island today? Do they have more in common with ABI or Fiddlehead? More important to me, personally, as a brewery visitor, does Sierra Nevada have more in common with the ABI group as a group or with Liquid Mechanics Brewing (1,369 barrels) in Lafayette, Colorado, where I had a terrific Helles Friday afternoon?

Forty years ago, Vince Cottone, a beer columnist for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer who contributed to numerous publications, first used the phrases craft-brewing scene, craft brewery and craft brewing in the manner they are thought of today.

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It is Memorial Day in America, so get outdoors, drink a beer if you want. If you missed these posts last week, read them Tuesday.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

“Me, if I have a SNPA (Sierra Nevada Pale Ale) in front of me, I am really only concerned with the taste of the thing in front of me, not whether it has hit the bullseye on the shifting dart board of style.”

                    — Alan McLeod

From Your Beery News Notes For The Start Of The Last Month Of Spring. Context follows.

We’re as Confused as You Are.

and

Is Sierra Nevada Pale Ale an ESB?

Alan McLeod’s quote comes from his reaction to these stories about Sierra Nevada Pale Ale winning gold medal in the ESB category at the World Beer Cup. I cited it at Bluesky, adding, “Let these be the last of many words.” So even though I have thoughts, I will honor what I wrote. Instead, consider this photo from a conference in Ecuador in 2022. Here, Gordon Strong, president emeritus of the Beer Judge Certification Program, answers the question, “Why beer styles?” Be sure to notice what guidelines are not.

YOU MIGHT ALSO ENJOY

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I may have exceeded my monthly quota for words last week, so showing more restraint . . .

Cask. This is a story about cask Ale’s bid for UNESCO cultural heritage status, but within there is a “hey, did you see this?” fact. “For all the headlines about American-inspired craft beer, about four times more traditional cask ale is served in the UK.”

The ink link. Jeff Alworth writes, “Credible, accurate journalism may not seem like an essential component to healthy beer culture, but I suspect it plays a bigger role than we imagine.” The importance seems obvious to me, although, granted, I am biased. I’d also suggest we should not overlook the role “brewspapers” — such as Celebrator, Ale Street News, and the Brewing News family — played in the growth of regional beer cultures.

In the woods at the edge of the city. “The bucolic setting is one thing, but what makes the Kugler Alm special is its place in the history of beer garden beverages. This beer garden is, by many accounts, where the Radler was invented. (For those who don’t yet know what a Radler is, it’s a mix of beer and lemon-lime soda—à la Sprite— that’s meant to quench your thirst without getting you too shlamboozeled. The word itself means cyclist.)”

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Okay, I lied. Here it is Monday and I have a few links for you before heading off to find some music, finishing with Piano Night here in New Orleans (lineup at the end). One reason for the unplanned post is that Ding has assembled the roundup for The Session #146. The other is these first two, because in another two weeks these so-called styles may already be resting beside Brut IPA.

Savoury IPA. In all fairness, Matt Curtis acknowledges that things did not go well for Brut IPA, and he questions the need for Cold IPA. In supporting the idea of using MSG in a beer, he writes, “Perhaps savoury isn’t the right word here. There are other, better, words I would use to describe this beer such as ‘bright’, ‘luminous’, or perhaps my favourite of all ‘resonant’. But ‘Resonant IPA’ doesn’t sound like a style that will trend well amongst the LinkedIn marketing set. Savoury though, that’s tangible and, most importantly, communicable.”

Northern IPA. Apparently Northern IPA was a subject of discussion on Bluesky and at Facebook while I was busy listening to music. Jeff Alworth found it a “real balm to the soul in these trying times. Beer, the liquid itself and the drinking of it, should be fun. Silly, even.”

RANDOM OBSERVATION NO. 1

“I’ve drunk good and bad cask beer from both independent and multinational breweries. I’ve also worked at small and large breweries. The multinationals are undoubtedly evil but then again some of the biggest cunts most awful people I’ve ever met have been running small breweries. Let us remain true to the core beliefs of our faith and venerate all beer that is pleasing to god.”

From Ed Wray in Why should I care if a brewery is independent?

RANDOM OBSERVATION NO. 2

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