Is the beer local if the bottle isn’t?

Let’s say that you drink local beer because you think it is important to support locally produced products and further the environmentally correct thing to do.

So there’s every chance you expect the local brewery to use local products itself. But what if it is much cheaper for the contract mobile bottling company — which happens to be called “Green Bottling” — that packages the beer for the brewery to buy from China or Oklahoma than from a plant three miles away.

Kind of complicated, I know. You’ll find the discussion at the Oregon Economics Blog.

 

Session #27: Beer cocktails

The SessionIt comes to my attention that The Session #27 is Friday and I never pointed to the announcement.

Oops.

Beer at Joes, operated by Joe and Jasime, will play host and the topic is “Beyond the Black & Tan.” Jasime writes:

What’s your favorite beer cocktail (and yes, despite the title of this post, it can be a black & tan or a shandy)? Find a recipe for that or a new one, try it, and tell us why you did or didn’t like it–even if you think beer cocktails are nothing but a good way to waste a beer. Have fun and try something new!

Everybody is welcome to participate. Head to Beer at Joes for details.

 

‘I am’ versus ‘Beer Wars’

OK, time to be cantankerous.

One heck of a lot of people in the beer blogging and twittering world have linked to the “I Am a Craft Brewer” video, including (in the interest of full disclosure) me.

Looks like love.

So who in the beer blogging world is going to slice and dice this puppy like they did Beer Wars?

 

‘I Am A Craft Brewer’ video

Greg Koch has posted the video he used yesterday to introduce his keynote speech at the Craft Brewers Conference in Boston entitled “Be Remarkable: Collaboration Ethics Camaraderie Passion.”


Click on the play button to watch or head on over to the “I Am A Craft Brewer” area at Vimeo, where he promises “a program is in development to include even more of America’s amazing craft brewers.”

 

Henry King and ‘institutional memory’

I’m doing my best not to get sucked back into the Beer Wars discussion. But I do want to point you to Harry Schuhmacher’s excellent “alternative view.” In it he mentions the late Henry King.

I first met King at Oldenburg Beer Camp in 1996 and was fascinated when he talked about “institutional memory.” Eight years later Jim Parker, then editor of New Brewer magazine, asked me to write a profile of King because — being perfectly honest — he was dying. A great assignment and a terrible one. King died in April of 2005.

Anyway, today I added “Henry King: Another king of beers” to the library. And I’m thinking again about the importance of institutional memory.

But not writing about Beer Wars, though I will suggest you read what Stephen Beaumont has to write about the idea “we’re all in this together.”