Month: July 2011

From Shanken News Daily:

Tenth & Blake, the MillerCoors craft beer unit, has begun testing Blue Moon Vintage Blonde Ale, a wheat beer produced with Chardonnay grape juice, in five markets. Tenth & Blake president Tom Cardella told Shanken News Daily that Vintage Blonde, which is packaged in 750-ml. bottles, is expected to be one in a “specialty series of higher-alcohol beers” marketed under the Blue Moon banner. Cardella added that Blue Moon Grand Cru, a limited-edition small-batch beer first launched in 2009 and retailing at around $10 to $11 a 750-ml. bottle, has received favorable consumer response. Tenth & Blake describes Vintage Blonde — which is being tested now through mid-September in Seattle, Colorado Springs, Chicago, Rochester and northern New Jersey — as “sessionable,” meaning that its profile is well-suited for several servings in a single occasion. The product is being sold in a limited number of grocery stores, liquor stores and about 20 on-premise accounts.

The label at beernews.org indicates the beers is 8.5% abv. Guess that is “sessionable” when you are a Chardonnay drinker, but not according to the rules at The Session Beer Project.

On the heals of a conversation about record-store clerks and beer zealots, Building International Coalitions Through Beer and Pavement gives us:

“(T)en things geeks, nerds, snobs, and connoisseurs do that makes it hard to take their advice and opinions on beer and indie rock seriously.’ (The link, in case you hadn’t figured it out.)

I can’t pick which one I like best, I do know the conclusion really closes the deal.

Still, the backlash directed at beer nerds and indie geeks seems to resemble anti-intellectualism or anti-elitism that runs rampant through our political climate at the moment. These experts are valuable parts of our communities. They can connect dots and provide insight when it’s lacking. The trick is to not let that abundance of knowledge overwhelm or drown out enjoyment.

Well put, ZJE.

How do you review a bottle opener?

It works. Or it doesn’t. This one works.

But $19.95 for a bottle opener? That must be a political statement. Really. I don’t think you buy a “Beers not Bombs” bottle opener unless you want to make a political statement or are enthralled by the story about how they are made. A company called War to Peace fashions jewelry from Peace Bronze, an alloy taken from copper previously used for wiring in nuclear missile systems.

The bottle openers are the newest addition to its catalog and 20 percent of profits are donated to peace and social justice organizations: The Hunger Project; Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières; and the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.

Now the disclaimer: The folks at War to Peace sent me the bottle opener pictured. Had they simply sent a press release I likely would have mentioned “Beers not Bombs” in a bunch-o-links post rather than devoting 200 words to the topic. I’m passing this much along not to make a political statement or because I need another bottle opener, but because it’s an interesting story. One you might talk about over a beer, where discussions involving politics are encouraged.

Has the craft-beer revolution gone too far? Its beverages are delicious, but its culture can be oppressive. And its most outspoken creators, servers and consumers have become a new generation’s record-store clerks: If a record-store clerk is someone who knows everything about music except how to dance to it, then the craft-beer connoisseur is someone who knows so much about beer that he’s the last person in the world you’d want to drink it with.

– Keir Graff, “The Contrarian: Has the craft-beer revolution gone too far?”

The beer I’m least excited about in general: yet another IPA. Beer is so varied and rich in tradition, flavors, and possibility that I personally get frustrated when people get hung up on any one aspect of what beer can be or brewers go chasing after the newest hop or meaningless theoretical IBU calculations. At some point it became, “Hey, I made this crazy new beer!” “What, did you just add a bunch of hops to it?” Noooo—we can do better than that. Don’t get me started on black IPAs — they’re the cheese in the crust of craft beer.

– John Laffler, brewer, Goose Island, in “Drinking with beer nerds”

At the end of August, we’re moving into our own office space in Chicago. One thing I really wanted was for our employers to brew beer at work. Lo and behold, when we open our offices in August, we’ll have a brew kitchen and we’ll be able to brew beer at the office.

– (MillerCoors owned) Tenth and Blake CEO Tom Cardella, interviewed by DRAFT Magazine.

For craft beer, the brand concepts and the direction that’s resonating has really been nostalgic post-prohibition-era look and feel. . . . I think because it hearkens back to the hand-crafted, the passionate brew master and it has that limited production feel about it that craft consumers are looking for.

– Stephanie Grubbs, in “Meet the Force Behind Private-Label Booze.” BTW, she also says, ” I do drink beer, and I do like the IPAs.” Does that mean they are two different things?

Even though there’s eight, ten breweries here, there are lots of inspectors that have never seen a brewing tank. . . . [one] didn’t understand what fermentation was; she was worried about this yeast being in there, and it took a lot of explanation for her to be OK with what we were doing.

– Pete Crowley, founder of Haymarket Pub & Brewery in Chicago, talking about the challenges of opening a brewery. Quoted in “An in-the-works brewery goes off the grid” (excellent read).

Is this just another sign of the globalization of beer?

The Washington Post has a story about “Belgium’s upstart innovators,” which of course prominently features De Struise Brouwers — a lightning rod when you talk about “new wave” brewers.

In the story, Wendy Littlefield of Vanberg & Dewulf, one of the first companies to import Belgian beers, expresses the concern about the “noise” these beers generate that’s been discussed at length in comments here.

Littlefield worries that these “extreme” brewers, who represent only a small fraction of the Belgian beer market, are overshadowing the traditionalists — or worse. Struise and [Picobrouwerij] Alvinne, she says, “really, arguably, are hurting the very culture that they claim to be arising out of.”

No arguing that if you disregard the international pale lagers that 90 percent or so of the world’s beer drinkers consume that more brewers outside of Belgium are fermenting beer with yeast taken from Belgium and that more brewers outside the United States are making hops from the American northwest a prominent part of the flavor and aroma in their beers.

Does the out-of-balance attention heaped on these beers, particularly the often out-of-balance ones, endanger traditional* beers?

* “Traditional” is no more easily defined that “craft,” so let’s not start.

This would be a different sort of globalization of beer tastes. (In the first round, those international pale lagers swept aside local breweries.) The parallel in wine, where Two Buck Chuck and Yellow Tail are signs of globalization, isn’t exactly parallel. But Mike Veseth’s discussion of “disruption” in Wine Wars does provoke the same questions beer drinkers might have.

Veseth draws upon two political economists, starting with Joseph Schumpeter and the well known concept of creative destruction: the “process of industrial mutation that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one.” He also points to Karl Polanyi’s theory of the “double movement.”

So a dialetic is unleashed, which is the heart of the double movement. Economic change (the first movement) provokes social reaction (the second movement) and it is the combination of the two that pushes economy and society forward. The future is not just one movement but both in a continuing dynamic interaction.

Take a deep breath. It is only beer. His point is that there are always going to be new products, new producers, new technologies and — this is important — new consumers with different tastes. But how those whose interests are threatened react will also determine the future of beer.