MONDAY BEER LINKS, MUSING 11.10.14
Remember all that stuff about the New Yorker cover? That is so October. If you follow the people I follow on Twitter and subscribe to the rss feeds that I do the news that AB InBev bought 10 Barrel Brewing in Oregon looked to be as big a deal as when InBev took over A-B. The Internet can fool you that way. It was a big ass local story, but how wide are the implicatons, really? How people reacted to the news might be as important down the road as the news itself. For instance, Jeff Rice has already used it as an opportunity to examine craft rhtetorics.
While we wait for an equally surprising “big” story this week, pig out on 10 Barrel:
– Making sense of Anheuser-Busch InBev buying 10 Barrel Brewing
– Why Anheuser-Busch’s Purchase of 10 Barrel – Brewing is bad for the industry
– The Short Life and Ugly Death of 10 Barrel Brewing
– Craft Rhetorics: the 10 Barrel Brewing Moment
– On Anheuser-Busch buying 10 Barrel
– Interview with 10 Barrel Brewing Founders and Anheuser-Busch InBev CEO of Craft Brands
Elitism, or something else? Millennials and the war on Big Beer. OK, this is why there’s such a fuss.
[Via CNBC]
The Soul of Beer. Jeff Alworth followed up on two posts he wrote about 10 Barrel with this one. There was at time the tagline here read “In search of the soul of beer” before I changed it to “Celebrating beer from a place.” I’m not sure that made my intentions any more clear, but it seemed like it at a time. Neither phrase lends itself to literal interpretation. In the era of the old tagline, I asked several brewers about the notion their beer might have soul. The best answer came from one who pointed out all energy must go somewhere, so a lot of what happens in a brewery ends up in the beer.
[Via Beervana]
There’s A Beer For That. When I was checking into a hotel last week I heard the words “Mosaic hops” coming from the television in the reception area and realized that a Guinness commercial was playing. It seems like just yesterday that we called that hop 369. Now it is part of television advertising, but I’ve managed to otherwise miss the commercial and probably will going forward. The roundabout point here is that I’ve seen numerous posts about the There’s a Beer for That campaign in England, but the advertisements are not part of my life and I’ve struggled to “get it.” This post put things in perspective for me. Your mileage may vary, but there’s a handy list of links at the bottom should you be interested.
[Via Total Ales]
It’s just good business. A reminder, from the Czech Republic.
[Via Pivni Filosof]
Perfect Parker Scores Keep On Coming. Is there similar score inflation going on in beer? This is a story about scores from critics, and in beer the scores of Internet rating sites carry more weight, but maybe this is a job for Bryan Roth.
[Via wine-searcher]
For next Monday’s roundup, mention that Boak and Bailey picked their porter!
The vitriol in the “Short Life and Ugly Death” post and the New School post floored me. But if one believes the “big beer wants to destroy small beer” argument as fully and deeply as the authors, how does one then account for the dozens and dozens of breweries that have appeared since (pick your historical event — the sale of Goose Island, the buying-in to Red Hook and Widmer, etc.)? It shows a lack of understanding of history as to how the former big three breweries actually became the big three breweries and a lack of understanding of how the current situation doesn’t mirror that of post-Prohibition 20th century.
But the anger directed at individuals — I don’t know. I don’t get it. Folks try to draw parallels to musicians “selling out” by licensing music to ads or signing with a major label (well, wait — I guess that example no longer works!), but this is way way over the top — this level of hatred towards folks is something I’ve never seen outside of, say, politics and Gamergate. If our passion for what is essentially a foodstuff takes us this far beyond the pale, to where we exclude and condemn folks because of whom they work… we become the ones doing evil, not the folks selling a business. We’re then the ones with the highly questionable lives.
Bill’s reply above is exactly why, after a solid week of reading similar out-of-context (or just dead wrong) responses to my post “The Short LIfe and Ugly Death…”, I came out so freakin’ depressed by A) the reasoning ability and B) the ethical and moral vacuum between a lot of people’s ears that I feel like digging a hole and jumping in. In the first place, what the freakin’ hell does “how does one then account for the dozens and dozens of breweries that have appeared since (pick your historical event — the sale of Goose Island, the buying-in to Red Hook and Widmer, etc.)?” even mean? WHERE did I or the authors of the other pieces say or imply that craft brewing died on the day that 10 Barrel was sold? We said that letting an avaricious gang of thugs like AB gain a toe-hold in craft beer moves the culture in that direction, which it does, even if the Bills of the world don’t want to see it. If you have to resort to that sort of wild exaggeration to make your “point”, BILL, maybe your point isn’t worth making.
As for the anger directed at individuals, Bill makes the clear insinuation that I somehow cast the Cox dorks as evil. Maybe Bill just read what served his “point” and ignored the rest. If he had read my post, he would have seen that I never called them evil. I called AB evil and there is a mountain of evidence of the evil – REAL, genuine EVIL, like buying breweries to crush competition and throwing (literally) a couple thousand Americans out of work, in their 100+ year history. They bribed tavern owners to pour only Bud – and paid the rent for those who agreed to shut out all other brands. (“tied houses”; look it up, BILL). And they’ve used their O’n’O distributors and backroom deals to squeeze competitors beers off the shelves of grocery stores and liquor stores. All of this is well-documented. One google search will show a 100-year history of ruthlessness that continues to this day, if in slightly more sneaky forms. THIS is what you’re so blithely unconcerned with having as a part of the craft beer community. I called the Brothers Cox greedy and stupid, which, when I wrote it, I was just extrapolating. It’s since been confirmed by dozens of Bend residents who have known them for two decades: Greedy. Stupid. Interested in owning a brewery only as an investment that would get them bought out and made rich.
Bill’s most telling remark is this one: “If our passion for what is essentially a foodstuff takes us this far beyond the pale, to where we exclude and condemn folks because of whom they work… we become the ones doing evil, not the folks selling a business.” To Bill, beer is just “a foodstuff”; just a cool brewski to chug mindlessly on a hot day, Dude! The fact that that beer is the product of MILLIONS of hours and dollars and the dreams of actual American small businesspersons – not corporate bean-counters in Belgium and England and Russia (The places where the owners of Bud, MillerCoors, and Pabst live, respectively) – is of no concern to people like Bill, who are so scared stiff at the very sight on a screen of genuine anger and human passion that they cluck like hens and wring their hands and whine about how we’re the ones “doing evil”. I would hate to be someone so totally lacking in human understanding and spiritual gumption that I couldn’t distinguish the slightest difference between simple anger at a perceived injustice or stupidity and “doing evil”. (Hyperbole much, BILL?) There is absolutely NOTHING about what I wrote that’;s “over the top”. Are you the one defining what’s the appropriate way to think and react, these days, Bill? Sorry, but Homie don’t play dat. I get paid to write what I think and feel and that’s what I do. If you can’t handle some righteous anger without freaking out, I can recommend about a dozen other beer blogs for you. You need not put yourself through the spiritual distress of The Pour Fool.
I’m MAD that two young buffoons decided to thumb their noses at the community which took them in, made them a part of their culture, helped them succeed, and then watched in horror as those two said, by their actions, “Fuck you, we got ours!” You want to be the arbiter of behavior, Bill, knock yourself out. But the people who work in the craft beer community in Bend get to decide for themselves what that community should be and NONE of the other brewers, owners, or employees of those breweries are at all any less angry than I am. They’re just less vocal than me. I’m cranky, well-off, not gullible, educated about what “Craft Beer” means and about what AB’s shoddy history is, and waaaaay too old to tolerate bullshit. This sale IS a bad thing, IS yet another step toward the eventual death of craft brewing, and IS something that ANYBODY who considers themselves a craft fan SHOULD be angry about. The Cox Brothers were NOT just two innocent kids, just “selling a business”. They could have sold to any other company in the brewing industry – including MillerCoors – and there would have been FAR less, maybe even NO, anger. They CHOSE to sell to the enemy…and for that, their future in the craft community IS very much questionable.
Hi Stan, thanks for sharing the link to my post, it’s appreciated!
Steve – I think “vitriol” is appropriate when describing your original post and your comment. That’s OK, at least sort of. One reason I chose the links I did was to include those the emotion involved, and the “us vs. the enemy” thinking.
One “problem” with having a blog is when discussions like this pop up. It take some discipline to keep myself away while I do work I’m obligated to tend to. So, please, Bill and Steve, I’d appreciate it if things remain civil.
Back to work, but with this in the back of my head: “They could have sold to any other company in the brewing industry – including MillerCoors – and there would have been FAR less, maybe even NO, anger. They CHOSE to sell to the enemy…” Hmmm.