Monday beer links: festivals, witchcraft & independence

MONDAY BEER AND WINE LINKS, MUSING 08.14.17

Farmhouse ale festival 2016.
[Via Larsblog]
An Ounce at a Time — Are Festivals Fatigued?
[Via Good Beer Hunting]
Compare and contrast.

The best kind of beer festival, I’ve found, is where the drinking public is at least as interesting as the commercial brewers and the speakers. And this was definitely that kind of festival. For one thing, farmhouse brewers are not like modern home brewers. They are country people, not hipsters or IT professionals. And the beer enthusiasts who travelled to the festival were not your average beer drinkers, either.

Witchcraft, Alewives, and Economics.

While we may never truly know if alewives were accused of witchcraft simply because they were alewives, it is clear that women who brewed were perhaps particularly vulnerable to the witch-hunts.

[Via braciatrix]

How evil is evil?

More work for the CAMRA theologians there.

[Via Ed’s Beer Site]

Drinkers demand clarity over craft beer producers.
[Via The Morning Advertiser]
Fake Indie Beer: These 15 ‘Independent’ Craft Brewers Have Deep-Pocketed Owners.
[Via TheStreet]
This truth in advertising stuff is tricky. Jason Notte does not sugarcoat things. (And I apologize for linking to a slide show.)

It was bad enough when small brewers used the fairly meaningless term ‘craft beer’ to describe what they were making.
     Now they’re rendering the term ‘independent’ meaningless as well.

4 Breweries Close Their Doors in 2-Week Span.
One of these was Rubicon Brewing in Sacramento, which has been around almost 30 years. That’s a big deal. However, in May the Brewers Association reported 96 breweries went out of business in 2016, acknowledging the number would tick higher because closings don’t get reported with the same enthusiasm as openings. In any event, about two a week, or four in two weeks. (Further reading: When good beer isn’t good enough) [Via Brewbound]

Is Colorado’s Craft Beer Scene Oversaturated?
[Via The Full Pint]
Has New Zealand reached ‘peak beer’?
[Via stuff]
More compare and contrast.

The dark, unseen side of this is there will be many current small breweries that will go out of business, because they couldn’t compete due to quality issues, branding problems, and overall not being able to offer value to the beer drinker.

TRAVEL

Flying to Berlin.
Tränenpalast.
Berliner Biermeile.
[Via Shut Up About Barclay Perkins]
One more compare and contrast. Ron Pattinson’s narratives and photos and Good Beer Hunting. Both Grade A. But different.

But Tränenpalast only tells half the story. There was a similar hall for those entering East Berlin. That was in the main part of the station and has totally disappeared. There you left through a single windowless door. With no handle on the East Berlin side. Dolores would wait, staring at a blank wall, until I popped through the door without warning. Strange days.

WINE (& SENSORY)

DNA to Define Your Wine Tastes.
Read it, be skeptical. Think about the “personalised” beer from Meantime. Be more skeptical. I talked to Todd Cushman at Aromyx, a startup that endeavors to measure and digitize taste and scent, for an upcoming story. Linking aroma perception to individual (or a combination of ) odor receptors is a giant challenge, but mapping the DNA behind those receptors is even larger. “I don’t think the science is there yet,” Cushman said. [Via wine-searcher]

Here Is Everything Wrong With Drew Barrymore’s Rosé Interview.
Not as much fun at Martyn Cornell’s dissection of a Smithsonian article on IPA a couples years ago, but that set the bar awfully high. [Via Vinepair]

FROM TWITTER

Click on the date to read the thread.