From a story I wrote for the current issue of Beer Connoisseur magazine: “Boston Beer Co. and Pete’s Brewing Co. together sold about 1.3 million barrels of beer in 1995, almost of it brewed under contract. Not long after the two companies went public their combined market capitalization reached about $570 million. At the time Coors – since merged with Molson and affiliated with Miller Brewing – brewed 20 million barrels of beer, owned its own breweries and had a market cap of $725 million. Maybe the math didn’t make sense, but everybody wanted a piece of the craft beer action.”
Within a few years “craft” beers sales went from soaring 70 percent per year to flat and we were told — incorrectly, of course &3151; it was all a fad. No small brewery operator wants to revisit the late 1990s.
– “On the younger end of the diametric, online critics are perhaps guilty extending the long tail of hipsterdom into impenetrably esoteric ends, allowing no gateway for the ignorant or uninitiated to fully enjoy a piece of music writing without feeling like they’re being talked down to.”
– “The author is expected to not only justify the album’s existence, but to justify the need to write about it in the first place. Is it any wonder then that such an intensely personal (and often defensive) writing tends to veer towards positivism?”