Beer links you shouldn’t miss

HopsStuff I marked this past week to muse about on Monday (but there’s not going to be room for). In case you haven’t already hit these links do it now:

– Tomme Arthur’s “Last Call” in Beer Advocate magazine — on the subject of auctioning beer on eBay — ignited a thread at BA that’s gone past 200 posts. Arthur since added the open letter to eBay on his blog at Lost Abbey so I suggest starting with that, then scooting over to BA.

– Evan Rail writes about protected status for the term “Czech beer.”

But labels can only do so much. If consumers don’t pay attention to how beers actually taste — buying, for example, low-quality brews ostensibly produced from high-quality ingredients — the term “Czech beer” could end up being a distinction without much difference.

A distinction without much difference — I’ve definitely had too many of those beers.

– Sign me up for the Friday brewery tour at Cricket Hill in New Jersey. The brewery has posted two videos at YouTube (thanks to Lew Bryson for pointing this out). At the risk of having my beer geek status revoked, I’m of the opinion that Rick Reed is less than fair to Bud and Coors. But he sure is entertaining.

– Burton Ale, Burton Ale, Burton Ale. Why you should have Shut up About Barclay Perkins on your RSS reader.

– And although James McMurtry has referred to himself as a “beer salesman” while performing, this is in truth a non-beer link. No point in watching the Grammy Awards tonight, since I’m pretty sure prizes for Best Contemporary Folk/Americana Album, Best Zydeco Or Cajun Music Album and every other category we’d care about will be presented off-air. Instead head on over to McMurtry’s MySpace page and listen a while.

(Choctaw Bingo will get you properly psyched for “Breaking Bad” on AMC, because who can resist a show that centers around selling meth in Albuquerque? They shot one of the scenes in the first episode at the library where Daria works. It’s available online.)

Hops: Ugh, the saga continues

HopsPart of it is pure chance because several beer periodicals just hit the streets, but this seems to have been particularly dreary week for hops news.

The newest issue of All About Beer magazine devotes a chunk of its news section to the hops shortage. Every regional edition of the Brewing News family of “brewspapers” has a story about hops, with the word crisis appearing way too much. Some of it is just print lagging behind what we already knew.

But I also heard a couple of nasty rumors this week that need investigating. It’s starting to look like a visit to the Yakima Valley in May and to the hops fields in Bavaria and Slovenia later this year will be fact-finding missions.

Alpha apparently trumps aroma these days, so it’s not just the future of IPAs we’re discussing.

At mid-week Bill Brand delivered a double whammy with a story for the Bay Area newspapers about beer prices going up, with more details from brewers in his blog.

Many of the horror stories you’ve read are about smaller breweries that didn’t, a perhaps still don’t, have contracts. They were left to buy what they needed on the spot market, which has been just plain ugly. But Brand talks to brewers who have contracts for this year, and they aren’t feeling too comfortable.

They shouldn’t. Consider, for instance, the recent story that India’s beer market will soon rival China. Those guys are going to need a lot of hops.

China already does. China produced 1.2 million hectoliters of beer in 1970, 251 million in 2003. That’s right, from one to two-hundred and fifty-one. In contrast, between 1992 and 2006 world hop acreage dropped from 236,000 to 113,000. Granted, farmers have become more efficient but that’s a lot of acres.

(It’s really an aside, but such a stunning number it merits passing along: UK hop farmers worked 53,500 acres in 1850, but tend to 2,400 today.)

Yes, China and India also will need a LOT more barley malt, and higher prices for malt are a major reason you are seeing $1 a six-pack prices increases as the pump. But — so far, at least — nobody is talking about the same sort of fundamental shift in what varieties of malt are available as they are when discussing hops.

Does anybody know where I can buy a “Save the aroma hops” T-shirt?

Going to extremes in pursuit of an ‘extreme’

Well, if we’re going to ask a woman about marketing to women, maybe we should check in with the Gen Y crowd when discussing “millennials” and beer. Both what they say, and what they will do.

Exhibit #1: Swordboarder’s comment the other day. He uses the word “they” but he’s the same age as Sierra Nevada Brewing. Sierra Nevada is Gen Y.

Exhibit #2: Steve at Summer of Beer, 26 and a grad student, heads off in pursuit of Deschutes The Abyss.

In case you don’t know, Abyss has been the “extreme beer” du Jour, particularly in Oregon.

Version 1.0, released last year, won all kinds of awards, and even deserved to. An 11% abv imperial stout, v2.0 it was aged in French oak, pinot noir and bourbon barrels since March. It’s got “extreme” written all over it.

Steve begins, “Conceding that it will not make its way into the Inland Valley, I am about to embark on a journey to the find Deschutes The Abyss.”

Along the way he might pick up a case of Olympia for his dad.

It’s a short trip, with a happy ending.

We’re screwed – The jinx is in

Sprecher Black BavarianOK, we’re not at the point that Time magazine has put 750ml bottles of beer on its cover and declared “Beer Is The New Wine.” That would definitely be a jinx.

But when the business types start paying attention — as BusinessWeek does with “Micro Beers Brew Up Big Business” — I get nervous.

Particularly when there’s every chance that 2008 isn’t going to look all that great for “craft beer.” In the next few months the totals from 2007 will come in and they are going to look great.

Don’t be fooled. Things aren’t that rosy. You’ve probably noticed that the economy could be looking better, and you might have heard a little something about beer ingredient costs skyrocketing with higher prices to follow. Not exactly a formula for double-digit increases in volume sales this year.

And if brewers hit that bump in the road what are business magazines and newspapers going to write?

In BusinessWeek we get just what you’d expect — a micro history of microbreweries and a list of beers to drink. Before we get to the latter I’d suggest you pass on history according to BusinessWeek and pick up the new All About Beer magazine (March 08 with bottles of beer and hunks of cheese on the front) magazine.

Lew Bryson’s “The Real History of Beer” is, to use the word of the week around here, more “authentic.”

Now the list of “America’s Best Craft Beers” (according to Nick Passmore and BusinessWeek):

Alaskan Pale
Anchor Liberty Ale
Anderson Valley Boont ESB
Breckenridge 471 IPA
Full Sail Amber
Ommegang Abbey Ale
Ringwood Old Thumper
Rogue Shakespeare Stout
Sprecher Black Bavarian
Stoudt’s Scarlet Lady

Not to pick on BusinessWeek, but the Black Bavarian is looking anything but black because they used a picture of Hefe Weiss (that’s why the photo above features the real Black Bavarian).

Fact is this is fine list and I’m glad they noticed.

Just a little nervous.

Who’ll be deciding what our beer choices are?

TrendsetterThis is a story overtly about wine, so you might not care, and about trends, so you might not care.

Rather than revisiting the discussion about if we want our beer hip or sick I will simply argue that trends matter because they may determine what’s available for us to drink. After all, hipsters managed to slow the demise of Pabst.

So consider this report last week from the annual Unified Wine and Grape Symposium in Sacramento, the largest conference of the year for the U.S. wine business.

The wines you’ll be savoring five years from now are being picked today by enological trendsetters barely old enough to drink.

Is it possible we might substitute the word beer for wine (and enological)?

The story reports that “what they’re looking for – wines that are quirky, regional, with rich background stories – isn’t what the mainstream domestic industry seems to be selling today.”

Can you think of a mainstream domestic drinks industry that seems to be struggling with growth?

Go give it a read. You may also enjoy the direction of this commentary: When the Young Eat the Rich.

You’ll find fodder for both sides of the “extreme beer” debate, for instance, but I’ll leave you with two takeaways:

– SABMiller may not yet have figured out how to wow the Gen Y millennials, but is right about their impact. They want products that are handcrafted, unique . . . “authentic.”

– Sommeliers, or Cicerones, are important.

And I also have to repeat the final quote of the story: “We way overestimate the knowledge of the American consumer.”

Is he talking about us?