Month: August 2014

Local beer: 63105

Beamer Eisele of Modern Brewery hard at work

More than an hour into the Modern Brewery’s launch party Friday at Craft Beer Cellar Clayton CEO/president Beamer Eisele was still in the store cooler, struggling to get a third keg of the brewery’s beer online. He’d already been back to the brewery to pick up the proper equipment.

“Now I can enjoy the party,” he said after the final beer was flowing. A few minutes later he and partner Ronnie Fink (that’s Eisele above and Fink below) looked at the line for beer at the rather small tasting bar in the back of the store and at friends and CBC customers pretty much filling up the place. Eisele sighed, then headed back to the brewery, this time to pick up another keg.

Ronnie Fink of Modern Brewery talks with a customer

Now that Modern Brewery is officially open there are four breweries within four miles of our house. When we moved to Clayton (ZIP Code 63105) three years ago there was one.

Clayton CBC, the western-most outpost of a chain that started in Massachusetts, just opened in May. It’s a 15-minute walk from there to The Wine and Cheese Place, the best retail store in Missouri, according to Rate Beer members and many others. For its weekly tasting Friday, Wine and Cheese was pouring Cathedral Square Ave Maria Bourbon Barrel Aged, Alpha Brewing Lapsided, Summit Brewing Sparkling Ale, Brasserie La Goutte D’Or La Mome Saison Orientale, and Brouwerij Verhaeghe Barbe Ruby Kriek.

Last month, Book & Bailey wrote that “For some, local is enough.” Local is important to me. It really does make a beer taste better (no I’m not suggesting it is something that might be replicated in a blind taste test). I’m pretty sure that it is “enough” to build a business on, but that “enough” must includes a decent level of skill in the brewhouse. There are too many quality beers, local and not-so-local, close at hand not to notice when others don’t measure up.

Write about beer; win prizes

– North American Guild of Beer Writers Awards

The deadline to enter is Aug. 25, and the whole process happens on line – right here.

“The NAGBW Awards honor the best beer and brewing industry coverage in eight categories. Journalism, feature writing, freelance authors, blogs and broadcast, published in print or online, are eligible.” For beer writing/broadcasts published between July 1, 2013 and June 30, 2014.

Those of us judging would really appreciate some top notch entries. Don’t be shy.

– British Guild of Beer Writers’ Awards

The deadline ot enter is Sept. 5 and involves the post office, so you might want to get those entries off early. Details are here.

“The competition is open to writers, broadcasters, photographers, poets, illustrators, designers, webmasters and bloggers whose work has broadened the public’s knowledge of beer and pubs over the past year. You do NOT have to be a member of the Guild of Beer Writers to enter and we welcome nominations by third parties – so if you have been impressed by a press article, book or blog about beer, please think about entering it.” For work published or broacast between Sept. 1, 2013 and Aug., 31 2014.

– The Geoffrey Ballard Essay Award

The first two are for published work. This one is for work you’d like to see published in Brewery History, the Journal of the Brewery History Society. Entries will be evaluated using the journal’s standard criteria for selection (i.e. excellence and interest to a wide audience) and will be published in the journal. The deadline is Jan. 31, 2015, and the details are here.

The winning essay will be published in Brewery History and also earns a £250 prize. “The unpublished essay, based on original research, should fall within the remit of Brewery History, i.e. it should be concerned with the history of beer and/or its ingredients; histories of existing and/or closed breweries; research on associated industries (e.g. malting, hops, retailing, &c.); or studies into the social, political and economic impact of beer and/or the brewing industry.”

Session #91 announced: ‘My first Belgian’

The SessionBreandán Kearney at Belgian Smaak has announced the topic for the 91st gathering of The Session will be “My First Belgian.”

Marching orders could not be simpler: “The rules are that there are no rules. There is incredible opportunity at your fingertips; whether it be to write about the first time you tried a Flemish red brown ale or the time you got your taste buds around a traditional Belgian witbier.”

And for old timers like myself, who might have forgotten just what the first Belgian beer they drank might have been, no pressure. “It doesn’t even have to be your ‘first’. You could use the Session title as a reference to a moment when after many years of drinking a particular Belgian beer your eyes were suddenly opened to its charm, whether that be down to the particular circumstances surrounding its consumption or a personal story you’d like to share.”

The next Session is Sept. 5.

Book recommendation: Brew Britannia

In 1977 in Dorset, a town in the south of England where Thomas Hardy’s Ale was first brewed in 1968, a splinter group of the Campaign for Real Ale calling itself The Real Ale Liberation Front engaged in “acts of civil disobedience.” They would order pints of beer dispensed from a keg— CAMRA was organized to preserve cask beer, at the time under threat from keg beer — then refuse to pay for them.

Nearly thirty years later BrewDog in Scotland turned “kegging into a statement” — a sign of a young, open-minded brewery. It was a message intended for CAMRA.

CAMRA has not eliminated keg beer, and the success of BrewDog and a legion of small breweries who sell “keg craft beer” has not eliminated CAMRA. Sure, authors Jessica Boak and Ray Bailey recount both success stories and failures in “Brew Britannia: The Strange Rebirth of British Beer,” but this is more simply a book about people who care about beer. And what can happen when people care about beer.

Those who read Boak & Baley’s Beer Blog will know what to expect — particularly since regulars sometimes had a sense they were seeing parts of chapters written before their eyes. The writing is straightforward and unpretentious, easy to read even for those whose primary language is American. Reviews from several writers in England (Alan McLeod has links, although not to Pete Brown’s late submission) sometimes suggest the authors should have emphasized particular people or events more or less. But none of them, most of whom have been writing about beer longer than the authors, questions the research. It is superb. There will be no online wiki for “Brew Britannia.”

There are a couple of books I’ve recently praised in this space by suggesting I wish I’d written them. I wouldn’t tell you that about “Brew Britannia.” I’m not as generous as Boak and Bailey. Had a publisher been silly enough to commission me I would have insisted on devoting an entire chapter to Sean Franklin, for instance, or tracking down members of The Real Ale Liberation Front (if they had jackets with cool logos sewn onto the backs I want one of them). The book would have been missing seventy percent of the essential information it contains.

Instead “Brew Britannia” serves two masters — those who want to read scores of delightful stories about people who care, stories that together provide meaningful context; and those who twenty or sixty or how many ever years in the future are going to come looking for a source they can trust.

Is there a beer bloodbath coming?

MONDAY BEER LINKS, MUSING 08.04.14

The State of Beer (As Craig Gravina Sees It). Josh Bernstein kicked off this round of the “are there too many breweries?” discussion with an article headlined “America Now Has Over 3,000 Craft Breweries—and That’s Not Necessarily Great for Beer Drinkers” that drew 93 (maybe more by now) comments. Stephen Beaumont replied “No, There Aren’t Too Many Breweries in the United States” and backed that up with a bunch of math. Read ’em both and then set aside a little time to consider what Craig Gravina has to add (time because the post is about 1,200 words – a definite candidate for Pocket). Two excerpts, the first a quote from Sam Calagione at Dogfish head in Bernsteins’s article.

We’re heading into an incredibly competitive era of craft brewing. There’s a bloodbath coming.

Then from “The State of Beer.”

‘Craft’ in that sense, shares something in common with the Oscars. Films that are deemed ‘important’, or those that deal with important or serious issues like war or diseases, often win Academy Awards. They, like ‘craft’, are in fact quite the opposite of important. They are celluloid past time fillers. Beer is beer — craft or otherwise — it is not important, and those who make it are not significant. Is it enjoyable? Immensely.

I don’t agree on all counts, but there’s a lot in the post to think about.

[Via Drink Drank]

Pure, cheap and a bit dull – my rebuttal to commentary on The Economist article. Start with the Economist story and the comments it generated. Might be more comments there than you want to read, but the first page provides a sense of the reaction to the story. Then read Rory Lawton’s rebuttal. He’s got a dog in the hunt — he runs specialty events and provides advice/consultancy &#151 but that doesn’t make him wrong. I think it is an overstatement to talk about the “many wonderful, authentic traditions that this great beer nation once (my emphasis) had” because you can still find a heck of a lot more traditional beers enjoyed in a traditional manner today in Germany than you could find in the United States 25 years ago. But the relentless march to commodify beer needs to be halted.

[Via Berlin Craft Beer]

Tree House Brewing Co. Finds Fertile Ground in Western Massachusetts. A feast of photos, but also a look inside another small brewery that has attracted more attention than you could have imagined not many years ago. Fact is that although The New York Times and Washington Post carried stories about New Albion Brewing 35 years ago it is better known today than it was then. Frank Prial didn’t write about drinkers lined up for beer at New Albion, as they sometimes do at Tree House. And I’ve never seen Jack McAuliffe quoted this was: “So I guess at this point it doesn’t particularly matter what we brew because we’ll sell out of it and sell out of it fast.”

[Via Good Beer Hunting]

Sierra Nevada Beer Camp was the best festival of the summer that nobody went to. No lines for Pliny the Elder and Supplication? That did not seem to be the case in Philadelphia.

[Via Westword]

The New Home of IPAs. I’m not in love with basing anything on lists from Rate Beer and Beer Advocate or any discussion of best IPAs that includes neither Bell’s Two Hearted Ale nor Firestone Walker Union Jack, but Carla Jean Lauter (The Beer Babe) offers serious analysis that makes a drinker reconsider some assumptions. And the data provides still more proof that hops travel better than hoppy beers.

[Via Medium]