Month: April 2016

How original is latest Brewdog prank?

Because links to a story about how 200,000 cans of Brewdog Punk IPA had to be recalled is a result of an employee prank keep showing up in my Twitter feed this smorning I remembered that something similar happened at Sun King Brewing in Indianapolis last year.

Given that we cannot agree on who brewed the first Double IPA — the same thought may occur thousands of miles apart at somewhat the same time — this certainly does not mean what happened at Brewdog was derivative. But it is a reminder that little in beer, no matter what modifer (in this case “craft”) in front of the word, is new.

If you missed the Brewdog story, packing manager Graeme Wallace added “Mother F***er Day” to the time stamp on the bottom of Punk IPA cans. He was not fired. Instead, a Brewdog spokesperson said: “At another company, someone responsible for a prank like this might have been given the heave ho. At BrewDog, Graeme was awarded Employee of the Month.”

And if you forgot the Sun King story, it involved 20,000 cans of Wee Mac Scottish Ale with “Tom Brady Sux” stamped on the bottom. This wasn’t too long after Brady and the New England Patriots had defeated the Indianapolis Colts in the NFL playoffs (the “DeflateGate” game). The message qualified as an obscenity for Patriots fans, and certainly wasn’t “Midwest polite.”

“It wasn’t an idea we came up with at all,” said (co-founder) Clay Robinson, referring to Sun King the company. “Every day, we change the thing on the bottom of our cans. One of the guys running the canning lines had to come up with something. Biscuit is his name. So Biscuit put ‘Tom Brady Sux.'”

Sun King is known for its quirky words next to its born-on dates. During the Indianapolis 500, for example, there will be sayings like “Turn left,” or “Go fast.”

Sometimes, there are movie quotes or one-line quips, such as “Drink and Repeat” and sometimes all the can says is “Yummy.”

Biscuit is real. Robinson didn’t reveal his real name because the brewery received numerous profanity-laced phone calls and, Robinson said, one death threat against Biscuit. A week after the first story appeared, he agreed to an interview with the Indianapolis Star that didn’t include his given name.

In addition, the brewery created this video:

Session #111 announced: Beer mid-life crisis

The SessionHost Oliver Gray has announced the topic for the 111th gathering of The Session on May 6. He writes, “I’m having a beer mid-life crisis, yo.” And so …

All that talk of beer bubbles might prove true, but instead of a dramatic *pop* we’ll might see a slow deflation followed by a farting noise as some of the air leaks out and the hobbyist move on the spend their time and dollars elsewhere. It’s impossible to see the future, but if my fall from rabid beer fanboy to dude-who-drinks-beer-and-sort-of-wants-to-be-left-alone is indicative of a trend, I’ve got some signs to make a doomsaying to do.

What say you?

Do you find it hard to muster the same zeal for beer as you did a few years ago? Are you suffering through a beer-life crisis like I am? If so, how do you deal with it?

I don’t mean to pick on Oliver, but when I saw his tweet — “I’m hosting the Session again in May. Topic? Beer Mid-Life Crisis. It’s exactly what it sounds like.” — my first thought was, “Mid-life crisis? You are a pup.” I do hope some bloggers in his age class, as opposed to mine, tackle this question.

Not so pretty Monday beer links: Sexism and cronyism

MONDAY BEER & WINE LINKS, MUSING 4.11.16

It seems not all of the stories, or tweets, I found last week were written with rose-colored beer goggles on.

Black Acre Brewery’s Jason Gleason’s viral post on sexism shouldn’t be remarkable.
[Via Time Out]
Gendered Wine Marketing Is Still All Too Real.
[Via Punch]
“It should be totally normal to treat women like people.” Take the time to read the first post, at a minimum.

The Crony Capitalists of Craft Beer.
“It’s easy to understand why politicians like funding breweries. They get to play with other people’s money, and much like when funding a new sports arena, they get to associate themselves with a product that many voters consider fun and pleasant. But the economic benefits are dubious.” And: “Lowering these barriers or making it easier for businesses to navigate them would encourage entrepreneurship across the board, rather than concentrating benefits on big breweries that cultivate political connections.” [Via Reason.com]

Why one of the nation’s premier beer festivals seems to have lost its luster.
And I thought slow ticket sales were because I am going to be there. [Via Washington Post]

Craft Beer Talk: Escape captures Redlands in a bottle.
“I was in the past. It was my first time home from college. Returning from a meal with my family, my mother took the back roads home through the orange groves and rolled the windows down. She said, ‘Did you miss this?’ It was in that moment that I realized what San Diego was lacking: Orange blossoms at night. This beer brings back that moment. That realization of what home smells like.” [Via Redlands Daily Facts]

Italian Rabbit and Polenta With Danny Smiles.
“According to Rhino, he started Beer Thugs because he “had fallen out of place” from Hop Heads, a larger craft beer club. The group has existed for five years and now has members in central California, the East Coast, and as far away as Tokyo. Most of the members are old punks, potheads, and skinheads. Beer Thugs is just one of the mostly Latino private craft beer groups that exist in Southern California, which are using their passion for craft beer to find their bicultural identity while also extending their personal networks.” [Via Munchies]

Allagash Brewing Company — Chasing Waves and Beer.
Beautiful photos, an excellent introduction to Allagash Brewing for those who have had the beer but know little about the Maine brewery, or a fine way to catch up with what is new there. However I don’t agree with the notion that flagship Allagash White “may be the brain, but it’s their fruited, oaked, and soured ales that are the heart.”

I might be wrong. I understand what Cory Smith is saying about rewarding consumers and that for them beers that come out of Allagash’s coolship are the heart. And, what the heck, one of the Allagash employees showing him around calls those beers “100% of soul.” White accounts for about 80% of the 80,000 barrels Allagash brewed last year. It is a delicate beer, nuanced, balanced. It could fall of the rails easily, but it doesn’t. So I think about what founder Rob Tod said when I visited the (much smaller) brewery in 2008 to talk about White for Brewing With Wheat. “Our focus has been on maintaining the flavor of the beer,” he said. “Six years ago, it might have been precisely like we wanted it after a certain amount of time. Now we have extended that time dramatically.” So I’d say White, and the passion for quality behind it, represents the soul of Allagash. [Via Good Beer Hunting]

FROM TWITTER

… and bringing us back to where we started (click on the time/date).

Monday beer links: Mixing history & business

MONDAY BEER & WINE LINKS, MUSING 4.04.16

Recreating Old Beer Styles Conference.
It’s too bad that Ed Wray couldn’t make it to the Ales Through the Ages Conference in Williamsburg to provide the same sort of detailed report from it he does this one at Fuller’s in London. But, of course, he can take a train to get to Fuller’s. Anyway, Martyn Cornell and Ron Pattinson went pretty much straight from Williamsburg to London, and didn’t repeat what they said in Williamsburg when they got there. Intuitively, the following thought makes sense, but it is nice to see supporting evidence: “Martyn talked about the taste of porter. He reckons that throughout its history there have been at least six different types of beer called porter, so when asked what porter tastes like the initial reply has to be ‘when?'” [Via Ed’s Beer Site]

The Identity of Irish Beer.
Jeff Alworth writes, “People think about beer in a lot of different ways, and the lens I use is slightly idiosyncratic. I think of it in terms of national tradition. This is a lens that includes not just beer style, but history and culture—the reasons beer styles emerge. It is the only way I know to explain why, say, people in Cologne drink kolsch, but in Munich they drink helles. It’s why cask ale, lambic, and weisse beer still exist.” Agreed, but now there is the matter of wondering how beer changes when a culture/society changes. [Via Beervana]

Is this the end of the Campaign for Real Ale?
[Via CAMRA]
Why the geeks won’t welcome a CAMRA rebirth.
[Via Stonch’s Beer Blog]
CAMRA describes its “Revitalisation Project” as “a wholesale review into the purpose and strategy of CAMRA.” Seems very important, but not really clear (to me) what the implications are. If it ever is I will report back.

GALLERY: Not Always About the Beer.
Be sure to scroll down to see the Carlton and its carpet in the lounge. “The landlady told us that people still respect the distinction — couples dressed up for a night out stick to the best room, solo male drinkers stand and play pool in the public.” Civility on display.[Via Boak & Baley’s Beer Blog]

What’s In a Name? Beer Industry Home to Unique Professional Titles.
“Master of Communal Amalgamation, Schmaltz-of-All-Trades and Slayer of Dragons.” [Via All About Beer]

THE BUSINESS PAGES

The Second Wave Sell-Off: Private Equity In The Craft Beer Market Spells Upheaval Within A Decade.
[Via Forbes]
The Pay-to-Play Scandal In The Beer Biz: How Far It Goes Nobody Knows.
[Via Forbes]
Two excellent stories by Tara Nurin, with information that hasn’t been reported any place else. “Despite what you might have believed, PE investors aren’t satisfied to collect off annual profits. A traditional private-equity fund, which pools money from wealthy individual and institutional investors to take equity stakes in companies, has a finite lifespan of usually 10 years. When that fund sunsets, investors expect to get paid out. A lot.” Doesn’t sound like a pretty sunset, does it?

Pabst Raids Dad’s Beer Fridge as It Looks to the Future.
“[Eugene Kashper] is pushing an aggressive effort to leverage the company’s distribution network, a part of the business that had been built up under previous owners, and dusting off old beer recipes and brands to capitalize on consumer desire for local products. ‘We’re ideally suited for the whole locavore thing,’ he said.” I’m happy to give full credit to any brewery promoting local, but think it takes more than hauling out a few old recipes. [Via New York Times]

Cask beer: is the price right?
The view from the UK: “Anybody who knows anything about beer will know cask is the ultimate craft. For this reason alone cask is under-valued and hence under-priced relative to craft keg. Also the massive ‘added value’ a highly skilled and motivated cellarman can bring to the perfect maturation of cask beer is rarely, if ever, reflected in the retail price.” In the US? Let’s be honest. Quality is all over the map, but nonetheless cask beer often sells for a premium. [Via Inapub]

Craft Wine? Craft Beer’s Innovation Edge (and What Wine Can Do About It).
“I guess I am calling for the broader commercialization of what you might call ‘craft wine.’ Fresh ideas, small lots, variations on the traditional themes but with some added flair. Not for everyone, that’s for sure, but the craft beer and spirits boom shows that there are many consumers who are interested in a more dynamic concept and some of them are being drawn away from wine.” [Via The Wine Economist]

FROM TWITTER

The Session #110: What would the BeerHunter tweet?

The SessionThe topic for Session #110 topic is Twitter. And, among other things, host Sean Inman suggested considering “brevity and how it affects writing about beer.” I’m not sure the example Inman uses, a long thought that Ray Daniels broke into tweetable parts, is the best example. He didn’t try to condense it into one 140-character passage (or even two or three).

In another life, I was briefly in charge of a newspaper photo department. Photos are often a better way to tell a story — you know, the picture is worth . . . thing — but newspapers have a finite amount of space. So there were conversations with questions like, “Can you tell this story in five pictures? Three?” Some of the most powerful stories turned out to be just a few photos, or even one.

Another example of powerful shortform writing, of course, is song. The first time we saw Joe Ely perform Robert Earl Keen’s “The Road Goes on Forever” and he introduced it as a novel in 4 minutes and 33 seconds. He was write. The lyrics fit on a t-shirt. I know; I own one.

Twitter can work that way, striking a blow for brevity. But often a tweet includes a summary of something longer and a link to the rest. So is that really brevity? For the Craft Writing conference in Lexington, Kentucky, a couple years ago I put together a few pseudo tweets from Michael Jackson. Pardon the less than perfect artwork and the fact that they don’t include links to longer articles. I think you’ll get the point.

Michael Jackson Beer Hunter tweets

The first excerpt came from a story Jackson wrote for Slow magazine (from Slow Food) that no longer seems to be available online. The second from his last book. It stands nicely alone, but the first reminds us that context matters and some stories deserve more than 140 characters.

The essay titled “The Pub Door” first appeared in Slow, Slow Food’s journal. The Beer Hunter as beer expert appears only briefly, well into the story to provide a quick introduction to Brettanomyces, a so-called wild yeast that can add positive or negative qualities to a beer. “Today it is part of my job to taste beer professionally,” Jackson wrote. “A colleague will sometimes ask: ‘Do you get Brett in this one?” From a scientific viewpoint that conclusion might be sufficient.”

The story began with his mother picking up the pace each time they neared a pub in the town where they lived. “I was four years old,” he wrote. “My legs could scarcely keep up the pace. I felt as though my feet would leave the ground. Had I been in a cartoon, they would have done. I would have been dragged horizontally. I doubt my mother would not have noticed.”

He later asked her what people did in the pubs and she said only that she did not know. “Whatever was going on in there my mother seemed to deem worthy of Dante,” he wrote. “If it was that bad, it must be good, I concluded. She pulled me away, but it was too late. Every time a pub door opened, I had noticed a distinct aroma. I had smelled the whiff of wickedness.”

The first time he knowingly smelled Brett the aroma was exactly the same. He wrote: “I have not yet managed to summarize in a tasting note the images that are triggered when I smell Brett: neither the big picture, the rise and fall of British industrial might, nor the cameo, the alienation experienced by my mother.

“If I could distill her story and mine, they would not be experiences shared and understood by every reader. We each have our own repertoire of memories and emotions triggered by smells and flavors. The most personal I can hint at, but little more. The more general I hope stimulate the senses.”

He usually did.

Here are three more that illustrate what he might have done just fine tweeting:

* “Ales are a persecuted minority.”

* “It was a great night of drinking Gose, but I am not sure it did much for my sexual potency.”

* “Is alcohol good or bad? We have had it for thousands of years, and still don’t seem to know.”

At the end I am left wondering: Should a tweet leave you wanting more? Or should it stand on its own?

*****

To confuse me further, there was this in The Beer Nut’s contribution to The Session: “I’m a big fan of the microblogging platform and it has certainly had a huge impact on the beer scene, even though a lot of that is to the detriment of blogs.” Is that true? Or true some places, not others? Is it function of form or function? John has given me plenty to think about.