In their monthly newsletter (available at Substack), Boak & Bailey ask, “Are you feeling Christmassy yet?” I am, and I am also ready to be done with beer-related lists and stories about Guinness and “splitting the G.” At some point, and it has passed, I see no reason to share them. Not today, and not next week. This will be the last collection of links in 2024. See you January 6, 2025.

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NEWSWORTHY

– Bart Watson Appointed as President and CEO of the Brewers Association. That’s the news, and this link includes a take on the news.

To this I will add that, by chance, an anecdote from 2015 I chose to include in a story about Watson that seems relevant today. It was part of Beer Advocate magazine’s regular “Will Work for Beer” series, and began . . .

“Bart Watson really does think this way. At 3:59 p.m. on Sept. 10, he tweeted: ‘Flight attendant says flight from SFO to Sacramento is 13 minutes. It’s 37 degrees warmer there. That’s almost +3 degrees per minute.’

“Forty-two minutes later he followed up: ‘The flight took 17m40s – There must have been some serious headwinds.’”

Even then, it seemed as if he was preparing for the challenge accepted last week.

– RateBeer will cease operations as of February 1, 2025. Or not. More than a hundred replies follow, so you are to free to choose what you think may happen Feb. 1.

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QUOTE OF THE WEEK

“I will say that for all of the sensory experience, recipe development, and other little skills I’m working on, there are some fundamental pieces – tools in the toolbox – that I still need. Some of that will come with more time, like rebuilding a heat exchanger. What I’m looking for is the bones, the raw physics and chemistry of brewing. It’s like, as a musician I can know chords and scales, and then I can learn theory that increases my capacity to create what I want. Same thing.”

          — Aaron Brussat

From Q & A with Glen Hay Falconer Foundation 2024 Brewing Scholarship recipient Aaron Brussat

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YOU MIGHT ALSO ENJOY

– The Nottinghamshire pubs combating loneliness and encouraging the art of conversation. “Pubs should be and often are the heart of the community. It’s where everyone is welcome. It’s where people who are struggling and are lonely can go and find friendship and companionship.”

– Observations from a dive bar. To which I will add two words, “third place.”

– Humphrey’s world: how the Samuel Smith beer baron built Britain’s strangest pub chain. A very long and very strange story impossible to summarize in a few words. But the part about villages that are left without a single pub is pretty sad.

– London – A Small Cask Snapshot. Might as well throw in a visit to a Samuel Smith pub.

– Texas brewery sells out of $300 bottles of beer. First, a question: How many bottles did they sell? Second, an observation: the bottles are 6-liters, so that works out to $25 for a half liter. Not cheap, but after reading this story I visited a store down the road that had more than a dozen 500 ml bottles selling for more. Third, this story oozes with the gushiness (“a rich and delightful barrel-aged masterpiece’) I think Alan McLeod would enjoy.

– The Colour of Vienna Lager: Somebody Got It Right. Fair warning, this is about style guidelines.

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“Well, the first shot I got was in a dynamite truck
The driver kept me telling me his bad luck
As we swerved around the curves I began to shout
I said, hey-ey mister would you let me out?
I had my hopes up high, I never thought that I
Would ever wonder why I ever said good bye
I had my hopes up high

– Joe Ely, “I Had My Hopes Up High” (click to listen)

Another week of beer news and conjecture. Another week of high hopes and dashed hopes.

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QUOTE OF THE WEEK

“Even if you have really incredible beer and an incredible space and an incredible community, it’s still very challenging to operate during this time,” she said.

          — Massachusetts Brewers Guild executive director Katie Stinchon
From Why so many Mass. breweries are closing (and what you can do about it)

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LEDE OF THE WEEK

One Christmas Eve in the late 19th century, the family on the Hovland farm in Hardanger, Norway, was sitting down for a festive dinner. The food was on the table, the candles were lit, and the big wooden mug was full of beer.

Then, suddenly, enormous hands appeared between the logs from which their house was built, tilting one side of the house into the air. In the gap between the logs, they could see giant eyes staring at them, glittering in the candlelight.

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Early on in this business story about Tilray brands, Dave Infante mentions a third wave of craft beer. I understand. Sales of beer from non-mega breweries surged into the late 90s, backed off, surged again into the teens, and now the hunt is on, as Infante writes, for a new story.

Yes, but, let’s talk about generations rather than waves. How old were you when Sierra Nevada Brewing began selling beer? Dogfish Head? Creature Comforts? Or, put another way, how old was Great Lakes Brewing when Off Color Brewing opened? It’s been more than 18 years since Dogfish Head founder Sam Calagione and four like-minded brewers traveled to and around Belgium, sharing their beers.

Each of them began their brewing careers between 1993 and 1996. When they returned I asked them if Anchor Brewing Sierra Nevada Brewing represented the first generation of something new, what generation did they think they were part of. The answers:

Adam Avery, Avery Brewing: “I’d say I was second generation when I started out. Hog Heaven (barley wine first brewed in 1997) really put us on the map, but our sales were still declining between 1998 and 2000. Then we made The Reverend for the first time, we started doing the series of threes (all extreme beers) and now we’ve got 19 beers we’re brewing at least once a year, third generation stuff.”

Tomme Arthur, Lost Abbey Brewing: “I’ve been at this for 10 years now and I have always considered myself to be one of the first third generation guys. I say this because I am very comfortable in my surroundings; I know a ton of the second-generation guys very well (Dick Cantwell, Fal Allen, Phil Markowski, Garrett Oliver, el al.). I believe . . . they would all view me as a younger version of them. So, third generation it is.”

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We left home early last week and are still traveling. The photo above was taken at Structures Brewing in Bellingham, Washington, where we had an excellent lunch and outstanding beers in their waterside restaurant. The tap handles are made of cattle bones.

Things seemed quiet in the beerblogosphere, giving me an excuse to link to this from The History of the Web. Beyond reminding us of the distinction between “free beer” and “freedom of speech” there is a call action.

“Put something on the web. And do it for free.

“This will require, first and foremost, your time. That is no small ask, time is the most valuable thing we have. But I can tell you one thing that’s become readily apparent to me in my decade of research of the web. It is only through people’s time that we’ve gotten to where we are.

“Here’s the thing about you. You know something nobody else does. You have a perspective that nobody else does. Information doesn’t have to just be information, it can be whatever you want it to be. Start a blog. Post an art project. Write a poem. Create a fan page. Contribute to a Wikipedia article you know something about. These little actions, these little contributions, are the best way we have to claw back to a truly free web.”

To this I will add a couple of quotes from “The Freaks Come Out to Write: The Definitive History of the Village Voice, the Radical Paper that Changed American Culture.”

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Bayden Rawlinson on the deck at Fork & Brewer (See Beer Name of the Week below)

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QUOTES OF THE WEEK

“Malting is about getting the barley to do what it wants to do in the field, but on our terms.”

          — Will Durrant, Bairds Malt
From Some Kind of Wizardry — Malting, Climate and the Future of Barley at Baird’s Malt

*****

People still “miss the good old days of being in a cowboy town where they’re used to having a $5 pint.”

          — Jaime Torres, taproom manager at Silva Brewing
From Why a Famed California Brewery is Going Under

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LEDE OF THE WEEK

I remember the first time I went to Banana Jam Café. It was 2011 and we were broke – a freelance writer and a Master’s student saving for a wedding. We used to walk straight past the bright yellow façade of the Kenilworth-based Caribbean restaurant to drink pints of Castle Lager for R12.50 in Hobnobs, the sports pub next door. Then one day we spotted a sign outside Banana Jam advertising free craft beer tastings.

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