Stan Hieronymus

MONDAY BEER & WINE LINKS, MUSING 10.02.17

Administrative note: There will be no more weekly links here until November. As in July, because of travel there simply won’t be time to collect and organize them.

– Hop harvest is not over everywhere yet, and even after the last bines are stripped of cones there is plenty to be done on farms and in processing plants. So more like the end of a chapter than the whole story.

East Kent Hop Klaxon: harvest is now complete, and a vintage. pic.twitter.com/yqSAsbtz6R

— Eddie Gadd (@gaedd) September 29, 2017

– Dave Berg at August Schell Co. digs deep into the history of brewing with adjuncts, inspiring Brian Alberts to expand the conversation. If you want to know even more about the history and why American brewers came to use adjuncts then I recommend the third chapter of Brewing Local (full disclosure – I wrote the book). How that history relates to what we call traditional is at the center of both of these posts.

– And defining what is traditional can lead to war.

– Wait. You can buy a brewery in Denver for $225,000? Could it double as an Airbnb? Appears a several Colorado breweries are available for the right price.

– On the other hand, you can open one in New Orleans with $80,000. Of course, “We have to grow, because we’re killing ourselves,” says Courtyard Brewery founder Scott Wood. “There’s just too much work for how much money we make.”

– How Gose got salty. Not exactly definitive, but a starting place.

– And the question I ask myself every day (and should address here more often). What does it mean to “drink locally”?

WINE/BEER

– Can the wine industry replicate the success breweries have had getting consumers to line up for special releases?

– The Evolution of American Oak.

FROM TWITTER

The Lithuanians are ready for the festival pic.twitter.com/GIk9CRBIRJ

— Lars Marius Garshol (@larsga) September 29, 2017

MONDAY BEER & WINE LINKS, MUSING 09.25.17

– I expect that this already fascinating conversation with the co-founders of Scofflaw Brewing (yeah, the middle finger guys) may be equally fascinating to look back on in one, three, maybe five, years.

– In explaining the evolution of buyouts Jeff Alworth concludes that “in buying minority stakes in Redhook and Widmer, AB got a front row seat at the craft show.” That would be true, but I’d suggest what they learned after buying Goose Island had a greater impact. It is important to remember AB InBev bought GI after InBev took over AB, bringing with it quite a bit of, shall we say, acquisition history. AB InBev acquired Goose Island in March of 2011 and it was almost three years before it bought Blue Point Brewing, then 10 Barrel Brewing, Elysian Brewing, and so on.

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MONDAY BEER & WINE LINKS, MUSING 09.18.17

Changing things up (again), simply a list of good reading, or at least what I’ve been reading. Well, a few thoughts.

– The Seven Ages of Beer Geek? and Jeff Alworth’s take on it at Beervana.

– How Ale Sharpton and Dennis Malcolm Byron fit inside the same hat.

– Friend or foe? Breweries’ perspectives on legal marijuana.

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MONDAY BEER & WINE LINKS, AND THE QUESTIONS THEY PROVOKE 09.11.17

Exhibit 1: Winemaker magazine, December 1971
[Via Boak & Bailey’s Beer Blog]
Flattery Will No Doubt Get You Any Number Of Places.
[Via A Good Beer Blog]
What did brewers know and when did they know it? How do you measure influence?

After High End Layoffs, AB InBev to “No Longer Focus on Brewery Acquisitions.”
[Via Paste]
“We continue to lurch forward into a new age of beer, wherein the complicated aspect of ownership and ‘independence’ will be a major point of debate and argument.” But will it change the beers themselves?

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