Stan Hieronymus

A couple of weeks ago at Good Beer Hunting, a story about the Tyranny of the Tickers and the pressure Untappd ratings exert on how beer is made and sold included was a reminder of the mini-empire that a company called Next Glass is building.

Head to its website to see it is parent to Untappd, BeerAdvocate, Hop Culture, and Oznr. So “next glass,” that sort of makes sense. Those apps and sites can help you with that. But had you visited the website six years ago you would have seen this.

Next Glass 1.0, circa 2015, was something different. It was one of several drink recommendation apps that came and went about that time. Some got tagged as the “Pandora for beer.” For First Glass, that made sense because it took a scientific approach similar to Pandora when collecting data. Others were more like Spotify, that is using collaborative filtering. Netflix and Amazon are the best known services using that technology, which is based on the assumption that if two users enjoy overlapping sets of movies or books their tastes are probably similar.

In contrast, feature-based systems begin by measuring specific attributes of songs (or beers). Pandora created the Music Genome Project and employs musicians to catalog key elements of every song in its database.

Next Glass mapped the chemical makeup of individual beers, forgoing any effort to quantify a beer based on its descriptive characteristics. The app used an algorithm to blend the attributes of the beer in question with what it knew about each consumer and assigned a number predicting how much the consumer would like that beer.

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A mural in Louisville commemorates Phoenix Hill Brewery & Park. The brewery made plenty of lagers and also Phoenix Komon Beer.

Recall that when Michael Jackson wrote “The World Guide to Beer” in 1977 he listed 23 classic beer styles. The Brewers Association added four more to its already somewhat lengthier style guidelines Tuesday.

Perhaps Kentucky Common was the veterans committee’s choice.

I wrote quite a bit about this in “Brewing Local” (you should buy a copy) and also here in the blog. So I will keep this brief.

The beer was so specific to a place it could have been called Louisville Common rather than Kentucky Common. In 1909, a glowing description appeared in The Louisville Anzieger, a German-language newspaper. The translation:

“Beer has conquered the world. But one thinks . . . that this refers to lager beer. In Louisville, however, the beer drinker can enjoy double pleasure, as they can along with the lager beer enjoy the ‘common beer,’ a really great and increasingly popular product. It is a healthful, light, pleasant drink that people in other large American cities are for the most part unaware of. Perhaps its popularity, which it has always enjoyed here, would not be as great if, with improved brewing methods, better stuff had not become available.”

To this I’ll add something from Dibbs Harting, a homebrewer who was central to getting the history of Kentucky Common right, told me in 2015.

“I’m sure it was a fabulous bucket (growler) beer,”