Stan Hieronymus

Public service announcement for DDH fiends: Less may still be more

This is your brain on hops

This is your brain on hops. I have no idea what a mouse’s brain would look like.

Welcome to my biannual reminder that less may be more, in this case referring to compounds that create beer aroma.

Some basics
Olfactory receptors are buried in the two patches of yellowish mucous membrane called the olfactory epithelium. Humans have about 20 million receptors, covering the epithelium of both our right and left nostrils. The first stop a collection of molecules otherwise known as an odor makes on the way to the brain, and to being identified as a particular aroma, is in the receptors. Once activated, neurons transmit signals to the olfactory bulb of the brain, which relays those signals to the olfactory cortex. Olfactory information is sent from there to a number of other brain areas, including higher cortical areas thought to be involved in odor discrimination and deep limbic areas. Odor sensation becomes olfactory perception.

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Covid neither neighborhood nor innovation friendly

Boak & Bailey’s news and nuggets Saturday served as a reminder that UK beer drinkers are stuck in a grim cycle. My Twitter and Instagram feeds, full of snaps of people gathered with friends (but not too many friends) at bars and brewery tasting rooms, suggest things are better here. Has the worst really past? There are reasons to believe it hasn’t.

Story No. 1 from the Wall Street Journal this past weekend: “McDonald’s, Chipotle and Domino’s Are Booming During Coronavirus While Your Neighborhood Restaurant Struggles.” The subhead: “A health crisis is creating a divide in the restaurant world. Big, well-capitalized chains are thriving while small independents struggle to keep their kitchens open.”

Story No. 2: “Covid Is Crushing Small Businesses. That’s Bad News for American Innovation.”

(These stories are behind the Journal’s paywall. I tracked them down in print, which is one more thing that’s not as easy as it was at the beginning of the year.)

Restaurants come and go. About 60,000 open in an average year, according to the National Restaurant Association, and 50,000 close. But this year it will be much worse. The association predicts 100,000 restaurants will close during 2020. Employment at restaurants and bars has dropped by 2.3 million jobs from a total of more than 12 million before the pandemic, according to the Labor Department.

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Looking ahead, and through the rear view mirror

Cold Beer

One read, two listens. My recommendations for this weekend.

Evan Rail writes, “If a big part of craft brewing is innovation, its flip side is tradition, at least part of which has meant the revival of extinct, historical styles. And to be honest, we’re starting to run out of those.”

He adds, in an essay titled “The Last Beer Style,” that, “If we keep resuscitating these previously extinct historic beer styles, we will run out of them—unless, of course, some contemporary beer styles also disappear along the way. It’s not hard to foresee the extinction of Amber Ale, Brown Ale or even Black IPA.”

That provides context for something Mike Karnowski told Jamie Bogner on the Craft Beer & Brewing Podcast. “How many of the BJCP styles are actually brewed commercially by brewers? It’s almost nostalgic to think of an Amber Ale.”

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But, can anybody ‘own’ a yeast culture?

Kveik

The preservation of cultures can be tricky.

Claire Bullen wrote about Voss region in Norway, Vossaøl, farmhouse brewing, kviek and ultimately cultural preservation last week at Good Beer Hunting. I’m going to quote a couple of paragraphs, but context is important, so start by reading the whole thing. It is long. I’ll wait.

The discussion about kveik turns to acknowledging, even rewarding, “the original owner” of an individual strain, and she writes:

“‘Now we have rediscovered the kveik and then some companies […] start taking out a yeast type and isolating it and basically taking the kveik apart. So what we’re trying to do is preserve the kveik culture as it is, the asset it has been for centuries,’ said Arne Bøhmer, CTO of the Kveik Yeastery, during a recent conference call.

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More than one kind of thoroughly modern pilsner

Pilsner: How the Beer of Kings Changed the WorldA couple of days ago, Jim Vorel went on a bit about how he was troubled to find “‘IPA-ification’ creeping into one of the greatest lager styles of all: Pilsner.”

Several Twitter threads followed, including this one (scroll up and down to catch the whole discussion). In it, David Berg at August Schell Brewing has a specific request, “Define Pilsner.”

Coincidentally, Thursday the European Beer Consumers Union posted “the most comprehensive guide to the growing range of beer styles found across Europe and beyond – their origins, differences and how to spot the best.” Tim Webb is the lead author and curator.

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