MONDAY BEER LINKS, MUSING 11.23.15
The Problem with “Craft”
[Via Beaumont Drinks]
What is an “honest” wine?
[Via Steve Heimoff]
The story of the week was “$1 Billion” or maybe just “B” — because the amount that Contellation Brands paid for Ballast Point Brewing was a bigger deal than another used-to-be-small brewery being acquired by a very large company. (Although whether a writer comments “x sells to y” or “x sells out to y” says as much about the commenter as the commentee.)
At All About Beer Jeff Alworth writes “fuller-flavor lagers and ales (what we used to call ‘craft beer’)” because in the magazine and at the website AAB favors letting the word beer stand on its own. I endorse that philosophy, but I also understand that “craft beer” can be a useful term, a point Stephen Beaumont makes quite well. Curiously, although we can blame the “C” word on America it is important to take a non-Americanized view of how it has become used elsewhere. Because he’s recently been to a lot more countries than you and I go ahead and trust Beaumont on this.
But as Steve Heimoff reminds us, semantics can be painful. I know what Ron Pattinson means when writes about honest beer, but I don’t want to start seeing the term used in just about any other context.
Golden Road Relationship Status: It’s Complicated (If you care).
Item 7. “Golden Road is pumping 25 million dollars into the city of Anaheim and will employ over 100 people.” Makes you think about the relationship between “local impact” and “local ownership.” [Via OCBeerBlog]
St. Louis Zoo proposes buying Grant’s Farm; Billy Busch makes competing offer.
Ulysses S. Grant, the Busch family, free beer, and a zoo. This story has it all. [Via St. Louis Post-Dispatch]
GEEK STUFF
Traditional malting in Morgedal.
[Via Larsblog]
Bright Brewer’s Yeast calls for beer ‘wish lists’ as it develops yeasts through selective breeding.
[Via Beverage Daily]
Watch an Electronic Tongue Taste Wine.
[Via Eater]
Sometimes when the “big picture” questions wear you down it is nice to curl up with a bit of technical stuff.
ON WRITING
Wine media and the internet: are we drowning in a sea of mediocrity?
[Via jamie goode’s wing blog]
Wine Needs Curmudgeons Now More Than Ever.
[Via Fermentation Wine Blog]
And to bring this week’s links full circle, Tom Wark writes: “Worrying about consolidation among the big wine brands makes no sense. And if you are a discerning wine drinker, you could care less. There are more wines and wine brands and wineries on the market today than ever before in the history of the world.”
Good Lord, Stan. If we are just going to “trust” people without looking to see if the idea really makes sense why read at all? At best it’s a rear guard action after the battle is lost. All that is left – apparently as of this month – is it means fuller flavour. What less will it means come the spring? I think the biggest problem writers face is the past investment made in the word as code given the current uncertainties.
Like it or not, the term has entered the vocabulary of drinkers around the world, and they think they know what it means.
I am fine with that – for better or worse. But the idea of trusting one person as to what it means for the whole world’s experience would either be a sad commentary on the state of the concept or the state of thinking about beer. I expect the world is familiar with “new and improved” too but it doesn’t mean its application has integrity or consistency. Plus it negates the need for Mr B to do the actual detailed explaining, a process which is most often quite delightful. Trust not lest ye be trusted.
I only meant that Beaumont has been getting around and he can testify that drinkers in a wide range of countries use the term “craft beer” and it has meaning to them. I understand it may be meaningless, or at least too ambiguous, to be meaningful to others.
I can’t speak to itinerary but just temporal reality. If you go to 50 craft beer fests around the world you’ll see the world as full of craft beer. What I liked about Mr B’s thoughts is how the word has devolved down to fuller flavour regardless of maker and maybe most every other characteristic. I disagree that this means it remains useful. But, and this is the trust part, I would be happy to have more detail to convince me to change my view. Without detail and left with only trust all we have is a slogan of sorts that might mean fifty things in fifty context – and likely does.
Ron Pattinson also used the phrase “polite beers.” Personally these 2 words together, used only once in his blog, have defined what I consider to be a measure of a brewer’s skill and what I like about a well crafted beer. Here is the quote from 2011:
“And as for a beer that keeps whallopping me over the head to get my attention, no thank you. I prefer more polite beers.”
I appreciate polite, but rowdy once in a while can be a pleasant change.
It’s true the term craft beer has become general term in popular culture. I was just reading a story in a newspaper about two friends getting together after a long absence and they met in a bar selling “craft beer” because they both enjoy that. The story had nothing to do with beer otherwise….
Terms change over time though, in a few years when almost all beer sold will be craft beer, the term will lose its raison d’etre and people will meet for a beer again.
One other point: a magazine like AAB uses terms specific to its function. It wants to appeal to a broad readership and doesn’t want understandably to use value terms in features and other news coverage, for one thing it might offend some advertisers. I agree with from their perspective, ditto with how a trade association might define craft brewery. But from the advised consumer’s standpoint, the term craft beer was always problematic and is even more so now.
There is only good beer, and considerations of brewery size or history are irrelevant as such to what people think is good beer. By the same token, what they think is subjective.
Gary
Gary – But size of brewery, localness of brewery, ownership, business practices, do matter to some people. A consumer doesn’t have to care, of course.
Agreed, Stan. I am in the group which excludes all considerations except on gastronomic lines (barring something unusual, e.g., if a brewery was associated with particularly egregious behavior of a social or legal kind, say).
Gary
A note about my online articles at AAB–they are basically unedited. Jon Page eyes them to see if any egregious errors leap off the page, but that’s it. I could say “craft beer” if I wanted to.
The reason I used that phrase is because I find that more and more the worlds are confusing. I’m honestly less and less sure I know what people are talking about. I know mass market lagers. After that …?
Will the beers that fit this bill:
“I suspect a brewpub in South Beach that served a line-up that tilted heavily in the direction of mass market lagers, had the streamlined, modernist design of the city, and which served interesting non-European cuisine would be quite a hit.”
be considered something other than mass market lagers?
Exactly! If some enterprising brewer did do that, on a ten barrel brewery, in the building where the beer was sold, would it be craft beer? I honestly have no idea. But I WOULD go there for a Miami-appropriate lager and ceviche before I’d go have a quad at Abbey.
You really need to get to New Ulm and have Schell’s Deer Brand at Turner Hall. I’m not sure how different a Minnesota-appropriate lager had to be from a Miami-appropriate one.
This is further supported by a number of small, “new generation” breweries in Canada which make products styled to the mass market. Some of them bill themselves as craft, and who is to say they are not given the ambiguities of the term? But this is what I meant when I stated the term is problematic for the informed beer drinker. Still, it has a rough and ready use and understanding, at least for now, which is enough I suppose to argue for its continuation.
To me, craft beer really means good beer, beer crafted well, no matter who makes it, when, or in what market.
Gary