beers of conviction

Make wort, CIP, repeat. #brewerylife

Last week, Evan Rail tweeted a link to a New York Times story about “The Twilight of the Imperial Chef.”

Rail wrote:

Great piece arguing against elevating celebrity chefs, recognizing that many people make restaurants great.

We’ve been saying the same thing about craft beer for years.

Breweries are *lots* of people. Delivery folks. Taproom workers. Keg cleaners.

In our culture we have a tendency to elevate & make heroes of individuals.

But our favorite breweries include more folks than just Sam, Garrett, Tomme, Evin or Yvan. (And look: you know which breweries I mean.)

These are teams. Groups. Real people. Let’s do right by them.”

Consider how Tejal Rao sets the table in the Times story:

For decades, the chef has been cast as the star at the center of the kitchen. In the same way the auteur theory in film frames the director as the author of a movie’s creative vision, the chef has been considered entirely responsible for the restaurant’s success. Everyone else — line cooks, servers, dishwashers, even diners — is background, there to support that vision.”

This is one of several stories recently about “monsters in the kitchen.” I don’t think anybody is suggesting that is going on within breweries. (On the restaurant side of brewery operations, that might be another matter.)

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Black is Beautiful beer: Where might it lead?

One down, 1,036 (as of Friday morning) to go. I hope they are as good as Arches Brewing version of the Black is Beautiful beer.

I will spare you a photo of my hand holding a can, perhaps pouring the beer into a glass. Instead, take a look at two tableaus posted on Instagram to appreciate the joy the beer has inspired.

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The Session: Quarantine edition

Being There

I like to watch.

Daria and I spent much of July 3, 1995, at Seaside Heights, N.J., on the beach and on the boardwalk. On the way back to Daria’s mom’s house we stopped at Antones in Cranford. It was (was being the operative term, because it was sold in 2008 and converted into an Irish theme pub) a tavern with a wide range of beer and frequented by people who lived and worked nearby.

The regulars played NTN (trivia) and we once saw a couple in a booth picking out wedding invitations. On this pre-holiday Monday these regulars filled almost every stool at the horseshoe bar. They were watching the 6 o’clock news and the weatherman was warning viewers of the danger of sunburn under clear Fourth of July skies.

“What’s UV-9?” one drinker asked.

“It means I have to wear my sunglasses in here tomorrow,” another answered.

Three years ago, I spent a couple of hours in Riley’s Pub, a St. Louis neighborhood establishment, taking notes for a gathering of The Session hosted by Boak & Bailey, scribbling down observations, speaking nary a word other than to order beer.

It’s what I do. I miss it.

The SessionWe said goodbye to The Session a year ago December, but Alistair Reece has summoned us for a special Quarantine Edition. He poses several questions, including “what has become your new drinking normal?”

Normal, what a concept. We live in Atlanta, Georgia — Georgia undoubtedly being the seven letters your eyes focus on. Things are not going to end well for many people in this state. That doesn’t mean everybody has to act stupidly. Most restaurants and brewery taprooms in Atlanta chose not to reopen at this time. Monday Night Brewing shared the results of a poll that indicated that three quarters of beer drinkers would not consider heading to a taproom before June.

Shadows on a wallFor Daria and I, the old normal on a Friday was to eat and drink at a locally owned restaurant, quite possibly a brewpub or taproom. The last time we did that eight weeks ago we had dinner and beer at Best End Brewing, then stopped at nearby ASW Distillery for an after dinner drink.

The windows there look out on the fire pits at Monday Night Garage, one of two brewery taprooms flanking the distillery. We watched people come and go, some with children who dashed happily about outdoors. We saw animated conversations, although we couldn’t hear what was being said (eavesdropping makes observing better). It was a good normal.

This Friday, as we have every Friday since, we’ll continue to eat local and drink local. I will walk to Fox Bros. Bar-B-Q to pick up dinner and on to Wrecking Bar Brewpub, which recently canned a pilsner made with hops from the Seitz Farm in Germany. We’ll dine on our back deck, listen to music (as well as the occasional train rumbling by, though MARTA is running less often now) and watch the shadows track across the bricks on a neighbor’s house.

The new normal is also a good normal, but I’m ready for another normal. One that looks more like the old normal.

How much do ‘we’ need to know about beer history?

Last week, Jeff Alworth struck a chord when he posted a list of “five breweries every serious beer fan should visit.” Lots of interest on Twitter and Facebook. No surprise, I agree that, “Even if you’re just into the standard American craft lineup, your appreciation for those beers will deepen if you visit the breweries that inspired them.”

This got a little more complicated for me: “An insularity is settling in among American craft beer fans, and it is cutting them off from the roots of their own tradition.” I agree that appreciating tradition enriches us. But I don’t know that today’s drinkers are any more insular than drinkers have always been.

That’s just an aside. Because the post turned out to be a prelude to a family of questions.

By chance, the next day on the Music Exists podcast Chris Ryan and Chuck Klosterman discussed, “How much do you really need to know about music history?” Not really all that timely because they were talking about the December dustup that began when Jimmy Kimmell asked Billie Eilish to name any member Van Halen.

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Has hard seltzer given beer the ‘Cross Road Blues?’

Standin’ at the crossroad, baby, risin’ sun goin’ down
Standin’ at the crossroad, baby, eee-eee, risin’ sun goin’ down
I believe to my soul, now, poor Bob is sinkin’ down

– From “Cross Road Blues” by Robert Johnson

Lew Bryson, bless his booming laugh, has written about the soul of beer. In the first years I posted at Appellation Beer the tagline here read, “In search of the soul of beer.” I had to lean on the Wayback Machine to find a copy of the old logo.

Appellation Beer 2007 logo

I changed the tag to “celebrating beer from a place” because I thought it would result in fewer questions like “why appellation?” Also, a lengthy discussion here sometime later documents the sort of trouble a blogger can get into suggesting some beers might have soul and others could be soulless.

Anyway, Bryson writes, “Those pioneering beers were great because of the heart and soul of the people who made them. I don’t want to see the soul go away. I don’t think that the beer world as we know it today could survive that.”

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