beers of conviction

Monday beer briefing: worthiness, consolidation and Baas Becking

04.08.19, BEER AND WINE LINKS, MUSING

Bill Wesselink, Dovetail Brewery
I spent about 21 hours during two days midweek at Dovetail Brewery in Chicago. It was quite noisy as times — I understood that the brewery sat next to the city’s Brown Line, but I didn’t know it had built a nest between two train tracks. Yet, when trains aren’t running it can be flat out quiet, particularly in the coolship room, looking at wort sometimes produced using decoction, and other times with a turbid mash. The turbid mash itself is less peaceful; co-founder Bill Wesselink raised an ugly looking blister doing some of the mixing by hand. Not until I was catching up Friday did I realize what a noisy week I had happily missed much of, one with many stories that intersected. So a different format today, and here goes . . .

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When, and why, Oberon became Oberon

Bell's Solsun - the beer that became Oberon

A quick quiz. What was the original name of Bell’s Oberon?

I thought of this for two reasons. Second, Twitter reminded us that next Monday is Oberon Day.

First, last week Good Beer Hunting reminded us that Sol and Sol Chelada are a big deal.

And I was left remembering that Oberon was once called Solsun. I’ve posted the whole story in this space before, so I won’t again (although I really like the photo at the bottom of license plates at the Eccentric Cafe).

Flagship beers and an enduring challenge

New Belgium Brewing - Asheville

Seven years after New Belgium began selling beer in North Carolina it opened a second brewery in Asheville.

On March 2, 2009, New Belgium Brewing began selling beer in North Carolina. As the company has since 2006, when it began selling beer west of the Mississippi and started in Illinois, it offered three brands in 22-ounce bottles — Fat Tire Amber Ale, 1554 Black Lager and Mothership Wit. Two weeks later they launched the same three brands on draft, following with six-packs about a month later.

We were in North Carolina at the time and visited a package store March 3. Neat stacks of 1554 and Mothership Wit remained piled as high as an elephant’s eye. The Fat Tire was gone.

That’s how a flagship beer leads a brewery into a new market.

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Lingering matters

foam
The hurricane party’s windin’ down
and we’re all waitin’ for the end
And I don’t want another drink,
I only want that last one again

– James McMurtry, Hurricane Party

Revisiting long established flagships tastes of antiquity, success, failure, unfulfilled dreams of resurrection, and ultimately nostalgia. A place in time to momentarily revisit if only to remind you how far you’ve come but rarely a place to linger long.

-Andy Crouch, on Twitter

Flagship February#FlagshipFebruary has begun. The website is live, listing participating locations and various promotions. Stephen Beaumont has written about Samuel Adams Boston Lager, the first of daily essays. I’ll be contributing words about a specific beer later in the month. (Yes, I know what it is. But I took a blood oath, let Jay Brooks stick a needle in my finger and everything, to keep it to myself.)

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Accept no substitute: These are not regular Monday beer links

I am flattered that Alan McLeod misses the Monday links and musing sometimes posted here, but I’m not inclined to resume weekly posts until I am certain they will be weekly. That might be December. But a few things I’ve read recently have me asking myself questions, and because here they are on a Monday it makes sense to include a few links.

Do breweries/wineries secretly value paying for writers to visit?
Alice Feiring began an interesting Twitter thread when she wrote, “I am troubled by the barrage social media of colleagues on cushy press trips.” Yep, we’ve seen that discussion within the context of beer writing many times on Twitter. But what struck me was this in the midst of the discussion. Sumita Sarma wrote, “Unless a press trip is paid for may by wineries or PR, you are never taken seriously as a writer.” Huh? Could this be true? Fortunately, in my experience it is not. But maybe I’ve been doing something wrong.

Is the IPA you just rated 4.5 really better than Blind Pig?
So why might ratings on everything from wine to products on Amazon products improve over time? According to Harvard Business Review: “The findings suggest that biased evaluations are the result of a misattribution process: If something feels easier to evaluate, people believe that it must actually be better. In other words, they misattribute their own feelings about evaluation (it feels easier to make an evaluation) onto their assessment of the actual merits (this thing must deserve a higher rating).” Just something to think about when flipping through your personal Untappd ratings or when to comparing them to others.

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