beers of conviction

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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While waiting for numbers from @BrewersStats

If you take the time to work through all the comments that followed Andy Crouch’s suggestion (click on the bird) you might not make it back here, but go look anyway.

As happens on Twitter, different threads developed and more questions came up. Bart Watson will be answering some them soon with what has turned into an annual crunching of numbers. I’ll add the link here. Meanwhile, his reports from 2017, 2016, 2015, and 2014. Lots of fun stuff, including the fact that he calculates expected medals versus actual medals won based on the difficulty of categories entered.

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Gose: Balancing tradition and innovation

Stephen Beaumont tweet

I was already thinking about the speed at which beer seems to be barreling ahead when this tweet from Stephen Beaumont showed up in my Twitter feed early (he’s in Italy) yesterday. The reason being that I’ve just finished reading Fal Allen’s Gose: Brewing a Classic German Beer For The Modern Era. Allen had never heard of the style months before Anderson Valley Brewing made its first one in July 2013. Now he’s written a book about it that fills 221 pages.

Gose: Brewing A Classic German Beer For the Modern EraThat he knew nothing of it is a bit humbling, given that it one of the “wheat beers from the past” I wrote about in Brewing With Wheat, which was published in 2010. Later that year I provided a “how to” guide on how to brew a gose for The New Brewer, the magazine for members of the Brewers Association. The point was that gose was a oddity. Now it is everywhere and includes beers that go well beyond your basic sour German ale with a bit of salt and coriander.

This allows Allen to dig into the history of the beer — yes, I’m jealous — while, as the title suggests, also placing it in a modern context. Are you drinking gose, and a lot of people are, and want to know all about it? This is a book for you. Want to learn everything about how to brew it from somebody who is really good at it. Again, the book for you.

One example. Goslar, where there style originated, was once a brewing center, with 300 breweries in 1500. As Allen writes, the gose origin story “has it that the salinity of gose once came from the mineral-laden water of the Gose river.” Later, as beers from Goslar gained in popularity other brewers added salt to emulate their character.

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