beers of conviction

Before the second edition of “The Beer Bible” reached store shelves, showed up on electronic tablets or arrived wherever people are reading books these days, Jeff Alworth wrote that national tradition is beer’s Rosetta Stone. Take the time to read his post before moving on.

His book offers a description of the American, German and other traditions that parallel the excerpt about British tradition. Buy the book to read them, but for now a few sentences from his blog post:

The American tradition, which like so many others was a riff on an older one, involves the use of unique ingredients (American hops) and techniques (all the weird ways Americans use them). The hoppy ales developed here are made unlike any beers before them, and certainly taste like nothing brewed in the last 12,000 years. And, like monumentally successful beers of earlier eras—London porter, pilsner, Bavarian lager—they are now traveling around the world and getting reinterpreted in other countries where local brewers will twist and distort them as their own cultures intervene.

It is true that many brewers in the United States and elsewhere are doing this. But it is true that even more are doing something else, and not just beers based on their own longtime national tradition. They are making beers like ones that originated in the United States almost 150 years ago and became globally dominant. Before getting to that . . .

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Monday I wondered about the difference between selling and selling out.

Today, there is a bit of news about Little Lion World Beverages buying Bell’s Brewery. Or as a Kalamazoo radio station put it, “Kalamazoo’s Bell’s Brewery to merge with Colorado-based New Belgium Brewing.”

I do not have great insight into “what does this mean?” Clearly, much will be made of it. Good Beer Hunting’s story points out that Bell’s Facebook page indicates all of its locations will be closed today (Nov. 10) and tomorrow to allow staff to “reflect on the past year and talk about what’s ahead.” Keeping it simple, it looks more like selling to me than selling out.

Expect to read many stories in the next few days about how the small brewery business was different when Larry Bell (pictured above at the brewery in 1994) and others were getting started. More than one will involve post-GABF parties and bathtubs.

Instead, on a personal note, when our family was traveling the country in an RV in 2008 and 2009 we slept in the parking lot of Bell’s production brewery outside of Kalamazoo. I might have stayed up late making phone calls that began, “Guess where we are.”

It seems Twitter has a new algorithm designed to show me every photo posted of Sierra Nevada Celebration Ale. A week or so ago those were often followed by comments from others who seemed to be suffering FOMO because the beer was not yet in their market. This was still October. Were they really worried there would be a Celebration shortage?

This isn’t 1995. Sierra Nevada Brewing makes five times more beer annually than in 1995, with capacity to produce even more. Because priority No. 1 was always to fulfill demand for Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, in 1995 the brewery decided to produce only 35 percent of the Celebration they’d need to “satisfy everybody,” and did not ship it east of the Rockies.

Fans took extreme measures to get some. Ken Fichera, a Brooklyn accountant, used his frequent flyer miles to fly from JFK International Airport to San Francisco and back in the same day to pick up four cases of Celebration. (You remember when we all could just wander onto a plane with a case of beer and put it in the overhead bin, right?)

And when beer drinkers in California learned that only 140 barrels of Bigfoot Barleywine-Style Ale would be brewed in 1996, compared to 11,000 in 1995, they were on the road.

Ken Papai and Charlie Gow, two Bay Area residents, made two road trips to Chicago to buy Bigfoot. In the first, they formed a three-car caravan with Dan Brown. “Dan couldn’t wait,” Papai said, and as a result, Brown was pulled over by a state police officer, although he didn’t receive a ticket. Two weeks later, Papai and Gow realized they needed more beer — most of it was earmarked for friends across the country — and headed north again, this time in the same car.

After they filled the car with beer and had a few pints at the pub, they tried to take a shortcut during the 200-mile drive home, missed a turned and ended up stuck in the mud in a wildlife preserve. (Papai’s longer version of this story was quite entertaining, but the tl;dr version is that Gow passed a sobriety test, and the car was towed from the mud.)