place/local/ingredients/sensory

Brewing Industry Guide has posted something I wrote about hop terroir, available now for subscribers and later in print.

There are plenty of reasons why terroir is real, many of them science-based. That’s the core of this particular story.

There’s another aspect of the terroir conversation.

Exhibit A, from “Thirsty Work,” written by Michael Jackson for Slow magazine (the defunct magazine for the Slow Food movement) in 2002.

“Where drinks are grown, they seem a central element of life. When they are uprooted, they can lose context. It was in Britain that a combination of the Protestant work ethic and the world’s first industrial revolution created mass production, placing an ever-increasing distance between the cultivation of raw materials, the brewing of beer, and its consumption. In Britain, there is still a bruised fissure between country and town. The suddenness and brutality of the industrial revolution ripped food and drink from the soil, to the detriment of both.”

Exhibit B, from Sam Calagione’s keynote speech at the 2006 Craft Brewers Conference:

“Today wine is made all over the world but the magic and mystery of quality wine always seems to come down to place. The experts are always claiming that great wine can only be produced in exclusive places and in tiny quantities. They each preach the gospel of terroir. Holy land. Today there are almost 500 appellations, or micro-growing-regions in France alone. And there are numerous distinct terroirs within each of these appellations. It sounds confusing because it is. Divide and conquer. If you can’t blind them with science, blind them with geography. Je parl francais en peu and I’m pretty sure the translated definition of terroir is dirt. The wine world has wrapped this one word with mighty voodoo powers and created a cult of exclusivity around it.

“Breweries have terroir as well. But instead of revolving around a patch of land, ours are centered on a group of people. We operate our business on a human scale and with a human face. Today, between the constant media-blitz of advertising and marketing and the breakneck pace of production and distribution, it can be easy to overlook the passion of the person selling and that of the person buying. But it’s this shared human passion that has always fueled commerce; this opportunity to create extraordinary circumstances for the production and procurement of something new, exciting and worthwhile.”

A couple of weeks ago at Good Beer Hunting, a story about the Tyranny of the Tickers and the pressure Untappd ratings exert on how beer is made and sold included was a reminder of the mini-empire that a company called Next Glass is building.

Head to its website to see it is parent to Untappd, BeerAdvocate, Hop Culture, and Oznr. So “next glass,” that sort of makes sense. Those apps and sites can help you with that. But had you visited the website six years ago you would have seen this.

Next Glass 1.0, circa 2015, was something different. It was one of several drink recommendation apps that came and went about that time. Some got tagged as the “Pandora for beer.” For First Glass, that made sense because it took a scientific approach similar to Pandora when collecting data. Others were more like Spotify, that is using collaborative filtering. Netflix and Amazon are the best known services using that technology, which is based on the assumption that if two users enjoy overlapping sets of movies or books their tastes are probably similar.

In contrast, feature-based systems begin by measuring specific attributes of songs (or beers). Pandora created the Music Genome Project and employs musicians to catalog key elements of every song in its database.

Next Glass mapped the chemical makeup of individual beers, forgoing any effort to quantify a beer based on its descriptive characteristics. The app used an algorithm to blend the attributes of the beer in question with what it knew about each consumer and assigned a number predicting how much the consumer would like that beer.

Read more

A mural in Louisville commemorates Phoenix Hill Brewery & Park. The brewery made plenty of lagers and also Phoenix Komon Beer.

Recall that when Michael Jackson wrote “The World Guide to Beer” in 1977 he listed 23 classic beer styles. The Brewers Association added four more to its already somewhat lengthier style guidelines Tuesday.

Perhaps Kentucky Common was the veterans committee’s choice.

I wrote quite a bit about this in “Brewing Local” (you should buy a copy) and also here in the blog. So I will keep this brief.

The beer was so specific to a place it could have been called Louisville Common rather than Kentucky Common. In 1909, a glowing description appeared in The Louisville Anzieger, a German-language newspaper. The translation:

“Beer has conquered the world. But one thinks . . . that this refers to lager beer. In Louisville, however, the beer drinker can enjoy double pleasure, as they can along with the lager beer enjoy the ‘common beer,’ a really great and increasingly popular product. It is a healthful, light, pleasant drink that people in other large American cities are for the most part unaware of. Perhaps its popularity, which it has always enjoyed here, would not be as great if, with improved brewing methods, better stuff had not become available.”

To this I’ll add something from Dibbs Harting, a homebrewer who was central to getting the history of Kentucky Common right, told me in 2015.

“I’m sure it was a fabulous bucket (growler) beer,”