place/local/ingredients/sensory

TWTBWTW*: Novelty, beta projects & consistent hitmakers

* That Was The Beer Week That Was (TWTBWTW) will be on hiatus until May 16.

Goschie Farms (known for hops)

Feel free to compare and contrast.

NOVELTY & CREATIVITY
The Novelty Trap

We have a creativity problem

What separates Blind Melon from Shania Twain?

My comment two weeks ago about Lew Bryson’s “Stop Drinking New Beers All The Time” post stands.

Outer Range Brewing makes beer about 60 miles west of ut. A lot of IPAs. They are very good at what they do, so there is no, “Hey, you should get better at this (or that)” first. A new IPA shows up, I might buy it. It will be interesting, something new, a little bit different. But it will still taste like an Outer Range beer. As humans we like what is familiar, but also what is different. Just not too different.

PLACE MATTERS
What do consumers deserve to be told?

A certain space

An estate beer

A farm brewery grows in Brooklyn
Other Half Brewing and Threes Brewing deserve all the beer geek love they get, but if there is time for only one stop in Brooklyn you’ll find me at Strong Rope. Blame founder Jason Sahler.

“When I am giving tours I am the face of the beer,” he told me a few years ago. “But I tell them all of this is not possible without farmers. The farmers do all the work before (ingredients) touch our deck. It’s easier for me to explain that on a small scale. There’s something more tangible to me when it’s local.”

BECAUSE . . . EARTH DAY
Customers expect these initiatives

Where sustainability and technology meet

And this . . .

Book learning: fruity, peach = ethyl octanoate

As mentioned Monday, when asked to contribute a list of “best books” to a new-ish book recommendation website I chose five related to aroma and flavor. You can see my picks here.

Whether the books did or did not specifically mention beer mattered little when I made the selections. However, since you are here for the beer, a couple of beer-related excerpts.

First, from Luca Turin in “The Emperor of Scent.”

“Look at beer, which is a very interesting cultural product. Beer smells like a burp. Gasses from someone’s stomach. Lovely. Again a product of fermentation, which is to say decay. Decay enhances smells and flavors, yet we have a sharp ability to identify decay, because decaying things will kill you. Bacterial and yeast decomposition.

“Which can give you ‘I wouldn’t touch that in a million years’ and, at the same time and in the same culture, mind you, ‘I will pay great sums to consume Rodenbach,’ which is a miracle of a beer from Belgium. A miraculous, powdery apple flavor. Those Rodenbach yeast have an I.Q. of at least two hundred. Fucking genius yeast.”

Second, a rather simple* table from “Nose Dive,” which really is the field guide the full title promises.

Table from "Nose Dive"

* Simple compared, for instance, to the one for “pungent spices: mustards and peppers.”

If you click around the site you will see each entry includes a “closely related book lists.” It pleases me that the one list related to mine is from Gordon Shepherd, since one of his books is among the five I point to. But, dang, I wish there were more lists related to aroma and flavor.

And you may ask yourself, ‘Well, how did I get here?’

Fog

Perhaps the wires in my brain simply got crossed this week. I have no interest in commenting on the news after news after news related to the business of beer that just keeps coming. (Take a look at Brewbound and keep scrolling if you think you missed something. Or, if you recently did something you feel you should be punished for, go directly to Beer Twitter.)

Instead my thoughts keep going back to June of 2020, when economists Lester Jones (National Beer Wholesalers Association) and Bart Watson (Brewers Association) discussed what was going on with beer sales only a few months after the world shut down. Jones planted this seed:

“When you look how the brewing industry has evolved . . . in that 2008, 2010 recession we saw a lot of different business models. We saw people who were a little bit more of the taproom model, where they wanted to be small, they wanted to be local. They had certain business models they were pursuing. Then you had players who were a little more lifestyle oriented, and they were the guys working on their second careers. They were doing it for a lifestyle versus other people who were doing it for a living.

“I think at this point we’re going to see a division in the industry as the people who were in it for the lifestyle of having a small little brewpub in a local community versus the people who were in there with the intentions of growing a real brewing business, widely distributed, with a widely recognized brand. These two business models are going to split off. This is the event that will do it.”

The beer business and culture. Culture and the beer business. Can they be separated?