Monday beer reading: 3rd places & signs of the times

A quiet moment in a friendly pub

When blogs die: Before getting to some good reading, this. I just counted. I am subscribed to 198 rss feeds, most of them blogs. Most of them out of service. Some now gone for 10 years or so. But you never know when one might return to life. I was briefly excited Friday to see seven posts from one show up in my reader, the first from that blog since 2017. Briefly, because now the site has the tagline “As Essential as Beer, Focused on Sex.” I’m not going to include a link, because I don’t want to embarrass the (former) blogger who let their domain name registration expire, and you can find your own damn porn.

Also Friday, I was just finishing reading a post from Boak & Bailey — in which they asked “What is it about pubs that makes them particularly suitable for socialising and ‘hanging out’, compared to cafes and restaurants?” — when my feed reader delivered the bold assertion that, “Breweries Are Great Third Places. But We Deserve Even Better Ones.”

Later in the day, Stephanie Grant added to the conversation going in in my head with, “Crafting Community in Taprooms: A Dive into Third Spaces.” For those not familiar with Ray Oldenburg’s work that introduced so many to the concept of a third place, she includes his eight characteristics of a third place as outlined in “The Great Good Place.”

Oldenburg wrote another book, published almost 30 years after “The Great Good Place,” called, “The Joy of Tippling: A Salute to Bars, Taverns, and Pubs.” He was cautious about advocating for the use of alcohol.

“The joy of tippling,” he wrote, “the case for which I’m writing and advocating, is most often experienced among the regulars at neighborhood bars. There’s far more conversation than drinking there and it takes place among people from different walks of life who take pride in diversity. To see this all passing away, and too often to the delight of city governments, makes me wonder about the kind of society we are becoming.”

At VinePair, Dave Infante argues that, “The Platonic ideal of a craft brewery is a good third place, and we deserve better ones. We deserve public spaces where buying shit is an option, not an obligation; where alcohol and NA drinks (and other recreational drugs) can be enjoyed safely and socially; where the magic of the public commons, not logic of the market, dictates the terms of engagement.”

A fine idea, but at time in which libraries struggle to remain welcoming, while it is reasonable to keep demanding proper public spaces the wait to see this happen may be long. For the time being, privately owned establishments that minimize the obligation to “buy shit” (or the drink of your choice) and maximize being welcoming are our best option.

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Murky Waters: Distilling truth from fiction in the Faubourg Brewing debacle
A very long read to start off, but worth your time, and the reason that I made a contribution to support Louisiana Illuminator, part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Let’s hear it for nonprofit journalism (the kind that pays journalists). Perhaps it is not a coincidence that Drew Hawkins, who reported on this story, has also written ones about the challenges Louisiana libraries face.

It is not just this gem of a truth: “If you’re a private equity investment firm looking to turn a major profit, craft beer isn’t as lucrative as it was a decade ago.”

The story holds the company Made By The Water, accountable for statement after statement that really needed to be challenged. They gutted Catawba Brewing, shut down Faubourg Brewing (formerly Dixie) in New Orleans, and even screwed over a reality TV star.

Reinheitsgegot, from Bavarian oddity to German icon, 1906-1975
“Throughout the industrialised world, concepts of food ‘purity’ and ‘natural eating’ emerged in the late nineteenth century as life reformers, food scientists, businessmen and regulators eyed the potential harms of the modern food system, from meat-heavy diets to the increasingly adulterated and synthetic alternatives that occupied the growing space between food producers and consumers.” In fact, in the United States there was a battle over what might be called “pure beer.” [h/T Andreas Krennmair]

How Guinness got women on board and left its lads-only image behind
“It’s not just a drink, it’s an experience. That famous strap-line, ‘good things come to those who wait,’ refers to the two-part pour needed to achieve that perfect creamy head on the beer. Just like when a cocktail is mixed in front of the guest, there is an element of performative theatre to its service.” Related: “How Guinness Led a Modern Nitro-Stout Takeover of Britain’s Pubs.”

Notes on central European beer – A sign of the times?
“In the past, when I’ve encountered young craft beer markets, there’s a since of excitement and possibility. In this region, breweries are in triage and just trying to get back to normal economies. They’re excited about the beer, but anxious about the market and tired from the long slog.”

Ideal Day Family Brewery on Crocadon Farm, Cornwall
I must echo Alan McLeod and Boak & Bailey pointing to this story. “All art is the journey back to the point at which your heart first opened.”

80+ Black-Owned Breweries to Support Across the Country
“Despite seeing some progress in initiatives over the last four years, such as the creation of the National Black Brewers Association, the fact remains that less than one percent of all craft breweries in the United States are Black-owned.”

The New, Old Look American Lager
“Rhinegeist doesn’t use the term ‘craft’ on their Cincy Light packaging, but they do use the Brewers Association’s Craft Brewers seal and embrace the term in telling their broader story. Garage Beer, which exited the Braxton Brewing architecture, was given a fresh start and updated design with no real history or other other continuity to factor in. They went with the phrase ‘Small Batch Brewed’ which makes sense as a way to distance themselves from a powerhouse brand like Modelo, which sells at a similar price.’

As market tightens, local breweries must find their niche
To bring chatter about third places full circle. “At Old Bust Head Brewery in Vint Hill on a recent Saturday, the taproom was lively. Lauren and Jared Fisher were there with their two young daughters playing Old Maid. They moved to the area four months ago from Florida. ‘We’re originally from New York, and I would go out to breweries with my girlfriends on Fridays,’ Lauren Fisher said. ‘Our neighbors recommended this place, so we came here with the girls. It feels a little bit like cheating. We get to have a little bit of fun, and they get to have fun.'”

Monday beer reading: culture, culture, culture

Deschutes Fresh Haze in a  half liter Paulaner glass

Good morning, class. Your assignment this week is to write an essay that should include beer and culture in the title as well as one or more of these words:

Class
Luxury
Affordable
Craft
Postmodern
Postindustrial

The reading material:

– First up, last week, Boak & Bailey asked “What is a healthy beer culture?”

– During the week, Jeff Alworth posted about time in Prague, including a bit of “generalizing.” Along the way he writes, “Beer, as I’ve mentioned probably too many times, is a product of culture.” Don’t click away without reading Alistair Reece’s comment.

– This may seem like an aside, but it is a reminder that alcohol is one of the attractions of drinking beer. Alan McLeod pointed to a story about experiences at a festival where the only manufacturers featured were Ontario based craft breweries that have begun to offer non-alc or low-alc products as part of their lineup. Some differences from the traditional version, and not just the demographic (some of the patrons have hearing aids).

Mcleod also had thoughts about list of the most overrated beer styles.

To which, Mike Kallenberger commented at Bluesky, “The take on overrated beer styles has me wondering yet again if ‘chasing trends’ hasn’t caused subtle but lasting harm to ‘craft beer brand equity’ (whatever that is) even as it spurs short-to-medium term sales.”

– Think about that while reading “After a Boom, Craft Beer Considers a New Creed: Less Is More.”

At the end, Bob Kunz at Highland Park Brewing in Los Angeles says he sees growing demand for beer served by the pitcher. “Nobody has to think about what they’re buying,” he said. “You end up having more collective experiences if you’re drinking the same beer.”

– In ”The Sum of Small Things: The Theory of the Aspirational Class” author Elizabeth Currid-Halkett introduces the concept of “conspicuous production,” which stands in contrast to “conspicuous consumption.” She writes that, “Inconspicuous consumption in other words, has become a shorthand through which the new elite signal their cultural capital to one another.”

Let’s be realistic. Had some members of what Currid-Halkett labels the new elite not embraced craft beer, stories about it would not be appearing in The New York Times. And what could be a better example inconspicuous consumption than drinking beer by the pitcher?

Alcohol. People. Beer drinkers. Connections. Beer makers.

Have I left anything out?

The photo at the top was taken at Pepi’s, a restaurant in Vail, Colorado, that serves excellent German-inspired food. That is Deschutes Fresh Haze in a half-liter glass. A crossing of cultures, it seems. FYI, a member of our traveling party ordered it. I went with a Hacker-Pschoor.

Link of the week: Collaborations and the way forward

Beer foam

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Stephanie Grant gets right to the point:

“True collaboration, especially when the grounds are unequal between the two collaborators, should ensure both parties benefit from the interaction. And that shouldn’t always come in the form of money, but also knowledge in and outside the brewhouse.

“It’s time for Black people in the craft beer community to go beyond the excitement of collaborating with a brewery they admire and ask themselves: How can we both get the most out of this collaboration? We must not mistake our unequal footing as in not having value. If that were the case, the offer to collaborate with established breweries wouldn’t exist. It’s time to balance the scales.

“So, what’s the way forward?”

Knowledge and capital, she answers, particularly capital. Exhibit A: The 8 Trill Fund started by Crown & Hops.

“Unlike past charity-based collaboration initiatives that often fall out of relevance once the beer is brewed and the check is written, the Eight Trillion Allies Collaboration Series encourages breweries to stay engaged,” she writes. “And it’s not restricted to a moment in time, but an ongoing effort to bring equity to the craft beer industry and increase Black brewery ownership to 13%.”

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– In the spirit of #PubJanuary: Anthony Gladman makes the case for “sitting on your own with a pint.” And when Boak & Bailey visited a pair of rebooted Bristol pubs they found “a classic example of a pub that has not got much for us personally but we’re glad it exists, serving a distinct crowd, and appears to be thriving.” Finally, a press release about Proper Pubs installing defibrillators across its estate. This is not to imply the customers who make up their distinct crowd are of a certain age, but that this is a measure to serve the communities where the pubs operate.

Historic hop fraud. Styrian hops sold as Saazer hops in the 19th century. I’ve got observations about some of the details in this post that I will share in the next Hop Queries.

– It seems that the status of craft beer — the good, the bad, the in-between — can be found on a single street in San Diego.

$20 pints are coming. Those are New Zealand dollars. That equates to $12.25 in the United States, where, in some cases, consumers may already be paying similar prices.

“I brewed the $150 Tesla Cyberbeer so you don’t have to.” It’s a video and it’s a bit silly. But, dang, it reminds you why it is fun to be a homebrewer.

And so 2024 beerlinking here begins . . . now

Request in one of the restrooms at Scratch BrewingYou know if you know (at which brewery this request is posted)

Happy New Year. It seems, since last compiling links Dec. 18, that I missed many year-end wrap ups and predictions for 2024. Alan McLeod generously catalogued many of them. I thank him for making it easy to move forward with only a quick look at two posts related to looking backward and looking forward before going forward:

If you didn’t share a recap video, did 2023 even happen?
A New Year’s resolution for 2024: never tweet
I look at X once most days, which means I only see a sliver of what I might. Plenty of interesting people are still there, and I wish they’d move to Bluesky. I occasionally will retweet something to be polite, but I’m doing my best not to post. It is always tempting. A little experiment Dec. 20, when the National Hop Report came out, served as a reminder: I posted to Twitter, to Bluesky and to Facebook. Twitter easily drove the most traffic.

Two essential reads this week
The Philosophy of the Farmer Brewers
Because these brewers only use ingredients sourced from their farm. “It is a volatile practice that leads to conflict, improvisation, and frustration in equal measure.”

Anon, A Giant Monster Roams — Torrside Brewery in New Mills, Derbyshire
Yes, Alan McLeod and Boak & Bailey already pointed to this story, but I didn’t want you to miss this thought: “They still feel unique within the industry—a more playful side of brewing that is becoming increasingly rare.”

The, wow, ‘How did this happen?’ story of the week
The Sad Spiral of Rockmill Brewery: How the Craft Beer Darling Ended up in Foreclosure

These ideas would seem to be related
Reasons to Skip Dry January
In 2024, How About “Pub January?”
As appealing as these “Pubs in AI” look, Pub January requires visiting physical pubs.

By the numbers
Boak & Bailey share their Bristol spreadsheet.
One Year and 389 Breweries Later.

I only read the headline
(I didn’t inhale)
9 Things You Should Know About Old Style Beer

Monday a.m. beer links: How’s 2024 looking?

Strong Rope Brewery, Brooklyn
Strong Rope Brewery in Brooklyn sends a message

A programming note: Looking at the calendar, I see that Christmas and New Year’s Day fall on Mondays, so no Monday links here until Jan. 8.

The year about to end will be the first one, with the exception of Covid-depressed 2020, that the sum of beers produced by the breweries categorized as “craft” did not increase. That goes back to when the Institute of Brewing Studies was collecting the statistics for microbreweries and brewpubs and had not yet defined “craft brewery.”

(The IBS was a subsidiary of the Association of Brewers, which merged with the Brewers Association of American in 2005 to form the Brewers Association.)

A “Year in Beer” summary produced by the Brewers Association and chief economist Bart Watson’s presentation last week for association members and the press both focused on the business of beer. They made it clear that the numbers reflect an ongoing trend, and that 2024 will be just as challenging for breweries.

Why should beer drinkers care? For one thing, if your favorite brewery goes out of business you’ve lost something. So consider Watson’s last two slides. He suggested that “most of the challenges craft faces have opportunities in craft strengths.” Flavor and variety matter, a wide range (including next to zero) ABVs serve different occasions well, and where diversity grows niche and local opportunities do as well.

And on the final slide, he asked, “How will you grow occasions in 2024?”

I was reminded of standing outside one of the tents at the first St. Louis Brewers Festival in 2007. Anheuser-Busch invested considerable resources to pour a few of its beers along with six other St. Louis area breweries at the time — a different time, indeed. The festival was a tiny part of A-B’s “Here’s to Beer” national campaign (the url herestobeer.com now redirects to A-B and the Wayback Machine gets stuck at the age check gate, which is too bad; fun to see that mid-aughts thinking).

Bob Lachky, executive vice president of Global Industry and Creative Development, was an enthusiastic proponent of the promotion. He was a man pretty good at his job, and credited with the “I Love You, Man” and “Whassup?!” campaigns as well as the Budweiser frogs. Bud Light did quite well when he was the brand manager.

(He was less than impressed with everything related to Dylan Mulvaney earlier this year. “It took us 20 years to take Bud Light beer to the No. 1 beer in the country, and it took them one week to dismantle it,” he told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.)

Lachky was drinking a Budweiser, watching attendees head out after the taps closed.

Among other things, he talked about young drinkers turning to spirits to celebrate rather than beer. “We can’t keep losing the occasions,” he said.

Deja vu.

Postcript: Primitive Beer’s Hotbierfest is a pretty good example of how to do a occasion right.

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Colorado Grain Chain. Speaking of Primitive Beer, the brewery uses all Colorado-grown grain. And Primitive co-owner Lisa Boldt is the Colorado Grain Chain project manager. The nonprofit Grain Chain is member-supported and, among other things, helps small-scale farmers to network and market their products. “If we as brewers and distillers want the local community to support us, to buy our products and come to our tasting rooms, I think it’s important that we support the local ingredients that go into our products,” Boldt says.

New York City’s Strong Rope Brewery and the East Coast Cask Revival. It is delightful to see Strong Rope founder/brewer Jason Sahler get this attention. “When I am giving tours I am the face of the beer,” he told me when I visited him in Brooklyn’s Gowanus neighborhood in 2019. “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.”

Cola Craze: Germans Love America’s Iconic Soda So Much They Put It in Their Beer. Spezi, a blend of Coke and orange soda, was created by Brauerei Riegele in Augsburg in the 1960s. Riegele was founded in 1386. A tour includes the well they draw water from. “This water has never seen humanity. The first thing it sees is beer,” Sebastian Priller-Riegele, a 28th generation brewer, told me when I visited the brewery in 2019. Riegele wins scores of medals for its well-made, Reinheitsgebot-conforming beers, but it seems that award-winning beer isn’t the only reason they have stayed in business for more than 600 years.

The Best Hidden Gem Places to Drink in 2023. Some of the places sound cool; others not so much. But what I really want to know is if any of the three (three!) spots in Austin, Texas, have a sticker that declares: “THIS IS ONE OF DOUG’S TOP 50 BARS IN AUSTIN.”

You can’t make this stuff up

HOPnotic spell. A hop water brand has hired a hypnotist “who will hypnotize select consumers to help make sure they stay extra dry this January.” It is a contest, of sorts.

Blue cheese beer. “We’re always looking for something to ferment, whether it’s sauerkraut or pickles or beer or wine, whiskey, cheese, you name it, it’s all fermented.”

And for the last link of 2023 . . .

I’d rather not point to a post from X, but this seems essential. Yes, do read the comments (replies).