monday links

Monday morning brewery dreaming & 1 great paragraph

Foam on a beer glass.

For your pondering pleasure this Monday morning, two links.

– #MyDreamBrewery. From Jeff Alworth, and his is actually a pub/tavern.
– How Unionizing Anheuser-Busch’s Craft Breweries Could Change the Industry.

Alworth invites readers to participate in a game that begins with this question, “Without worrying about pesky concerns like ‘solvency’ and ‘funding,’ what’s your dream brewery look like?” That his own fantasy establishment is a sprawling tavern is merely a nuisance.

No surprise; my thoughts won’t fit in a comment. Perhaps this shows a lack of imagination on my part, but my fantasy brewery would be smaller. A world tour in a single building does not appeal to me. (Each of) mine would be a brewery, with a taproom. The beers would be well made, with proper foam (see above). The people who work there would be paid a fair wage, with proper benefits (see link #2). The customers would look like the surrounding community. The beer would be affordable.

(Two quick points of order:

– I should point out that if you poke around Beervana you will see that Alworth has written extensively about these matters. He maintains the Diverse Breweries Database. He is not oblivious to these problems. This game is better enjoyed as a frivolous diversion, even if I choose not to. In the final paragraph he writes, “This tavern, which is impossible, will somehow earn enough money to stay solvent and pay its staff a hefty salary. . . . All are welcome, and all feel welcomed.”

– Affordability is not the biggest reason why beer has a diversity problem. People who look like me, except younger, are good at excluding all sorts of people who are different than them but can afford what many call “craft beer.”)

As important as all of the above, “all would feel welcome.” That doesn’t happen by accident. I expect my dream brewery to be an active community member. There is, after all, a community within the brewery and within the taproom, and surrounding the brewery.

I am, in fact, imagining thousands of breweries that check all the boxes, but that are different. Some might have live music, and it could be hip hop on a Mondays or alt-country on Wednesdays, depending on the community. But I would always expect James McMurtry to be featured at the annual anniversary bash. One in the Walnut Hills neighborhood of Cincinnati will naturally be different than one in Fairbury, Illinois.

Which brings us to Link #2. I won’t rehash what I wrote back in January about unions (TL;DR, on the side of angels). The post does not pretend to answer the “what then?” might happen elsewhere were ABI-owned craft breweries to unionize.

Would it matter? Does it matter more than it did in [picks random year] 2017?

Last week, the news broke that Culmination Brewing in Oregon is up for sale. In a story about why co-founder Tomas Sluiter cites the rising cost of labor, and the supports the thesis that workers at smaller brewers have begun “realizing that their jobs were neither as swell as they’d been told, nor the stepping stone to the greener pastures of owner-operatorship they’d hoped.”

“Before COVID, people had the mentality that, I love this business and I love working in it and I’ll take whatever amount of money for it,” he said.

“A lot of people were working for less than their value, and that was a mindset correction after COVID hit. Afterward, people weren’t coming to work for $35,000 a year, and rightfully so.”

What makes #MyDreamBrewery a great place to work is as complicated as what makes it a great place to be. But I’m pretty sure that when an operator says “a lot of people were working for less than their fair value” that it is time to wake up.

You might also enjoy

– Does the Beer Industry Seem Weird Right Now? You’re Not Alone. “In the early days, I spent a lot of time chasing down new releases and sharing them on Instagram. That all changed with the pandemic, and I haven’t had the desire to return to that way of life. Instead, I look for new ways to enjoy beer, like diving into the history of my favorite styles or attending festivals and events that deepen my knowledge.”

– Seeking Forever in a Temporary World. “We don’t say ‘traditional’ here. We don’t say ‘craft.’ We’re not a ‘craft brewery.’ We don’t make traditional lagers. Nothing about this is traditional to me. Nothing about this is Old World. I hate that people classify it as that.”

– When did people stop being drunk all the time? A lot of tables, a lot of numbers, to absorb.

– The Great British Beer Festival 2023. Wrapping it up with the paragraph of the week:

“And though the next day was a bit of a struggle it was brightened by the return of twerps whinging on about the GBBF on twitter, this time because Abbot Ale got overall second place in the CBoB. CAMRA and the blind tasting panel are in the pay of Greene King it seems. Which I suppose makes a change from Wetherspoons. To me the twerps are just showing their ignorance. The wonder of cask beer means that at times it can elevate beers to highs you would never have expected. If people spent less time suckling at the devil’s drainpipe and more time drinking beer served as god intended they would realise this.”

Beer writing last week, one paragraph at a time

The question of the week last week was “Has the thrill gone?” The comments when I shared the question on Facebook pretty much took the words out of my mouth.

Jeff Alworth had many thoughts of his own. Many thoughts. They weren’t just about the question Boak & Bailey ssked, but also sparked by a comment by a regular at Beervana that, “Craft beer has very few stories left to tell.” I agree with Alworth that there are many new interesting stories to write about beer and the surrounding culture. But I’m not sure if that was what B&B were asking about.

[Added Monday afternoon (in Colorado): The flatness of beer part 2: the opinions of others]

In any event, there were some lovely drinks-related paragraphs written last week. Here goes . . .

Craft Central offers regular flurries of brightly coloured American tins at exceedingly high prices, largely made up of hazy IPAs in the way that beer these days generally is. I have little interest and usually scroll on past, but . . . maybe I should be checking in now and again to see if there’s value to be had. These, presumably, are the beers that everyone else around the world is copying, right? OK, I’ve convinced me. Here’s two IPAs from the less obscenely priced end of the spectrum, both from New Jersey, a lonely state, lacking a New Guernsey or New Sark to keep it company.

— From The Beer Nut

Making wine is science. Drinking it is not. The amount of time a given wine has spent in a barrel is an unalterable fact, my ability to detect that oak is a skill, but my judgement on whether that oak is well integrated and how good the result tastes is entirely subjective. Confusing facts with opinions is not, unfortunately, restricted to the wine world, but a social activity such as wine tasting that revolves around a very complicated technical process may be especially ripe for misunderstanding. This, surely, is why a liquid that is both a chemical and a metaphysical source of happiness ends up causing so many arguments.

— From Club Oenologique

“I wanted to highlight time and place in both the ingredients and the concept of the beer I brew,” says Josh Chapman. “It’s important for me to be excellent without being exclusive. I don’t want to be perceived as pretentious, especially as the first brewery on the Eastern Shore. There are lots of Bud and Miller drinkers here, and so I wanted something relatable but adjacent to what they are used to.”

— From Pellicle

Scholarship programs are part of a larger push within the beer industry, from individual breweries, trade groups and nonprofits, to increase representation among people of color in beer. Scholarships benefit the recipients, of course, but they also critically benefit the companies and industry that employ them. Repeated studies conducted by workplace consultancy McKinsey & Co. since 2014 show that companies with more diverse leadership financially outperform those with low racial and gender diversity among their leaders. That message has become critical as breweries feel less public pressure to keep issues of race and inclusion front and center.

— From Good Beer Hunting Sightlines

“For the very first Fourth of July, Worthington was a temperance town. One of the temperance people in Tallinn had busted open a barrel — Professor Humiston was his name — some settlers had brought out to celebrate the Fourth of July. Well, they didn’t take too well to that, and so they marched down and got another keg of beer. They took the other keg of beer that he had busted open, and they dug a hole and buried it in his front yard, placed the new barrel on top of where they had just buried that barrel of beer. They proceeded to stand around and guard the barrel so he couldn’t bust it open, and they invited everybody out to have a party on Professor Humiston’s lawn — that’s where we got the name from.”

— The origin story of Forbidden Barrel Brewing in Minnesota, from Dakota News Now

In Memoriam
David Geary, founder of the D.L. Geary Brewing Company in Maine, died last week. There are many reasons to remember him, but his keynote at the 1996 Craft Brewers Conference has to be in the top 10.

You might also enjoy
– Mapping historic breweries in Bamberg

– How London’s First Black Pub Landlords Changed the City’s Drinking Culture

– Big Trouble in Little Kortrijk?

– A musing on menace

– Major new guidance on beer styles for consumers

– Creating Safer Spaces in Craft Beer, Part Seven — Brewing Beers That Make a Difference

TWTBWTW: Take that, ‘Judgment of Paris’

As you likely know, the big story in The Beer Week That Was was Sapporo giving up on Anchor Brewing. I have nothing to add, and you’ve probably read enough already (including the stories I would link to), so I will simply point to one about the property the brewer is sitting on.

Otherwise, here goes:

– Mike Royko’s 1973 Foreign Vs. Domestic Beers Test Will Be Restaged
A pretty good way to pass a summer Sunday afternoon in Chicago. Here are the results from 30 50 years ago.

Mike Royko's beer taste test 1973

– Kölsch Night in the Boonies
It’s a story about beer and community. Give it a read. My comment as only tangentially related to beer. First, I cringe when I see “boonies” in a headline, or story, for that matter. Fairbury is located along U.S. 24 in Illinois. I know this because I used to live along U.S. 24. I’ve been to Fairbury, and I’ve also been to Havana, which is located along another stretch of U.S. 24.

People who live in such smaller town don’t take kindly to having the places where they live described as the boonies. I was once hung in effigy in Havana because I wrote a story, one meant to praise the “big city” confidence their high school team played with, in which I rattled off the way others viewed small towns.

Anyway, Prairie Central High School is situated in Fairbury. It was formed in 1985, combining Fairbury-Cropsey High (a 1951 consolidation) and Chatsworth and Forrest-Strawn-Wing. Prairie Central’s sports teams are nicknamed the Hawks. Fairbury-Cropsey’s nickname has been the Tartars and F-S-W’s was the Eskimos. Two great nicknames wipe out in one consolidation. Consolidation is not only bad for brewing diversity.

– The death of the beer festival is jolting the craft brewing industry
Todd Alström posted a link to the story in a Beer Advocate forum and a discussion much more interesting than anything similar that would occur on Twitter (or Threads or, sadly, Mastodon) followed.

– How hazies changed West Coast IPAS
It feels like a humble brag to point a post that starts with an observation I made 14 years ago, but Jeff Alworth turns it into something more modern. “The freedom to be indifferent in these after-hazy days has gone. … A whole new generation of beer drinkers has come along with no memory of beer BH (before hazy).”

– Down on the Farmhouse
“Folks can come here, order a pawpaw beer, and then wander down to the orchard and read about pawpaws, look at pawpaws, while they’re drinking a beer,” says co-founder and brewer Todd Boera. “You know, that’s just kind of something that sticks with people and is meaningful. You can’t do that anywhere else.”

Wine specific, but beer related

– The latest alcohol advice ignores the value of pleasure
“A pleasure-agnostic approach to health advice is now in vogue even outside the domain of alcohol, and is filtering down to the general public with sometimes absurd results. Recently, a reader asked me: Is there any data on health benefits to orgasms? I am not aware of reliable data from randomized experiments suggesting that having more orgasms improves health. That isn’t the point of orgasms, anyway. The point of orgasms is that they are fun. We do not need to prove health benefits to want to have them.”

– Profit-Sharing is Taking Root in the Wine Industry
“Profit-sharing is still far from the norm in the wine industry — and agriculture, generally — a sector that is notoriously asset-heavy, cash-poor, and has long relied on a low-paid migrant workforce to turn a profit or just break even.”

TWTBWTW: Quick, name 3 flagship beers that are thriving

Where have all the beer brands gone?

The lead gets right to the point: “The ground is shaking under some of the most important beer brands for a trio of California’s largest brewers.” The breweries are Sierra Nevada Brewing Company, Firestone Walker Brewing Company, and 21st Amendment Brewery.

Why should this matter to us beer drinkers?

You will have to answer that yourselves. I am writing zero words rather than 1,000. Instead I will point you at Flagship February. (At least, I hope the link takes you to one of the pages in the Flagship February website and you can make your way around. Simply typing in flashipfebruary.com will not get you there. Nothing seems to be going right for flagship beers right now.)

You might also enjoy

Could an ancient, climate-friendly crop be the future of beer?
Fonio sounds too good to be true.

“Growing a pound of malted barley has a 327-gallon water footprint while a pound of wheat requires 219 gallons of water, and a pound of white rice requires 400 gallons of water.

“Meanwhile, fonio can thrive with just 600mm annual rainfall, and none of the irrigation, pesticides or fertilizers needed by other grains. Brewing with fonio follows the same process as making beer from other grains.”

In fact, this could be a problem: “Cleaning the sand out of fonio is a time-consuming, manual process that requires beating the grassy fonio paddy to release the grain, and using a lot of water to rinse out dirt and sand.”

Something to watch.

How Far Will Salmon Swim for a Craft Beer?
It appears that salmon prefer yeast trub to extract of shrimp, tincture of watercress, skin of steelhead, or bile of minnow. The beer connection aside, really fascinating stuff going on at the Oregon Hatchery Research Center.

The Inextinguishable Appeal of Draught Bass
Lyme Regis. 1994. As soon as we were checked in at the Angel, publican Ed Bignal took time to point out the sights, such as the Leper’s Well a block away. Lepers once lived along the Angel’s street, Mill Green, a narrow alley on which monks had led horsedrawn carts centuries ago.

First off, we went to the Volunteer because Bignal assured us the Bass would be in as good of condition as we could find anywhere. He did not lie. “Bass is a beer that lodges in the mind” was flat out true that day.

(Early in the evening, we saw him step from behind the bar and go outside to check a tire because one of his female customers was worried it was going flat. After dinner, the place was bustling. Patrons constantly paraded between the skittles alley out back and the back door to the pub, where they refilled their pints. When the skittles shut down, the singing began.)

Craft brewery boom in Switzerland draws to a close
“Boom draws to a close” means a period of hyper-growth has ended, not that the Swiss suddenly abandoned fancy beer. It is not surprising that 90 percent of all breweries are nano-breweries. They are “often run as a hobby.”

Pairing seasonal beer and seasonal produce
Not new, but it hit my feeder aggregator this week. Some specific suggestions: LAGER: Grilled corn-on-the-cob with chili and lime; WHEAT BEER: Watermelon and tomato salad; IPA: Pico de gallo and chips.

Gummies Beer
Tantalizes the taste buds. 19.2 ounces at a time.

House beers
“This latest iteration of house beers has proven successful because they’re not a novelty.”

Maggie Harrison’s War on Wine
Now, this is a tasting note. Something you’d expect to hear in “Drops of God.”

“First, it made me see colors: the inkiest indigos and the bluest blacks, streaked with fissures of silver. Then I pictured something lurching out of a cave on a moonless night during a thunderstorm, which made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.”

Do the beers you drink make you see colors? Asking for a friend.

Monday beer links to accompany your fireworks

Thank you, craft breweries, for making my drinking problem seem like a neat hobby.

It’s Fourth of July Eve and we are spending the week in a dry town. Let’s get right to it.

The Problematic Culture of Overdrinking When You Work in Alcohol
“De-stigmatizing sobriety and addressing alcohol use disorder head on can be challenging, but will help our friends and colleagues before they reach their own depths. Resilience requires vulnerability, but it also gives us the chance to lift each other up.”

The Timeless Appeal of Drinking in Train Station Bars
“It might be a slightly smaller story in North America, but in the railway-prioritizing Old World, train station bars are much more common, in both upscale and dive incarnations.” A much smaller story in North America, I would say, sadly.

The 23 Best Cheap Domestic Beers, According to Brewers
In fact, it’s not just brewers, and if domestic=mainstream industrial then I made a mistake by choosing Lagerado from Odell. A lot of love here Coors Banquet (keep scrolling to get to the Rockies). I almost feel like a traitor to Colorado history, but I am sticking with Lagerado.

University of Wisconsin wouldn’t let J.J. Watt buy every graduate a beer when he was commencement speaker
“I was talking to the university and said this is what I want to do. Spotted Cow is the best beer in Wisconsin. It’s incredible. I want to put a Spotted Cow under every single seat in the stadium. I’ll pay for it all … but at the end of the commencement speech I’m gonna say ‘now to congratulate you, just reach under your seat and have a cold one on me.’”

Portland’s Best Breweries
“The difference between Portland’s 7th-best brewery and 17th-best is paper-thin. Indeed, if I wanted to establish Portland’s bona fides in terms of overall quality, I’d compare its second-ten best breweries up against any in the US. Portland is such a good beer town because the beer is so good across the city.”

The Return to the Classics: Talking Beer with Good Word and Schilling
Q: “Do you think there’s a tension between ‘the classics’ in terms of beer styles and experimentation and boundary pushing?”

A: “Yes and no. We have a deep respect and affinity for certain styles of lagerbier that we believe require no “boundary pushing.” A great Munich-style Helles or Dunkel, for example, should be beautiful symmetries of hops, malts, yeast and water. Anything else detracts from these styles, in our view.

“However, many modern German brewers aren’t opposed to playing around with dry hop schedules on a pilsner, for example. As we know, climate change in Europe (and elsewhere) is forcing a robust discussion on hop utilization. So there is progressivity and experimentation–’boundary pushing’–but we choose to do so as respectfully as possible and with a great deal of intentional, intra-team discussion. That said, you won’t see an adjunct-ed lager from Schilling. There’s a line we won’t cross.”

Homebrewing
– BRÜLOSOPHY Homebrew Survey
– Why homebrewing matters
The survey does not pretend to represent all homebrewers, but it makes you wonder how the hobby might find a wider audience. And about the crossroads Drew Beechum is referring to in the second link.

“Homebrewing is at a crossroads right now. Involvement is declining, homebrew shops and clubs see less interest. Every neighborhood has a brewery or two. Why bother spending 4-8 precious weekend hours making beer that I can buy down the street in a minute?

“I cannot implore you enough – get out there, show people the creativity and positivity brewing encourages (even if you’re grumpy like me) and for the love of all things beery – MAKE BEER, HAVE FUN, AND ENJOY THE PEOPLE!”