monday links

As the hours pass at a beer festival, sometimes a bit of beer is spilled, in this case Saturday during Blacktoberfest in Stone Mountain, Georgia. (If you find some irony in a black beer festival held only a few miles from Stone Mountain Park, where the road into the park is called Jefferson Davis Drive, good for you.) Ale Sharpton suggested the day before the event would be “epic.” Change is underway in Georgia, and it is accelerating. More later.

Meanwhile, a few links you may want to click . . .

But not a drop to drink
More on the discussion about if peasants in medieval times regularly drank beer instead of water because water was unsafe to drink. The latest from Lars Garshol, in which he concludes it is “abundantly clear by now that in the past lots of people did in fact drink beer against thirst every day.” And a recent post from Martyn Cornell the explains why this was not possible for much of the population.

Questions not asked
“Despite its rosy self-mythology, the craft beer landscape used to be full of pieces of shit. It had exploitative owners, power-mad managers, cruel and entitled customers.”

This, from Dave Infante, seems like an overstatement.

We can talk about that another time. Instead, consider this. “Fawning fluff gives pieces of shit room to fester; puff pieces underwrite the status quo.” Hard questions can be hard to ask. I’ve mentioned before that I once worked for a newspaper where the publisher told us, “If we (publish) something about a person, we should (write) something good the next.” Really. Easy questions made his life easier.

By chance, I was still thinking about Infante’s story when I came across this one about a woman who has worked at Deschutes original brewery (a brewpub) for 32 years. In we learn, “(Melissa) Talbott says she has looked at exit plans regarding retirement, but for now, she says she has at least another five years left in her.” And I wondered if she has earned some sort of pension from Deschutes or if the company provides health insurance. Should those questions have been asked and addressed? Asking for a friend.

From the cask
– Pete Brown offers six reasons cask ale-loving publicans should immediately whack the price up.
– Coming soon. Cask Beer: The real story of Britain’s unique beer culture.

Beer writing wanted
– Alan McLeod revisits the why question. “It’s only in the writing that the fixation becomes of value . . . This is the problem with the British Guild of Beer Writers and NAGBW shift from talking about ‘writing’ to the thinly smug language of ‘reporting’ and ‘journalism’ over the last few years. Not only does it smack of needy niche (and also pretendy-ism… yes, I said it) it misses the fundamental point that most of this is obsession, not reportage. Write!”

– Cutleaf in partnership with All About Beer is thrilled to offer a call for submissions for beer-related writing. Share with us your short stories, personal essays, poems, or hybrid work in which beer is featured.

I spent Saturday morning during the Great American Beer Festival awards ceremony seated next to Jonathan Moxey, head brewer at Rockwell Brewing in St. Louis. One of us would comment occasionally when a winner was announced.

“I taught him to homebrew,” Moxey said at one point.

I scribbled a few notes. After Boston Beer won gold for Just The Haze in the non-alcohol beer category, I reminded myself to see when the company last won a medal. It was 2014. (They won a second medal Saturday, in experimental IPA).

And so we came to category 83, Belgian-style witbier. You might remember that in May heads were turned when the judges at the World Beer Cup chose not to award gold or silver in this category, instead giving only a bronze, to Allagash White.

Saturday the judges gave three medals in the category, and gold to Allagash White (its eight GABF medal).

“Balance has been restored,” said Moxey.

That was the second most quotable line of the weekend. My top choice was simply overheard. “The good news is more women are getting into beer. The bad news is there is a line at the women’s room.”

[Note, a Monday morning edit] Festival recaps are just staring to get posted. The ROI of the Great American Beer Festival is a thoughtful one.

And a few more links . . .

Breaking news: Bell’s makes Hopslam a holiday beer.

For your viewing pleasure: Beer zines.

Science: Scientists Just Figured Out a Way to Make Beer Taste Even Better.

More science: LANL pair want to tap into science for better beer.

There is no mention of beer in this love letter to the sense of smell.

If the five senses were a boy band, smell would certainly be the least popular member. This is not news: Some of the most influential philosophers in Western history turned up their noses at olfaction. “Man can smell things only poorly,” Aristotle declared, deeming our noses inaccurate sense organs. Immanuel Kant called smell “the most dispensable” of our senses, citing its fleeting nature as the reason “it does not pay to cultivate it or refine it.” Centuries later, a study conducted by the marketing company McCann Worldgroup would reveal that more than half of the 16-to-22-year-olds they interviewed would rather give up their sense of smell than technology.

But without our sense of smell there would be no pleasure in drinking beer.

Great Good Places
Could this happen? I hope so. In his Fingers substack Dave Infante draws our attention to what he calls ThirdPlacesTok. It took a lot less than two years of zoom happy hours to establish face-to-screen interactions are not the same as settling in face-to-face, preferably in friendly establishment. The point is not that ThirdPlacesTok might replace our favorite “great good place” (to cite the title of Ray Oldeburg’s book), but that they introduce a new generation to the importance of third places. And this: “Remaking the American civic landscape to preserve the third places we have and build new ones (ideally where commerce is a secondary focus, or not a focus at all) will be impossible without a massive, small-d democratic groundswell of demand.”

You might also enjoy
Another love story (Brasserie de la Senne Zinnir). “It looked cool, it tasted cooler: it was the first time I’d found a beer that was a bit of me. It tasted modern, in its hoppy aroma and bracing bitterness, while having a distinctly ‘Belgian’ edge in its spiciness. I fell in love, so much so that what Zinne did for me is something that I hope to do for everyone who drinks my brewery, Solvay Society, beers now – to change their perception of ‘Belgian beer.'”

The other Oktoberfest. Germany’s second largest Oktoberfest, the Cannstatter Volksfest, attracts more than 4 million visitors to Stuttgart over the course of 17 days. Plenty of details and photos from Franz Hofer. We went in 2008 (photo here was taken then) and now I am wondering if festivalgoers still dance to “YMCA” on table tops and sing “Take Me Home Country Roads” at the top of their voices. I wrote a bit about the day for All About Beer magazine (god bless the return of the archives).

Festival, what festival? Yes, you could spend the week in Denver, drink hundreds of different beers from breweries all over the country and never step a foot inside the Great American Beer Festival.

The power of the story. Feel free to replace the word “wine” with “beer” each time you see it in a story. “Priming is a psychological phenomenon in which exposure to one stimulus influences how we respond to a subsequent, related stimulus—consider the high-decibel music that is often played during a sports game to energize the crowd and athletes. Studies show that if a wine is presented with a formidable reputation or is highly priced, people tend to rate that wine as higher quality. But quality alone does not guarantee greatness. A compelling story can imbue a wine with the crucial components of memorability and uniqueness, giving it an advantage over others even before the first taste.”

The people’s wine (or beer)? Eric Asimov at the New York Times makes his low opinion of Fred Franzia and Two-Buck Chuck clear in this story. Asimov is a member of a “smaller group of wine lovers spend a considerable amount of time, energy and money on wine because they find it delicious, as well as rewarding intellectually and aesthetically.” Nonetheless, deep in the story is another instance where the word “wine” could be replaced with “beer” in two instances. “The wine industry itself is much to blame with its history of pretentiousness, and its absurd rituals and vocabulary that convey the message that one must be a connoisseur before one can enjoy wine.”

The chase continues. Bottle flippers, mules . . . you’ve read about them before. But, wait, this isn’t another beer story. In this one “the good stuff” is bourbon.

Headline Gussie Busch would not understand
5 Best Brewery Experiences in Springfield, Missouri

The North American Guild of Beer Writers announced its awards for beer writing between mid-2021 and mid-2022 yesterday.

Plenty to read there, but here are a few other posts that caught my attention last week:

– The Voodoo Ranger Effect.
“What do these drinkers actually want?’ They want to have fun. They want to drink with their friends. They want to game.”

– Another tough year for Italy’s craft brewers.
Consumers pivoting to buying their beers in supermarkets seems to have largely benefitted the country’s Big Brewers.

– Craft Beer’s Pastry Obsession Has Hit Bourbon.
“I find it funny that those same dudes will scoff at Knob Creek Smoked Maple or [Wild Turkey] American Honey, while sipping on a Toasted Strawberry Mocha Finished whiskey with a ‘Let’s Go Brandon’ sticker on it.”