monday links

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.

– 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.”

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!”

I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen a brewery profile that includes the brewer/founder being interviewed say something along the lines of, “We don’t want to be huge.”

I thought of this last week when I read Jeff Alworth’s post about Skagit Valley Malt suddenly closing, because I had learned a lot more about the business of running a craft malting company after meeting Jeff Bloem during the Wheatland Spring Farm + Brewery Land Beer Fest a couple of weeks ago.

He started Murphy & Rude Malting Co. in his basement. He’s expanded, but has been cautious.

Between the time I read the question in Alworth’s headline (“Is craft malt in trouble?”) and a post at Good Beer Hunting Sightlines highlighting the risk of craft malt expansion I dropped him an email. I probably would not have if I had known Kate Bernot would contact him for the Sightlines story. (Because, honestly, I am inherently lazy.)

I asked him if he could describe a scenario where craft malting is viable. Turns out, he is living one. He wrote back:

“Our recent modest capacity expansion served as a much needed right-sizing that improved cash flow, jettisoned us into healthy profitability, and fixed a plethora of issues we were struggling with as an under-built craft malt house — bumpy cash-flow due to delayed invoicing brought about by constant out-of-stocks and backorders.

“This right-sizing was Phase 1 of a five-year, three-phase growth plan and Phase 2 sees us making additional modest investments in additional production equipment, as well as much-needed material handling upgrades that are meant to reduce the amount of time-sucking manual labor costs associated with getting a batch from steep tank to bags on a pallet.

“What I have come to terms with is that the financing play for expansion has to jive with malt house aspirations, not the other way around. Letting the needs and requirements of the financing terms influence our goals or take undue risks is simply too reckless for me. In short, unwise ego-driven aspirations need to be replaced with modest, incremental growth strategies utilizing myriad funding options all at the same time (private capital, bank, community rounds, government program funding, and organic).

“It takes forever because in funding an agriculture-based business you immediately go from an ocean of financing options to a hot tub of very hard to find slow-money-minded investment partners. While customer demand is there, trying to service all of it immediately doesn’t necessarily make financial sense.”

In her story, Bernot talks to Ron Extract at Garden Path Fermentations in Washington, and he points to a parallel between breweries and maltsters. Expansion at any cost doesn’t always work out, so I am left with questions. Are economies of scale more important for maltsters than brewers? Are craft maltsters agents of change? Are brewers, and ultimately drinkers, willing to pay for this change?

You might also enjoy

– Why Rocket Pop Is This Summer’s Hottest Beer Flavor. This may or may not be true, but I am totally down with the “taste the stick” experience.

“When you eat those popsicles, you taste the actual stick,” WeldWerks head brewer Skip Schwartz says. Think of gnawing the cold, wet piece of wood, sucking out the last sugary juices. “Even if it’s not a predominant flavor, to me it’s part of that beer,” he says.

– What Does It Mean to Be an Asian American Brewer? The next question should be, What will it mean in another decade?

– Beer Group Asks Drinkers, Legislators to Pick Sides in Beer’s Battle with Spirits. But what if I like wine?

– Henekey’s Long Bar and the birth of the pub chain. The rabbit hole here leads to Norah Docker, and if you keep going to “The Judge, the Duke and the Frenchman.”

– A Turn-of-the-Twentieth-Century California Steam Beer. Michael Jackson once referred to steam beer as the lone American indigenous beer style. Now we know better.

– Man over machine. Spoiler alert, in Jake Against (recipe written by a human) against The Machine (AI recipe) Jake Against wins.

– Defining Craft: Italian Do it Better. I can’t agree, because adding a few more stipulations and even making it a legal definition means little to consumers. Same old problem.

Hop Queries subscribers have seen Scott Lafontaine mentioned multiple times in my newsletter, most recently about the impact of maturity on aroma and flavor. But he knows a bit about non-alcoholic beer, and rice was one of the reasons he chose to join the faculty at the University of Arkansas.

“A lot of schools want a brewing program,” he told the Fayatteville Flyer. “But you have to have an agricultural product to be successful with one. Arkansas has rice, which is a very underutilized crop when you look at how brewers treat it right now. Most brewers use it as an adjunct [a supplement rather than an essential ingredient]; almost as an afterthought. But there’s so much more potential when you look at how breeders are working with aromatic rice varieties. And since I also wanted to diversify myself from my former advisor, who was working with hops, I decided Arkansas was the right fit for me.”

He is looking at the potential of several varietals.

ARoma 22 is one of them. It is a jasmine-type aromatic rice developed by the Arkansas Rice Breeding Program, which is a part of the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture. Over the last ten years the program has developed a total of sixteen rice varieties, of which three have been aromatic lines.

Contrast this with what Anheuser-Busch wants from the rice it uses in Budweiser. When I wrote “Brewing Local” A-B was the largest buyer of rice in the United States, and using about about 8 to 9 percent of the total crop annually.

“We don’t want grassy (like fresh-cut grass),” said David Maxwell, then the brewing director at A-B InBev. Mold will jump out at you, like walking into a basement.” would will be looking for a starchy taste. Rice has a higher starch content and lower protein content than any other cereal adjunct. “We want quality starch,” he said, and freshness is the key.

Gasp
Anchor Brewing cuts national distribution, cancels Christmas Ale
Anchor has made Christmas Ale since 1975. It is/was known for its annually changing combination of spices a different hand-drawn label featuring a tree each year. A small amount will be for sale solely at Anchor Public Taps for visitors to the tasting room. That’s it.

An Anchor representative cited “time-intensive and costly brewing and packaging requirements” as the reason for the change. Christmas Ale is unlikely to return next year, the representative said.

Garrett Kelly, a former brewer at Anchor, indicated to the San Francisco Chronicle that the recent news confirmed concerns he and others voiced after the sale to Sapporo. “The loss of a beer as iconic as the Anchor Christmas Ale, the first American holiday beer post prohibition, is a loss for not only beer nerds like me, but anyone with an interest in preserving culture against the grinding pressure of corporate Darwinism,” Kelly wrote the newspaper.

Just as stunning is the news that Anchor will only sell its beers, including iconic Anchor Steam Beer, in California. Currently, the beer is available in all 50 states.

Sustainability
Breweries are starting to capture carbon — from beer
Clinton Mack, Austin Beerworks’s cellar manager, uses techniques developed by NASA to capture the naturally produced CO₂ and dissolve the molecules into beer.

You can make more money from a car park than a vineyard
Wine root systems on Santorini can be 400 years old. This story is a reminder that sustainability, which I write about often in Hop Queries but not enough here, is complicated.

You might also enjoy
– The Myth of the Mexican Lager — Brewing Cerveza Chango from Desperado

– Everlasting Hype: The Enduring Appeal of Nano Breweries
There was a time more than a dozen years ago I tried, although not too seriously, to figure out how small a brewery needed to be to qualify as nano.