monday links

“This is another industry that we should be cashin’ in on just like everybody else. Young men can grow up and be brewers— that’s a real job that you can do. You look around our neighborhoods, we’re buyin’ beer, why don’t we make it? Why don’t we buy our own beer? That’s just another thing that we need to make a little Blacker, and there’s nothing wrong with it.”

– Atlantucky co-founder Fish Scales (pictured) in a story about the brewery’s first anniversary party (this past weekend).

“Customers will change. Demographics are changing. We’re going to get new drinkers, we’re going to get changing drinkers.”

– Brewers Association economist Bart Watson speaking to members of the Ohio Craft Brewers Association.

“10 years ago if you had asked me to tell you what I thought craft beer would be like in 2022, I would have taken a guess. Now if you asked me to tell you what I think it will be like two years from now, I wouldn’t even attempt that. It’s actually a lot of fun. You get to really flex your skills and use different techniques.”

– Great Lakes Brewing brewmaster Mark Hunger. (A thought so terrific Alan McLeod also singled it out last Thursday, along with feather bowling.)

“This is what micropubs make possible: new ideas about what a pub can be, and which rules of the game it is obliged to follow.”

– Boak & Bailey, writing about The Dodo in London.

“Changing the recipe of Fat Tire is not just something I consider to be a poor marketing decision. It’s sacrilege. The wholesale abuse of a genuine icon. We were once bold enough to call the emergence of American craft beer a ‘revolution.’ This feels like a revolt.”

– Matthew Curtis, offering this week’s deep thoughts about Fat Tire. How many more weeks in a row will there be a noteworthy comment about the former icon?

“This is a potential home that had a working microbrew at one time you can rejuvenate the microbrewery or expand the home and take over the microbrewery area, there are many options for the creative person.”

– From home for sale listing in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Homebrewing at a different scale, I guess. 5,000 square feet!

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Meet Day Bracey, The Man Behind Barrel & Flow — America’s Most Progressive Beer Festival. Would this have been your answer if I asked you what might be America’s most progressive beer festival?

A journey to the birthplace of lager beer. h/t to Don Tse and his newsletter. (Also for the next link.)

Assessing the influence of colour and glass type on beer expectations. Among other things, glass type makes a difference in expectations only in certain colors.

Beer predictions from Rolling Stone. I will leave it to somebody hipper than I to explain the cultural ramifications.

Retweeting Boak and Bailey’s tweet pointing to their weekly roundup of interesting writing about beer and pubs, I commented “In which I am reminded a ‘thing’ maybe still be a ‘thing’ after it has been written about so much it seems there is nothing ‘new’ to write. Case in point, this morning I learned the Bermondsey Beer Mile ‘is still a thing.'”

To which Alan McLeod replied: “Isn’t ‘a thing’ different from ‘still a thing’ in that to be ‘still a thing’ there needs to be a reasonable length of time when it really wasn’t a thing even if there are those who thought the thing was thoroughly thingy throughout.” That was probably more than I was prepared to think about before breakfast on Saturday (this is where I should insert a photo of my food, but I will not).

My comment, however, is something I had been thinking about since it was announced Scratch Brewing is a semi-finalist for a James Beard Award. In the first few years after Scratch began selling beer in 2013 there many, many stories about the brewery. It was, and is, a great story. But if (almost) everybody writes one time about a place all at once then pretty soon there are no new stories.

Scratch’s post about the awards had 725 likes on Instagram this morning, and a similar one on Facebook had 594 likes. To many people Scratch is still a thing, even if the story faucet is no longer running wide open.

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So you understand I might be biased, I think unions are on balance a good thing. I know they aren’t perfect but most of the “cons” on pro and cons lists are bullshit. I once worked for a newspaper in which members of the editorial department were not represented by a union. And I worked for one, both inside and outside of management, where they were. Not only was the second a better place to work, for both union members and those in management, but I think having the union in place made the newspaper better.

That said, here is a straight up news story from The Red&Black, the University of Georgia student newspaper:

“On Tuesday, a majority of employees from Creature Comforts Brewing Company filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board for a secret ballot election for employees to vote to be represented by their newly formed union, the Brewing Union of Georgia, according to a press release from the union.

“BUG intends to become a fully independent union for breweries across the state. Various community leaders and union members delivered the letter requesting voluntary recognition on Jan. 13 to management requesting a response in three days, the release said. On Jan. 16, management said they would consider the request.

“Since the company did not immediately agree to recognition, BUG proceeded with filing for the election.”

Of course, it isn’t that simple. To understand what is going on you really need to be reading Fingers, Dave Infante’s Substack newsletter. Both his Wednesday report and a follow up (scroll down) on Saturday. Really, go do it now.

PorchDrinking has a “what does it all mean” story, and it includes a list of pros and cons (scroll about half way down). You could center an enthusiastic debate in a brewery taproom around any of the first five cons offered by Jon Hyman at the law firm Wickens Herzer Panza.

But No. 6 . . . wow.

“Nothing in the employer-employee relationship is supposed to be equal.”

Really?

Brewery cats. “Working cats” are not friendly or otherwise compatible with normal home life. A Kentucky Humane Society program finds homes for them, including at breweries. “At a lot of shelters that don’t have a working cats program, [these cats] wouldn’t be adoption candidates and they would probably be euthanized,” said the program manager.

Ghost pubs. In Brussels. If that doesn’t have your attention, the images are a product of a Praktica L and Kodak Portra 400 film.

An old story becomes a new story in Uruguay. This reads like an origin story that has been told thousands of times during the last 40 years in the United States. Things like this happen: “But only a few months before the scheduled shipment was supposed to arrive, the location they thought they had secured fell through. They were left with a fortune in state-of-the-art equipment about to be unloaded into the busy port with nowhere to go.”

And to be filed under wait-didn’t-these-breweries-just-open?, “they took inspiration from breweries like Grimm Artisanal Ales in Brooklyn, 2nd Shift Brewing in St. Louis, and Tripping Animals Brewing Co. in Miami.”

Requiem for Fat Tire. “As Fat Tire Moves On, I Miss the Old Belgium.”

The official beer of . . . World Axe Throwing League. The beer is Pabst and this is a real story.

Mic drop:

Wow. Why didn’t we think of this? Because it’s a dumb idea that tastes awful. Craft beer is better than this. Craft is about flavor, not shock and novelty. Forgetting that belittles the hard work required to make it. #beerflavoredbeer#craftbeer @avbc
https://t.co/s2WiO7eK5j

— Gordie.McGee (@McgeeGordie) January 28, 2023

This lovely essay from Eoghan Walsh is not about Fat Tire. That it arrived the same week so many were moved to comment on changes in Fat Tire was a coincidence. There is, in fact, much more to what Walsh writes than these three sentences, but, dang, they seem relevant to the Fat Tire conversation.

“A beer evolves in other ways too; the Zinnebir of 2022 is not the Zinnebir of 2002 because of innumerate conscious and unconscious decisions made in those 20 years. Brewers are constantly tweaking their beers, paddling furiously out of sight of the drinker to provide them the same – or better – experience every time. Over the course of 20 years a beer is pulled from its original template by incremental changes to brewing processes, new or different raw materials, or marketing decisions altering its colour, bitterness, or alcohol content.”

This week in AI news

– Atwater Brewing in Detroit has used ChatGPT to write a beer recipe, then brewed Artificial Intelligence IPA.

– If the commitment of beergeek to AI generated words and images wasn’t previously clear, it should be now that the site has been renamed beergeekAI. It is not a place to worry about the role AI will play in journalism (worth considering, but not in this context). It is a place to visit when you need a smile.

– Perhaps something similar is needed for wine drinkers, because otherwise this: “It wouldn’t surprise me if this has been going on for some time now. I’ve already written about straight-up plagarism in wine writing before, this just refines it. In most cases, given the paucity of sources used to plagiarize content for Instagram posts and the like (most copycat content is lazily purloined from a single website), a bot-written rehash will be both more balanced and more readable. But if we’re really honest, most wine writing is a recycling effort in the first place.”

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But what does the “new” Fat Tire taste like? For those who can’t wait until they sample it themselves there is this: “If the color and packaging had remained unchanged, I honestly wonder what percentage of the Fat Tire drinkers would have noticed the shift in flavors. I can fully believe that some less discerning tasters would have happily gone on drinking the brand without realizing that things had changed.”

As an aside, because I wrote a couple of stories about hops and sustainability last summer I learned that New Belgium was already using HBC 522 in Fat Tire. Beers evolve.

23 people to watch. “These are folks whose voices are changing craft beer for the better every day just by doing what they do best: brewing beer. And yes, many of them by nature are also actively championing safer, more-inclusive spaces in craft beer.”

This is what success looks like. Cannonball Creek Brewing in Golden, Colorado, celebrated their 10th anniversary this past weekend. They brew about 750 barrels of beer a year. That’s not very much compared to a somewhat larger brewery in Golden, but enough to sustain a community business. They are better than pretty good at it what they do, winning a GABF medal every year since they opened. That’s not the only reason it was packed Friday night, although it’s a good place to start. Sunday they had a Piñata.

Elephant-friendly beer. If that headline won’t entice you to read this story I do not know what might.

The best hop waters. Many of these are more expensive than beer.