monday links

Monday beer links: Reckoning ahead? Would it be crispy?

Scratch Brewing, Ava, Illinois
St. Louis-based Sauce magazine has six suggestions for brewery/hike combinations in Missouri and Illinois. Of course, Scratch Brewing is one of the destinations. The story would lose all credibility if it were not. We made time eight days ago to get to rural Ava and sample everything on tap. The beers were tasting as wonderful, maybe more wonderful, than always. That’s a fig porter (made with fig leaves, not the fruit) in the glass.

Now to the links . . .

Tin Whiskers, a brewery in Minnesota, is closing. “A lot of people are getting in that think it’s easy — easy money,” says Tin Whiskers owner Jeff Moriarty. “I feel like a bubble is coming — a reckoning is going to happen.”

The brewery, the last to operate in downtown St. Paul, has been in business eight years. There were plenty of local stories, but little additional insight. However, the discussion at Beer Advocate is pretty interesting.

Just so you know, two Dallas-Fort Worth breweries also closed last month. There was no mention of a reckoning.

ON LANGUAGE
In search of elegant wine. I saved this story because the headline grabbed my attention. Before I got around to reading it I thought a bit about what attributes in beer, or simply what beers, I might describe as elegant. I know I’ve used the word. Not a lot, but apparently without proper thought. Honestly, this story didn’t help a lot. However, perhaps you can take the suggestion about what makes a mathematical proof elegant and make use of it.

Crispy. Jeff Alworth chimes in on the use of the word crispy, a topic I already said what I have to say about in February.

There was a certain amount of conversation when he posted a link on Twitter.

Which was followed a tweet from Matthew Curtis about “beer writers policing language that becomes part of a drinkers vernacular” and more comments.

And eventually this from Alan McLeod:

“While I agree that policing is fundamentally silly there is possibly an underlying question: is there any meaningful standard upon which the self-appointed might do such a thing? For the best part of twenty years doing this, I am left with the impression that too much of what has been written about good beer has been larded with a sameness made up of business promotion, recycling of the works of others, forms of oversimplification** mixed with claims to expertise and a certain code compliance. Is ‘crispy’ an example of that code? Maybe. I don’t have an exact idea what is meant when used. But it’s not unique in that regard. And I’m not sure that is the point. It seems that circles of praise gather whenever someone achieves the great gold ring of getting paid for their written code compliant words, as if that is the main end of beer writing.”

After you consider the intriguing question McLeod raises — What is the main end of beer writing? — there is this.

In “Democracy, authenticity, and the enregisterment of connoisseurship in ‘craft beer talk’” (Language & Communications 75 (2020) author Lex Connelly draws a parallel between oinoglossia (wine talk) and brutoglossia, (craft) beer talk (just focus on the words that make sense to you).

My takeaway, further informed by non-beery books I’ve been reading, is likely different from yours what yours might be. I think there is more to this what’s going on than hipster affectations and peer skeptically over the tops of my my glasses when I come across sentences that contain these words: “the key kind of class distinction in late capitalism.”

So, I suggest that some beer drinkers (writers and citizens themselves) may use language, tasting rituals and what they view as the importance of authenticity to accrue cultural capital. In “Distinction,” French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu posits that cultural capital (as opposed to economic capital) is an accumulation of knowledge and skills that demonstrate social status.

(You know if you know. Guilty here.)

Anchor Brewing savior Fritz Maytag once said, “It’s very hard to get pretentious about beer. You can become knowledgeable and start to talk with a highfalutin’ vocabulary. But you can only go so far with beer, and I’ve always liked that.”

Perhaps, but beer drinkers who adopt specialized language (i.e. crispy boi) that means nothing to my neighbors may be as intent on collecting cultural capital as those who celebrate elegant wine. That’s fine, unless that capital is used as a weapon to exclude those without similar special knowledge from joining the craft beer club.

PUBS
The whole point. “The Ted Lasso pub is just a pub.” Locals in the UK take the pub for granted. Viewed from afar it is idyllic.

Pressing play. And so it begins, “Over the weekend, I travelled on a number of different trains to a couple of different pubs and beer events. It was the first time since the start of the pandemic that everything about the day felt part of a previous lifetime; one that had been merely paused for a couple of years and restarted.”

Double threat. What’s the greater danger? A 26-story going up next door to a 200-year-old pub and leaving it permanently in the shade or Heineken installing its own manager?


Click on the photo on the left for details.

Monday beer links: Make time for the first one

If breweries and beer, or craft breweries and craft beer if you are still a member of the movement, are going to save the world they must do better. The story about “How Sexism, Assault Pushed One Woman Out of the Beer Industry” is absolutely gutting.

And a part of the story not to be overlooked is this.

“It’s exhausting to keep telling this fucking story,” (Sarah) Hite says, adding that between 2020 and 2021, she and a trusted industry peer contacted two journalists about her experiences. Hite had given an interview to one of these journalists, but neither published stories about it. She says the reporter who interviewed her eventually stopped communicating with her.

Make time to read the whole story.

#FOODIES
Interview with a master cicerone
So long, Chowhound
There’s this: In his conversation with Em Sauter, master cicerone Shane McNamara says, “I like to think of this journey as the same of what people describe as becoming a ‘foodie.’”

And this: Writing about the announcement that Chowhound website will close next week, Eric Asimov explains that the site was “a neighborhood hangout for food adventurers — chowhounds, (founder Jim) Leff called them, distinguishing them from dilettantish foodies — to indulge their opinionated obsessions among a like-minded community.”

Leff clearly is not pro “foodie.” I admit this is piling on, but there is also this from the foreword of “Foodies: Democracy and Distinction in the Gourmet Foodscape.”

“(The authors) show the pursuit of social status that underlies the false egalitarianism of foodies’ claims to like humble dishes. They know that we are really luxuriating in our sense of entitlement, and that every claim to like simple food is a means of asserting our distinction.”

Does that sound inclusive?

Bonus reading: Leff wrote a series of blog posts about selling Chowhound. Start here.

THE EARLY DAYS
A long conversation with Alan Sprints, who recently announced he will soon close his Hair of the Dog brewery. This: “It was very frustrating that having good beer wasn’t enough. It wasn’t even the second or third most important thing. It was always so frustrating that I had to work so hard, and yet I never was financially very successful. Critical success came early on, and that sustained me for quite a few years, but financial success is the reason you get into business in the first place.”

AUTHENTICITY
Bringing Ancient Beer Back to Life in the Modern World
This is true: “If history, as they say, is told by the victors, rebrews can either reinforce or challenge cultural narratives.” And that may be more important than perfectly replicating the flavor of an ancient.”

“Re-creation beers, whether authentic or not, illuminate our understanding of beer and culture, and show us that we are actually very similar to our ancestors; beer is still a ubiquitous influence in our lives today,” George Schwartz wrote in a Beer History magazine essay in 2013 that examined the importance of authenticity in modern versions of historic ales. “What unifies these projects — whether they are derived from archaeological artifacts, scientific research, or archival documents — is a strong desire to connect with the past.”

PUBS
Drinking with the Simpsons
After you read this new story about the popularity of Moe’s Taverns in South America, consider Samer Khudairi’s essay about how The Simpsons taught him about beer and drinking.

Surveying the literature of the pub
“It has also long been a favored site and subject for English literature. Some writers have dramatized the pub as a male-only space. For others, it has been a staging ground for transgression, where the norms of behavior break down. The pub has meant shame, dissolution, pleasure, companionship, and the artifice of companionship. A mutable mini-England on every high street.”

FUTURE READING
The North American Guild of Beer Writers announced the 2022 “diversity in beer writing” grant recipients, as well as the topics each of them will be writing about. Cool stuff.

Monday beer links: Some success is random; B.O.R.I.S. is not

Sometimes beer stories pop up during the week that seem to be thought about along side something that I am currently reading. Such as this story about “What’s the Next Big Beer Style?” It showed up about the same time I reached the seventh chapter of “Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction.”

First, about the list. Adam Beauchamp at Creature Comforts stays true to what he said when Creatures introduced its Cold IPA collaboration with Bell’s Brewery. Second, I like the honest answer from Mitch Steele of New Realm Brewing, which is that making predictions is a crap shoot. “A lot of us brewers are wishing we had crystal balls. But we keep hearing that beer drinkers are moving back to lagers and other lighter styles. We’re also hearing that West Coast IPAs are making a bit of a comeback.”

Back to “Hit Makers” and the chapter where author Derek Thompson considers how random success can be. “Making complex products for people who don’t know what they want–and who aggressively cluster around bizarrely popular products if a couple of their friends do the same–is unbelievably difficult work. It’s important to appreciate the stress inherent to being a creator, an entrepreneur, a music label, a movie studio, a media company. People are mysterious and markets are chaos. Is it any surprise that most creativity is failure,” he writes.

That is not exactly like brewing something new and trying to sell it, but it also not totally different. And there is this next thought, “One solution for taming the chaos is to own the channel of distribution.” Hmmm.

BRINGING IN OUTSIDERS
Can ‘Outsiders’ Like Me Disrupt the Wine Industry? The Answer Isn’t Clear.
“Our culture, our heritage, and the places we come from shouldn’t determine where we land or what we’re able to be a part of. The truth is, there is no wine gene.” Pretty sure there’s no beer gene either.

STILL BODACIOUS
From Ireland . . . “There are certain products of American brewing that were once spoken of reverentially, back when all that was thrilling in beer came from the USA, and as a still-scribbling hack who was around then, I take great pleasure in ticking them off.” The original B.O.R.I.S. revisited, plus brand extensions.

PUBS, BARS & SALOONS
The Chelsea Drugstore – the pub of the future?
“In the 1960s, British brewers sometimes behaved as if they didn’t believe the traditional English pub had a future and scrambled to find ways to reinvent the pub for the late 20th century. For Bass Charrington the solution was a glass and metal wonderland in West London, on the King’s Road – The Chelsea Drugstore.”

For whatever reason, when as I was reading the responses (click to expand) to Robin LeBanc’s question I thought of the final words in “Faces Along the Bar.” They are, “The saloon was a creature of its time, and its time was past.”

Britain’s ancient pubs (or are they?)
“It also looks like most claims from pubs about their antiquity are false. Does it matter and do we care?”

A RENAISSANCE
Indigenous Maori Winemakers are Guardians of New Zealand Terroir
– “We are the land, and the land is us.”
– “The history of the Maori people’s relationship with their colonizers is one that echoes other nations around the globe: that of devastating disease, broken contracts, loss of land and systematic cultural oppression.”

Monday beer links: Making connections

It is said that beer is about making connections. Here are a few.

CRISPY & CRUNCHY
Can a Wine Actually Be “Crunchy”?
Craft Beer Snobs Suddenly Love Lager
First the crunchy part. “It kind of describes something in addition to taste in terms of tension. It’s just a perfect, succinct word to describe that texture: the balance between density and acid structure. That addition of acid almost causes the liquid to seize in a way that gives it a bit more of a three-dimensional feeling or experience.”

Make of that what you will. Here is the partial sentence I was happy to see: “Texture is an essential and underappreciated aspect of taste.”

Which brings us to the second story. It is behind a Wall Street Journal paywall. I’d like you to think about this from Chris Lohring, founder of Notch Brewing. “I’m gonna go on record that I hate the term ‘crispybo.’” That’s because he doesn’t find most lagers to be crisp.

I’ve heard enough brewers use the descriptor “crisp” to understand that the word has meaning to them. But I’m with Lohring. Saturday afternoon I had the helles at Bierstadt Lagerhaus. It was not crisp. It was not crunchy. It had texture. Like high thread-counts sheets. Well, if they tasted of beer.

WHAT DOES PROGRESS LOOK LIKE?
Across the Industry, Calls for Craft Beer to Grow Up
Brewing students at Niagara College hopped up for equality and diversity ‘bevoltion’
From the first story:

“Last October, Esther Tetreault, co-owner of Trillium Brewing, hosted a panel on how to create a safe and discrimination-free work environment with HR professionals, attorneys and diversity, equity and inclusion professionals. While she believes the event was impactful and important, it was not as well-attended as she had hoped.

“‘I will say we were a little saddened, a little frustrated, a little disappointed, to not get more support, more responses and more engagement,’ says Tetreault about the event.”

From the second story:

“This is exactly where the conversation around creating ethical workplaces should start – early on during the educational process,” said Ash Eliot, co-founder of Brave Noise and “Women of the Bevolution.”

VALUE ADDED
Communal Brewing in Bohemia
More about the brewing commune in Freistadt
Would you pay more for a house that came with brewing rights? Perhaps that is a rhetorical question.

PERHAPS IT WAS TIME
The Historic Jerusalem Tavern, One of London’s Best Pubs, Has Closed
The final night at ‘JT’
I spot a difference of opinion. “What was once a must-do for any beerhunter in London had become a moody experience best overlooked years ago.”

BEER IS AGRICULTURE