monday links

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

Monday beer links: Add your own commentary

Valles Caldera

Pardon the brevity. We spent the weekend in New Mexico and now are headed home, still thinking about the Valles Caldera (pictured).

Rice. Trust me. It begins like a collection of links, with a lot more commentary than here, but it is really about rice.

The Difference Between Blue Moon, Shock Top, and Hoegaarden, Explained. A real headline and a real story.

The Difference Between a Lager and an Ale (Because You’re Probably Getting It Wrong). Another real headline and real story.

Leprechaun entrance, Coleman's Authentic Irish PubGreen Beer Sunday. Still going at Coleman’s Authentic Irish Pub in Syracuse, N.Y., although for the first time without the man who started it. That’s the “leprechaun door” at Coleman’s pictured on the right.

When did pub crawls become a thing? Answers included, and a promise there’s more to be said.

Pittsburgh’s Craft Breweries and Taprooms Offer More than Just Great Beer. Way above average pub crawl.

Adventure. On the hunt for cask in London. Encouraging.

The 1904 Brewery Strike – Part One. From Toronto.

Do Beer Sites Really Keep Track of Your Birthday? This is absolutely the question I woke up in the middle of the night asking myself.

WORD

Monday beer links: Tiny beers, indie beers, hop men

Ron Pattinson visits Elsewhere Brewing

Remember when Lew Bryson started The Session Beer Project in 2007? He originally set the cap for session beers at 5.5% ABV, then lowered it to 4.5%. And finding truly flavorful beers that met the standard was not particularly easy.

Now it seems as if 2.5% ABV is the new 4.5%. Such beers may be labeled “low alcohol.” “Building quality low-alcohol beer is a balancing act,” Josh Bernstein writes in The New York Times. Among others, Bernstein talked with Todd DiMatteo, brewer and co-founder at Good Word Brewing & Public House in Duluth, Georgia. He also mentioned Little Beer, a festival Good Word will host in April.

The first Little Beer, held last May, was the first and last festival I have attended since Covid arrived in the United States. The 2022 lineup is spectacular in a different way than the also spectacular lineup for Side Project Invitational the same day. I plan to write more about that later.

A bit of disclosure. DiMatteo and I are friends. I once hung out and helped brew a 3.5% ABV beer at Good Word that we called Lunar Gravity. (One Untappd contributor gave it 4 1/2 stars and wrote “Definitely good for a lager.”) Last week, among the reasons I was back in Georgia was because Ron Pattinson came to the U.S. to drink a beer DiMatteo brewed from a recipe Pattinson wanted to taste.

The beer is called No Wooden Shoes and is a 3.5% ABV Dutch-style Donkerbier. About four dozen Georgia brewers showed up at Good Word on Thursday to listen to Pattinson talk about low-gravity English beers. I sat beside him and answered a few questions about hops, but I know why they braved Atlanta traffic to get to Duluth.

On Wednesday, Pattinson and I visited a few Georgia breweries. The photo at the top was taken at Elsewhere Brewing and that’s brewer Josh Watterson with him in front of 12 horizontal tanks (six fermentation tanks, six serving vessels).

Now, back to regular programming.

COMPARE & CONTRAST
“Selling out” revisited. This is quite a sentence: “At its zenith, craft beer might have achieved something close to that kind of (beer-centric) social, civic saturation, but those days are in the rearview now.” Perhaps this overstates the import of craft beer in the decade of your choice and at the same time understates its ongoing impact within smaller communities.

Bell’s Brewery has 1,300 employees. What’s it going to be like to work there in five years and what will Eccentric Day be like? I’m willing to wait and see. What will it be like at New Belgium Brewing, which is now “integrating” with Bell’s? There is a standard to live up to (see the next section and Brian Callahan).

[Insert headline]. Try as I may I could not come up with a few words to summarize this story that doesn’t come off churlish. The Brewers Association independent craft brewer seal has caught plenty of flack since it was introduced in 2017, but it helped make “indie brewer” part of our vocabulary. I expect that the founders of Indie Brewing are good neighbors and don’t deserve a headline that reads, “Indie Brewing Is Dead.”

‘WOW, I THINK I COULD DO THIS’
He started as a volunteer, bottling beer. He was the company’s first employee owner. He finished happily working on the grounds crew. A very New Belgiumesque story.

A FORGOTTEN RUNT
An exploration of sour and our evolutionary past. Or why you wouldn’t give a tomato or lemon to a sheep.

BUSINESS PAGES
“It’s been years since a new beer ad reached pop culture status.” I can live with that.

Discarding gender roles. “There is no more important narrative in the last century of U.S. alcohol than the rise of women drinkers.”

Related: In The New Brewer (available in print and to Brewers Association members online) “Beer’s Tenacious Gender Gap” concludes “Someday we may look back and see this era as the time when our culture tools its first baby steps away from the whole idea of categorizing human traits as ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine.’”

When Fuller’s was funky. Ah, yes, the 70s.

I’m confused. The subhead on this story states, “As baby boomers retire and buy less wine, producers need new ways to tempt a White Claw generation back from other alcoholic drinks.” But within there is this quote: “A brand’s social values are increasingly connected to a consumer’s decision to purchase particular products, including wine.” I would like to see the memo revealing White Claw’s social values.

HOP MAN
Why was I not given this option when answering census questions?

Monday beer links: Probably overthinking things . . .

Barrels at work
New Pete Brown posts are rare (the last before Friday was June 4), but these 1,300-plus words were worth waiting for. They aren’t all his words. He has mined comments from thet “sewers that run below the lines of Daily Mail articles” and, well, maybe I should back up.

CAMRA has asked its members to fill out a questionnaire.

Brown explains, “After years of being criticised for only being relevant to white middle-aged men, CAMRA is asking how it might broaden its audience from that base. After decades of women reporting that they are patronised, ignored ridiculed, harassed or even assaulted at beer events, CAMRA is asking people for their experiences, to gauge how serious the problem is and, if necessary (spoiler alert: it is) to do something about it.

“Speaking as an overweight, bearded, middle-aged real ale drinker, I’d say this is long overdue, and is to be welcomed.”

Not by those he cites.

Easy to read. Hard truths.

GOTTA SERVE SOMEBODY
The governor of Oregon ordered flags in the state be flown at half-staff to honor Austin Smith, a volunteer firefighter, who suffered critical injuries Thursday from an explosion while he was fighting a barn fire in his hometown of St. Paul, population 480. I know this because Friday multiple hop farms I follow on Twitter and Instagram sent their condolences. Smith, a sixth generation hop farmer, was manager of B&D Farms and also had plans to open a brewery.

The story I linked to does not mention hops or beer. Alan McLeod describes himself as “a beer community denier.” I don’t necessarily agree, but sometimes I would rather think about beer and community and their impact on each other than the fraternity of beer/brewing. This story is a reminder of what it means to serve a community.

NATIVE LAND
Each can of Native Land beer acknowledges the ancestral land the brewery that made the beer is located on. Here’s another reason that matters.

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LEDE OF THE WEEK

“Wherever there’s a row of railway arches, a brewery is inevitable.”

And so begins “Little Martha: a new stop in Bristol’s brewery quarter” from Boak & Bailey.

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MESSAGE IN A CAN
In this case one that contained Labatt Ice. “A phenomenon like craft beer, itself in constant evolution, is not the final arbiter of beer taste.”

NA
-Dry January in Germany.
-Dry January in Chicago.

ON HOLD
Flagship February.

STOP OVERTHINKING IT
The shape of your wine beer glass doesn’t really matter. Actually, it does, but not that much. And clean matters a lot more. The important message here is, “Stop overthinking it.”

QUESTION OF THE WEEK

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