monday links

In honor of this week’s featured ingredient (last week it was yeast) here is the Craft Malsters Guild map that was on display during the Craft Brewers Conference in September.

Whimsy
“The Universally Recommended Timeless Institution Pub” is evidence that we need more blog posts written after a beer or three. Because, otherwise we might not get sentences like this, “That thing where it feels traditional and unchanged but has actually morphed slowly through the ages. So it’s just about on trend, but doesn’t feel trendy.” I wish somebody would say something like that about me.

Baby steps
Lawson’s Liquids is renaming two beers. Say goodbye to Knockout Blonde and Maple Nipple.

Selling (out)
I’ve always wondered about what the difference might be between selling and selling out. Entrepreneurs start businesses every day, and quite often the business plan includes an exit strategy.

Author Tom Acitelli used the word movement on more than a third of the pages in the first edition of “The Audacity of Hops.” I get it (this is not a “Succession” shout out) — drinkers sign on to a movement to stick it to the man and then a brewer who is supposed to be leading this movement sells (out) to the man.

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It was a good week for readers interested in yeast (you know who are are), so jumping right in:

Family tree
The more scientists study the genome of different yeast strains, the more obvious it is how diverse they are. That’s about as succinct a summary as I can offer, so go read Lars Garshol’s post. One nugget: Saccharomyces cerevisiae likely originated in China.

Custom strains
Jasper Akerboom once isolated a strain from what he found on a 40 million-year-old whale fossil, and Lost Rhino Brewing used to brew Bone Duster Amber Ale. He points out that the yeast likely was not close to as old, but instead is a strain from the environment, Nevertheless beer and the yeast received national and international attention from publications such as Popular Science and Scientific American. These days Jasper Yeast sells unique strains to hundreds of breweries. A Q&A.

Not sure this is progress
Two meetings organized by Mikkeller adjacent to its Copenhagen-based festival “offered few concrete answers for what’s actually going to happen next as Mikkeller says it will work to rectify past wrongs.”

Black Beer Dialogues
The background and the first episode.

Sensory
“The smell of old books stems from their slow chemical decomposition. Books are largely paper, and paper is largely plants. But the materials from which books are made have shifted over the centuries—and those shifts, in turn, have influenced how different generations of books smell.”
— Excerpt from “Revelations in Air: A Guidebook to Smell”

Strictly business
– Barley prices are up. Aluminum prices are up. Beer prices must follow, right?

– 2021 craft beer report. Including hard seltzer, of course.

– Thinking about starting a brewery? What are the chances of getting it financed?

– What do Napa and Berlin have in common?

Jeff Alworth and Betsy Lay in conversation at Lady Justice Brewing.

This past week in her Hugging the Bar newsletter, Courtney Iseman expressed frustration with beer consumers who continue to support toxic breweries. She also suggests that there are many beer influencers act who should act more responsibly. A code of conduct for influencers — now, that’s an interesting idea.

But to return to the question she asks, “How do we get [consumers] to give a shit?”

Spoiler alert, her suggestion: “All I can think of right now is just to keep the conversation going. Because I do know so many people, who have nothing to do with craft beer and so don’t know all “the news and updates, but who love drinking it, who have been immediately receptive upon learning about issues with certain breweries. So, whenever you’re not too utterly exhausted, keep spreading the word and steering friends and family away from the baddies and toward the breweries and brands contributing to a better industry for all.”

If a change it going to come, that must be part of it. To that end, links to three posts worth talking about:

– An article — published in Civic Eats, so outside the beer bubble — to print out and keep for reference purposes. It is time to help make sure Betsy Lay is right when she says, “The door has been opened. It’s going to be very hard to shut it now.” That’s Lay at the top beside “The Beer Bible” author Jeff Alworth. Alworth was at Lady Justice, where Lay makes the beer, as part of a book tour promoting the second edition of his book. Not surprisingly, the conversation turned to just this topic. The next day, Alworth posted this:

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Doing a bit of Feedly cleaning last week I counted 212 beer-blog feeds I follow. Of them, only 26 of them had published a new post in the last month. For many it was more like years since the last post. Sure, I should be embarrassed that I lousy job I do curating the list, but that is not the point.

In the 13 or so years I’ve intermittently posted links on Monday I’ve always looked beyond blogs, and beyond beer stories for that matter, for interesting items to pass along. If you are disappointed that I don’t point to more beer blogs, well, so am I. But let’s face it. Beer blogs are dead. That is why you are not reading this.

‘Drinking buddies’ – 8 years later
Hard truths.

“(The movie) captures so much of what’s been wrong with craft beer culture that we’re literally only starting to confront right now. These ideas of there being such in-demand breweries that people who brew there can act however they want; that you should want to work at those breweries so badly you’d be willing to put up with anything; that because it’s a brewery, basic workplace behavior expectations don’t apply and people can drink and make women feel objectified and even threatened . . . these elements were all there all along, hidden under the haze of us all viewing craft beer like this bohemian, artistic, no-rules beast, where we didn’t have to closely examine anyone’s behavior because everyone was supposedly united under this pious goal of sticking it to Big Beer.”
[From Hugging the Bar, a newsletter you should be reading.]

Whoa!

A pretty swift transformation from the days of being called Fat Tire https://t.co/EYLWAsmlXt

— Beer Cruncher ?? (@beercruncher) October 5, 2021

It’s only business
Anheuser-Busch InBev NV “Chief Executive Officer Michel Doukeris is considering a sale of some German beer brands it has owned for decades as the world’s largest brewer aims to prune less profitable businesses and trim debt.

“Doukeris has said that a ‘big revolution’’ is afoot in the alcohol industry, with more than 60% of growth being driven outside of beer. He’s seeking to insulate AB InBev against a stagnant performance in beer by doubling down on the company’s more nascent Cutwater Spirits canned cocktails, canned wine, e-commerce platforms and energy drink brands.”

Acidity
This is a story about wine, but there are beer lessons to be learned. Including this:

“Often, high levels of acetic acid are accompanied by an excess of another volatile molecule, ethyl acetate. It has the pungent aroma of nail polish remover . . .

“At high concentrations, these volatile compounds conspire to make a wine that’s aromatically distracting at best and downright unpleasant at worst. Elevated levels can even deliver a burning sensation in the throat.”

Change is constant
Dijon mustard producer Grey Poupon has released a white wine that is infused with Grey Poupon mustard seeds, along with honeysuckle. Can a beer be far behind?

Always for pleasure

Go here, click through. It really is a terrific great guide, and an example of how fresh hop beers are part of a time and place.