monday links – Page 26 – Appellation Beer

The good (terroir), the bad (climate change) & the ugly (unacceptable beer festival behavior)

August 30, 2021

Bale Breaker Brewing, Loftus Ranch
Hops (at Loftus Ranches) viewed from inside a brewery (Bale Breaker). Moxee, Washington.

There is a decent chance I will be in a hop field, or on the way to one, when you read this. I’ve also seen a lot of grapes, fruit trees, corn and cattle since reaching the Northwest a week ago. Also a lot of smoke, from fires in California and Washington, hanging in the air and plants that suffered from the “heat dome” that settled over the region early in summer. So the first link today is to a press release. It reads like a press release, but, dang, pay attention, because climate change is real.

Carbon neutral
“New Belgium Brewing is releasing its Carbon Neutral Toolkit to support fellow beer companies on the journey toward net-zero carbon emissions. The detailed resource, which represents hundreds of hours of work and significant financial investment from New Belgium, is designed to help other small- and medium-sized breweries measure their carbon footprint and take steps to make their businesses carbon neutral by supporting the highest impact greenhouse gas emissions reduction initiatives available.”

Unacceptable
“I know I keep using the word ‘unacceptable’ . . . but how else can you describe the fact that part of going to festivals for womxn just naturally includes being prepared to guard yourself, to be subjected to discrimination and danger, to turn on yourself if something bad does indeed happen because that’s who society has taught you to blame?”

Courtney Iseman, who writes the Hugging the Bar newsletter, and Women of the Bevolution founder Ash Eliot are starting a series discussing the current state of safety and beer festivals . . . or lack thereof. Subscribe to Hugging the Bar to follow.

Texas terroir
You must be new here if you don’t know I am a sucker for terroir (hence “appellation” beer). Yeast found in the wilds of Texas may help Texas breweries create beer unique to their region. Many excellent points in “Yeast Hunters,” but I hope readers read this carefully: “around 70 percent of flavor in beer is due to the yeast.” That’s not “yeast flavor” flavor but the aroma and flavor that result from the interaction of yeast and other raw materials, perhaps also from Texas.

Wrong
I’ve never enjoyed judging the “Irish Red” category in beer competitions. Martyn Cornell’s takedown leaves me feeling OK with that. “(In 1988) Coors declared that ‘In 1864 in Enniscorthy, Ireland, George Henry Lett brewed the first batch of a full-bodied, red-colored lager that would eventually become known as George Killian’s Irish Red,’ which manages to cram five pieces of utter nonsense into less than 30 words.”

Crowd sourcing
“I’ve yet to visit any two identical farmhouses, so why should the beers made there (or modeled after the setting) be any different?” I’m not usually a fan of mashups of book blurb length comments, but I read this collection that Mandy Naglich assembled to the end. That said, I spent hours Friday talking about the mixed-culture beers at Fair Isle Brewing in Seattle and I’m not sure the word farmhouse was uttered once. Farm, yes, but not farmhouse.

Always for pleasure

Beers conditioning in the bottle at Fair Isle Brewing, Seattle, Washington
Beers conditioning at Fair Isle Brewing. Seattle, Washington.

Stories I didn’t read last week

August 16, 2021

Lady Justice Brewing

The headlines Feedly delivered were more than enough

– We Drank And Ranked 23 Beers From Elysian Brewing To Find The Best One
– The Difference Between White Claw and Truly, Explained
– This Is the Worst Cheap Beer in America
– White Zinfandel, the Acid-Washed Jeans of Wine
– Robot Waiters Have Descended on Silicon Valley
– 8 Things You Should Know About Twisted Tea
– Much Adew About . . . Something – Boston Beer, Pepsico HRD MTN DEW Deal Portends Fuzzing Categories at All Tiers

Jeff Alworth did read the last post on my list, which becomes part of his own. And one takeaway for me personally from “Maybe We Don’t Need to Shout at Jim Koch’s Latest Cloud” is that not caring about Truly, robot waiters and beers from a brewery I don’t patronize is perfectly OK. Climate change is something to pay attention to. Hard seltzer is not a threat to the world our grandchildren will live in.

Another takeaway is that what Alworth calls “good” beer and others would call “craft” is niche. (For context, read this Twitter thread.)

With that in mind, consider something from Pete Brown’s book, “Craft: An Argument,” first accepting the fact that whether you call it craft beer, good beer, or better beer (a Jim Koch term, since we’ve already introduced him as a witness) we are talking about more expensive beer.

Brown writes, “Craft is elitist. It’s a luxury. It always was.”

Alworth writes, “And unlike the acronym segment, good beer is a sophisticated, sticky product that keeps its fans. Cultures arise around it. Indeed, I’m so excited by the various reckonings happening with race, sexuality, and gender in beer because they mark the moment these underrepresented groups are demanding to define the culture for themselves. There’s a lot of growth potential because new populations have an interest in participating in good beer culture.”

Indeed. And the members of these new populations can afford to participate in this culture. It’s a right and a privilege.

I took the photos at the top and right Saturday at Lady Justice Brewing on Colgate Avenue in Aurora (Colorado). The brewery is tiny — they produced 161 barrels in 2020 and seating capacity in the taproom is 45 — occupying a small storefront (look for the red umbrellas) that fits in easily with other non-homogenized storefronts in a working class neighborhood.

Colfax is the longest commercial street in the United States. This stretch includes many more small eateries than chain restaurants and several old-fashioned motor lodges with appropriate neon. There are three pawn shops near Lady Justice, a head shop across the street that offers glass blowing classes, and around the corner early Saturday afternoon people of color were waiting for day work. Nearby, one youth group after another took a stage outside the Martin Luther King Jr. Library and belted out rocking gospel music.

Alworth talked with Betsy Lay, one of the Lady Justice founders, a few weeks ago when he wrote about how women enrich beer. Give it a read. Lady Justice directs its profits to nonprofits. “We live in Denver and we drink beer and we saw how much people were willing to spend on beer, and the idea was how do we funnel beer money into making our communities better?” Lay told Alworth. (I added the italics.)

But it’s not just money that Frontline Farming or Soul to Soul Sisters receive from Lady Justice. People who are able and willing to spend money on beer become aware of, and often end up engaging with, various nonprofits. “It (beer) is the secret sauce,” the head of a community foundation in Georgia told me not long ago.

I can’t imagine her saying the same about hard seltzer.

(I should mention that there’s a hard seltzer on the Lady Justice menu. Now I have.)

A pied piper becomes a middle-aged dad
From brewing beer to making ginger ale. Look for a hard seltzer connection if you want, but much has changed since Unknown Brewing opened in 2013, “when people in Charlotte celebrated every brewery opening like a moon landing.” Start it and you won’t be able to put down this story about “the bearded, music-loving, bro-having, corporate-shunning, all-local, can’t-believe-they-get-to-make-beer-for-a-living generation.”

“It becomes just like any other ecosystem, and some species die off and new species are created and evolution happens. And we’ve evolved into some sort of gingery butterfly. We were kicking it over there with the caterpillars for a while, and now we’re ginger ale butterflies.”

Science
Heirloom barley varieties appeal to brewers for several reasons. Problem is they were replaced long ago for good reason. They are agronomically inferior. So can “updated heirlooms” with old flavors and new agronomic qualities be produced?

Always for pleasure
Boak & Bailey visited a pub:

“Three men watched football on an iPad propped against the wall at the end of their table. An elderly regular was greeted with low-key delight as he made his return after months away. A student tried to order a pint of Leffe and was firmly told it comes by the half. The landlady trapped a wasp under a beer glass with a beermat and took it out into the street – four times.”

And you can kiss my ass, it’s just a character flaw*

August 9, 2021

A little more Monday retro-blogging . . . or come for the science, stay for the beer bats. Yes, beer bats, not beer brats. Links to stories you might have missed.

VinePair’s “Old Skills, New Tricks” series looks at “how drinks pros are taking on old trends with modern innovations.” The first about beer focused on canning sour beers (without talking to Ron Jeffries at Jolly Pumpkin Artisan Ales, which I do not understand). So far, I’ve found the one that asks if cutting-edge technology and character can coexist in winemaking the most interesting.

Because I might have had the technology/character conversation with brewers once or twice.

The process Christian Gastón Palmaz at Palmaz Vineyards has designed is definitely cutting edge. For instance, here’s how the grapes are chosen:

“Armed with a ‘four-axis vision system,’ the equipment considers each grape’s size, shape, color, and texture using a 3D stereoscopic camera. With the aid of an advanced AI algorithm, the machinery rapidly identifies the fruit, while 248 puffer air jets ensure anything that doesn’t meet the winery’s standards will not make it to the next stage of the journey. ‘We used to do this all by hand,’ Palmaz says, an almost lamenting tone to his voice. ‘This system is infallible. It’s becoming the gold standard of optical sorting for fruit.’”

These grapes produce juice that becomes wine in fermentation tanks that contain five independent heating and cooling zones and are hooked up to and controlled by a machine-learning, AI-assisted computer program. It monitors the activity of fermentation based on the speed that sound travels through the liquid, then adjusts the temperature accordingly.

The story details how Palmaz has broken down every aspect of viticulture and vinification to find how to do it better, more efficiently. At conferences, he discovered other winemakers are not as enthusiastic about attaining total consistency.

“That’s when it dawned on me that there is a large subset of the industry that truly believes a little bit of error in the process gives the wine character,” he says. So, speaking to a group, he will ask them if they have instructed their staff to make mistakes. None say they have.

“Why would they?” he says. “We all try to avoid mistakes but when they happen, we’re very quick to say, ‘It’s character.’”

I think it is a cop out to call it a mistake when one batch of beer, or wine, does not taste exactly like the last. When brewers, or winemakers, assess the raw materials at hand and make adjustments they might be forgoing a measure of consistency that Palmaz is striving for, but it feels more like character rather a mistake.

Further reading: New Beer Rule #4: Variation is not a flaw.
Further listening: Character Flaw, by Joe Ely. *And the source of this week’s headline.

Diversity
– Laura Garcia.

– Something is going on in a city where most people “are white, old-school, blue-collar and Yinzeree,” and the Pittsburgh Brewery Diversity Council is at the center.

Empty sentences
“It’s more about keeping in tune with where consumers are going, pivoting your product mix and meeting demands where there is growth — without being too staid in your habits. The good news is IPAs are still growing and hazies inside of IPAs are still growing, so there are still some good trends there.”

– From Q&A with Stone Brewing CEO Maria Stipp

On the lighter side
Beer bat full of beer We witnessed players in Chicago Cubs uniforms (but not the players who wore the uniforms when we bought the tickets) win a baseball game last week in Denver, a rare sight these days. I considered buying ice cream that comes in a helmet, but it is hard to get excited about collecting Cubs memorabilia right now.

However, had there been beer bats, even ones that carried a Rockies label and contained Coors Light, I would have paid silly stadium prices for beer (as it is, Coors Field is one more arena that could learn a lesson from Mercedes-Benz in Atlanta).

Who could resist? Apparently, whoever is in charge of promotions for the Rochester Red Wings does not understand this. Because the team ran out of bats last week during beer bat day. And, as Deadspin reported:

“It feels like it should not have been possible to underestimate the demand for beer bats. Take the capacity of your stadium, multiply it by the maximum number of beer bats that one fan would be allowed to buy before being considered overserved (this is where you have to know your market — some places can really put away the brews), and, boom, there’s how many beer bats you need per game — because people are going to max out on beer bats, which, again, are beers served in bats.”

(The photo is from a Budweiser tweet last May.)

Other voices, other rooms

September 23, 2021August 2, 2021

Mountain Toad Brewing

With apologies to Truman Capote or Nanci Griffith. Her 1993 album took its name from Capote’s novel, and is a collection of covers (and some sweet collaborations) that draw attention to artists Griffith’s fans might not be familiar with.

Jeff Alworth wrote last week about how women enrich beer, pointing to a multiple voices beer drinkers and thinkers will benefit from listening to. That they view beer as outsiders may be their super strength.

I’m currently reading an advance copy of “A Woman’s Place is in Brewhouse,” available Sept. 21, a sweeping history of women in beer by Tara Nurin. It provides context for many things I’ve read of late, including Alworth’s post, and sometimes what I read elsewhere adds context to the book.

A week ago, The Guardian posted an interview with Jeanette Winterson about her new book, “12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Go Next.” Although Claire Armistead was describing Winterson’s task she could have been referring to Nurin’s: “This means writing women back into history as active contributors to the modern world, capable of imagining the future, breaking codes and solving the knottiest scientific problems.”

Why we drink
A bit of context for the “hard seltzer is dead, no it’s not” flap. “How Big Beverage poured empty promises down our throats” (from The Goods at by Vox) barely mentions beer, but you can connect the dots. Two paragraphs to consider:

– “At this cultural moment, drinking for drinking’s sake is considered a waste of time — people want their beverages to do something. As a result, we’ve created an entire category of ‘functional’ beverages that claim to have the ability to make us better in every single way, from our brains to our beauty. Beverages must play an active role in our lives, and assist us in achieving self-determined goals.”

– “Beverages have become just another way for people to signal allegiance to a certain lifestyle or to tell ourselves that we are working toward something better. But our faith in the beverage industry has mostly survived so long because we are in denial about what gives us pleasure. Instead of collectively admitting that we love drinks — on a social and emotional level that is hard to compare to anything else — we would rather fool ourselves into believing that drinks can fix us.”

On the lighter side
VinePair calls Modelo Especial the most important beer in America right now. The statement is based on metrics generally used to define success, that is sales.

But here are a couple of other numbers.

1 – That’s how many mugs (out of a possible 5) Howard Hillman gave the beer in “The Gourmet Guide to Beer” in 1983. Budweiser got two, Bud Light zero. And he wrote, “Brewed in Modelo and not so ‘especial.”

16 – The rating from James Robertson (out of a possible 100) in his “Beer-Tasters Log” (compiled during tastings across three decades. He wrote, “Tawny-gold, malt aroma; faint malt flavor that gains in strength at the finish; long dry malt after-taste.”