monday links

Walking into Wisconsin tavern with dollar bills on the ceiling never gets old.

This week’s featured beer ingredient is hops. I’d riff on some of those links now, but we’ve been traveling and I have some catching up to do (thus the overall brevity). More in the next Hop Queries (remember, the newsletter is free).

Our travels took us to several well worn Wisconsin taverns. Not exactly English pubs, but certainly different than brewery taprooms. That, for us, added extra context to Tandleman’s “Underneath the Arches” post, which included this:

“I think I have to face facts. E and I just aren’t the target audience. We will never really feel at home in such places, as the beer and the demographics just don’t suit us. I know they vary and some are, indeed, much better than others, but we generally feel out of place in them, which hardly makes for a good time.”

And for this comment from Cooking Lager:

“Brew taps may be uncomfortable but they have the air of exclusivity and special privilege granted to those in the know. That’s what craft beer is, exclusivity and privilege. Wrap it in an establishment as well as a product and you’ve got a winner.

“Pubs are for the hoi polloi, the prols, those that don’t fetishize beer and breweries. Anyone could be in there for crying out loud.”

Hops
– Happy Fugglesvesary.

– Brewing an English-hopped NEIPA.

– Juicy High Life.

Priceless?
– Pleasure and value from high wine prices.

– Spend money on experiences, not things.

Rhetorical tension
Does the word rustic tell you anything about flavor?

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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