monday links

Lager
Doug Veliky writes that it has been a running joke since 2014 that the upcoming year would be “The Year of the Craft Lager.” More like since 1994.

But were this to come true, it would be a welcome change. “It may never be the ‘The Year of the Lager’ because you simply don’t convert an impactful enough percentage of cheap light lager drinkers to $11.99 four-packs in a single yea . . . I am very open to the idea of the 2020s being ‘The Decade of the Lager’ though.”

Plenty of brewers would like to see it happen. The picture at the top is two ballrooms full of attendees Friday for a panel discussion at the Craft Brewers Conference: “Let’s Talk Craft Lagers: Brewing on Low to High Tech Systems.”

TikTok taste test
Can a bunch of journalists tell the difference between Karbach’s new Love Street Light and Bud Light? A smaller Houston brewery takes a shot at the latest release from one owned by Anheuser-Busch.

Vessels I
A primer for how different vessels impact aromas, flavors, and textures in a wine. It would be great to read something similar related to beer. (If it is already out there, please send a link.)

Vessels II
An ode to drinking wine from cheap glassware:

“For me there’s an order of importance when it comes to enjoying wine: the company, the quality of the wine itself, the food and, somewhere near the bottom, is the glass. Unpretentious glasses say spontaneity, fun and pleasure while delicate expensive ones say oneupmanship, pedantry and general twattery. They are for the sort of people who say stemware instead of glass, or timepiece for watch. Don’t be a glass bore. Life’s too short.”

But clean, please. Clean is still important.

State of the industry
You’ll have to connect a few dots, but here is Bart Watson’s “State of the Industry” presentation at the Craft Brewers Conference:

Previewing the conference, Jonathan Shikes took the opportunity to examine eight topics facing craft beer right now.

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.”

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
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.)