monday links

07.22.19, BEER AND WINE LINKS

1) The Breweries Cooling And Heating Up For Summer.
We drove to Louisville this past weekend for GonzoFest and related exhibitions at two museums, but also traveled a bit of the Bourbon Trail along the way. We toured Willett Distillery, plenty impressive with eight barrel warehouses but dwarfed by nearby Heaven Hill Distillery. And then we drove by Jim Beam, which is simply massive, at first glance stunning in a similar way to coming around a bend of Interstate 55 in St. Louis and first seeing the Anheuser-Busch brewery.

Size and context matter. That’s clear in the second (but #1 here) of two stories analyzing beer sales during the first six months of 2019. Consider this: Dollar sales of the top 10 craft breweries in grocery, convenience and other chains stores tracked by the research firm IRI did not match Michelob Ultra’s revenue. And then this: there are more than 7,000 other breweries to consider and the off-premise accounts such as those IRI tracks only about 60 percent of craft beer sales. The Brewers Association is in the process of compiling results from a midyear survey of all its members and those numbers will make it easier to understand how they are doing in aggregate.

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07.15.19, BEER AND WINE LINKS, MUSING

1) How Homebrewers Built New York.
I’m not sure I agree with this premise: “The recent explosion of new breweries in New York is totally consistent with what’s happening elsewhere—but homebrewers being at the center of things is not.” It’s pretty easy to find breweries with homebrew connections just about everywhere, clubs are often incubators and that’s not only in the United States. The club house for Cerva Serra in Caxias, Brazil, is downright amazing. There is a nano-size brewing system members can reserve, there are two large fermentation cellars (one for ales, one for lagers) and a roomy classroom area. I don’t mean that this isn’t an interesting story or to denigrate what has happened in New York. I wish I had not already left Homebrew Con a couple of weeks ago when Bitter & Esters was chosen homebrew Shop of the year by the American Homebrewers Association. The Brooklyn shop has certainly been at the center of whatever has happened in the five boroughs. That’s co-owner John LaPolla on the right, looking pretty happy about the award.

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07.01.19 BEER & WINE LINKS

Alan McLeod found plenty interesting to write about last week, but Boak & Bailey not so much. I am in the latter camp. Brevity today will be followed by silence next week, because beginning Wednesday I’ll be bouncing between cities in Brazil.

1) The $100 million question.
A San Diego Union-Tribune reader asks what happened to the Stone Brewing Company program called “True Craft” and Peter Rowe answers. “True Craft sounded too ambitious to be true, and that proved to be the case. Reached while traveling in Europe this week, Greg Koch confirmed that True Craft is dead. ‘That hasn’t been active for some months,’ Koch said. ‘It was an idea that never came to fruition.’”

Poor Cascade, hanging out with Old Man Fuggle pic.twitter.com/f17A1oNeoN

— Em (@PintsandPanels) June 28, 2019

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06.24.19, BEER AND WINE LINKS, MUSING

A one-word tweet from Ron Pattinson broke off into multiple paths last week. The first link takes you to Jeff Alworth’s statement that “Lager was an innovation.” Nobody seemed to dispute this. Would you agree? I’m not so sure, but settling the matter isn’t what interests me. Instead, reading The MVP Machine: How Baseball’s New Nonconformists Are Using Data to Build Better Players another question comes to mind. The nonconformists in the book are set on disrupting the process of player development, and changing process (say, the way a beer is made) may change what results (say, a particular beer). Is that how we got lager? In which case, how did a brewer come to think, “I was taught to do this, but I am going to do that?”

Anyway, a book that gets you thinking if you are a baseball fan. In reviewing it for The Atlantic, Jack Hamilton asks, “Would democratizing baseball greatness actually be good for baseball? Part of what makes baseball’s greatest players so memorable is how much better they are at playing the game than anyone else on the field. In important ways, the sport’s drama relies on inequality.”

1) Englewood Brews is here to prove craft beer is for Black people, too.
“Everyone says craft beer is for everybody, but you walk into these North Side taprooms and how many Black people do you see, frankly? Continuing to concentrate breweries on the North Side is missing out on a growing population that wants to enjoy good beer, too.” Just in case you think this seems abrupt, Sam Cooke wrote “Change is Gonna Come” in 1964.

2) Gulp // Cask ale comes to Brussels.
“Cask ale is also another way for local brewers to explore and innovate, beyond simply brewing new styles.” There’s that word again.

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06.17.19, BEER AND WINE LINKS, MUSING

1) All shook up: When craft beer goes mainstream.
2) The Economics of ‘Craft-on-Craft’ Acquisitions.
3) Oregon’s craft brewers have a problem: ‘There’s just too much beer out there.’
4) The beer industry is not dying.
5) Wine Consumption Probably Won’t Return to Normal.
In #1, Pete Brown writes, “In one sense, craft is simply the latest stage in the ongoing, permanent state of evolution in beer, of consumer education and rising expectations.” Change is constant in any business, and beer is not immune. Sometimes consumers benefit and other times they do not. And so drinkers may spend a certain amount of time guessing about the future, reading stories intended for those in the business. With that in mind, note that both #4 and #5 cite a survey that states “Americans spend about 1% of income on alcohol, no matter the age.” Don’t expect to find exactly the same conclusions.

6) The Most Delicious Foods Will Fall Victim to Climate Change.
Cutting directly to this scary scenario: “The main way that most people on Planet Earth are going to experience climate change is through its impact on food. . . But it was Jerry Hatfield, who’s a USDA scientist, who said to me that the broadest disruption caused by climate change will be in food systems, because there will be very region-specific impacts: from droughts, from flooding, from intolerable heat. There will be uninhabitable regions of the earth, and the global food system is completely integrated.” Pair this with the following story.

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