monday links

A briefer version of Monday beer briefing

02.18.19, BEER AND WINE LINKS

We headed to Arizona and the Grand Canyon for the weekend that just past, so most of these links were compiled early Friday before we boarded to plane from Atlanta to Phoenix. Call this Links Lite, lighter still on musing.


– Working Class Heroes — Anchor Brewing Employees Seek Rare Industry Result: Unionization
– ‘America’s first craft brewery’ attempts to unionize

– Portland’s BridgePort Brewery Has Closed After 35 Years
– Fred Eckhardt and the Columbia River Brewery (BridgePort), 1984-1985
– Bridgeport Brewing: Anatomy of a Disaster
– BridgePort Brewing is closing; analyzing the failure

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For Monday beer briefing, complete this sentence: “Beer is …”

02.11.19, BEER AND WINE LINKS

Eleven days into February and do you know where your flagship beer is? Or what a flagship beer is? My contribution to #Flagshipfebruary posts Friday, and that’s when I’ll add more thoughts here. So this is a No Flagship, No Corn roundup. If you somehow missed the Chronicles of Corn you should be reading Alan McLeod’s Thursday posts.

A Long, Strange Trip — Wicked Weed is Opening Something in Atlanta, But They Don’t Know What it is Yet.
A story as strange as the headline suggests. Wicked Weed co-founder Walt Dickinson rambles just a bit throughout, and there is no single takeaway. He asks, and answers, the question I find everywhere I go these days. “For me, the big line is, ‘How big can we get without compromising the quality?'” Dickinson says. “And I know there’s incremental compromise that happens with scale, but not from production. I think that’s the biggest myth I’ve ever heard.” He provides an interesting example, but I suspect it is not that simple.

Brewers are ready for the low-ABV revolution. But are beer drinkers?
Because this is the way many people think. “First, you take the serving size of your beer. Then, you multiply by the ABV. Divide by the price, and there you have it: the absolute value of the buzz in your bottle.”

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Monday beer briefing: On saving barley, flagships, diversity, and homebrewing

02.04.19, BEER AND WINE LINKS

Don’t Save the Planet for the Planet. Do It for the Beer.
Beer is an agricultural product. This is a story about barley — and be warned, much of it about what A-B InBev is up to. But there’s a similar story to be told about hops. Dr. Eric Snodgrass, director of undergraduate studies for the department of atmospheric sciences at the University of Illinois, talked about all things weather last month at the American Hop Convention. Growers and brewers in attendance walked away realizing that turbulent changes in weather that have affected hop production are not an anomaly. Drought and heat have devastated the crop in Germany and the Czech Republic two of the last three years. The Czech harvest of 4,200 metric tons in 2018 compared to 6,800 in 2017 has been labeled “catastrophic.” Farmers in the American Northwest have avoided similar results because they irrigate their fields. But drought and extreme heat will continue to threaten crops every year. Beer is an agricultural product.

We’ve Created a Monster — What Does it Mean to Talk Flagship Fatigue?
You guys are overthinking this.
I could have lumped the links that follow together, added more, and commented it depends where you are looking from and what direction you are looking in. Jeff Alworth used Conan O’Brien’s “tour” of the Samuel Adams pilot brewery (which has more than a million views on YouTube) to make that point about the “beer world’s insularity.”

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Monday beer briefing: Fuller’s, Fuller’s, Fuller’s, Natty Light

01.28.19, BEER AND WINE LINKS

This happened. And there was plenty of reaction on Twitter.

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Monday beer briefing: How much should you ask of beer?

01.21.19, BEER AND WINE LINKS

Why does craft beer think it can save the earth?
Thanks to Will Hawkes for helping me think about a question that popped to mind read last week. He writes, “A sense of purpose is part of what defines ‘craft beer’: it’s a campaign as much as a drink.” And he concludes (spoiler alert), “Why does craft beer think it can save the earth? Because that’s the entire point of craft beer.”

Those are pretty high expectations. The question that came to mind last week is, Why do we have these expectations for this thing people call craft beer? And why should they be different for breweries than for bakeries or bookstores or car repair garages? Not the first time I’ve wondered, and I still don’t have an answer. The question was provoked by Bryan Roth’s long examination of workplace harassment in breweries. Once again, jumping to the conclusion.

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