monday links

Can a brewery be good for a community? Last week the Smyrna, Georgia, city council voted to sell green space near the community center so a brewery can go there.

Economic Development Director Andrea Worthy pointed to the revitalization of the downtown area as the main reason for supporting the vote. Smyrna is within the inner ring of the Atlanta metropolitan area. “It’s different than a restaurant, it’s different than a coffee shop,” Worthy said. “It’s really a community gathering place that invites a lot of other visitors to downtown. It serves as a community center where folks can meet up, [it] increases foot traffic for other businesses downtown.”

“A Breakdown Of Smyrna’s Controversial Decision To Sell Public Land To A Private Brewery” is a long form (more than 3,000 words) account of how and why the deal was made.

FOR READING OUT LOUD
Just in time for Burns Night, Martyn Cornell has discovered a poem written in the form known as “Burns stanza,” an ode to “Gude Stout Ale.”

CREAM BEER
Alan McLeod returns to a favorite topic, cream beer, tying it to immigration, which included brewers with contemporary skills.

As a silly aside, here’s one of several suggestions why cream ale was called cream ale. In 1837, a dialogue called “The Beer Trial” in the Journal of the American Temperance Union drew attention to charges that brewers in Albany sold adulterated ale. It refers specifically to Albany Cream Ale, and a fellow named James, who was spotted drinking the beer by a friend, says, “I asked why they called it Cream Ale, and they said it was because the foam looked yellow, like cream.”

ICONIC
– Thanks for the (UK) memories.

– Crowd sourced. Quite a list follows the question posed by Don Tse on Twitter. One thought after reading through suggestions is that you should know how to spell the name of a brand before calling it iconic.

THE OTHER SHOE
– Three, or more, Connecticut breweries have closed or soon will.

– Marin Brewing Company shutting down after almost 33 years. Marin opened in 1989 and won four medals at the Great American Beer Festival, three the next year and four the following year. The brewpub also laid claim to being the “first and best brewery on the internet.”

ALWAYS FOR PLEASURE
Can a brewery be good for a community? 2021 by the numbers at Allagash Brewing.

Still not commenting about the Monster Deal. Still can’t get away from navel gazing (final 3 links).

DRINKS FOR BETTY
Over the years patrons started buying drinks for Betty White in the case that she ever returned to Mineral Point, Wisconsin.

THEN CAME MARCH 2020
From the Zenne Valley.

TRENDS
A half dozen. Smoked lager?

LIFESTYLES
– Beer.
– Wine.

LIFESTYLES II
In that first link directly above, Jeff Alworth writes beer is “an everyman (everyperson?) drink.” I would argue craft beer is not. (Please settle for this for now.)

It is good marketing to portray it as a working person’s drink, calling on images of laborers enjoying beer at the end of a shift. Consider this evocative sentence: “There would be twenty or thirty men either sitting on a grass bank of leaning against a wooden fence drinking and chatting before working and when the morning shift came up from work, some of them would buy a drink and stand or sit in the lane before going home.” But when we buy into that nostalgia, it might be best to stop and consider what we are longing for.

CYMBOSPONDYLUS YOUNGORUM
First, a beer was named for a fossil. Later, a species was named for the maker of the beer.

AROMA & FLAVOR
A newish site (still in beta) called “Shepard: Discover the Best Books” asked me to contribute to their list of “best books.” They might have been expecting 5 beer books, but instead I suggested 5 about aroma and flavor. More about the picks Wednesday.

COUNTERPOINT
Jeff Alworth on the state of beer blogging and media. “Grandpa’s old blog may seem peripheral to the media world—though by my reading this couldn’t be more wrong.”

NO COMMENT(S)
A wonderful post from Beth Demmon about the evolution of her personal bucket list would seem to be the sort of blogging Alworth is defending. But there is no opportunity to comment. I guess you have to do that on Twitter.

AN ALTERNATIVE
Why create a subscription site? Because it gives value to writing. Despite this view that all things creative are done simply for passion, writing about wine has a cost whether that’s travel, research, books, education, or just one’s time.

ALWAYS FOR PLEASURE

Policy statement. pic.twitter.com/bYeYqE2D7Q

— Boak and Bailey (@BoakandBailey) January 14, 2022

Imagine a university within a single giant building. Once in a while you’d walk into a room and everything the lecturer said would be eloquent and new to you. But the longer you spent the less often that would be true. Still, you would see newcomers listening with rapt attention, because they’d never heard of foeders. There will always be newcomers.

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A post shared by Birds Fly South Ale Project (@bfsbeer)

HERE’S AN EXAMPLE
Sorry, this in depth report from the Wall Street Journal about the “beer vs. liquor rivalry” is behind a paywall. It is an excellent story, with information new to me, but not really that much. If you’ve been following Good Beer Hunting Sightlines and other beer centric sites you already know most of this.

FEEL GOOD STORY OF THE WEEK
South Africa’s first black female brewery owner, Apiwe Nxusani-Mawela, finds a market for her beers . . . in the UK. Here’s an interview with her (from 2019).

INDIE BEER
Could what last week was craft beer be indie beer this week? Steve Body thinks so. Sam Calagione began using the term in the early teens, but nobody seems to remember.

BEER BLOGOSPHERE
Yes. This is what happened to the beer blogosphere. Please read the thread.

Blogs are back. It's the blogosphere that's gone.

And that's partly because of this here web site! https://t.co/5O57KJHSff

— Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) January 5, 2022

Back in 2007, perhaps I would have linked to this story and written a post about what it means to be a “wild-derived” hop variety. Instead I pointed to it on Twitter with no explanation.

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Jeff Alworth uses the term “craft beer” just once in his Beervana beer in review post, and that only to describe a bar. Dave Infante totally leans into those two words in tandem at VinePair. A headline that declares it was “a very bad year” for “craft beer” accurately describes the story that follows.

It has been more than seven years since editor John Holl declared in All About Beer magazine that the magazine would use the term “craft beer” only when absolutely necessary.

“One word shouldn’t be a dividing point. Ultimately, it should be about the beer in the glass, and whether it tastes good to the individual drinker. In the same way that the word microbrew is still batted around, we don’t honestly believe that the word craft will disappear anytime soon, but we do believe it’s time to have a conversation about what it really means. Is it a helpful word that makes beer better, or is it necessary at all?,” he wrote.

“There is a lot of passion surrounding this one word. And we believe it should be the right word, the beverage we cover, the one we enjoy. That’s why, as often as possible, we’re just going to call it beer.”

I liked that idea then and I like it now. That doesn’t make what Infante wrote less relevant. For instance this, “For a time, craft beer had something approaching mainstream cachet, and that time has passed. I admit, this is a feeling more than a fact. But man, 2021 made me feel it. It was the year that craft beer became irrevocably cheugy.”

However, when he writes, “Culture is powerful stuff, and craft beer’s didn’t do it any favors this year, online or off” that would seem to lump together what might fairly be called a group failure with the cultures at Birds Fly South in South Carolina with Our Mutual Friend in Colorado or with Fair State in Minnesota. That bothers me because the crew at each of those breweries understands their responsibility to the communities that support them.

Granted, lumping can be necessary. There is no denying the truth in the subtitle of Pete Brown’s “Craft: An Argument,” that “Why the term ‘Craft Beer’ is completely undefinable, hopelessly misunderstood and absolutely essential.”

I’m not crazy enough to make predictions about how “craft beer” will be viewed in 80 years from now when somebody writes the history of pop culture in the 21st century. (See Chuck Klosterman’s “But What If We’re Wrong?”) But it may read differently than local histories about breweries such as Lady Justice, Creature Comforts or Montclair. There are times we should be talking about the trees individually rather than the forest.

Additional reading: Reckoning, Retribution, Reconciliation, Recovery, And Resilience Mark The Year In Craft Beer.

LISTS
– Compare and contrast. First an observation: Hop Culture’s list of 5 favorite under-the-radar beer states didn’t include a state west of the Eastern time zone. But I thought you might want to compare their 5 under-the-radar cities with an on-the-radar list from Michael Jackson 21 years before.

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’Tis the season of “best of” lists.

I am a list skeptic, but I read them, I contribute to them, I and talk about them (“How is James McMurtry’s ‘The Horses and the Hounds’ not on more best lists?).

I realized as the lists started to roll out in recent weeks that I miss Bryan Roth’s annual effort to add objectivity to subjective choices. I’m too lazy to do something similar, but I did start saving lists a while back with the idea of posting them here in one giant listicle of listicles. Then I came to my senses.

Instead, I’ll simply point to two well-done ones — the year in review at DC Beer and the Axios survey of Colorado beers — and suggest you look for something similar close to where you drink.

MORE ’TIS THE SEASON
Boak and Bailey’s notes from London the week before Christmas . . . sigh. We were there four years ago, but it feels like it was a decade.

THE BEAT GOES ON
– A victory for the not so little guy.

– Consolidation I.

– Consolidation II.

– It never gets easier.

ALWAYS FOR PLEASURE
The weekend before Christmas I posted a few photos from the Hot Bierfest at Primitive Beer in Boulder. There appears to be some interest in sticking a hot poker in beer, because I got a message from a brewer asking if I knew where to buy the pokers. So this post at Punch seems timely.