monday links

Year end beer links: Bring on 2019

BEER AND WINE LINKS, MUSING 12.31.18

Reflections on my first year as the craft beer industry’s first Diversity Ambassador.
Before complaining that lists dominated the online beer space the past week, there is this, which is wonderful and you really should get to reading right now. You don’t have to come back here. My feelings will not be hurt. Scrolling through an eighth time to pick a sentence that might draw you in, I kept thinking, this one is perfect, no, wait, this one is better, how about this whole paragraph? I’m going with this because, as it should be, you can replace the words “craft beer” with “our lives” and it works.

“I fear that if we continue speak in terms of the finish-line, we will forget that we have a marathon to run. For what it’s worth, I would rather have this conversation in terms of the process–what we need to be or do to progress toward the goal of a more diverse craft beer industry. I would rather have conversations about inclusion, equity, and justice.

Not long after I posted last week’s rather spare beer links o’ the week, Alan McLeod tweeted: “As I look towards Thursday then consider when this week is over, I think folk will remember Stan’s news update as the wordy one.”

Indeed, Boak and Bailey probably had the right idea, passing on roundups the last two Saturdays, because unless you are a fan of lists beer reading has been rather spare the last couple of weeks. These include best beers, biggest beer news, and predictions about what is to come. And as McLeod pointed out, a list of favorite beers isn’t real useful if you can’t drink those beers yourself. And Jeff Alworth acknowledged the limitations of picking the “best” even within a particular region. So the best of the yearenders (beer related and otherwise):

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Ho! Ho! Ho! And beer links for your stocking

BEER AND RELATED LINKS, SANS MUSING (THIS WEEK) 12.24.18

– That rising tide? Not always great for breweries.

– If Marytn Cornell says to read a behind-the-bar tell-all book you probably should.

– Worth revisiting.

– Merry Christmas.
– Vrolijk Kerstfeest and Joyeux Noël.
– Feliz Navidad.

NOT BEER, BUT…

When discussing topics that might be more serious than if a beer should or should not be hazy it seems fair to consider them within the greater cultural context that might include beer. A few examples this week.

– Social causes and branding.
– Cultural appropriation.
– Gentrification.

WINE/SENSORY

– Bad smells.

FROM TWITTER

MORE LINKS

ReadBeer, every day.
Alan McLeod, most Thursdays.
Good Beer Hunting’s Read Look Drink, Fridays.
Boak & Bailey, most Saturdays.

Monday beer links: Inside Trillium and Doom Bar, lots of history & even a listicle

BEER AND RELATED LINKS, MUSING 12.17.18

Case Study: How Trillium (Temporarily?) Lost the Plot.
Jeff Alworth writes, “An industry insider texted me as all this was playing out and joked snarkily that Trillium had ‘been sideswiped by finding that craft beer fans drink the ‘craft beer movement’ Kool-Aid!’ If a brewery preaches an ethos that craft beer is different, that it is about community and connection, then it will be held to that standard.”

That’s one bottom line here. Another, outlined in detail, is that growth is intoxicating but new owners often are not prepared for the challenges. That’s why I’m surprised that none of the stories linked to why Massachusetts officials shut down the brewery for a month in 2014 when it was discovered Trilliam was operating without a license. At that time, fans were clearly on the side of the brewery.

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Monday beer links: Archiving done right, labeling not so much

BEER AND WINE LINKS, MUSING 12.10.18

I missed Monday links, and I hope you did as well, so here are a few.

Boak & Bailey recently explained how they choose what to put in their Saturday lineup. In the interest of transparency, my rules are pretty arbitrary. I include links here to stories I think you should enjoy reading, either because the writing is terrific or the ideas within merit thinking about, or both. I also include links to stories I simply want to comment on.

Archiving Craft Beer Blogs.
Archive-It (a subscription service of the Internet Archive) is providing an in-kind grant, 100GB of storage to archive beer blogs using their tools. Erin Lawrimore, university archivist at UNC Greensboro and manager of the Well Crafted NC project, explains the Beer Bloggers Archive will focus on craft beer blogs that examine the US craft beer industry.

She wrote, “We’re focusing on those with a national scope, but we’re also likely going to include some with regional scopes as well. Essentially, this is a way to ensure that the content of these blogs is preserved, even if the blogs close. It seems like we’ve lost a number of them already, sadly. So hopefully this can capture the information online now before it goes away! Also, we’re interested in active blogs as well as those that are no longer active but still have a publicly-available web presence.”

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Accept no substitute: These are not regular Monday beer links

I am flattered that Alan McLeod misses the Monday links and musing sometimes posted here, but I’m not inclined to resume weekly posts until I am certain they will be weekly. That might be December. But a few things I’ve read recently have me asking myself questions, and because here they are on a Monday it makes sense to include a few links.

Do breweries/wineries secretly value paying for writers to visit?
Alice Feiring began an interesting Twitter thread when she wrote, “I am troubled by the barrage social media of colleagues on cushy press trips.” Yep, we’ve seen that discussion within the context of beer writing many times on Twitter. But what struck me was this in the midst of the discussion. Sumita Sarma wrote, “Unless a press trip is paid for may by wineries or PR, you are never taken seriously as a writer.” Huh? Could this be true? Fortunately, in my experience it is not. But maybe I’ve been doing something wrong.

Is the IPA you just rated 4.5 really better than Blind Pig?
So why might ratings on everything from wine to products on Amazon products improve over time? According to Harvard Business Review: “The findings suggest that biased evaluations are the result of a misattribution process: If something feels easier to evaluate, people believe that it must actually be better. In other words, they misattribute their own feelings about evaluation (it feels easier to make an evaluation) onto their assessment of the actual merits (this thing must deserve a higher rating).” Just something to think about when flipping through your personal Untappd ratings or when to comparing them to others.

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