monday links

Monday beer links: yeast genomics & the smell of old books

It was a good week for readers interested in yeast (you know who are are), so jumping right in:

Family tree
The more scientists study the genome of different yeast strains, the more obvious it is how diverse they are. That’s about as succinct a summary as I can offer, so go read Lars Garshol’s post. One nugget: Saccharomyces cerevisiae likely originated in China.

Custom strains
Jasper Akerboom once isolated a strain from what he found on a 40 million-year-old whale fossil, and Lost Rhino Brewing used to brew Bone Duster Amber Ale. He points out that the yeast likely was not close to as old, but instead is a strain from the environment, Nevertheless beer and the yeast received national and international attention from publications such as Popular Science and Scientific American. These days Jasper Yeast sells unique strains to hundreds of breweries. A Q&A.

Not sure this is progress
Two meetings organized by Mikkeller adjacent to its Copenhagen-based festival “offered few concrete answers for what’s actually going to happen next as Mikkeller says it will work to rectify past wrongs.”

Black Beer Dialogues
The background and the first episode.

Sensory
“The smell of old books stems from their slow chemical decomposition. Books are largely paper, and paper is largely plants. But the materials from which books are made have shifted over the centuries—and those shifts, in turn, have influenced how different generations of books smell.”
— Excerpt from “Revelations in Air: A Guidebook to Smell”

Strictly business
– Barley prices are up. Aluminum prices are up. Beer prices must follow, right?

– 2021 craft beer report. Including hard seltzer, of course.

– Thinking about starting a brewery? What are the chances of getting it financed?

– What do Napa and Berlin have in common?

‘And I say, brother, help me please’

Jeff Alworth, Betsy Lay, Lady Justice Brewing
Jeff Alworth and Betsy Lay in conversation at Lady Justice Brewing.

This past week in her Hugging the Bar newsletter, Courtney Iseman expressed frustration with beer consumers who continue to support toxic breweries. She also suggests that there are many beer influencers act who should act more responsibly. A code of conduct for influencers — now, that’s an interesting idea.

But to return to the question she asks, “How do we get [consumers] to give a shit?”

Spoiler alert, her suggestion: “All I can think of right now is just to keep the conversation going. Because I do know so many people, who have nothing to do with craft beer and so don’t know all “the news and updates, but who love drinking it, who have been immediately receptive upon learning about issues with certain breweries. So, whenever you’re not too utterly exhausted, keep spreading the word and steering friends and family away from the baddies and toward the breweries and brands contributing to a better industry for all.”

If a change it going to come, that must be part of it. To that end, links to three posts worth talking about:

– An article — published in Civic Eats, so outside the beer bubble — to print out and keep for reference purposes. It is time to help make sure Betsy Lay is right when she says, “The door has been opened. It’s going to be very hard to shut it now.” That’s Lay at the top beside “The Beer Bible” author Jeff Alworth. Alworth was at Lady Justice, where Lay makes the beer, as part of a book tour promoting the second edition of his book. Not surprisingly, the conversation turned to just this topic. The next day, Alworth posted this:

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Monday beer links, courtesy (in part) of the Town Crier

Thinking about Monday beer links

True? Not true? Has hard seltzer brought us to this?

In his substack newsletter Fingers, Dave Infante reaches this conclusion:

“[Flavored Malted Beverages] aren’t just changing drinking habits. They (will) also swing beer business’ collective center of gravity away from brewers (“all about the liquid”) and back towards marketers. Or, to put it another way: from craft back to commodity.”

OK, collective center of gravity leaves room for beers left of the dial, but how much?

Also last week, I pointed to a podcast/transcript about “How Hops Got Sommified.” In it, there is some discussion about brewers prominently listing hop varieties.

“That is done under the guise of giving the drinker more information. In fact, you’re kind of making people feel dumb because they don’t know what to do with that information,” says Zach Geballe. “To me, it is analogous to this thing in wine that I find incredibly frustrating, when you go to a winery or event and all the person talking to you about the wine can do is recite the technical data of the wine.”

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Who’s your drinking buddy now?

beer foam

Doing a bit of Feedly cleaning last week I counted 212 beer-blog feeds I follow. Of them, only 26 of them had published a new post in the last month. For many it was more like years since the last post. Sure, I should be embarrassed that I lousy job I do curating the list, but that is not the point.

In the 13 or so years I’ve intermittently posted links on Monday I’ve always looked beyond blogs, and beyond beer stories for that matter, for interesting items to pass along. If you are disappointed that I don’t point to more beer blogs, well, so am I. But let’s face it. Beer blogs are dead. That is why you are not reading this.

‘Drinking buddies’ – 8 years later
Hard truths.

“(The movie) captures so much of what’s been wrong with craft beer culture that we’re literally only starting to confront right now. These ideas of there being such in-demand breweries that people who brew there can act however they want; that you should want to work at those breweries so badly you’d be willing to put up with anything; that because it’s a brewery, basic workplace behavior expectations don’t apply and people can drink and make women feel objectified and even threatened . . . these elements were all there all along, hidden under the haze of us all viewing craft beer like this bohemian, artistic, no-rules beast, where we didn’t have to closely examine anyone’s behavior because everyone was supposedly united under this pious goal of sticking it to Big Beer.”
[From Hugging the Bar, a newsletter you should be reading.]

Whoa!

It’s only business
Anheuser-Busch InBev NV “Chief Executive Officer Michel Doukeris is considering a sale of some German beer brands it has owned for decades as the world’s largest brewer aims to prune less profitable businesses and trim debt.

“Doukeris has said that a ‘big revolution’’ is afoot in the alcohol industry, with more than 60% of growth being driven outside of beer. He’s seeking to insulate AB InBev against a stagnant performance in beer by doubling down on the company’s more nascent Cutwater Spirits canned cocktails, canned wine, e-commerce platforms and energy drink brands.”

Acidity
This is a story about wine, but there are beer lessons to be learned. Including this:

“Often, high levels of acetic acid are accompanied by an excess of another volatile molecule, ethyl acetate. It has the pungent aroma of nail polish remover . . .

“At high concentrations, these volatile compounds conspire to make a wine that’s aromatically distracting at best and downright unpleasant at worst. Elevated levels can even deliver a burning sensation in the throat.”

Change is constant
Dijon mustard producer Grey Poupon has released a white wine that is infused with Grey Poupon mustard seeds, along with honeysuckle. Can a beer be far behind?

Always for pleasure
Fresh Hop Beers
Go here, click through. It really is a terrific great guide, and an example of how fresh hop beers are part of a time and place.

Hoppy connections, diversity, and flying suds

Steven Pauwels of Boulevard Brewing sniffing hops at Segel Hop Ranch
Click to view on Instagram.

If you looked at my Instagram feed the past month you would see photo after photo of American brewers visiting hop farms in the Northwest, assessing this year’s crop and interacting with the people who grow those hops. This is a good thing, communication that was much less common not long ago.

In some cases, those brewers may have a contract to buy a certain amount of a certain variety of hops from that farm. Or they may be thinking about it.

That may also be a good thing, but not always.

Such was obvious the past two years when smoke from fires in the Northwest tainted many harvested hops. For instance, last year smoke settled into Oregon’s Willamette Valley about the time Crystal hops were ready to harvest. One grower delayed harvest, waiting for the smoke to clear. It did not. The hops were harvested and a brewer who had a contract to buy them rejected them (the farmer agreed they smelled unpleasantly of smoke).

In this case, Indie Hops, a broker who would have processed those baled hops into pellets, was able to supply that customer (and others) with Crystal from previous crop inventory.

All that to explain why I paused when I read that English hop growers charting a new path could mean a new generation could be “dealing directly with breweries, bypassing the hop merchants who have been a key element of hop-buying in this country for generations. It’s a shift that has the potential to revolutionise the perception of English hops, in this country and further afield.”

Goodness gracious, these are not easy times for English hop growers. They deserve better. Stronger relationships with brewers, which may or may not include direct sales, would surely help. So will English-specific varieties that excite brewers, and drinkers, as much as New World hops from the United States and down under. And hop merchant Charles Faram has been the leader in breeding those sorts of varieties. The merchant-grower relationship can also be a valuable one.

I should add that “charting a new path” is a lovely story.

“Life changed when a neighbour invited (Will Kirby) to a hop harvest. ‘I just fell in love with the buzz, and the smell,” he says. “There’s something about hops that really grabs you.’”

My kind of guy.

A few other stories from last week you might want to read:

Diversity
Other voices, other rooms: “You can get lost in the amount of podcast content that is out there about beer. However, like the larger industry, voices of women, people of color, and LBGTQ folks are often underrepresented in the podcast universe.” 11 podcasts changing that.

You talkin’ to me? A second Black-owned brewery opened Saturday in Chicago. “Funkytown is a brand meant to reflect the perspective of its Black owners. The label on (the) flagship pale ale is a riff on an iconic ’90s-era hip-hop album. . . . Expect most everything else of Funkytown’s to follow the ethos. Beer names and labels will reflect the founders’ tastes in music (hip-hop and R&B), often with a 1990s vibe (‘the clothes, the music, the culture, the slang, the lack of digital technological pervasiveness,’ one owner said).”

Jamhal Johnson, co-owner of Moor’s Brewing, which opened earlier this year, said the theory he most often hears is that cost drives Black people from craft beer. He doesn’t buy it.

“I feel it’s never been marketed to that group in the right way. It’s always been marketed to, for lack of better term, beer nerds — a ‘You have to be part of the culture’ type thing. My idea is to create a craft beer brand and focus on marketing it to the people with imagery and messaging that resonates with that group.”

Outsider advantage
The “technical evolution of fine wine is being driven by those outside of the industry . . . Most of these people are wine outsiders – pioneers and agitators, passionate about wine but seeing it as an advantage that they are not part of the establishment. Between them, they have garnered hundreds of millions of investor dollars and venture-capital funding to turbocharge their growth.”

And the beer analogy would be?

Lead of the week
[Via New York Post]

LIVINGSTON MANOR, N.Y. — The suds are flying as a bitter battle brews between beermakers in this Catskills hamlet.

And . . .

But the yuppie imbibers have bumbled into an old-fashioned, small-town brew-haha, gossiped about at the barber and at bars, complete with alleged beer-trayals and backstabbing.

Always for pleasure (except when it’s not)