monday links

Monday beer links: Institutional amnesia?

BEER AND WINE LINKS, MUSING 08.27.18

Aministrative note: Monday links will be on hiatus for, well, I’m not quite sure how long. Upcoming travel and work plans don’t align with collecting links and posting them on Mondays. I hold out hope that I will have time for an occasional post (and those have been rare, to be honest) from Norway and other destinations. After I mentioned last week I wasn’t finding much new of note recently Alan McLeod commented I was starting to sound like him, but that’s not the reason for the hiatus. (And I might point out there are other curmudgeonly voices chirping away too.) Before I begin packing, just one bit of musing this week, before some more links as thanks for showing up.

– It’s Lit — The Unfortunate Trend of Exploding Cans in Craft Beer.
– Craft Beer Was Built on an Us-Versus-Them Ethos. Now It’s Tearing Us Apart.
This one-two punch left me thinking about community. No, not beer community. Community. I had a wonderful rambling conversation with Mark Jilg at Craftsman Brewing about this a few years ago, some of which made it into Brewing Local. He talked about the symbiotic relationship that develops when beer is consumed locally. Brewers care about what their friends will be drinking, and consumers take pride in consuming beer made by people they know. In such a setting a beer that might blow up cans would not be served, would be served on draft, or a brewery would go to the trouble and expense of acquiring and using bottles guaranteed to withstand higher carbonation.

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Monday beer links: Adjective-juggling courtiers in action

BEER AND WINE LINKS, MUSING 08.20.18

There is no solution. This should be a concern for all.
Spoiler alert. That’s not the headline on this story, but the last line. An absolutely fascinating, and damning, essay about how money changes everything about wine, including the stories about it. Leaving those who write about the beverage in a not so great place.

This makes those writers, at best, outside observers of a world to which they will never belong (there’s honour, if little insight, in that). At worst, they become a set of adjective-juggling courtiers, fools and jesters, there to lubricate the relationship between wine-making kings and queens and their luxuriously wealthy global public.”

I may have to find space for “adjective-juggling courtier” next time I order business cards.

BEER

First, a couple calls to action:

Brewery compensation survey.
At least it is a call to action if you work for a brewery. There are plenty of people looking forward to reading the results.

From Twitter

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Monday beer links: The Twitter Edition

BEER AND WINE LINKS, MUSING 08.13.18

In concluding his beer newsy notes last Thursday, Alan McLeod wrote, “No need to link to the usual bland beer travel puff, beer pairing puff or puff-packed beer style announcements.” At that moment I paused to realize I heart more tweets than I save links to pass along here because it seems to easier to stay interesting for 280 characters than even a simple paragraph (not that there isn’t puff on Twitter). There was, in fact, some excellent reading last week related to beer and wine that I feel compelled to share. But before getting to them, The Twitter Edition (and be sure to notice those that lead to conversation).

GIVE ME AN I, GIVE ME A P, GIVE . . .

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Monday beer links: IP, kids in pubs & stillness

BEER AND WINE LINKS, MUSING 08.06.18

– How to Screw Your Brewer: The Case of Toppling Goliath.
– What’s Yours is Mine and What’s Mine is Ours — When Yeast, Intellectual Property, and Marketing Collide.
What started as a story about non-compete agreements morphs into a discussion of non-disclosure agreements in the comments at Beervana (first link), and ultimately leads to one about creations of the mind. And Intellectual Property. And beer as art, and even the components of beer as art themselves. I need to come up with a CliffsNotes version of my thoughts on the topic of beer as art but haven’t. So although I’d prefer you buy a copy of Brewing Local this link should get you to the non-summary version (proceed from “The Hike to Hanging Lake”).

My Milk Sour Chocolate Tripe Tripel.
Before leaving the always onerous topic of beer as art, there is this. “What is authentic? What is craft? What is it that motivates the home-brewer, the home-baker, the home-writer and the home-lawyer to make the transition from this meditative silence of home to the noise and disruption of the market?”

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Monday beer links: Pubs, churches & lagers

BEER AND WINE LINKS, MUSING 07.30.18

Thoughts on deleting my Twitter archive.
This happens to come from a wine blog, which is not by coincidence (I subscribe to the Gray Report’s rss feed). But this is a truth that is relevant to all blogs and Twitter (a platform that has changed blogging): “It’s a less sociable world, and we’re all worse off for it. 2018 being what it is, even that statement is going to piss off some people. Even writing ‘piss off’ is going to piss off some people. To them, I say in the British sense, ‘piss off.'”

Sandor Katz
Walk on the Wild Side — How an Off-the-Grid Fermentation Revivalist is Changing Beer.
Would I link to this story if I hadn’t written it? Yes. So I am, without apologies. You can help me decide if makers of wild and sour beers should be labeled Post-Hansen or Pre-Hansen.

Freshly tapped: Allagash’s Little Brett.
A long, long read, but a story that is hard to put down (not sure how the print analogy works on a screen). This is not the primary point, but an important one from Jason Perkins, the guy in charge of brewing. “We could take classic ornery musician approach and say, ‘We make the kind of music we want to make, and we don’t care what other people think. And we certainly only make beers that we want to make, but we have so many beer ideas here. We’re not going to brew a beer that only appeals to a couple of people; it just doesn’t make sense.'”

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