monday links

And you can kiss my ass, it’s just a character flaw*

A little more Monday retro-blogging . . . or come for the science, stay for the beer bats. Yes, beer bats, not beer brats. Links to stories you might have missed.

VinePair’s “Old Skills, New Tricks” series looks at “how drinks pros are taking on old trends with modern innovations.” The first about beer focused on canning sour beers (without talking to Ron Jeffries at Jolly Pumpkin Artisan Ales, which I do not understand). So far, I’ve found the one that asks if cutting-edge technology and character can coexist in winemaking the most interesting.

Because I might have had the technology/character conversation with brewers once or twice.

The process Christian Gastón Palmaz at Palmaz Vineyards has designed is definitely cutting edge. For instance, here’s how the grapes are chosen:

“Armed with a ‘four-axis vision system,’ the equipment considers each grape’s size, shape, color, and texture using a 3D stereoscopic camera. With the aid of an advanced AI algorithm, the machinery rapidly identifies the fruit, while 248 puffer air jets ensure anything that doesn’t meet the winery’s standards will not make it to the next stage of the journey. ‘We used to do this all by hand,’ Palmaz says, an almost lamenting tone to his voice. ‘This system is infallible. It’s becoming the gold standard of optical sorting for fruit.’”

These grapes produce juice that becomes wine in fermentation tanks that contain five independent heating and cooling zones and are hooked up to and controlled by a machine-learning, AI-assisted computer program. It monitors the activity of fermentation based on the speed that sound travels through the liquid, then adjusts the temperature accordingly.

The story details how Palmaz has broken down every aspect of viticulture and vinification to find how to do it better, more efficiently. At conferences, he discovered other winemakers are not as enthusiastic about attaining total consistency.

“That’s when it dawned on me that there is a large subset of the industry that truly believes a little bit of error in the process gives the wine character,” he says. So, speaking to a group, he will ask them if they have instructed their staff to make mistakes. None say they have.

“Why would they?” he says. “We all try to avoid mistakes but when they happen, we’re very quick to say, ‘It’s character.’”

I think it is a cop out to call it a mistake when one batch of beer, or wine, does not taste exactly like the last. When brewers, or winemakers, assess the raw materials at hand and make adjustments they might be forgoing a measure of consistency that Palmaz is striving for, but it feels more like character rather a mistake.

Further reading: New Beer Rule #4: Variation is not a flaw.
Further listening: Character Flaw, by Joe Ely. *And the source of this week’s headline.

Diversity
– Laura Garcia.

– Something is going on in a city where most people “are white, old-school, blue-collar and Yinzeree,” and the Pittsburgh Brewery Diversity Council is at the center.

Empty sentences
“It’s more about keeping in tune with where consumers are going, pivoting your product mix and meeting demands where there is growth — without being too staid in your habits. The good news is IPAs are still growing and hazies inside of IPAs are still growing, so there are still some good trends there.”

– From Q&A with Stone Brewing CEO Maria Stipp

On the lighter side
Beer bat full of beerWe witnessed players in Chicago Cubs uniforms (but not the players who wore the uniforms when we bought the tickets) win a baseball game last week in Denver, a rare sight these days. I considered buying ice cream that comes in a helmet, but it is hard to get excited about collecting Cubs memorabilia right now.

However, had there been beer bats, even ones that carried a Rockies label and contained Coors Light, I would have paid silly stadium prices for beer (as it is, Coors Field is one more arena that could learn a lesson from Mercedes-Benz in Atlanta).

Who could resist? Apparently, whoever is in charge of promotions for the Rochester Red Wings does not understand this. Because the team ran out of bats last week during beer bat day. And, as Deadspin reported:

“It feels like it should not have been possible to underestimate the demand for beer bats. Take the capacity of your stadium, multiply it by the maximum number of beer bats that one fan would be allowed to buy before being considered overserved (this is where you have to know your market — some places can really put away the brews), and, boom, there’s how many beer bats you need per game — because people are going to max out on beer bats, which, again, are beers served in bats.”

(The photo is from a Budweiser tweet last May.)

Other voices, other rooms

Mountain Toad Brewing

With apologies to Truman Capote or Nanci Griffith. Her 1993 album took its name from Capote’s novel, and is a collection of covers (and some sweet collaborations) that draw attention to artists Griffith’s fans might not be familiar with.

Jeff Alworth wrote last week about how women enrich beer, pointing to a multiple voices beer drinkers and thinkers will benefit from listening to. That they view beer as outsiders may be their super strength.

I’m currently reading an advance copy of “A Woman’s Place is in Brewhouse,” available Sept. 21, a sweeping history of women in beer by Tara Nurin. It provides context for many things I’ve read of late, including Alworth’s post, and sometimes what I read elsewhere adds context to the book.

A week ago, The Guardian posted an interview with Jeanette Winterson about her new book, “12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Go Next.” Although Claire Armistead was describing Winterson’s task she could have been referring to Nurin’s: “This means writing women back into history as active contributors to the modern world, capable of imagining the future, breaking codes and solving the knottiest scientific problems.”

Why we drink
A bit of context for the “hard seltzer is dead, no it’s not” flap. “How Big Beverage poured empty promises down our throats” (from The Goods at by Vox) barely mentions beer, but you can connect the dots. Two paragraphs to consider:

– “At this cultural moment, drinking for drinking’s sake is considered a waste of time — people want their beverages to do something. As a result, we’ve created an entire category of ‘functional’ beverages that claim to have the ability to make us better in every single way, from our brains to our beauty. Beverages must play an active role in our lives, and assist us in achieving self-determined goals.”

– “Beverages have become just another way for people to signal allegiance to a certain lifestyle or to tell ourselves that we are working toward something better. But our faith in the beverage industry has mostly survived so long because we are in denial about what gives us pleasure. Instead of collectively admitting that we love drinks — on a social and emotional level that is hard to compare to anything else — we would rather fool ourselves into believing that drinks can fix us.”

On the lighter side
VinePair calls Modelo Especial the most important beer in America right now. The statement is based on metrics generally used to define success, that is sales.

But here are a couple of other numbers.

1 – That’s how many mugs (out of a possible 5) Howard Hillman gave the beer in “The Gourmet Guide to Beer” in 1983. Budweiser got two, Bud Light zero. And he wrote, “Brewed in Modelo and not so ‘especial.”

16 – The rating from James Robertson (out of a possible 100) in his “Beer-Tasters Log” (compiled during tastings across three decades. He wrote, “Tawny-gold, malt aroma; faint malt flavor that gains in strength at the finish; long dry malt after-taste.”

A few links to things you might have missed last week

– Should The Complicated Legacy of Worst Beer Blog and Craft beer’s “99% asshole-free” myth have made you wonder what the mythical Peter David sounds like you can listen to these two archived podcasts. a) Steal This Beer, March 30, 2020. b) Have You Tried The Hef? The Full Pint, Sept. 24, 2019.

– On Twitter, Em Sauter had a question. “Drawing craft beer heroes/pioneers today for the P&P book. Who are some of your craft beer heroes?” Good luck finding the bottom, let alone defining craft beer and pioneer.

– Finally: The Death of Keg.

– Pete Brown is is staring an online book club.

– Wine Influencers Inspire Strong Reactions.

Some best and otherwise Very Important Beers

American Brewer magazine 1999

Back in the day I yielded to temptation and posted lists. I also railed against them. So you might figure there is no reason to trust me.

But two lists (the second is really multiple lists) that showed up last week sent me to the files to dig out a couple from the days of print that I will share them here.

The headline on the first—The 25 Most Important American Beers of All Time—screams bring back a Jay Brooks takedown (another back-in-the-day thing in which Jay would dig deep, point after point, about something written). I commented in one Twitter thread, and otherwise have three questions.

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Covid neither neighborhood nor innovation friendly

Boak & Bailey’s news and nuggets Saturday served as a reminder that UK beer drinkers are stuck in a grim cycle. My Twitter and Instagram feeds, full of snaps of people gathered with friends (but not too many friends) at bars and brewery tasting rooms, suggest things are better here. Has the worst really past? There are reasons to believe it hasn’t.

Story No. 1 from the Wall Street Journal this past weekend: “McDonald’s, Chipotle and Domino’s Are Booming During Coronavirus While Your Neighborhood Restaurant Struggles.” The subhead: “A health crisis is creating a divide in the restaurant world. Big, well-capitalized chains are thriving while small independents struggle to keep their kitchens open.”

Story No. 2: “Covid Is Crushing Small Businesses. That’s Bad News for American Innovation.”

(These stories are behind the Journal’s paywall. I tracked them down in print, which is one more thing that’s not as easy as it was at the beginning of the year.)

Restaurants come and go. About 60,000 open in an average year, according to the National Restaurant Association, and 50,000 close. But this year it will be much worse. The association predicts 100,000 restaurants will close during 2020. Employment at restaurants and bars has dropped by 2.3 million jobs from a total of more than 12 million before the pandemic, according to the Labor Department.

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