monday links

BEER AND WINE LINKS, MUSING 06.18.18

Over a Decade in, Have Cicerones Actually Made Beer Pairings Relevant?
“The Cicerone program has certainly been valuable. But the future of beer and food pairing is not Cicerones. It’s not competing with wine, either. It’s being wine.” True some of the time, I agree, but there are other times — say when you are in a crowded bar watching Spain versus Portugal with a bunch of people you didn’t know when the match started — you just want beer to be beer.

It Was Then That I Carried You — A Defense of Distribution.
Reality check. “Own premise” means nothing to most people. If they are drinking local beer it is because they bought it at the grocery story or a similar outlet. “The economic impact of breweries on their local communities is massive, which means ceding wholesale to the unimaginably large conglomerate breweries is limiting the benefits of local breweries.”

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BEER AND WINE LINKS, MUSING 06.04.18

Beer in the Shadow of War.
This is a lovely story you would have expected to read in print at All About Beer magazine, but AABM has discontinued its print edition for at least the rest of 2018. Daria and I first wrote for the magazine in 1993, contributing pretty regularly (including the travel column for seven years) until recently. But the news is also saddening because print and pixels feel different.

Talking ‘craft beer sellouts’ with the guy who wrote the book on them.
Barrel-Aged Stout and Selling Out: Goose Island, Anheuser-Busch, and How Craft Beer Became Big Business has raced to the No. 1 spot among beer books at Amazon and posts about it have filled by rss feed (I don’t think author Josh Noel can keep up with them.) John Holl writes that with the release of this book “the writing game will change. I firmly believe that folks will look differently at how beer should be covered.” You might want to advance directly to Go and read the book, but before or after Kate Bernot’s interview covers new territory.

Ten years ago next week InBev submitted its first formal offer to acquire Anheuser-Busch. Little more than a month later the deal was done. Not quite three years later ABI acquired Goose Island. There are dots to be connected, and Barrel-Aged Stout makes that easier.

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Administrative note: Monday links will be on hiatus until June 4. Get your links fix from Alan McLeod each Thursday and Boak & Bailey on Saturdays.

BEER AND WINE LINKS, MUSING 05.07.18

The digital revolution is leaving black people behind.
Nothing about beer or brewing in this story, but Thursday morning the North American Guild of Beer Writers announced the winner of its first Diversity in Beer Writing Grant. And the topic came up more than once in panel discussions at the NAGBW meeting that followed. As often as not it was about diversity in the marketplace, but this story and one about women and STEM jobs in brewing Bryan Roth wrote about 18 months ago seem directly related to something the Brewers Association’s new brand ambassador J. Nikol Jackson-Beckham said during a presentation later in the day.

If you’re going to grow, you cannot simply sell beer just to white dudes with beards,” she said. According to Jackson-Beckham, beer companies have three main growth opportunities: their customers, their employees and their brand’s packaging and marketing.”

Their employees. A series at Good Beer Hunting (next link) should make anybody realize that working in the beer world does not necessarily equate to getting rich. However there are STEM opportunities, long term and short term (trainees or entry level employees who are going to move on to better paying jobs). Brewing companies should be actively recruiting more than white dudes for both.

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