monday links

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.

Read more

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 Also, we’re interested in active blogs as well as those that are no longer active but still have a publicly-available web presence.”

Read more

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.

Read more

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.

Read more

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

Read more