monday links – Page 45 – Appellation Beer

Monday beer briefing: Authenticity, legacy, and a canary in the coal mine

March 4, 2019March 4, 2019

03.04.19, BEER AND WINE LINKS

Huge Beers, Big Ass Beers, and all manor of beers at Mardi Gras

This photo was taken during Mardi Gras in New Orleans in 1996. The ongoing battle of Huge Ass Beers vs. Giant Ass Beer suggests how timeless New Orleans can be.

Reisch family celebrates revival of Gold Top beer with last brewmaster, now 100.
“This is Springfield’s own. It was brewed in Springfield for 117 years. And with the family being instrumental and the last brewmaster turning 100, it was the right time to bring it back.” Profits from the sale of Gold Top will be used to preserve Springfield’s historic sites. There’s something to be said for nostalgia.

Why authenticity is for tourists.
An engaging tale that may cause you to think about what it means to be authentic. Sorry, didn’t mean to give you a headache to begin the week. For a story a few years back about how the words craft and beer began to travel together Mike Kallenberger of Tropos Brand Consulting said, “I’d argue that craft beer as a category has a collective brand identity, and one of the most important values implicit is that identity is authenticity.” And here Will Hawkes writes, “Authenticity appears to be in the ascendancy at the moment because, in my view, there’s only so much worthwhile innovation around before you end up with marshmallows in your beer.”

Monday beer briefing: Seeing things as they are

February 25, 2019

02.25.19, BEER AND WINE LINKS

Selective Outrage: Does Inclusion Include Us?
I am reminded when we travel, as we did much of last week, that I subscribe to way too many RSS feeds. As a result, when I am playing catch up plenty of good reading gets deleted almost randomly. Likewise, what I see on Twitter is pretty arbitrary. But it was pretty easy to figure out this was the story of the week, at least within a specific bubble. Bubble because when I checked a few days ago I was surprised to see Toni Canada (@craft_curiosity) has only about 3,000 Twitter followers. Seems like the number should be much higher (and this will get confusing if she changes her handle). Meanwhile, this YouTube video in which Michael Tonsmeire discusses the differences between brewing on a homebrew system and a commercial one attracted more than 100,000 views and 140 comments by the time it was a week old. Is this an unfair comparison or does it tell us something?

As repeated often here, beer culture (or kulture) exists within our overall culture. Which is why I suggest reading Could BlacKkKlansman finally snag Spike Lee the Oscar he deserves? He didn’t last night, because Green Book did. If you don’t want to take the time to read the entire story, scroll to the end for a comparison of BlacKkKlansman and Green Book. Or consider this: “BlacKkKlansman is a film that shows how America actually is, Green Book shows what Academy voters often wish America would be.” We need more of the former.

A briefer version of Monday beer briefing

February 19, 2019February 18, 2019

02.18.19, BEER AND WINE LINKS

We headed to Arizona and the Grand Canyon for the weekend that just past, so most of these links were compiled early Friday before we boarded to plane from Atlanta to Phoenix. Call this Links Lite, lighter still on musing.

– Working Class Heroes — Anchor Brewing Employees Seek Rare Industry Result: Unionization
– ‘America’s first craft brewery’ attempts to unionize

– Portland’s BridgePort Brewery Has Closed After 35 Years
– Fred Eckhardt and the Columbia River Brewery (BridgePort), 1984-1985
– Bridgeport Brewing: Anatomy of a Disaster
– BridgePort Brewing is closing; analyzing the failure

For Monday beer briefing, complete this sentence: “Beer is …”

February 11, 2019

02.11.19, BEER AND WINE LINKS

Eleven days into February and do you know where your flagship beer is? Or what a flagship beer is? My contribution to #Flagshipfebruary posts Friday, and that’s when I’ll add more thoughts here. So this is a No Flagship, No Corn roundup. If you somehow missed the Chronicles of Corn you should be reading Alan McLeod’s Thursday posts.

A Long, Strange Trip — Wicked Weed is Opening Something in Atlanta, But They Don’t Know What it is Yet.
A story as strange as the headline suggests. Wicked Weed co-founder Walt Dickinson rambles just a bit throughout, and there is no single takeaway. He asks, and answers, the question I find everywhere I go these days. “For me, the big line is, ‘How big can we get without compromising the quality?'” Dickinson says. “And I know there’s incremental compromise that happens with scale, but not from production. I think that’s the biggest myth I’ve ever heard.” He provides an interesting example, but I suspect it is not that simple.

Brewers are ready for the low-ABV revolution. But are beer drinkers?
Because this is the way many people think. “First, you take the serving size of your beer. Then, you multiply by the ABV. Divide by the price, and there you have it: the absolute value of the buzz in your bottle.”

Monday beer briefing: On saving barley, flagships, diversity, and homebrewing

February 4, 2019

02.04.19, BEER AND WINE LINKS

Don’t Save the Planet for the Planet. Do It for the Beer.
Beer is an agricultural product. This is a story about barley — and be warned, much of it about what A-B InBev is up to. But there’s a similar story to be told about hops. Dr. Eric Snodgrass, director of undergraduate studies for the department of atmospheric sciences at the University of Illinois, talked about all things weather last month at the American Hop Convention. Growers and brewers in attendance walked away realizing that turbulent changes in weather that have affected hop production are not an anomaly. Drought and heat have devastated the crop in Germany and the Czech Republic two of the last three years. The Czech harvest of 4,200 metric tons in 2018 compared to 6,800 in 2017 has been labeled “catastrophic.” Farmers in the American Northwest have avoided similar results because they irrigate their fields. But drought and extreme heat will continue to threaten crops every year. Beer is an agricultural product.

We’ve Created a Monster — What Does it Mean to Talk Flagship Fatigue?
You guys are overthinking this.
I could have lumped the links that follow together, added more, and commented it depends where you are looking from and what direction you are looking in. Jeff Alworth used Conan O’Brien’s “tour” of the Samuel Adams pilot brewery (which has more than a million views on YouTube) to make that point about the “beer world’s insularity.”