musing

The good (terroir), the bad (climate change) & the ugly (unacceptable beer festival behavior)

Bale Breaker Brewing, Loftus Ranch
Hops (at Loftus Ranches) viewed from inside a brewery (Bale Breaker). Moxee, Washington.

There is a decent chance I will be in a hop field, or on the way to one, when you read this. I’ve also seen a lot of grapes, fruit trees, corn and cattle since reaching the Northwest a week ago. Also a lot of smoke, from fires in California and Washington, hanging in the air and plants that suffered from the “heat dome” that settled over the region early in summer. So the first link today is to a press release. It reads like a press release, but, dang, pay attention, because climate change is real.

Carbon neutral
“New Belgium Brewing is releasing its Carbon Neutral Toolkit to support fellow beer companies on the journey toward net-zero carbon emissions. The detailed resource, which represents hundreds of hours of work and significant financial investment from New Belgium, is designed to help other small- and medium-sized breweries measure their carbon footprint and take steps to make their businesses carbon neutral by supporting the highest impact greenhouse gas emissions reduction initiatives available.”

Unacceptable
“I know I keep using the word ‘unacceptable’ . . . but how else can you describe the fact that part of going to festivals for womxn just naturally includes being prepared to guard yourself, to be subjected to discrimination and danger, to turn on yourself if something bad does indeed happen because that’s who society has taught you to blame?”

Courtney Iseman, who writes the Hugging the Bar newsletter, and Women of the Bevolution founder Ash Eliot are starting a series discussing the current state of safety and beer festivals . . . or lack thereof. Subscribe to Hugging the Bar to follow.

Texas terroir
You must be new here if you don’t know I am a sucker for terroir (hence “appellation” beer). Yeast found in the wilds of Texas may help Texas breweries create beer unique to their region. Many excellent points in “Yeast Hunters,” but I hope readers read this carefully: “around 70 percent of flavor in beer is due to the yeast.” That’s not “yeast flavor” flavor but the aroma and flavor that result from the interaction of yeast and other raw materials, perhaps also from Texas.

Wrong
I’ve never enjoyed judging the “Irish Red” category in beer competitions. Martyn Cornell’s takedown leaves me feeling OK with that. “(In 1988) Coors declared that ‘In 1864 in Enniscorthy, Ireland, George Henry Lett brewed the first batch of a full-bodied, red-colored lager that would eventually become known as George Killian’s Irish Red,’ which manages to cram five pieces of utter nonsense into less than 30 words.”

Crowd sourcing
“I’ve yet to visit any two identical farmhouses, so why should the beers made there (or modeled after the setting) be any different?” I’m not usually a fan of mashups of book blurb length comments, but I read this collection that Mandy Naglich assembled to the end. That said, I spent hours Friday talking about the mixed-culture beers at Fair Isle Brewing in Seattle and I’m not sure the word farmhouse was uttered once. Farm, yes, but not farmhouse.

Always for pleasure

Beers conditioning in the bottle at Fair Isle Brewing, Seattle, Washington
Beers conditioning at Fair Isle Brewing. Seattle, Washington.

About the ‘smell camera’ that will taste your beer . . .

Books about aroma

Drinks headline of the week: “Those online quizzes that match you with your ideal wine are worse than horoscopes.”

Ester Mobley of the San Francisco Chronicle does not think much of Tastry’s palate quiz. “People want to drink wines that seem cool to them. I don’t know how an algorithm can solve for that,” she writes.

Seems related to what I wrote in March about apps that aimed to be “Pandora for beer.” They weren’t.

Aroma — what we think we smell and what we call it — is complicated. Scientists can identify odor compounds. They know how those compounds make their way from our noses to our brains. But the compounds only become aroma within our brain. As A.S. Barwich explains across 312 pages of “Smellosophy,” context is an important variable but not the only one. Or, put another way: “Psychological phenomena are expressions of neural processes, and a synthesis of their explanations benefits from a philosophical angle that’s been informed also by the history of inquiry.”

So what should we think about this statement from Koniku Inc. founder Osh Agabi? “What the camera did for vision, we’re now doing for smell. I believe we are the first company to build a smell camera on the smell sidewalk.”

Koniku is one of “at least three startups attempting to bring their biotechnological achievements in odor detection out of the laboratory,” according to Bloomberg Businessweek. I am a) a sucker for a story about aroma, but b) a skeptic about how a breakthrough might be at hand.

But maybe I am wrong.

In July, Koniku made a deal with Anheuser-Busch InBev to deploy the Konikore, its new device, to “measure how a beverage’s aromatic notes are perceived and experienced by the nose, with the aim of enhancing flavor.”

“You can stick a beer into a gas chromatograph and it will tell you every single chemical component,” Agabi says. “But there are things that a chemical device will pick up that your nose or taste doesn’t code for or care about. We built a system that gets as close as it can get to what taste is perceived as. We’re giving you a human filter—an accurate picture of the human perception of smell.”

The bingo card not played
From Twitter to newsletter to here. Em Sauter’s tweet inspired Chris O’Leary to create these bingo cards for his Brew York and Beyond newsletter (and Instagram).

Brewery taproom bingo card

He made three, so you could print them out before a pub crawl with a couple of friends. When I looked them over I thought naturally of taprooms we visited recently. Don’t Touch The Barrels~Giant Jenga~Exposed Brick~TV With Untapped menu, that’s an easy Bingo.

But I also thought of places that tick almost none of the boxes. Scratch Brewing being an example many people will understand. That’s where I’d rather be drinking these days.

Talking pumpkin spice & ice cream, but thinking about beer
– Once upon a time, August meant sipping cool drinks on a hot beach. Nowadays, it’s essentially the unofficial start of fall for companies that are bringing back their pumpkin spice products earlier each year. While the majority of consumers think August is too early for brands to sell pumpkin spice items, the share who are ready to embrace the fall flavor during the dog days of summer has grown since last year, with younger generations especially open to early sales, according to new Morning Consult trend data.

– “The spoils of success — tens of millions of dollars in incubation deals, plus the potential for hundreds of millions more if a label is bought by a giant like Unilever — have heightened competition in the $10-a-pint world. Now the business of gourmet ice cream is go big or melt.” [via The New York Times]

Wrong
– The latest research indicates not only are the plastic dividers restaurants and bars installed in the past year ineffective at containing virus-loaded aerosols, they might disrupt airflow that would disperse the virus.

– The discovery of a 3,700-year-old tablet shows the use of “Pythagorean triples” a thousand years before Pythagoras was even born and in ways that are more akin to pure mathematics. Something to keep in mind next time you read about a thousand-year-old beer discovery.

Always for pleasure
From The Beer Nut:

“Conversely, Delicious has been part of the Stone range for many years and is much more their métier. It’s an American IPA devoid of nonsense, 7.7% ABV and a flawless pale amber colour. An aroma of caramel studded with citrus fruit told me we were back in the good old days. They’ve loaded the crystal malt into this, giving it a heavy rich texture and a long toffee aftertaste. That’s necessary because up front it’s all hop. They’re quite modern varieties — El Dorado and Lemon Drop — but it may as well be Cascade and Centennial because the effect is pure classic: pine, grapefruit, lime peel, and all of it pristine-clean and deliciously dry. I’m sure this turned heads when it first arrived, and now as a found artefact from a bygone age it’s turning mine. Never mind the west coast revival, viva the west coast continuum.”

Beertown 1997 & other web artifacts

The most recent The History of the Web newsletter focused on travel and the internet in 1997 (or somewhere between 1996 and 1999), which got me thinking about beer in that context at that time. What follows is certainly not the definitive history of beer on the internet, or even beer on the internet in 1997. It’s mostly an excuse to post the sketch of Beertown I remember vividly, for whatever reason.

Backing up a bit, in September 1994 All About Beer Magazine published a story headlined “Tapping the Net.” This was about the time the Netscape browser launched. Thus AABM provided, first, a primer for those who recently received an AOL CD in the mail, and second, a guide a guide to resources that remind us there was/is more to the internet than the web. Not surprisingly, I can’t link to the story because AABM didn’t begin publishing online until 1996.

(Let’s get the disclosures out of the way now. I created the first AABM website, and am properly embarrassed to revisit it. I also worked fulltime for The Real Beer Page/The Pro Brewer Page, which we’ll get to soon, from 1998 until 2003 and part time for 15 years after that.)

Because there is no AABM link, I have scanned the various lists [view the pdf here]: a guide to usenet groups, to mailing lists, to ftp sites, to bulletin boards and to a few World Wide Web pages. You’ll notice the urls are rather long. Although domain registration was free before 1995, hosting a site was another matter. It was a different time.

By 1997, a few beer sites operated out of their own domains, which makes them much easier to find using the Wayback Machine. The logos here are the size they originally appeared, although I have converted gifs to jpgs. Just another reminder the era of dial-up connections was much different. [Here’s a bit of dial-up nostalgia – be sure to turn on the sound.]

Beertown

The image is missing in this 1997 page from Beertown, the umbrella site for the National Homebrewers Association, Association of Brewers, etc. I grabbed the drawing from a 1999 page.

The Real Beer Page debuted in 1994, although it didn’t serve from its own domain until 1995. By 1997, it housed the largest collection of beer-related stuff on the internet. I use the word stuff because I’m not sure how to categorize burps (which are still around, if you know where to look.)

The Pro Brewer Page

Real Beer officially launched The Pro Brewer Page (now ProBrewer) in 1997. Lots of jobs still being found here, lots of used equipment still changing hands.

Brewing Techniques

Brewing Techniques began publishing in 1993, moved online in 1996 and ceased operations in 1999. The link is to a 1997 page.

All About Beer Magazine logo

I’ll quit showing you logos now and finish with just a few more links. As noted, All About Beer began posting content online in 1996. Here’s a front page from 1997.

The Discovery Channel created a Michael Jackson Online site in 1996, in part to support an interactive, but not really that interactive, CD it was selling. The Beer Hunter site which is still online today, although it has not been updated since he died, launched in 1998.

Finally, a couple more links from 1997: Brew Your Own magazine and Stephen Beaumont’s World of Beer, which celebrated its first birthday in 1997. That we can look at long gone posts from that second site are one more reason to support the Internet Archive. Beaumont sold (you would have, too; admit it) the domain name to the World of Beer chain of drinking establishments and a bit of history with it.

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.”

There’s more than one way to pay for beer

Threes Brewing in Brooklyn is accepting cryptocurrency. You know, like Bitcoin.

Compare and contrast with Scratch Brewing. You likely know the name because Marika Josephson and Aaron Kleidon have made an art out of brewing with foraged ingredients. Good beers, but the real reason people keep going back is the joy of simply being there. Not the sort of place you’d pay for a beer with digital money. In fact, if case you aren’t seeing the image below, they only take cash.

Scratch Brewing, cash only reminder