musing

Has the craft-beer revolution gone too far? Its beverages are delicious, but its culture can be oppressive. And its most outspoken creators, servers and consumers have become a new generation’s record-store clerks: If a record-store clerk is someone who knows everything about music except how to dance to it, then the craft-beer connoisseur is someone who knows so much about beer that he’s the last person in the world you’d want to drink it with.

– Keir Graff, “The Contrarian: Has the craft-beer revolution gone too far?”

The beer I’m least excited about in general: yet another IPA. Beer is so varied and rich in tradition, flavors, and possibility that I personally get frustrated when people get hung up on any one aspect of what beer can be or brewers go chasing after the newest hop or meaningless theoretical IBU calculations. At some point it became, “Hey, I made this crazy new beer!” “What, did you just add a bunch of hops to it?” Noooo—we can do better than that. Don’t get me started on black IPAs — they’re the cheese in the crust of craft beer.

– John Laffler, brewer, Goose Island, in “Drinking with beer nerds”

At the end of August, we’re moving into our own office space in Chicago. One thing I really wanted was for our employers to brew beer at work. Lo and behold, when we open our offices in August, we’ll have a brew kitchen and we’ll be able to brew beer at the office.

– (MillerCoors owned) Tenth and Blake CEO Tom Cardella, interviewed by DRAFT Magazine.

For craft beer, the brand concepts and the direction that’s resonating has really been nostalgic post-prohibition-era look and feel. . . . I think because it hearkens back to the hand-crafted, the passionate brew master and it has that limited production feel about it that craft consumers are looking for.

– Stephanie Grubbs, in “Meet the Force Behind Private-Label Booze.” BTW, she also says, ” I do drink beer, and I do like the IPAs.” Does that mean they are two different things?

Even though there’s eight, ten breweries here, there are lots of inspectors that have never seen a brewing tank. . . . [one] didn’t understand what fermentation was; she was worried about this yeast being in there, and it took a lot of explanation for her to be OK with what we were doing.

– Pete Crowley, founder of Haymarket Pub & Brewery in Chicago, talking about the challenges of opening a brewery. Quoted in “An in-the-works brewery goes off the grid” (excellent read).

Is this just another sign of the globalization of beer?

The Washington Post has a story about “Belgium’s upstart innovators,” which of course prominently features De Struise Brouwers — a lightning rod when you talk about “new wave” brewers.

In the story, Wendy Littlefield of Vanberg & Dewulf, one of the first companies to import Belgian beers, expresses the concern about the “noise” these beers generate that’s been discussed at length in comments here.

Littlefield worries that these “extreme” brewers, who represent only a small fraction of the Belgian beer market, are overshadowing the traditionalists — or worse. Struise and [Picobrouwerij] Alvinne, she says, “really, arguably, are hurting the very culture that they claim to be arising out of.”

No arguing that if you disregard the international pale lagers that 90 percent or so of the world’s beer drinkers consume that more brewers outside of Belgium are fermenting beer with yeast taken from Belgium and that more brewers outside the United States are making hops from the American northwest a prominent part of the flavor and aroma in their beers.

Does the out-of-balance attention heaped on these beers, particularly the often out-of-balance ones, endanger traditional* beers?

* “Traditional” is no more easily defined that “craft,” so let’s not start.

This would be a different sort of globalization of beer tastes. (In the first round, those international pale lagers swept aside local breweries.) The parallel in wine, where Two Buck Chuck and Yellow Tail are signs of globalization, isn’t exactly parallel. But Mike Veseth’s discussion of “disruption” in Wine Wars does provoke the same questions beer drinkers might have.

Veseth draws upon two political economists, starting with Joseph Schumpeter and the well known concept of creative destruction: the “process of industrial mutation that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one.” He also points to Karl Polanyi’s theory of the “double movement.”

So a dialetic is unleashed, which is the heart of the double movement. Economic change (the first movement) provokes social reaction (the second movement) and it is the combination of the two that pushes economy and society forward. The future is not just one movement but both in a continuing dynamic interaction.

Take a deep breath. It is only beer. His point is that there are always going to be new products, new producers, new technologies and — this is important — new consumers with different tastes. But how those whose interests are threatened react will also determine the future of beer.

Deep within a lengthy story in the July 4 New Yorker about online dating (currently available online, but could migrate behind a paywall) a factoid to share with the person on the bar stool next to you.

And yet some questions are unpredictably predictive. One of the founders, Christian Rudder, maintains the OK Trends blog, sifting through the mountains of data and composing clever, mathematically sourced synopses of his findings. There are now nearly two hundred and eighty thousand questions on the site; OK Cupid has collected more than eight hundred million answers. (People on the site answer an average of three hundred questions.) Rudder has discovered, for example, that the answer to the question “Do you like the taste of beer?” is more predictive than any other of whether you’re willing to have sex on a first date. (That is, people on OK Cupid who have answered yes to one are likely to have answered yes to the other.)

This particular service, OK Cupid, is big on algorithms. Who’s to argue with algorithms?

This will be of little use if you live far from St. Louis, but look at the picture above. Great setting for a beer festival, don’t you think? In this case the “2nd Shift and Friends 201st Annual BEERFEST” from noon to 5 p.m. Saturday. Host 2nd Shift Brewing is located outside of New Haven, in the Cedar Creek Conference Center, a cool little complex.

The brewery is in the building closest to the car, and the tasting room next to it, but Saturday beer from nearly to 20 breweries will be all over the place. It’s a bit of a haul (60 miles or so) from St. Louis, but sure to be worth the time. Wish we weren’t otherwise committed.

Details here and here.

And so it begins.

The #IPADay hashtag hit Twitter a few minutes ago, so you’ve got about a month to get ready for the event Aug. 4. Although I’ve signed up as an “attendee” I’m not sure what that means. Can you find a proper India Pale Ale in London? That’s where we’ll be the first week of August, and during visits to Meantime Brewing on Monday and the Great British Beer Festival on Tuesday there’s a chance I might learn something new that I can pass along.

But what about you? This is supposed to be a grassroots movement, so I guess any dang thing you want. The mini-site says, “To participate, share your photos, videos, blog posts, tasting notes, recipes, thoughts with the world on Twitter Facebook, YouTube, WordPress, RateBeer, Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp, Untappd or any other social media platforms you may use. Use the hastag #IPADay in all of your posts and then see what others are saying by searching the hashtag on google, twitter or other social media resources. Participants are also encouraged to organize ‘real-life’ #IPADay events.”

My suggestion is that this might present an opportunity to learn the difference between India Pale Ale and IPA, particularly if this is really going to be International #IPA Day. The mainstream IPAs so many American beer drinkers are ordering these days would be out of place in nineteenth century Britain or India. That’s fine, but it is silly to pretend any different.

I was reminded of this yesterday after I posted a link on Twitter to a crazy-long story in the San Diego Reader called “Beer Heaven: Hoppy Daze in San Diego.” A nice yarn, but as @thebeernut replied the story contains a paragraph worthy of one of Ron Pattinson’s contests.

IPAs started life as a British export to their troops stationed out in India back in the 1800s. British brewers discovered that if they put lots of hops and alcohol in the beers they were sending out, the strong beer wouldn’t go sour on the four-month voyage around Africa. The alcohol and the hops acted as preservatives. ’Course, then a few India-bound beer ships wrecked on the coast of Scotland, which gave locals the chance to sample the cargo. The secret was out, and IPA has been a staple in the UK, as well as India, ever since.

How many errors can you spot? It might take until Aug. 4 to count them.

Suggested reading
(I know, I keep suggesting the same two books, but these are the reigning champions.)

Amber, Gold & Black: The History of Britain’s Great Beers, by Martyn Cornell

Hops and Glory: One Man’s Search for the Beer That Built the British Empire, by Pete Brown