musing

Is beer an agent of change? Should it be?

The headline itself — The Cultural Triumph of Craft Beer — evokes my questions, but you really should read Jeff Alworth’s post at Beervana from start to finish. It is not easily summarized, but I’ll go with what he wrote for the front page:

“The sense about craft beer right now, with assaults from a global pandemic and hard seltzer, is often morose. In purely financial terms, beer seems to be sputtering. But as a cultural force, it has never been stronger.”

The headline above gives away the questions the post provoked for me. Is (craft) beer changing our culture? Or is our culture changing (craft) beer? Put another way, is (craft) beer keeping up with a changing culture? And, of course, beer is made by brewers at breweries. So we have another set of questions, including, Are brewers and breweries keeping up with a changing culture?

Additional reading
– Martin Luther King, Jr.’s final unfinished struggle.
– Introducing the Imbibe 75.

Second annual Beer Culture Summit: Nov. 11-14

Hop pickers

The second Beer Culture Summit begins Nov. 11 with “Yes…I’ve heard of you: A conversation with Dr. J Jackson-Beckham and Garrett Oliver” and concludes Nov. 14 with “Beatles, Bowie, and beer.”

Between those presentations are 30 Zoom sessions, as different from each other as the opening and closing ones. Of course, the event hosted by Chicago Brewseum is virtual. Three quick examples of what to expect:

– Nate Chapman and David Brunsma, who answered questions here last week, will discuss their book, “Beer and Racism,” and then lead a panel discussion with Alex Kidd, Ale Sharpton, Shyla Shephard and Garrett Oliver.

– Michael Roper of Hopleaf and Hagen Dost from Dovetail Brewery will demonstrate “beer poking.”

– “A motley crew of current and former beer professionals sit in front of their laptops in their respective homes and discuss the virtual beer community informally known as Beer Twitter – the good, the bad, and the borderline absurd.”

One more thing. I’ll be there on a panel talking about hops. Thus the photo at the top.

Covid neither neighborhood nor innovation friendly

Boak & Bailey’s news and nuggets Saturday served as a reminder that UK beer drinkers are stuck in a grim cycle. My Twitter and Instagram feeds, full of snaps of people gathered with friends (but not too many friends) at bars and brewery tasting rooms, suggest things are better here. Has the worst really past? There are reasons to believe it hasn’t.

Story No. 1 from the Wall Street Journal this past weekend: “McDonald’s, Chipotle and Domino’s Are Booming During Coronavirus While Your Neighborhood Restaurant Struggles.” The subhead: “A health crisis is creating a divide in the restaurant world. Big, well-capitalized chains are thriving while small independents struggle to keep their kitchens open.”

Story No. 2: “Covid Is Crushing Small Businesses. That’s Bad News for American Innovation.”

(These stories are behind the Journal’s paywall. I tracked them down in print, which is one more thing that’s not as easy as it was at the beginning of the year.)

Restaurants come and go. About 60,000 open in an average year, according to the National Restaurant Association, and 50,000 close. But this year it will be much worse. The association predicts 100,000 restaurants will close during 2020. Employment at restaurants and bars has dropped by 2.3 million jobs from a total of more than 12 million before the pandemic, according to the Labor Department.

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Looking ahead, and through the rear view mirror

Cold Beer

One read, two listens. My recommendations for this weekend.

Evan Rail writes, “If a big part of craft brewing is innovation, its flip side is tradition, at least part of which has meant the revival of extinct, historical styles. And to be honest, we’re starting to run out of those.”

He adds, in an essay titled “The Last Beer Style,” that, “If we keep resuscitating these previously extinct historic beer styles, we will run out of them—unless, of course, some contemporary beer styles also disappear along the way. It’s not hard to foresee the extinction of Amber Ale, Brown Ale or even Black IPA.”

That provides context for something Mike Karnowski told Jamie Bogner on the Craft Beer & Brewing Podcast. “How many of the BJCP styles are actually brewed commercially by brewers? It’s almost nostalgic to think of an Amber Ale.”

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But, can anybody ‘own’ a yeast culture?

Kveik

The preservation of cultures can be tricky.

Claire Bullen wrote about Voss region in Norway, Vossaøl, farmhouse brewing, kviek and ultimately cultural preservation last week at Good Beer Hunting. I’m going to quote a couple of paragraphs, but context is important, so start by reading the whole thing. It is long. I’ll wait.

The discussion about kveik turns to acknowledging, even rewarding, “the original owner” of an individual strain, and she writes:

“‘Now we have rediscovered the kveik and then some companies […] start taking out a yeast type and isolating it and basically taking the kveik apart. So what we’re trying to do is preserve the kveik culture as it is, the asset it has been for centuries,’ said Arne Bøhmer, CTO of the Kveik Yeastery, during a recent conference call.

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