musing

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.

Read more

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.”

Read more

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.

Read more

Recommended reading: Fingers (it’s a newsletter)

Yesterday I learned that Fair State Brewing in Minnesota has unionized.

The details: “Today is a momentous day in the history of Fair State – we just became the first microbrewery in the United States to become unionized. Yesterday morning, employees across our business – in both Minneapolis and St. Paul – banded together and requested that Fair State voluntarily recognize their union. In consultation with our member-owner Board of Directors, we quickly agreed to voluntarily recognize the union. We founded this cooperative on democratic principles, and this is the next natural step in our push to show that fair and democratic workplaces can thrive.” [Read more.]

I learned this reading David Infante’s free and highly entertaining newsletter about beery matters called “Fingers.” I am not going to continue to pass along every important thing I read there, so you might want to subscribe yourself. The “publishing schedule” to the right infers I might have a recommendation for you some Fridays. You are welcome.

Tasting notes, diversity, racism and sexism

The best read post here this year will be the same one that has been best read each of the last dozen years: “Words to describe the beer you are tasting.”

Beyond the obvious fact that people seem to struggle with talking about aroma and flavor, my excuse for pointing this out is Esther Mobley’s story yesterday in the San Francisco Chronicle that asks, “How many people have actually tasted a wet river stone, anyway?”

That amusing poke aside, she examines a more serious issue, stating “it’s becoming clearer than ever that the conventional language used to describe wine isn’t merely intimidating and opaque. It’s also inextricable from racism and sexism, excluding dimensions of flavor that are unfamiliar to the white, Western cultures that dominate the world of fine wine and reinforcing retrograde notions of gender.”

This is something those who write about beer should be aware of as well.

Further reading
– A review of “Discriminating Taste: How Class Anxiety Created the American Food Revolution,” which introduces the concept of “aspirational eating.”
– “The Taste of Beer,” an essay by Zak Avery in Brewery History Number 139, a special issue in 2011 that paid tribute to Michael Jackson.