musing

This morning, a link that should make you smile but also may cause you to think twice about what you read.

Wine writer Jamie Goode has a new book out, appropriately enough called, “The Goode Guide to Wine: A Manifesto of Sorts.” I own several of his books because his technical and cultural insights are relevant to beer and brewing as well as wine. This book is less technical, and often draws from his long-running blog.

One chapter is drawn from a 2015 post titled “How to succeed as a wine writer by writing boring wine articles.” Just to make it clear in the book that this is satirical he included a footnote to that effect, while repeating that he thinks wine writing “is a broken system.”

How it starts.

First of all, you need to take a press trip. Two or three days in wine region X, paid for by a generic body, where you get to visit a mix of producers. Travelling with a group of fellow writers, you’ll be taken to see one or two boutique producers, one or two larger producers, and some lousy huge producers who pay a lot of money to support the generic body. The exact itinerary, of course, will mostly be determined by internal politics. [Bad producers, you see, don’t realise that it would be better for them if journalists just visited the best producers in any particular region.]

So how do you write your boring wine article? You haven’t got room to go into depth, so remember: big overview without too many specifics. The good news: it won’t take long to do, especially if you follow my template here.

Commence satire. One example.

Everything is getting just a little bit better. The wines being made today are better than those being made a few years ago, and because everyone is so passionate and motivated we can confidently predict that things will continually to improve, little by little.

Good reading from an author who writes, “Personally, I’d rather drink beer than suffer these dull, dishonest, trick-about wines.” Not sure what alternative he’d suggest for dull, dishonest, tricked-about beer.

a) Last week, Brews News in Australia highlighted a report that suggested “the positioning of many craft beers to target ‘purists’ and ‘hipsters’ gave the independent brewers less traction with a sizeable part of the Australian market.”

The result is that mainstream breweries have created a class of “contemporary beers” that are priced between budget beers and premium beers. They appeal to “consumers tiring of traditional beer brand offerings but ‘who felt disenfranchised by the craft movement.’”

b) With that in mind, look at what Mike Urich wrote in his Seven Point Analytic blog last month. Really nice visuals illustrate that, “Low income drinkers have exactly one entry point into beer, and it’s pale/light lager. We’re hardly offering new and low income drinkers a lot of options.”

He contrasts that to spirits, where every segment has significant pricing overlap. “The average price of whiskey, gin, and tequila are each above the average price of vodka, but there are still plenty of options in every segment at essentially every price point. This allows drinkers of every income level an entry point into any spirits segment that they want to try. From there, they can go wherever they want—there’s a cheap, widely available spirits brand in every segment for every drinker.”

c) In 1998, The New Brewer included an article about “The Demographics of the Micro Market.” It reported the results of the National Beer Survey, which was sponsored in part by the Institute of Brewing Studies (a forerunner of the Brewers Association).

Read more

Yesterday was IPA Day.

Today is International Beer Day.

Tomorrow is Fresh Fest Digi Fest.

One of these is about the future.

You decide.

A box of Fred Eckhardt’s papers at the Oregon Hops and Brewing Archives.

7 years ago I started a #beer archive and it delights me that the #beerhistory field has grown so much since then! Learn more about the collections at https://t.co/Ko80O1mG2q and https://t.co/0hUBEzaw2R pic.twitter.com/BQtAIE4cvh

— OHBA (@brewingarchives) August 1, 2020

I would not know Tumblr still exists if it weren’t home to the Oregon Hops and Brewing Archives blog. It seems that’s just one more way it is a link to the past.

As Tiah Edmunson-Morton wrote in her tweet this past weekend, the #beerhistory field has grown impressively since she started OHBA seven years ago.

I wrote about her and the archives for DRAFT magazine two years into the run. (You can find the story here, but be aware the site is no longer secure.)

Edmunson-Morton has been running ahead of the crowd from the start, already practicing what Paul Eisloeffel of the Nebraska State Historical Society called holistic collecting, “thinking outside of the archives box” and gathering artifacts as well as historical documents. This doesn’t necessarily come naturally.

“Dealing with artifacts has always been a problem for standalone archives,” he said. He’s a proponent of the sort of proactive collecting Edmunson-Morton undertook. “It is important for archivists to be able to look at what’s happening in a culture and start collecting now. I really applaud her.”

In “But What If We’re Wrong” author Chuck Klosterman writes, “It’s impossible to understand the world of today until today has become tomorrow.” It’s also impossible if somebody is not saving the important stuff to begin with.

Saturday, Boak & Bailey wrote that self-published books are the future of beer writing, the premise being, “Books about beer seem to be evolving in ways we like quite a bit: getting more specific, exploring fresh territory, enjoying the freedom of new business models.”

They offer two new books — Pete Brown’s “Craft: An Argument” and Andreas Krenmair’s “Vienna Lager” — as examples. Both are excellent, and they are quite different, supporting Boak & Bailey’s thesis. Still, I pause anytime I see the words “future of [fill in the blank] writing,” although there are good reasons to be considering them. A few thoughts:

– Self publishing allows writers/authors to distribute words that would not otherwise be published. Presumably they will earn something in the process.

– Blogging allows writers to distribute words that would not otherwise be published. It is a hard way to earn money. On Thursday, Alan McLeod repeated his pitch for more beer blogging, more new voices. (Suggesting how complicated this might be, his weekly news wrapup included only one link to a personal beer blog, and that one has a corporate sponsor).

– New writers may stick to old territory, but somebody is going to find new ways to write about new subjects for new audiences.

– Consider the responses to a question Robin LeBanc asked on Twitter the week before last.

“Question for the beer writers out there inspired by a few conversations: with all that’s going on, how do you stay motivated or inspired to talk about beer?

“I would like to clarify that I mean not what your usual drive is, but where your drive comes from when the world is as it is, currently on fire with a lot of hate, pain, and issues that make beer seem supremely unimportant in comparison.”

Read the thread. Change, not change within the same thread.

– Beer and brewing will continue to change. What’s in the glass and everything related to how it is made always have.

“Historians love chapter breaks,” Robert Kaplan, an American foreign-policy expert and former member of the U.S. Defense Policy Board, told an Atlantic magazine reporter in May. “COVID-19 will come to be seen as a chapter break.”

It certainly has been for most of the 8,000-plus breweries in the United States. Kaplan spoke before 989 breweries (as of 11:00 a.m. GMT, July 13) signed up to brew a Black Is Beautiful Beer, part of “a collaborative effort to raise awareness for the injustices people of color face daily and raise funds for police brutality reform and legal defense for those who have been wronged.”

Let’s be honest, many breweries will consider that their contribution to change. Others will just be getting started.

Who will tell these stories and how will they do it?