musing

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.

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.

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.