musing

Beer for Mother’s Day? An answer

Teri Fahrendorf was way ahead of me.

While I was wondering why more beer marketers don’t pay attention to Mother’s Day, Fahrendorf — a brewster herself and creator of the Pink Boots Society — was sending a message to the small breweries of America via the Brewers Association Forum, calling for action rather than blogger-like pondering.

Grass Roots Mother’s Day Event:

Once in our ancient brewing past, beer was brewed by mothers, in their homes, for their families. Now that rarely happens.

One goal of the Pink Boots Society is to reach out to the fair gender, expose women to great beer, and encourage them to learn about it and enjoy it. We hope to create more female beer drinkers and homebrewers in the process, (which are additional Pink Boots Society goals).

Mothers Day is celebrated around the world, from Australia to Zimbabwe, each May. Let’s invite folks to bring their mom out for a beer that day.

If you own or work for a brewery or brewpub, consider inviting your customers to “Bring Mom Out for a Beer” on May 9, 2010. Offer moms free brewery tours and free or low cost samplers of your beers from 1:00-4:00 pm.

If you own or work for a beer-centric pub, then design your own creative idea to get mothers in your door and tasting great beer on May 9th from 1:00-4:00pm. Feel free to share your great idea on the Pink Boots Society forum and let me know how it went.

We don’t currently have a nifty way for you to register your individual event online, or to publicize it through PBS. Try grass roots tools, like Twitter, Facebook, and anything else you can think of. We’d love for you to email us your success stories, so we can spread the word.

Grass roots and beer pair so nicely.

What about beer for Mother’s Day?

The first of what will be many email solicitations just arrived suggesting a “beer of the month” club membership makes the Father’s Day present.

You know it’s almost time to plant the tomatoes (we can get a late frost in our parts) and brew a wit beer once the “Dads and Grads” promotions begin.

But what about May 9, Mother’s Day? What’s wrong with giving mom a membership in a beer club? Who’s assembling baskets complete with artisan cheese, chocolates and beer?

5April2010: Beer linkorama

Love this lead from the Indianapolis Star: “The rinsed aluminum cans met their destiny on a vibrating gravity slide, where they took a hit of carbon dioxide, got filled with foaming pale ale five at a time, then were sealed with a pop top.”

Sun King in Indianapolis began canning beer last week. Just a few days more than a year after used fermentation tanks were still on their sides and construction workers were putting in drain trenches. That’s when I took the picture at the top. We were there because, here comes the disclaimer, my cousin, Clay, is one of the founders, with the help of my aunt and uncle, Judi and Omar Robinson. So am [insert your favorite obsencity]-ing excited.

  • I already pointed to the long version, but now Martyn Cornell offers the “the executive summary on what we know, what we don’t know, what we can justifiably assume and what we can’t assume about the history of India Pale Ale.” Read it, memorize it, and if anybody ever asks you about the history of IPA, suggests you write a neck label or a description for a beer menu or, heaven forbid a book (yes, Mitch, I’m looking at you) . . . don’t screw it up.
  • Porter’s last hurrah. More history to examine before you type something stupid.
  • Why is it necessary to find a definition of craft beer, and what might that definition be? Yes it feels that we’ve already talked that to death. But this time the questions are asked outside the Brewers Association guidelines because they are delivered with an Italian accent.
  • The Malt Manifesto, intended to help “real ale to appeal to a broader range of people.” Alan McLeod seems to approve, but Pete Brown might be skeptical about the “Guardian’s latest attempt at beer coverage.”
  • Why beer doesn’t matter. Of course it does, or there wouldn’t be 29 comments.
  • The Oregon Economics Blog examines beer often enough I have it filed under “beer” in my reader. Patrick Emerson gets to several key issues in a visit to Upright Brewing, including price. I think he’s wrong that “many” other places wouldn’t support Upright like Portland and Oregon do, but give it a read and think about time as ingredient in beer. And how it adds to the cost of every glass.
  • Sam Adams as the little guy.
  • Nick Matt explains whey the fire at F.X. Matt turned out to be a good thing.
  • It’s not beer (although DUI is mentioned) but we live in the land of “Breaking Bad” — awaiting the episode shot in the bar down the road — so just for fun Better Call Saul.

    • More beer links, but first I digress

    beer Log LogoIt doesn’t take much to encourage me, so a couple of comments following last week’s list of links means a linkorama this week. However, when I started this post I took a quick detour so the buncholinks will have to wait until tomorrow or the next day.

    This is where I started, with this absolutely brilliant sentence from Alan McLeod: “I hate running myself due mainly in its distinction from sitting on a sofa.” I read a lot, beer stuff, wine stuff, tech stuff, political stuff, journalist stuff, music stuff, popular culture . . . and this was my favorite sentence of the week. Just because.

    The day before, Alan celebrated his 2,000th post. At the rate Jay Brooks is going he’ll surely pass him soon, or perhaps already has. But Alan has been at it since 2003, although the Good Beer Blog posts begin in 2004, which is the noteworthy part.

    That got me looking around. I started this blog late in 2005 after I’d used WordPress for a while on our (not currently updated) Beer Travelers blog and on the Real Beer blog. When we began using WordPress at Real Beer we had to leave behind four-plus years of archives generated by entirely different blogging software. OK, we didn’t exactly have to – but looking over several hundred posts it was shocking how many links out had died and it seemed better to let them rest.

    I’ve still got all the posts in an archive, so as an excuse to re-use one of several rotating illustrations (at the top) here’s the first post (and the links still work):

    Monday, March 19, 2001

    Drinking poses: Do you grasp your pint glass like a weapon or do you stare intently into a pint? A new study identifies six basic drinking poses and what they reveal about the drinkers.

    Microbrews, microprofits: The Seattle Times takes a look at “an industry crowded with too much product and way too many companies.” It’s a reminder about how competitive the beer business remains.

    Gary McGrath of Pyramid sums it up nicely: “There’s certainly still some romance in brewing craft beers. We continue to have some very passionate brewers, but we needed a balance. To survive, you’ve got to care about both – the beer and the business.”

    Gee, didn’t this same topic just come up?

    Craft beer sales increased 1.7 percent in 2001. Business is much stronger these days. And there are a lot more beer blogs. Which is the cause? Which the effect?

    Waiting for RSBS

    Belgian lacingWith apologies to Samuel Beckett . . .

    The current, but perhaps not ongoing, demise of really simple BEER syndication has been noted in comments here and in a devoted post by Alan McLeod. For those of you don’t know, it is a site that aggregates the latest rss feeds from hundreds of beer blogs.

    Jonathan Surratt invented both RSBS and The Beer Mapping Project, another free web utility that has improved the quality of our beer drinking lives. He wrote in an email that Twitter now works for him much as RSBS did before, but he’s not ready to let it pass. He’s got a lot going on — he’s the web director for Draft Magazine and devotes (gives away) time to various other projects — so cut him some slack.

    When I started this blog I did a lot more pointing to “good reads,” but between RSBS and bloggers discovering how to use Twitter and Facebook to promote their posts that seemed redundant. I figured, probably incorrectly but I’ve learned to live with such ignorance, that if I was seeing three to five notifications every time a new beer post went up that you were seeing at least one.

    I wouldn’t begin to attempt to replicate the service RSBS provides, with sometimes more than 100 posts a day, but here are a half dozen recent posts you might have missed and should read while waiting for RSBS.

  • The first ever reference to IPA. You shouldn’t need more than the headline to motivate you. But just in case, it’s a Martyn Cornell post.
  • What’s a pilsner? “Should Pilsener be considered a beer made with Saaz or Hallertauer or other noble hops only, or even be reserved for beers that actually come from Plzen?”
  • Take that, Philadelphia. “A unique blend of climate and tradition make the Great Lakes region the best in the country for beer brewers and drinkers.”
  • San Francisco versus Portland. Because they aren’t aware that the Great Lakes region is really No. 1.
  • Reviews for something that doesn’t exist. What if Schrute Farms B&B were a beer?
  • Now this is just stupid. Pilsner Urquell versus tiny Pivovar Kout na Sumave. I point you to this not only because I’m a big fan of Kout na Sumave (despite the fact I can’t get WordPress to show the various marks above the S and e correctly), because you must read the story at the end.