musing
A few words about words about beer
The Unicode Technical Committee recently announced it would not add a white-wine emoji to Unicode’s standard emoji mix, despite a 19-page proposal and well-organized petition campaign supported by winemaker Kendall-Jackson.
“If certain news outlets are to be believed, white-wine drinkers everywhere were devastated,” Stephen Harrison wrote in Slate. He doesn’t particularly care one way or another, and instead poses a question “. . . more philosophical in nature, namely, whether emoji are supposed to represent broad emotions and concepts or something more specific.”
Coincidentally, last week Jonny Garrett traced “the origins of beer language, from Michael Jackson to emojis” at Good Beer Hunting.
So what changed since Heinrich Knaust wrote Funff Bücher, von der Göttlichen und Edlenn Gabe, der Philosophischen, hochthewren and wunderbaren Kunst, Bier zu brawen in 1573? (Plenty was written about beer centuries before that, but this is a blog not a complete history of beer writing, and Richard Unger calls Knaust’s book the first extensive and comprehensive work on brewing.)
Pop-up beer links
Monday beer links and musing remain on hiatus, but here are a few “just the links” that shouldn’t be overlooked.
– The Calamity of Cultural Confusion: Appropriation vs Appreciation.
and
– A Look At Cultural Appropriation Within The Hip-Hop Culture.
– In Trump era, breweries and bars wear politics on their sleeves.
and
– The Beer Politic.
– Lagunitas brews Newcastle Ale.
and
– Light Beer, Big Opportunity — Lagunitas Enters the Low-Cal Market.
– Brewer Lee Hedgmon Learned the Rules in Order to Break Them.
and
– Lee Hedgmon Oral History Interview.
– Just the Essentials — How Distilled Oils are Expanding the Impact of Hops.
and
– The Complex Case of Thiols.
Disclaimer: These are my stories. If hops interest you consider signing up for Hop Queries.
While waiting for numbers from @BrewersStats
If you take the time to work through all the comments that followed Andy Crouch’s suggestion (click on the bird) you might not make it back here, but go look anyway.
I think it's difficult for individuals in other parts of the US (Colorado, California, the Pac NW) to understand how little breweries & consumers in other regions care about the @gabf. In New England, it's rarely discussed, few participate in the event, and consumers don't care.
— Andy Crouch (@BeerScribe) September 24, 2018
As happens on Twitter, different threads developed and more questions came up. Bart Watson will be answering some them soon with what has turned into an annual crunching of numbers. I’ll add the link here. Meanwhile, his reports from 2017, 2016, 2015, and 2014. Lots of fun stuff, including the fact that he calculates expected medals versus actual medals won based on the difficulty of categories entered.
Pop-up beer (and drinks) links
Monday beer links and musing remains on hiatus, but here are a few “just the links” — because breweries are small businesses and what is written about wine is often true about beer.
– Remember when a glass of wine a day was good for you? Here’s why that changed.
– What Millions of Retiring Small Business Owners Could Mean for Cities.
–America’s Newest Monastic Brewery Opens in Oregon.
– The wonder of the fresh hop: How Washington’s special autumn beer gets made.
– Fifth Hammer Brewer Chris Cuzme Would Take Orval and John Coltrane to a Desert Island.
– Metallica Talk Top-Secret Distilling Process Behind New ‘Blackened’ Whiskey.