musing

This images was taken from a greeting card, and was captioned, “Where hipster gnomes gather; ‘Yes! More small batch beer and hancrafted sausages for all!” Perhaps this will cause you to think about hipster beer drinkers in a different way. See below.

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More than 15 years ago, The New Yorker published “A Better Brew: The Rise of Extreme Beer.” Last fall, Dave Infante interviewed Burkhard Bilger, who wrote the story, for Taplines. Read the article, listen to the podcast, when you have a chance.

The New Yorker invested a good chunk of change to put this story on the page. Bilger went to Europe, to Delaware, to the Great American Beer Festival and elsewhere, across many days of work. How many stories in small beer-focused publications would have been funded with what was spent on a single story? It was and is an outlier, but toss it into the mix when you write a blog post in your mind based on:

– What Boak & Bailey wrote about “beer writing” in their most recent newsletter.
– Alan McLeod’s comments and further thoughts.*
– Evan Rail’s still fresh essay about the same subject.
– Matthew Curtis on publishing and sustainability.

Read more

This photo was taken during a 2009 visit to Golden, Colorado. The sign has changed, but the message is the same today at Golden Liquors. The Coors brewery is located across the street from the store. Coincidentally, we now live within the Golden ZIP code, but not the town. Read more about Coors below.

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QUESTION OF THE WEEK

Is beer really just the sum of its molecular parts, or is there an intangible aspect that can’t be emulated by a machine?

— Posed by Evan Rail early in “A High-Tech ‘Beer Printer’ From Belgium Wants to Digitize the Drinking Experience.”

Rail writes that the company has “presented a fully operational prototype, called ‘OneTap,’ that can pour five different styles of beer, as well as custom brews users can adjust to their preferences. Since then, members of the public have been able to sample lager; blonde, brown, and triple ales; and IPA made by the small countertop device at trade fairs and other events in Belgium.”

And some people within the brewing trade have been impressed.

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This past week, Katie Mather asked, “I love leading tasting sessions, but do people actually want to know about cryo hops and malt varieties?”

The short answer is, “Some do, most don’t.”

Mather wrote, “I truly think there’s a wall between the beer world and the average drinker, built by lack of info but conversely, by a vast, impenetrable-seeming pile of details. That’s why I like running tasting sessions. It feels in that moment like I’m knocking that wall down.”

That hasn’t necessarily changed in the past 40 years. “People forget you had to explain beer styles 50 times a night,” said John Hickenlooper, co-founder of Colorado’s first brewpub, Wynkoop, and now a U.S. senator. “It was like being the first one on the Santa Fe Trail . . . a lot of boulders to move.”

I thought of this Saturday in Seattle. We were at a brewery when Daria pointed out to me that Untappd offers users an imposingly complete list of words to describe the beer in their glass. That’s a screen shot above, turned sideways, so you can see some of the C words. Impenetrable? Perhaps not, but it does suggest that appreciating a beer requires some special skill. It does not.

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The big news Friday was that billionaire Hamdi Ulukaya, the Turkish-born CEO and founder of Chobani, has purchased Anchor Brewing, lock, stock & steam. The stories will keep coming in the next few days, some with bits and pieces that have not been previously reported. We’ll have to wait for the most interesting ones, which will come from on the ground and be about what hasn’t happened yet. When I see them, I will pass along links.

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Step away from the beer bubble for a moment to consider style. It is a function of culture, right?

Let’s start with the conclusion of Jeff Alworth’s riff on a post about XPA at Hop Culture, which goes, “Style is one useful way to think about beer, but it’s not the only way. Too often, it blinds us to something more interesting.

“As a final comment, I’ll connect this point to the discussion last week about hazy IPAs. See what happens when you think of them as less a style than a function of beer culture. Does that change the way you think about them?”

Has “beer style” disconnected from “beer culture,” and if so, when and why?

Read more

Sunday, Boak & Bailey wrote about the pleasure of a pint at the end of a hike (see below). Later in the day, we were hours away from beer when I took this photo looking southeast* across Black Canyon of the Gunnison. But eventually, there was a lager flavored with hops from nearby Billy Goat Hop Farm. Small world.

* Looking straight south offered a spectacular view of the San Juan range, but not as revealing a look at the canyon.

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I do not agree every word in the paragraph that follows, but Alan McLeod provides context for considering the links that will follow.

“What Andy does not seem to want to admit is that it’s not about the rise and full of each particular form of drink but a greater overall trend. These sugar bomb beers that are labeled as Hazy IPA are nothing more than the beery sibling to RTDs, coolers and hard seltzers. Interchangeable. Forgettable. Cavity causing. They may sell but they are part of that continuum that speaks to a candy fixated palate. Kinderbier. Easy to make and easy to sell with the right cartoony can wrapper. In fact, their rise was perfectly culturally appropriate for the troubled times, a perfect drink for an era of crisis that started with the shock of Trump getting elected and then continued on through the daze of life in the pandemic. They are booze for unsettled people who have bigger things to deal with, those who don’t want to think about it. Any of it. The ‘eating a box of ice cream sandwiches standing by my fridge because I can’ of beers for folk who no longer can muster the energy to give a shit. What sort of industry bases its long term health on that sort of consumer? By all appearances, this shrinking one called craft.”

Jeff Alworth writes he “has been seeing a lot of grumbling” about hazy IPAs, a sense of lost fun, and a generalized mood of dyspepsia.” He points to thoughts from:

      * Stephen Beaumont.
      * Pete Brown.
      * Drew Beechum.

Alworth asks, “Are things really very dismal, and if so, how dismal?” He quickly adds, “I think things are actually pretty good,” and then provides context.

On another Monday, I might choose to add additional context. But it is Memorial Day in America and “sure is gonna be fun.”

Instead, a single thought. A certain amount of back and forth following Evan Rail’s post earlier this month has been about how so little in beer these days is new. Beechum writes it is no longer hip.

Here’s the thing. Hip is seldom forever. That is a feature of hip. In “Hip: The History,” John Leland writes, “Once opposed to mainstream values, hip now seems merely a step ahead of them. It is taken for granted that what is hip today will be mass tomorrow.”

Perhaps that is a cynical, commercialized view. What is not cynical is that the beer from [                    ] is not going to be mass produced. Fill in the space between the brackets with the brewery of your choice. Zebulon Artisian Ales would be a fine one. I would suggest more, but it is Memorial Day in American and I have more James McMurtry to listen to.

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KICKER OF THE WEEK
As opposed to the regular Lede of the Week

To criticize an active and engaged audience of hazy IPA drinkers just because you don’t personally prefer the style or think they should be drinking helles is self-defeating. Hazy IPA has helped connect younger drinkers to craft beer. Unless you want a taproom occupied by a handful of 55 year old dudes grumbling about the good old days on RateBeer and BeerAdvocate, I’m not sure that shitting on hazy IPAs makes any sense.

— From the aformentioned Hazy IPA Conspiracy Theories in All About Beer

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

“The problem with this flavor thing is that eventually you’re a kumquat”

— JB Shireman of Arlington Capital Advisors, from Beer Crunchers

PUBS

– Pubs: They’re quite good
This is related to the ongoing discussion about beer writing, including at the top. From Boak & Bailey: “We’re absolutely not objective when it comes to pubs. We’re highly emotional and irrational. We think they’re a good thing and that it shouldn’t be left to the market, and cold-hearted commercial logic, to decide whether they survive.

A pub on the edge of reality
“After hours with the sea on one side and woods or open land on the other, you become gently disconnected from reality.

“It becomes about putting one foot in front of the other, warding off the sun, warding off the rain, and negotiating never-ending ups that lead into never-ending downs, in never-ending cycles.

“This has the effect of making almost any pub you reach at the end seem idyllic, and any beer taste like nectar. In this case, though, the pub really was special.”

– Infinity lost.
“The pub was a bigger landscape that stretched beyond every horizon. Now it feels like the last days of a zombie film, where only the main protagonists linger on. The characters that weren’t important at the start have long gone. But, beyond fiction, they were important, despite what James May says.”

– On loneliness part II
“Why does time spent in the pub help alleviate a sense of loneliness? My belief is that you are around people, but not with them, and therefore free from any responsibility for them. You overhear conversations which, in my case as a writer, are a seam to be mined with the utmost vigour and energy. You are on the edge of gatherings, a spectator of family and friends getting together and the energy comes to you, though not in a vampiric way, but maybe it is like being at a gathering, a gig perhaps, or watching a TV drama in which you are incredibly engrossed and invested in. Energy shared.”

YOU MIGHT ALSO ENJOY

– Some Craft Brewers Just Aren’t Built for This Market
And perhaps they should look before they enter a market that was not built for them.

– Up in Smoke — Lagunitas to Close Chicago Plant as Brand Continues to Wobble
The news was greeted with alarm in social media, and no doubt some drinkers will miss visiting the taproom. But this was not a local institution, nor one offering beers totally unlike you could buy nearby. In contrast . . .

– How Dovetail Brewery Uses Engineer-like Precision to Master Neglected Beers
. . . there is this brewery.