musing

There were many words spilled over beer last week, including some from Jeff Alworth related to one of my favorite topics: authenticity. He even headlines a phrase, “authenticity trap,” that I almost always have to explain during conversations with brewers.

In his post he leans to a passage in which “Holt demonstrates how iconic brands exude authenticity by encompassing political and cultural authority as resources for self-expression.” I’m pretty sure that is Douglas Holt, a marketing consultant who along with his partner Douglas Cameron, was responsible for the tagline “Follow your folly, ours is beer,” that New Belgium Brewing used for more than a decade.

In 2003, Holt and Cameron created a commercial that features a character they called The Tinkerer, who finds an old bicycle at a garage sale, carefully restores it, and then happily rides it into the Colorado countryside.

They outline their strategy for New Belgium in a chapter called “Fat Tire: Crossing the Cultural Chasm” within their book, “Cultural Strategy: Using Innovative Ideologies to Build Breakthrough Brands.” As well as Fat Tire, those brands include Nike, Jack Daniels, Patagonia and others. The word authentic comes up in most chapters, but usually as a given and without a definition of what it means to be authentic. What is clear is how important whatever they label authenticity is to those focused on marketing.

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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.

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.

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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.

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.

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?

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