musing

Not-Monday beer links: You happy now, Alan?

German hopyard - because dormancy matters

NOT-MONDAY BEER AND WINE LINKS, MUSING, 12.23.16

Monday I wrote that regular Monday beer links would be taking the next two Mondays off. That remains true, but after Alan McLeod complained and because there’s some good stuff you should be reading, a few it’s-not-Monday links before we head over the Mississippi River and through the wood (yes, I am aware it is a Thanksgiving poem) … If you still need a link fix tomorrow (Saturday) morning try Boak & Bailey’s News, Nuggets & Longreads. Happy holidays.

Father and son bond over beer at all 73 Iowa craft breweries.
This is a road movie waiting to be made. [Via Des Moines Register]

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Monday beer links: Stone beer, DNA silliness & that word that’s not going away

MONDAY BEER & WINE LINKS, 12.19.2016

Editorial note: Weekly links will be on unpaid leave the next two Mondays. Regular service will resume Jan. 9 (01.09.2017 or 09.01.2017 depending on where you live).

Craft: The Lost Word.
So let’s head into 2017 with the optimistic thought we’ll quit talking about the word we put before beer and talk about beer itself, brewing, culture, ingredients, geography, or anything that does not involve bickering about a definition of something that which refuses to be defined. [Via Boak & Bailey’s Beer Blog]

Beer tailored to your DNA: London brewery creates the perfect pint based your genetic code.
No. Just no. I sense this story has legs, so wherever you read your headlines you’ll keep seeing it, often enough that you might believe that somebody has done a little investigating and established there’s a reason to pay going on $32,000 for 317 gallons of beer. (That’s the equivalent of 3,381 12-ounce servings, so almost $10 for each one.)

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Significant beer digit

Crazy Mountain beer on tap in Asheville, NC

Reading Bryan Roth’s story about American beer sales abroad in the latest (37.6) issue of All About Beer magazine this fact about Crazy Mountain Brewing in Colorado jumped out at me.

Another fast-growing market is South Korea, where (Kevin) Selvy sells about 360 barrels a month and is hoping to increase that to 480 in early 2017.

Four hundred and eighty barrels a month would be 5,760 a year. To provide some context, sales in South Korea alone (not even its best foreign market) would have made Crazy Mountain the 184th largest microbrewery in the United States in 2015. There are, of course, 176 larger regional breweries, including Crazy Mountain, and then some rather big breweries not classified as craft. But Crazy Mountain Korea would easily be larger than more than 90% of the 5,000-plus breweries in the U.S.

Whither the brewmaster?

The other day Zymurgy editor Dave Carpenter wrote about “Five Beer Clichés We Need to Stop Using,” and this was the first.

Brewmaster: I’m not against the word ‘brewmaster’ per se, just its liberal use. All brewmasters are brewers, but not all brewers are brewmasters, just as not all cooks are Michelin-starred chefs. The mere act of upgrading from 5-gallon homebrew batches in a garage to 5-barrel commercial batches in a larger garage does not automatically a brewmaster make. Head brewer? Sure. But let’s use the title ‘brewmaster’ more sparingly.

I was thinking the “how do you define a brewmaster?” topic had come up here before, but if so I’m not very good at figuring out the archives because I couldn’t find it. There was something Garrett Oliver said in 2013 at the European Beer Bloggers Conference.

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Monday beer links: Diversity, blogs through the ages & GMO questions

MONDAY BEER & WINE LINKS, 12.12.2016

Is Craft Beer Still Too White?
[Via Vinepair]
Addressing Diversity in Beer: A Q&A with Julia Herz.
[Via This Is Why I Am Drunk]
Addressing Diversity in Beer: Seeking Action.
[Via This Is Why I’m Drunk]
Opinions about this filled my Twitter feed last week. Among suggestions was one that the Brewers Association provide scholarships to people who are not white males to attending brewing school. Nothing wrong with that idea. But the Brewers Association is, well, an association of brewing companies. One of the reasons that there are more local breweries is that they are part of communities, regularly making connections with people in those communities. Shouldn’t they reflect the, and pardon me for using this word, demographics of that community? Shouldn’t the members be allowed to hold them responsible to do that?

Hello From The Blog’s Back End – And The Road …
Alan McLeod nicely summarizes the phases beer blogging has been through, easier for him to do than most because he was there at the beginning. [Via A Good Beer Blog]

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