musing

NO HOLIDAY FOR MONDAY BEER LINKS, BUT PERHAPS FOR MUSING, 07.04.16

An Open Letter to Beer Nerds.
Pick a paragraph, any paragraph. I’ll take this one.

The labels explain how this unique, captivating brew came into existence. Often there’s a “journey” involved, which displays excellent creative skills on the part of the marketing team involved, and no flagrant embellishment or anything. Beer is important and political and life-altering.

[Via McSweeney’s, h/T James Schirmer]

How Big Will Craft Get? Oregon’s Numbers are Suggestive.
There was more sky is falling speculation last week, but also this. [Via Beervana]

Burned Boise beer brewer back on job, wins awards.
“Sometimes, you don’t realize how dangerous your job is, because you do it every day. We work around chemicals and batters, slippery floors, heat. There’s so many different hazards in the brewery and you just take them for granted when you’re around them all the time.” [Via Idaho Statesman]

Beer essentials: The craft beer boom in Japan shows no sign of running dry.
“Ichiri Fujiura, proprietor of Watering Hole and soon to be brewer at Tharsis Ridge Brewing, notes that homebrewing and craft beer are ‘totally unrelated in Japan.’” And this story suggests that is one thing that slow the advance of in craft beer. [Via Japan Times]

MSU’s century-old barley revived to make Michigan beer.
“The whole idea of locally grown barley to make your brew is resonating very well with the microbrew industry.” [Via Lansing State Journal, h/T Jeff Alworth]

So many oral histories, such wonderful women!
It’s really important to collect this history. [Via Oregon Hops & Brewing Archives]

Categories of grisette and grisette strength.
“As usual there are still questions, but hopefully this helps to make the identity of grisette a bit more clear and helps you choose what strength to make your grisette.” [Via Hors Catégorie Brewing]

MOVING ON TO WINE

10 questions to ask about any wine appellation.
Granted, I think in terms of beer and appellations more than most, but there are some parallels here. [Via The Gray Report]

FROM TWITTER

Following acquisition by Lagunitas/Heineken, the Independence Brewing Company of Austin TX will rebrand as the Ironic Brewing Company.

— The Beer Nut (@thebeernut) June 30, 2016

Tom Vanderbilt’s You May Also Like:Taste in an Age of Endless Choice is an absolutely fascinating book, although it likely won’t leave you satisfied if you expect an answer to the question of why we like what we like. But he introduces so many ideas, like this one from an article in The Guardian: “With the internet, we have a kind of city of the mind, a medium that people do not just consume but inhabit, even if it often seems to replicate and extend existing cities (New Yorkers, already physically exposed to so many other people, use Twitter the most). As Bentley has argued, ‘Living and working online, people have perhaps never copied each other so profusely (since it usually costs nothing), so accurately, and so indiscriminately.'”

He gets around to discussing beer late in his book, and that might make its way into something I write. Meanwhile, a non-beer-specific thought from the final chapter, which is made up of a series of messages—a sort of “field guide to liking” in a world of infinite variety.

We like thing more when they can be categorized. Our pattern-macthing brains are primed to categorize the world, and we seem to like things the more they resemble what we think they should. Studies have found that when subjects look at pictures of mixed-race people and are asked to judge their attractiveness, the answer depends on what categories are used; a Chinese-american man may be judged more attractive than men in general but less attractive than Chinese men. Things that are “hard to categorize” are hard to like—until we invent new categories. We like things more when we can categorize them, and categories can help up like things more, even things that aren’t as good as we might like.

You could read this as an argument for more beer styles. Please do not show it to anybody with the power to make that happen.

MONDAY BEER LINKS, MUSING 6.20.16

Why Czech lager is just better.
Joe Stange has written a love letter to Czech pale lager. It is wonderful and were I a Czech pale lager and he followed this up with a proposal of marriage I would accept. I cannot argue with much in it, but I do have a problem getting past Exhibit No. 1 — that “It just tastes better” — which also became the headline for the post.

I read this Saturday morning, sitting on our back patio after a bit of yard work and before the sun reminded me it was summer in the city (cut The Lovin’ Spoonful). The evening before we walked three short blocks to have dinner at Manchester Public House. The first beer I drank was Katy from 2nd Shift Brewing, currently made several miles west of St. Louis, but soon to be produced 1.3 miles up the road from MPH. The second beer I had was Odinson from Modern Brewery, a few hundred yards more along the road.

I would be delighted if MPH were to offer a fresh Czech lager on tap — OK, that’s a fantasy — but it wouldn’t taste any better to me than those two local beers did Friday evening. [Via DRAFT]

Crafty Beer Girls.
A report from the front, with more reports if you dive into their blog. [Via Salt Lake City Weekly]

Beer and (industry) loathing with Stone Brewing’s Greg Koch.
Koch’s answers to Jason Notte’s questions are not always straightforward, so put your translating and thinking caps on. And there’s also this. I’m a fan of beer and music analogies, but sometimes I’m not sure how well they work.

As we move through this, there are going to be some people who are thrilled with our decisions, and there are going to be some people who are going to want us to not change. They’re going to want us to come out with our second album again … and then again … and then again. And we don’t want to come out with our second album again. We want to come out with new albums and make new music …”

[Via MarketWatch]

World’s oldest beer brought back to life, scientists claim.
Scientists claim? What is this, skepticism? This story popped up everywhere last week, and this was the most in depth version. It seems brewers/scientists are attempting to take history recreations to a new level these days. And I’m not sure how we might measure if they are succeeding. [Via Catalyst, ABC Australia]

Soured: Craft Beer’s Misplaced Obsession With Bugs and How to Deal With It.
Josh Weikert’s rant was provoked by beers he tasted during Homebrew Con, both from homebrewers and commercial breweries. I didn’t seek out sours during Homebrew Con, so I can’t comment on their quality there. He wrote: “The sour beer I’m drinking these days isn’t good. When sours were much more rare in the marketplace, I’d say that three out of four were definitely worth a try, and even that fourth was usually good-but-not-what-I-wanted.” My experience past and present has been different. When sours were less abundant there were still plenty that would take the enamel off your teeth. While there are still too many of those a larger percentage of brewers have figured out what they are doing. There are still plenty of examples of poorly made beers, but that is because there as so many more overall. [Via Beer Simple]

WINE & OTHER THINGS WITH BEER IMPLICATIONS

The 2016 MW examination papers.
If you write about wine there are a year’s worth of blog topics here. And I agree that Question A1 on Theory Paper 5 is a great one: “‘The consumer’s limited knowledge is a blessing for the wine industry.’ Discuss.” [Via Jancis Robinson]

Delusion at the Gastropub.
[Via The Baffler]
The Fed Is Worried About Worker Productivity.
[Via FiveThirtyEight]
From the Baffler: “Viewing our foodie status as a badge of honor makes sense only if we’re prioritizing food advocacy—from promoting sustainable farming practices to reducing food waste to embracing and popularizing more sustainable crops to making healthy food more affordable to the poor—over our indulgence in wildly expensive plates of exotic fare.”

I’ve been repeating something Left Hand Brewing co-founder Eric Wallace once said for almost 20 years ago: “The large brewers are not tooled to do what we do. They’ll have to build less-than-efficient breweries to make beer like we do.” I like this idea. But sometimes I remember there’s a downside to inefficiency. It wouldn’t be much of a world if we rewarded only the efficient, but there’s the quality of my life, the quality of your life, and the quality of the life of the guy down the road to be considered.

FROM TWITTER

Click on the date to open the thread.

I’m often told ‘we drink with our eyes’ — doesn’t happen when I have a cup of tea at dawn’s first gleamings, so maybe it’s another beer myth

— Adrian Tierney-Jones (@ATJbeer) June 16, 2016