musing

MONDAY BEER LINKS, MUSING 5.09.16

The Session #111: Are you there Beer? It’s me, Oliver.
[Via Literature & Libation]
Session 111: You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling.
[Via A Good Beer Blog]
Session #111: A Beer Mid-Life Crisis?
[Via Boak & Bailey’s Beer Blog}
Surviving a Beer Midlife Crisis — The Session #111.
[Via Good Beer Hunting]
The premise behind The Session is, or at least was, that the host recap the various posts, so I generally don’t point to them on Monday. But I’ll break with tradition because although I did not chime on Friday — a) I was in information collecting mode at the Craft Brewers Conference, and b) am more interested in writing about various aspects of beer and brewing than my relationship with beer — it is so interesting to read how those more generous about revealing their motivations think about their relationship with beer. In addition, Michael Kiser calls out what he refers to as “an old guard in craft beer.”

There are 6,000 active TTB licenses in the US right now, according to the BA. That means in the next couple of years, we could see 1-2k more breweries. Instead of applause, that line got a collective groan from an audience of craft brewers. For those people, more breweries means more competition, or noise, depending on how you look at it, that they have to fight through every day to sell their beer. And the assumption seems to be that these new people are either getting in to it for the wrong reasons (money) or they’re young and dumb and they’re going to screw everything up with low quality beer.

That sounds like a form of mid-life crisis to me. And fuck that.

I’ll be borrowing from these and other Session #111 posts when I speak at The Beer Bloggers & Writers Conference in July. Because writers should be as concerned about remaining relevant as companies/brands/brewers are.

Smithsonian Announces New Initiative To Document Brewing History.
This was announced at the Craft Brewers Conference. Brewers who won medals in the World Beer Cup competition might disagree, but it looks like the biggest news of the week to me. [Via Smithsonian]

Will Big Lager one day go the same way as Big Porter?
And a related question from Ron Pattinson: Why do beer styles disappear? [Via Zythophile]

America’s New Beer Test.
“In craft beer, you’re dealing with voters of the whole spectrum, from 21 until they’re cold. Our beer drinkers are left, right, Independent. Beer is the x-factor. People might not agree politically, but they can agree that this beer is great.”

When James Schirmer drew my attention to this via Twitter the headline said: “How Craft Beer Became the Budweiser of America.” That certainly could be taken to mean many different things. [Via Atlantic]

An American beer snob in Munich.
As you will see if you read the replies to Joe Stange’s tweet (“Confused sad American person goes to Munich in search of IPA”) some people didn’t think much of this story. [Via Boston Globe]

FROM TWITTER

Maybe she'd prefer hop flowers today? #MothersDay pic.twitter.com/vAYz0PHToV

— Rogue Ales & Spirits (@RogueAles) May 8, 2016

If you are interested in beer and writing, and maybe a little bourbon on the side, you might want to figure out a way to be in Lexington, Kentucky, the last day of September.

Organizer Jeff Rice has announced the University of Kentucky will host Craft Writing: Beer, the Digital and Craft Culture for a second time, and it is still free. Beyond the list of speakers, the web site is a little short information. However you can reserve a spot.

Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergso of Evil Twin Brewing is the keynote speaker. Other speakers include Joe Tucker of Rate Beer, freelance writer Heather Vandenengel, All About Beer editor John Holl, Boulevard Brewing ambassador brewer Jeremy Danner, and Julia Herz, Brewers Association craft beer program director.

Craft Writing: Beer, the Digital and Craft Culture I was great fun back in February of 2014. I wrote about it here (links to other coverage included).

Shakespeare is commonly believed to have died 400 years ago Saturday, but it seems — and I don’t think this is because I live in an insular beer world — that the official 500th anniversary of the Reinheitsgebot is getting a lot more attention. If you somehow missed the onslaught, read this story, or this story, or this one, or do a search on Twitter.

What else could there be to say? How about a sideways look at the Reinheitsgebot and how it might have affected beer in the United States?

Yesterday evening, Greg Casey pointed out how different beer in America might have been had the U.S., or at least some states, enacted Reinheitsgebot-like laws in the last decades of the nineteenth century or the first of the twentieth. Casey worked in the brewing industry for more than 30 years before retiring from MillerCoors in 2013. He is best known for his expertise in yeast. He invented the application of chromosome fingerprinting to provide the global brewing industry with its first definitive means to fingerprint production strains of yeast.

Even before Casey retired he had begun research into the political battles to define “what is beer?” that began in the final decades of the nineteenth century and continued until the beginning of Prohibition. He shared some of the information about the arguments surrounding the use of adjuncts he has accumulated during a presentation at a St. Louis Chapter of the Master Brewers Association of the Americas meeting at the O’Fallon Brewery. He is in the process of writing a book he’ll call Americans Drink Beer With Their Eyes that he hopes to see published in 2017.

Thursday he focused on what happened in Missouri and suggested, as he has in presentations to other MBAA chapters across the country, that brewers today who use ingredients beyond water, malt, hops and yeast owe a certain debt to those who fought for the the right to brew with adjuncts. Not something you think about right off.

Hypotheticals are always, well, hypothetical. So it is hard to imagine the government imposing a Reinheitsgebot-like law. However, consider that after Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 the committee in charge of establishing standards for malt liquors tentatively proposed definitions that created a separate class for malt beers made without adjuncts. The proposal also included a requirement that lager beers be lagered for at least three months. (Good luck enforcing that.) Neither of those became part of the final recommendation, but it is just one of many examples Casey has.

What you might not think about when you are drinking a kumquat gose or pineapple IPA is it was relatively recently that it became acceptable to serve such beers in mixed company. Legal earlier, sure. A good example of a brewer’s craft, not so much. Fritz Maytag at Anchor Brewing and Jack McAuliffe at New Albion made as big a deal about “beer purity” in the 1970s as any anti-adjunct politicians did in the 1890s.

When Frank Prial of The New York Times visited McAuliffe in 1979, he wrote:

Jack McAuliffe boasts that his beer is a completely natural product. “We use malt, hops, water and yeast,” he said. “There are not enzymes, which the big breweries use to speed up the process of mashing and aging; there are no broad spectrum antibiotics, which they use to stop bacteria from growing, and there are no heading agents to create an artificial head. The proteins which are filtered out of most beer are what make the head. We don’t filter.”

And Maytag might as well have used the word Reinheitsgebot last year (and 50 years after he bought Anchor Brewing) in an interview in the San Francisco Chronicle:

Mind you, there was no beer in the world more traditional than ours. Pure water, good yeast, malted barley, hops. Period. No additives, no chemicals, no nothing. That was a theme we felt strong about. To make old-fashioned beer in a pure, simple way.

American brewers today are not playing by the same rules.