musing

Some Monday beer links that just read better

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.

Monday beer links: Who should be mayor of Homebrew Con 2017?

MONDAY BEER LINKS, MUSING 06.13.16

U.S. craft beer pioneer New Belgium has some lessons for old Belgium.
I’m am going to cheat and flip right to the end: “The consumer really has started to be the person asking for new beer. I always used to say: ‘We’ll make it, they’ll drink it anyway.’ It was brewer-led brewing. Now it’s more consumer-led.” [Via MarketWatch]

14 Breweries Split from Colorado Brewers Guild.
Some numbers might add context. This group includes Colorado’s five largest small brewers (small being every brewery other than the massive MillerCoors plant in Golden and the Anheuser-Busch brewery in Fort Collins). Those five (New Belgium, Oskar Blues, Left Hand, Odell, and Great Divide) produced about 70 percent of the 1,775,831 barrels of beer Colorado’s craft breweries made in 2015. Avery (52,805 barrels) and Ska (32,187 barrels) are the largest breweries that did not join the group of 14. [Via Porch Drinking]

Postcard from Forchheim, Upper Franconia.
“Sadly, younger Germans are less interested in traditions like Stammtisch and Frühschoppen, or less able to keep them. I worry that in 20, 40, 60 years these things become mere anecdotes: My opa used to drink there every Sunday morning.” [Via DRAFT]

A craft beer revolution brews in Paris.
Yes, your first thought might be, Not another craft beer in Paris story. But I find it interesting to consider what it can mean to be local in the twenty-first century, no matter the location. [Via SFGATE]

Craft Beer Drinkers are Interested in Healthy Habits and Alcohol Abstinence, Nielsen Survey Finds.
Introducing The Weekend Warrior Craft Drinker. [Via Brewbound]

WINE, AND MAYBE A BIT OF NAVEL GAZING

Wine Critics – Everything Old Is New Again.
Beer drinkers who know of Pliny the Elder the Person mostly do so because of Pline the Elder the Beer. But his influence on wine is somewhat larger. And not only because he wrote things like this: “The wine produced (nascitur) at Signia—useful as an astringent because it is just too harsh—counts as a medicine.” [Via Huffington Post]

Into the tall weeds of the critic: Kramer and being “captious.”
“I guess I’m thinking politically — critics are rather like politicians running for office. You have to talk, talk, talk to convince people to listen to you and believe in your views.” [Via Steve Heimoff]

FROM TWITTER

I pass this along because Minneapolis-St. Paul is hosting Homebrew Con in 2017. The first time I saw Steve Fletty in Baltimore this past weekend I told him I think he should be declared the official mayor of Homebrew Con next year. A grassroots movement seems in order.

The beer stories you might have missed last week

MONDAY BEER LINKS, MUSING 06.06.16

Inside the Underhanded Effort to Unseat Craft Beer in Seattle.
A serious bit of reporting. “No one familiar with Seattle’s beer industry thinks that AB is alone in the kinds of practices uncovered by LCB investigation. With more violations expected to be announced later this year, it’s possible that craft brands could be implicated in similar schemes. But the details revealed by the state, paired with AB’s growing influence over the distribution networks smaller breweries rely on to reach customers, do provide a clear picture of the kind of cutthroat deals that go into delivering a pint to your hands, often at the expense of small, independent producers.” [Via Seattle Weekly]

On Disclosure and Early Reflections of Being a Freelance Beer Writer.
I find this statement deeply troubling: “The notion of integrity in journalism is flawed.” It opens the penultimate paragraph, which includes more disturbing suggestions. I don’t want to get into a pissing match, so I will simply point to the Society of Professional Journalists code of ethics. It makes it pretty clear why integrity still matters. [Via Total Ales]

Why Is the Smithsonian Collecting 50 Years’ Worth of Beer Artifacts?
American History Museum Smithsonian food exhibitAs the photo I took Saturday at Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History illustrates wine has a head start. But this Q&A with Susan Evans McClure, the Smithsonian’s Director of Food History Programs, indicates how wide sweeping its collaboration with the Brewers Association will be . “So, we’ll be looking at advertising, agriculture, industry, business history, community and all of these strands that people might not even think are related to brewing. I’m particularly interested in the agriculture stories of brewing. How does the farmer who feeds spent grains to his cows relate to the fact that Americans are drinking more craft beer? That, to me, is a much more complex story of American history.” [Via Punch]

The Great American Beer Brawl 2016.
Serious Eats invites “beer experts and aficionados from around the country to state the case for their favorite beer towns.” The seven featured are New York, San Diego, Denver, Asheville, Portland, Tampa, and Burlington. There’s also a poll in which readers can vote for their favorite. When I last looked “other” was winning. Fun to compare to a list from 2000, when in an interview in Westword magazine the late Michael Jackson listed seven cities. They were (west to east) Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Denver, Austin, Philadelphia, and Boston. [Via Serious Eats]

Frothy Minnesota market might not bear much more craft beer.
On any given Monday I could link to multiple “craft beer bubble” stories. I promise not to, but this is well reported and on a local (well, state) level. “It’s not my fault that there are 100 breweries in Minnesota. But brewers get angry when I tell them their beer is not as good as the ones already on our list.” [Via StarTribune]

Selling Millennials Through Myths & Lies (Part 2 of 3).
Since I linked to millennials and beer last week, might as well make it wine this week. [Via SBV Wine]

FROM TWITTER

Oh, what the heck, most bubble talk. Click on the time/slash date to read the conversation.

Monday beer links: Sahti, hyperlocal, millennials, hoplore

MONDAY BEER LINKS, MUSING 5.30.16

Sahti – What Can We Learn From a Farmhouse Brewer?
There’s a lot here. For instance: “Since house strains for baking and brewing could have been the same, I have been testing how the traditional sourdough starters ferment sahti. So far I have been able to revive one functional brewing strain from a at least decades old baking strain. This particular strain delivers surprisingly neutral malty taste. I will continue to hunt and test traditional baking strains and hopefully in future I encounter more distinctive strains.” [Via Maltainen, h/T @larsga]

Two Brewers Admit Their Methods for Haze.
On the subject of sourdough strains, the “wild” strain at Scratch Brewing in southern Illinois is in fact its sourdough starter. To use it directly means adding a bit of flour to beer, which sometimes settles out (with time) but other times does not. But I am having a problem wrapping my head around the idea of adding flour to beer for the sake of appearance. Haven’t they heard of Tanal A? [Via BeerGraphs]

We’ve seen the future, and it is hyperlocal craft beer.
This leaves me wondering how hyperlocal and the Next Big Thing coexist. “The whole craft beer market has taken on a certain Silicon Valley (or Kendall Square) vibe. You can see the parallels in Lamplighter. They’ve spent years building their product in dorm rooms and basements. Their market is young, desirable, and growing. They think their product — the sours and Brett-fermented beers — has the potential to be the Next Big Thing. And, without having tasted a drop of their beers, droves of hopeful employees are e-mailing them about job openings, happy to start at the bottom if it means a toehold in the industry. In other words, they sound like your typical new Cambridge business: a hot, young startup.” [Via Boston Globe]

Is It OK Not To Be OK With Brewery Takeovers in 2016?.
So after the hyperlocal brewery that captured your affection grows into a local brewery, then a regional brewery, and then a regional brewery big and popular enough to be acquired . . . what next? The straw man that Boak & Bailey mention, that might be me. At least sort of. I am less focused on whether the beer changes than on what happens to the local connection. [Via Boak & Bailey]

Your Handy Guide to Explain Why Millennials Are So Important to Beer.
If you don’t understand why brewing companies big enough to have marketing budgets want the attention of drinkers of prime consumption age then this is an excellent primer. Ultimately, at least we hope, there has to be more than a marketing message. And if people who have been assigned to this demographic put value on local (there’s that workd again), racial diversity, religion, gender equality, those are things that are hard to fake. [Via This Is Why I Am Drunk]

Living in Isolation: How Elitism is Alienating Macro Beer Fans.
This may be true: “Craft beer fanatics are now considered so insufferable as to have developed into a recurring punch line on television shows. Want to signal to the audience that a character is an unbearable jerk? Put a six-pack of fancy beer in his hand as he walks into the party. Worse yet, have him try and offer one of his high priced beauties to another character and then watch him get flatly rejected.” But television is not real life. And I’m not convinced that it is the “Bud bashing” that offends real people, but the whole idea that beer is so frigging important, because it isn’t to them. [Via Beer Advocate]

Hoplore, a defense of stories.
The question that Tiah Edmunson-Morton asks here isn’t that different from one journalists also need to consider. “There is a bit to pause and think about here: being a participant observer. For her that meant participating in the Agrarian hop harvest as a volunteer and being hired by Agrarian as a paid employee, but also working at Independence Heritage Festival and and doing a community survey. I often feel this same distance as an archivist working with living and evolving social, cultural, agricultural communities. I go to festivals or on tours, but I always have a certain ‘documentarian’ distance. I might attend, but as the curator of this archive do I actually participate?” I wrote about Tiah has year for DRAFT magazine, and in reporting the story I talked to Paul Eisloeffel of the Nebraska State Historical Society, who is an advocate for proactive collecting. “It is important for archivists to be able to look at what’s happening in a culture and start collecting now,” he said. But the act of collecting itself has the potential to change what happens going forward. Tricky balance. [Via thebrewstorian]

The five tribes of US wine buyers and the ROI of social media.
Are beer tribes any different? [Via Harpers]

FROM TWITTER, MEMORIAL DAY WEEKEND

Monday beer links: History and dive bars

MONDAY BEER LINKS, MUSING 5.23.16

Mega-merger? How About No?
As the headline suggests, Lew Bryson makes his position clear. “One company. Thirty percent of world beer sales. About half of world beer profits.” [Via All About Beer]

Budweiser and the Selling of America.
About those cans labeled “America” … “Today the difference (you might call it an innovation) is that this newer imaginative product sells us—some of us—to ourselves, not to the rest of the world, and is maybe, in this way, evidence of an increasing confusion over our national identity.” [Via The New Yorker]

Remembering the forgotten (and then drinking it).
[Via DRAFT]
A Beer Museum Could Open In Chicago With A Brewpub & Rooftop Bar.
[Via Eater]
The Sensible Regulation Of Beer In New Netherlands.
[Via A Good Beer Blog]
History. Lots of it in the first link. The second link is to a project that will “launch a fundraising campaign this year” so some skepticism
is OK. And the third is an example of history done right. To return to the first and re-configure one of Joe Stange’s sentences: “Many (amateur historians) are shedding light on primary sources and questioning the validity of others—and, I believe, that’s what historians are supposed to do,” but “their rigor varies widely.” I apologize for coming across as a curmudgeon. However, even though there is arguably more well-documented research into the past being posted on blogs than in print publications (“Journal of the Brewery History Society” excluded) there’s something to be said for peer and technical review. Been there, made those mistakes.

What’s Happened to the Great American Dive Bar?

Walking through any city center, however, residents might be led to believe that dive bars are still alive. These faux-dive bars, where imbibers have the option of sipping on a $6 Lagunitas draft, can easily deceive transplants and tourists looking for a real down-and-out drinking experience. From a visual appraisal, they have the cliché signs: neon Budweiser signs, an LCD electronic jukebox on the wall, and maybe some specials for $2 PBRs. But Jeremiah Moss, author of the blog “Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York,” describes them as harbingers of fabricated cookie cutter sameness that derives from the neo-liberal, winner-take-all mindset permeating cities (see: yuppies shrieking with glee at the opening of an artisanal coffee shop, cocktail lounges playing Top 40 hits, kitschy diners serving $13 alcoholic milkshakes).

[Via Easter]

The Bar Where Nobody Knows Your Name.
Related. [Via Punch]

FROM TWITTER

If you click on the date you’ll see a longer thread. I pass this along for two reasons. First, as a bit of disclosure. I was one of the journalists who attended at the expense of the Carlsberg Foundation (a plane flight, two nights lodging, a fancy dinner that the crown prince attended).

Second, Joe Stange asks an interesting question. Is have this little calculator in my head. In this case, the foundation conducts research in all aspects of brewing. Much of this is shared. I know how expensive it would be for a laboratory to do research about the biotransformations of various hop compounds that result from different yeast strains. (In other words, what different hop aromas occur in beer fermented with a yeast used at Fuller’s than one used at Lagunitas? And what changes when you replace Centennial with Mosaic?) I doubt I can find out the total cost of the project, but I will ask. Because I am pretty sure it would pay for a chunk of hop/yeast research.

We all have our priorities.