musing

The last Monday beer links before the big Reinheitsgebot party

MONDAY BEER LINKS, MUSING 4.18.16

There was a lot to read last week. I felt particular pressure assembling these links because Boak & Bailey were out in the field and didn’t post their usual Saturday nuggets and longreads. I didn’t want to leave anything out, so pardon pairings that look strange and please be sure to at least scan to the end.

Recreating Old Beer Styles Conference part 2.
You knew I’d put this first. Beyond the the nitty gritty details about styles you may or may not care about there is this: “After the Beer History Conference we had a preview of CAMRA’s revitalisation project from Tom Stainer. Martyn Cornell asked if this was CAMRA’s version of Tony Blair’s ‘Clause Four moment’. Ron Pattinson saw it as the choice between taking a Stalinist or Trotskyist position. To which I could only reply that when it comes to real ale revisionism I’m positively Maoist.” [Via Ed’s Beer Site]

DEUTCSHEN BIER

Wie verändert sich der Biergeschmack?
(What happens to the taste of beer?)
Next Saturday is the Big Day, the 500th anniversary of the Reinheitsgebot. If you are still catching up with what that might mean then read Jeff Alworth’s story in All About Beer magazine. This interview (Google will translate it for you, although I sense something is lost in the process) with Ludwig Narcissus is fascinating. He offers first hand experience about the last seventy years of brewing in Germany. There are many takeaways, beyond that Narcissus finds the Reinheitsgebot important. My favorites:

a) He wrote the recipe for a beer called “Hersbrucker” that was brewed at the Weihenstephan pilot brewery. I love Herbrucker hops.

b) At the end he is asked, “If you were young brewers today – what would you wish for and the beer?” He answers, “Dass es so bleibt wie bisher, mit dem erweiterten Feld der Craft-Biere.” In his view, tradition and craft can oo-exist. [Via Frankfurter Allgemeine, h/T @STLBrewer}

Blind German Pils Tasting #3 – In the Land of the Blind.
We can’t get most of these beers in the United States, but there’s a good chance you can’t get a bunch of the beers on any other “drink this” list. [Via Berlin Craft Beer}

FOLLOWING UP

Cloudy IPAs: Cloudy with a chance of hops. [Via Joe Sixpack] and What We Need to Talk About When We Talk About North East IPAs. [Via Beer Graphs]

Wooing the Brewery: How Asheville’s big beer deal fell flat. Remember the discussion last week about Roanoke “winning” Deschutes’ east coast brewery? This is the story from the other competitor. A very long read, about 5,000 words worth. [Via Citizen Times]

WITHER CRAFT?

What Happened to the United Craft Brewers?
[Via Boak & Bailey’s Beer Blog]
What Could UCB Ever Do For Us?
[Via Beer Noveau]
Brewdog and craft beer post-The United Craft Brewers.
[Via Brew Geekery]

Much of the discussion here is about defining “craft beer.” Where have we seen that before? Just because there is no definition that satisfies everybody does not mean tha craft beer is not a thing. But, from Brew Geekery, there comes a warning: “Surprisingly, Brewdog’s project is an international one, as James told us he and Martin are in talks with Stone Brewing in the US regarding it. Stone has obviously been a massive influence on Brewdog, but how any definition of UK craft beer can be arrived at between the two perplexes me. It would make sense if Brewdog had applied to the Brewers Association about an international membership, but just what is it and Stone brewing here? A breakaway global movement? Craft brewers of the world unite? Whatever they are up to, they’re no doubt set to throw a metaphorical hand grenade into the already volatile battleground of how to define craft beer.”

THE SALE

Anheuser-Busch buys Devils Backbone, its 8th craft brewery.
Just one story about last week’s big sale, an interview with Devils Backbone co-founder Steve Crandall. “We have a vision, and we’ve had a vision since we started this business. We’re on 100 acres here in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and we want to develop a very positive experiential facility, including a campground and RV hookups. We’re a destination brewery — people drive to get here and want to stay on the property — but we couldn’t spend any money on it because everything was going to capacity. AB listened to us and believed in us. From the very beginning, we had a great relationship with these guys; prior to meeting them, I wasn’t sure they put they’re pants on one leg at a time, but they do. They’re decent people. So we’re building the campground — plus some other things we’re not ready to announce yet — and a 50,000-square-foot facility at our packaging facility in Lexington.”
[Via Chicago Tribune]

BEER TRAVEL

On the Road Again: The Very Real Impact of Beer Tourism.
“In a way, it’s merely one end of a spectrum, where at the other, local rules supreme. Even if you may be a national brand, you can still find a connection to that powerful emotional theme of community.” [Via This Is Why I’m Drunk]

Finding Cuban Beer in the Land of Cigars and Rum.
“‘This is the perfect drink for this country,’ our guide, Anna, explained as we drank mugs of helles lager. ‘People think we are sugar cane and rum, but here people are hot all the time. You go to the beach and the baseball game, and people drink beer. Not the mojito, not the Cuba libre. Beer. Every day they are drinking beer.’ [Via All About Beer]

Lithuania and its peculiar, little-known farmhouse ales.
“When we name the world’s great beer-drinking people—the Czechs, Germans, Belgians, Brits, and what the hell, Americans, too—we probably ought to include the Lithuanians. Based on their number of breweries, distinct brewing traditions, sheer quantity consumed and beer’s importance in their social life, they belong in that echelon. But people rarely mention Lithuania in that conversation, because they don’t know much about it.” [Via DRAFT}

INTERVIEWS

Two Atlanta beer pioneers talk local beer history.
[Via Creative Loafing]
Inside the Tank | Off Color Brewing’s John Laffler.
[Via Porch Drinking]
Hear From DC Brau’s Co-Founders About Their Five Year Mark.
[Via DC BEER]

Reports from Atlanta, Chicago and Washington, D.C. Does the metro-centric aspect indicate anything? I’m not sure, but I know you too should love the barrel aged cask story (link No. 1).

FROM TWITTER

Not so pretty Monday beer links: Sexism and cronyism

MONDAY BEER & WINE LINKS, MUSING 4.11.16

It seems not all of the stories, or tweets, I found last week were written with rose-colored beer goggles on.

Black Acre Brewery’s Jason Gleason’s viral post on sexism shouldn’t be remarkable.
[Via Time Out]
Gendered Wine Marketing Is Still All Too Real.
[Via Punch]
“It should be totally normal to treat women like people.” Take the time to read the first post, at a minimum.

The Crony Capitalists of Craft Beer.
“It’s easy to understand why politicians like funding breweries. They get to play with other people’s money, and much like when funding a new sports arena, they get to associate themselves with a product that many voters consider fun and pleasant. But the economic benefits are dubious.” And: “Lowering these barriers or making it easier for businesses to navigate them would encourage entrepreneurship across the board, rather than concentrating benefits on big breweries that cultivate political connections.” [Via Reason.com]

Why one of the nation’s premier beer festivals seems to have lost its luster.
And I thought slow ticket sales were because I am going to be there. [Via Washington Post]

Craft Beer Talk: Escape captures Redlands in a bottle.
“I was in the past. It was my first time home from college. Returning from a meal with my family, my mother took the back roads home through the orange groves and rolled the windows down. She said, ‘Did you miss this?’ It was in that moment that I realized what San Diego was lacking: Orange blossoms at night. This beer brings back that moment. That realization of what home smells like.” [Via Redlands Daily Facts]

Italian Rabbit and Polenta With Danny Smiles.
“According to Rhino, he started Beer Thugs because he “had fallen out of place” from Hop Heads, a larger craft beer club. The group has existed for five years and now has members in central California, the East Coast, and as far away as Tokyo. Most of the members are old punks, potheads, and skinheads. Beer Thugs is just one of the mostly Latino private craft beer groups that exist in Southern California, which are using their passion for craft beer to find their bicultural identity while also extending their personal networks.” [Via Munchies]

Allagash Brewing Company — Chasing Waves and Beer.
Beautiful photos, an excellent introduction to Allagash Brewing for those who have had the beer but know little about the Maine brewery, or a fine way to catch up with what is new there. However I don’t agree with the notion that flagship Allagash White “may be the brain, but it’s their fruited, oaked, and soured ales that are the heart.”

I might be wrong. I understand what Cory Smith is saying about rewarding consumers and that for them beers that come out of Allagash’s coolship are the heart. And, what the heck, one of the Allagash employees showing him around calls those beers “100% of soul.” White accounts for about 80% of the 80,000 barrels Allagash brewed last year. It is a delicate beer, nuanced, balanced. It could fall of the rails easily, but it doesn’t. So I think about what founder Rob Tod said when I visited the (much smaller) brewery in 2008 to talk about White for Brewing With Wheat. “Our focus has been on maintaining the flavor of the beer,” he said. “Six years ago, it might have been precisely like we wanted it after a certain amount of time. Now we have extended that time dramatically.” So I’d say White, and the passion for quality behind it, represents the soul of Allagash. [Via Good Beer Hunting]

FROM TWITTER

… and bringing us back to where we started (click on the time/date).

Monday beer links: Mixing history & business

MONDAY BEER & WINE LINKS, MUSING 4.04.16

Recreating Old Beer Styles Conference.
It’s too bad that Ed Wray couldn’t make it to the Ales Through the Ages Conference in Williamsburg to provide the same sort of detailed report from it he does this one at Fuller’s in London. But, of course, he can take a train to get to Fuller’s. Anyway, Martyn Cornell and Ron Pattinson went pretty much straight from Williamsburg to London, and didn’t repeat what they said in Williamsburg when they got there. Intuitively, the following thought makes sense, but it is nice to see supporting evidence: “Martyn talked about the taste of porter. He reckons that throughout its history there have been at least six different types of beer called porter, so when asked what porter tastes like the initial reply has to be ‘when?'” [Via Ed’s Beer Site]

The Identity of Irish Beer.
Jeff Alworth writes, “People think about beer in a lot of different ways, and the lens I use is slightly idiosyncratic. I think of it in terms of national tradition. This is a lens that includes not just beer style, but history and culture—the reasons beer styles emerge. It is the only way I know to explain why, say, people in Cologne drink kolsch, but in Munich they drink helles. It’s why cask ale, lambic, and weisse beer still exist.” Agreed, but now there is the matter of wondering how beer changes when a culture/society changes. [Via Beervana]

Is this the end of the Campaign for Real Ale?
[Via CAMRA]
Why the geeks won’t welcome a CAMRA rebirth.
[Via Stonch’s Beer Blog]
CAMRA describes its “Revitalisation Project” as “a wholesale review into the purpose and strategy of CAMRA.” Seems very important, but not really clear (to me) what the implications are. If it ever is I will report back.

GALLERY: Not Always About the Beer.
Be sure to scroll down to see the Carlton and its carpet in the lounge. “The landlady told us that people still respect the distinction — couples dressed up for a night out stick to the best room, solo male drinkers stand and play pool in the public.” Civility on display.[Via Boak & Baley’s Beer Blog]

What’s In a Name? Beer Industry Home to Unique Professional Titles.
“Master of Communal Amalgamation, Schmaltz-of-All-Trades and Slayer of Dragons.” [Via All About Beer]

THE BUSINESS PAGES

The Second Wave Sell-Off: Private Equity In The Craft Beer Market Spells Upheaval Within A Decade.
[Via Forbes]
The Pay-to-Play Scandal In The Beer Biz: How Far It Goes Nobody Knows.
[Via Forbes]
Two excellent stories by Tara Nurin, with information that hasn’t been reported any place else. “Despite what you might have believed, PE investors aren’t satisfied to collect off annual profits. A traditional private-equity fund, which pools money from wealthy individual and institutional investors to take equity stakes in companies, has a finite lifespan of usually 10 years. When that fund sunsets, investors expect to get paid out. A lot.” Doesn’t sound like a pretty sunset, does it?

Pabst Raids Dad’s Beer Fridge as It Looks to the Future.
“[Eugene Kashper] is pushing an aggressive effort to leverage the company’s distribution network, a part of the business that had been built up under previous owners, and dusting off old beer recipes and brands to capitalize on consumer desire for local products. ‘We’re ideally suited for the whole locavore thing,’ he said.” I’m happy to give full credit to any brewery promoting local, but think it takes more than hauling out a few old recipes. [Via New York Times]

Cask beer: is the price right?
The view from the UK: “Anybody who knows anything about beer will know cask is the ultimate craft. For this reason alone cask is under-valued and hence under-priced relative to craft keg. Also the massive ‘added value’ a highly skilled and motivated cellarman can bring to the perfect maturation of cask beer is rarely, if ever, reflected in the retail price.” In the US? Let’s be honest. Quality is all over the map, but nonetheless cask beer often sells for a premium. [Via Inapub]

Craft Wine? Craft Beer’s Innovation Edge (and What Wine Can Do About It).
“I guess I am calling for the broader commercialization of what you might call ‘craft wine.’ Fresh ideas, small lots, variations on the traditional themes but with some added flair. Not for everyone, that’s for sure, but the craft beer and spirits boom shows that there are many consumers who are interested in a more dynamic concept and some of them are being drawn away from wine.” [Via The Wine Economist]

FROM TWITTER

Monday beer links: Science & the Beer Tribe

MONDAY BEER & WINE LINKS, MUSING 3.28.16

The science behind why you like (or hate) certain beers, if at all.
“Part of what we are trying to get at here is not what experts think works but, in real practice, experience what people like,” says Cicrone program founder Ray Daniels, who is part of the Beer & Food Working Group that organized this “crowdtasting.” The tasting was Friday and the results will be discussed at the Craft Brewers Conference in May. I’d like to say I will report back then, but should I attend that presentation or one about using hops more efficiently at precisely the same time? [Via The Denver Post]

Tribal Drinking.
Crowdtasting will not provide all the answers to understanding why we drink what we do. Lew Bryson writes, “But thinking about why you do can be rewarding, and maybe lead you to a better understanding of what it is you’re looking for from beer, and that can help make you a happier, more directed person.” [Via All About Beer]

Time to Let The Old School Rejoin the Party?
Relevant to what Lew had to say, but it also made me think of the three-tap lineup at Rich’s Public House in New Albany, Indiana back in 1995. One was for Guinness, one for Pilsner Urquell and the “middle tap” rotated. [Via Boak & Bailey’s Beer Blog]

Worthington White Shield.
[Via Paul Bailey’s Beer Blog, h/T Boak & Bailey]
Pale and hearty.
[Via Michael Jackson’s Beer Hunter]
It’s strange how dots sometimes connect. Boak & Bailey’s weekly roundup led me to Paul Bailey’s post about White Shield. In turn I thought about Bill King and King & Barnes, then Steve King (who is not at all related). Steve King, a beer distributor in Peoria, Illinois, was way ahead of the game in the late 1980s, making more interesting beer available to drinkers in central Illinois than most were ready for. That included beers from King & Barnes. I haven’t seen Steve King in several years, but Saturday we’ll be on a panel together. The American Spirits: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition traveling exhibit is at the Peoria Riverfront Museum. Related events include “Speakeasy Saturdays.” The one five days hence will focus on “Rise of Craft Beer.” But enough nostalgia. White Shield is more interesting, and I remember the King & Barnes version quite fondly.

The Hottest Trend in Craft Brewing Is Beer That Doesn’t Taste Like Beer.
[Via Time]
Craft Brewers Embracing the Nutella Craze.
[Via CraftBeer.com]
No comment.

The aggressive, outrageous, infuriating (and ingenious) rise of BrewDog.
“In its brief history, BrewDog has upset, variously and sometimes repeatedly, rival breweries, drink industry associations, health organisations, the Advertising Standards Authority, even LBGT groups.” Even if you remember most of this stuff and BrewDog pisses you off just on basic principles this is a good read. There’s a reason that people want to go to work for “BrewDog” beyond the fact that James Watt is “not … troubled by self-doubt.” [Via The Guardian]

Bamberg, Germany: A city of just 70,000 people but nine breweries.
Regulars here do not need to be reminded about the charm of Bamberg, but as Will Hawkes concludes, “A beer culture this rich is good for the soul.” [Via The Washington Post]

NOT BEER

Cheap wine – good, or no good?
“If you can buy perfectly good Sancerre Rosé for less than £10, why pay more?”

Well … exactly. Why indeed? [Via Sediment]

Song Review – Sturgill Simpson’s “In Bloom” (Nirvana Cover).
“In the end the task of the singer is to sing, and the task of the audience is to listen.” [Via Saving Country Music]

FROM TWITTER

How old is your brewery? Was it on MySpace?

Earlier this week Tom Acitelli wrote about when breweries started tweeting for All About Beer.

I’m certain that there is as book focused entirely on beer, breweries, brewers, and related hangers on as good as “Food and Social Media: You Are What You Tweet.” I hope somebody goes for it.

Thinking about it sent me digging through a few stories I wrote for New Brewer magazine, a trade publication for members of the Brewers Association. First, from 2009:

2007. Nobody talked about Twitter at the Craft Brewers Conference and it was lumped in with other social media such as YouTube and Second Life in a story in this space later in the year (full disclosure: I wrote that story.)

2008. A panel about using the Internet consisted of two distributors talking about tracking sales on the web and using it as a broadcast tool and Neal Stewart, then Prime Minister of Marketing for Flying Dog Ales, as the lone spokesman for social media. He wanted to document what he learned during the conference using Twitter, but the technology wasn’t in place and he had few followers in the craft beer business.

2009. What a difference at the CBC in Boston. Stone Brewing CEO Greg Koch tweeted during his keynote speech and later used Twitter to spread the word that the “I Am a Craft Brewer” video could be watched on the Internet. In providing an excellent how-to on “New Media and the Brewpub” Dan Browell and Mike Hiller included a Twitter primer. And during a panel discussion about “Beer on the Web” the panelists did a bit of tweeting. Additionally, many attendees tweeted throughout the conference, using hash tags so others could easily find their posts. At the beginning of 2009 perhaps 50 American breweries used Twitter. By July more than 200 breweries had Twitter accounts, far more than maintain active blogs.

Ah, 2007. Simpler times. New Belgium had a MySpace page, but it was run by a fan. Here’s the beginning of the New Brewer story I wrote that year:

Fred Bueltmann rightfully considers himself a now, aware kind of guy. The director of sales and marketing at New Holland Brewing, he still stands in with bands that play at the brewery’s pub, he’s tech savvy, he works in an industry that’s currently trendy . . . and his company even has a MySpace page.

The thing is Fred was a little surprised when he found out this last fact. Isaac Hartman, who works in sales for Bueltmann, created the space. Hartman is 26; Bueltmann is 38, and when Bueltmann looked at the carefully designed and focused New Holland web site and then at the anarchy that characterizes MySpace he didn’t feel quite as hip.

“I felt a little dated. I had to figure out how to register,” he said. “Certain forums are new to my generation. There’s another generation that’s doing things that surprise me. We’re being brought in rather than being on the cutting edge.”

Bueltmann had a decision to make. “There are some good reasons to roll it up and make it part of your company approach,” he said. “Your other instinct is, ‘Let’s go with it.’ You empower different parts of you team – this was his initiative.” New Holland “went with it” and in mid-June had more “friends” on MySpace than all but one other craft brewer, Flying Dog, which has made MySpace an integral part of its Internet marketing.

(At the time MySpace was the largest of the social networking websites – with somewhere between 50 million and 70 million different visitors in June, depending on which data tracking site you believed. New Holland Brewing had about 2,500 MySpace friends when the story was written. Now back to 2009: At the beginning of July Stone Brewing had 6,005 Twitter followers and 5,419 Facebook fans. All things are relative, given that Ashton Kutcher had 2.6 million fans at the time and Oprah Winfrey 1.8 million, but for comparison’s sake: Dogfish Head Brewery 6,529 Followers and 16,432 Facebook Fans; Flying Dog Brewery 7,294 and 4,293; and Magic Hat Brewing 7,539 and 13,546.)

Beer and social media should be a part of the next book about on the history of the industry. But a book that focuses only on Twitter could be a lot more fun.

So for the historians in the crowd, one quick point of order. Acitelli reports that Lagunitas started tweeting in 2014, but Tony Magee was there much earlier as LagunitasT.

You might recall he officially quit Twitter at one point, then came back. That’s part of the story.

And, in case you were wondering, my first tweet was not about beer, but did mention MySpace.

©2005-2024 Stan Hieronymus ~ Powered by GeneratePress