musing

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

Perfect day @SchellsBrewery in the bier garten pic.twitter.com/GAx8zzWpGb

— Chad Fink (@JDBoozers) May 29, 2016

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

@jeffreyjohnbell @drcrasch I wonder what @carlsberg spent to fly out a bunch of writers to taste a beer that tastes like beer.

— Joe Stange (@Thirsty_Pilgrim) May 18, 2016

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.

MONDAY BEER LINKS, MUSING 5.16.16

A Czech Influence on Belgian Brewing.
Evan Rail goes digging though the remaining archives of a number of Belgian beer makers and discovers “how Czech brewing has impacted the beer culture in other countries — without being recognized for doing so.” [Via Beer Culture]

What Is the Brewers Association Doing to Address Gender and Race?
What *Should* the Brewers Association Do to Address Gender and Race?
I will only add that we are talking about an association of independent breweries. Shouldn’t some of them have their own programs to recruit minorities? [Via This Is Why I’m Drunk]

The “Reputation” of Beer.
“As a community, we need to stay on offense. The craft beer drinker is a much more diverse group than many know; we need to embrace our diversity. Beer is a gender-less beverage. Beer is a race-less beverage.” [Via Stouts & Stilettos]

Beer to Fish Food: Nonprofit Finds New Use for Spent Grain.
A couple of quick additions to the story, to illustrate how a small brewery can connect with its community. West Sixth Brewing resurrected a 90,000-square foot 1890s building that is called the Bread Box because it used to be a Rainbow Bread factory. As well as FoodChain Lexington (featured in this story) it houses artist studios, a non-profit community bicycle shop, the seafood restaurant mentioned, a distiller, and a coffee roaster. [Via All About Beer]

BIGGER BREWERIES

Historic brewing names Pabst, MillerCoors locked in legal battle.
This story flew under the radar, coming to life while the Craft Brewers Conference was in full swing: “Pabst and its owner, Los Angeles-based Blue Ribbon Intermediate Holdings LLC, claim in a lawsuit filed in circuit court that MillerCoors has breached without warning a long-term agreement to brew Pabst products, after repeated assurances that MillerCoors had sufficient capacity to honor the deal into the next decade.” [Via Milwaukee Journal Sentinel]

Budweiser Renames Its Beer “America.”
a quick Google search will lead you to plenty of related commentary, most of it not particularly positive. Budweiser has indeed gone to “to potentially ingenious, potentially absurd branding extremes.” [Via Fast Company]

WINE

The wine tasting that shocked the world — and forever changed what we drink.
[Via The Washington Post]
Would California wine have succeeded without the 1976 Paris Tasting?
[Via Steve Heimhoff]
Fifteen years ago American brewers asked when they’d have their own “Judgment of Paris.” I don’t know that there is a single historic moment to point to, but most would agree that American beer now occupires a “lofty position.”

FROM TWITTER

Shift to aroma/proprietary varieties has pushed the real value of hop crop/lb back to levels last seen in WWII… pic.twitter.com/gGqN658FeO

— Bart Watson (@BrewersStats) May 11, 2016

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