musing

MONDAY BEER & WINE LINKS, MUSING 2.22.16

Sensory expectations elicited by the sounds of opening the packaging and pouring a beverage.
Because Fred Eckhardt. [Via Flavour]

Fishdog River Brewing Co.’s Ultimate I.P.A.
I guess this is a riff on Dogfish Head’s Hoo Lawd, but the almost final line sounds like another brewery (or two). “And, remember, if you don’t like it, you’’re wrong.” [Via The New Yorker]

‘Saucy’ Beer Names.
They are relatively new — and a reminder not everything new in beer is necessarily better. After reading this I decided I should add a link that shows some Olde Frothingslosh labels, which in turn led me Marsha Phillips’ obituary. She was Miss Olde Frothingslosh and the guest of honor at the Beer Can Collectors of American national bicentennial convention in Philadelphia in 1976. [Via Boak & Bailey’s Beer Blog]

THE BUSINES PAGES

Heineken is taking tips on how to sell beer from an American craft brewer.
I’m still struggling to imagine what a Heineken “Beer Circus” might look like. [Via Business Insider]

The Coming Distribution Wars.
I’m not sure much has changed since the 1999 Craft Brewers Conference in Phoenix whenn Brooklyn Brewery partner Tom Potter explained to brewers that distributors moved boxes. The implication was that brewers needed to take responsibility for selling their beer. [Via Beervana]

Are nanobreweries a good first step for North Carolina brewers?
And related to the previous story you have this: “If I had to do it all over again, hindsight 20/20, I really wouldn’t suggest people get into nanos and try to grow them organically. I don’t think there’s time left in the market now.” [Via The News & Observer]

WHAT WINE CAN TEACH US

The Neuroscience of Wine.
“The role that our senses play in our attraction to and appreciation of wine has been illuminated by generations of wine writers and critics. What has undeservedly received less attention is the brain, the hugely complex organ within which all that sensory information is processed and synthesized. We don’t just taste with our senses, we taste with our minds.”

If you’ve managed to stay awake during one of my presentations about hops and aroma you know I always say something along the lines that “Brewers* create odor compounds. Aroma becomes aroma in your brain.” *That’s brewers with a lot of help from yeast, of course. [Via Nautilus]

The seven key aromas of aged Bordeaux.
In the event you don’t want to take the time to click over, they are “undergrowth, truffle, toasted, spicy, liquorice, mint, fresh red- and blackberry fruints.” Undergrowth? [Via Decanter]

FROM TWITTER

This morning we made paper cut outs of the vessels and laid them out to visualise. Top tip from @WishboneBrewery! pic.twitter.com/1XKVxa2hs8

— Andy Parker (@tabamatu) February 20, 2016

Please make note of the following Product Notice on our recent release of Bourbon Barrel Timmie. pic.twitter.com/rJYknIL44b

— Sun King Brewing (@SunKingBrewing) February 19, 2016

This is the map I got when I did a search for hops and hops products at the 2016 Craft Brewers Conference trade show (called BrewExpo America). The point is there’s a lot going in with hops and I have some catching up to do, starting now.

– Southern hemisphere shortages ahead? This from Hop Products Australia:

On 8 December 2015 two storm cells collided close to our Victorian farm, Rostrevor Hop Gardens in the Ovens Valley. The Gardens experienced 65mm of rain and hail in just 15 minutes accompanied by very strong gusts of wind which significantly damaged the southern half of the farm and resulted in many plants losing their growing tips.

Over the past six weeks we’ve invested thousands of hours in re-training lateral arms to re-establish apical growing tips, essential for progressing proper growth stages in the plants. It is now clear that while some bines recovered quite well, others failed to grow any higher than approximately half their normal height.

As such, we now estimate the crop from Rostrevor Hop Gardens will be approximately 40 per cent below expected yield in 2016.

The main varieties affected are Galaxy, Vic Secret, Ella and Topaz, although the true impact will not be known until harvest is completed at the end of March.

– Earlier this week Bryan Roth dug into the numbers related to the most popular varieties. The Hop Growers of America annual report also includes news that farmers outside the Northwest states of Washington, Oregon and Idaho planted hops on 1,253 acres in 2015.

That might not seem like much — the total is less than Simcoe grew in 2015 — but that number was less than 100 only a few years ago. That’s more hops than all of Australia or all of New Zealand. So maybe the headline here should be “Hops, hops, local hops.” This story indicates the number of acres may still be understated, at least in Michigan. “It’s been really ridiculous in the last 24 months,” said Brian Tennis, who started rrowing hops on one acre 10 years ago. “The face of Michigan hops changed overnight. It makes your head spin.”

– A relatively mild winter is not necessarily good for those new hop growing regions.

– A hop described as wild was named the overall winner of the British Hop Awards 2015. There’s a lot of interest these days, although more often in America, in finding some wonderful aromatic hop growing in the wild. This hop, called Sussex, was not found in the wild but on an anchor wire next to a field growing a farm trial of another hop. It is wild in the sense it was an unplanned product of open pollination and in the ten years since it was discovered has obviously developed into a pretty good hop. According to a press release about the competition, “Sussex has earthy, grassy and minty flavour notes.”

– This tweet by Paul Corbett indicates English farmers harvested about 20,000 pounds of Jester last year. For perspective, that’s little more than a tenth of Jarrylo grown in Washington last year. Wait, haven’t heard of Jarrylo? Then that’s comparable to the Citra you’d get from 13 acres in Washington — and Washington farmers grew 2,335 acres in Citra in 2015.

– Circling back to that map at the top. Per usual, CBC will include an opportunity to try several new varieties, some of them experimental, in beer. I’m already planning to visit hops growers from France (Booth 951), who are bringing one one hop, and from Germany (Booth 2016), who are bringing two experimentals.

MONDAY BEER LINKS 2.15.16

Happy President’s Day. We left town early for a long weekend, but here are a few stories I saved earlier. I might get around to commenting on them, well, eventually.

The Reality of Being a Woman in the Beer Industry.
This is the “if you read only one story read this one” pick of the week. [Via All About Beer]

What Will Drive Beer in 2025? (Hint: Not Beer).
The “flawed” post of the day before is also worth your time. [Via Beervana]

Coffee beer 2.0: Brewers get serious about sourcing, treatment of beans.
“And it’s not just where the beans come from or how they’re roasted—the method by which a brewer brews, steeps or infuses a beer with beans changes its ultimate flavor profile. As a recent spat of brewer/roaster collaborations illuminates, carefully sourced and selected beans are the next frontier.” This would be more exciting if I liked coffee-flavored beers. [Via DRAFT]

The Beer Hot Stove: The Role of Rumors in Beer Media.
“Don’t worry about the reports of something that might happen. Read the analysis of the thing once it does happen. That’s where the heavy thinking is happening.” [Via BeerGraphs]

Beer’s incessant infighting only serves to hurt the industry.
“At the end of the day, it’s all beer. And if anyone could hold their temper long enough to stop insulting one another and start making it easier for drinkers in all states to enjoy what they’re brewing, they just might help everybody enjoy a beer the way Peyton Manning’s enjoying his Budweisers this week.” Sorry, I just ruined the ending. (And I apologize to linking to a story in which I appear.) [Via MarketWatch]

And from Twitter, a story idea

There is a very real generational gap in the brewing industry. Customers and owners alike. Difficult to properly describe, but it's there.

— Joe Lemnah (@HopfenTreader) February 12, 2016

Host Jon Abernathy has posted the roundup for The Session #108: Snowed In!

And you know the list of suggestions — the idea being you could pick one and focus on it? Mark Linder, the Bend Beer Librarian, pretty much tackled them all.

He’s the host for the next Session, March 4, so perhaps he wanted to set a good example.

MONDAY BEER AND WINE LINKS, MUSING 2.08.16

Living with Beer and Mental Health, Part One: Geoffrey Did it Wrong.
Expect to feel uncomfortable reading this, whether it is because this story is so private and honest or because of what it leaves you thinking about. Before you begin, understand a) it is 2,328 words by my count, and b) there are paragraphs like this: “I often wish my Dad had died but he has proved himself immortal. I never thought I’d share these stories before his own obituary but I find it prudent to share them now. If you ever feel you don’t have control over your drinking, if you ever begin to do it to guide you through every day, if you ever feel that you HAVE to drink for whatever reason that is, then seek the help you may need. It could really be the start of something serious that won’t just destroy your own life but all those around you who love you.” [Via Beer Compurgation]

Still Not Backing Down For Four Hundred Years.
There’s already been plenty of chatter about Budweiser’s #NotBackDown Super Bowl commercial (40 0,000 views on YouTube for the full versionbefore the game even started) and we can expect plenty more on Twitter, in blog posts, and in online publications. Alan McLeod’s post will be the best single thing you read. I spent considerable time the past year scrutinizing what was going on in American beer the last 400 years, but through a different prism. Different enough it will take a full post to explain. So it’s not the best single thing you will read because I agree with it, but because these are things you should be thinking about. Agreeing is not required. So even though Alan describes Budweiser as “unpleasantly bitter” (huh? bitter?) take him seriously. [Via A Good Beer Blog]

The Unsessionability of Session IPA.
[Via Pencil & Spoon]
Defending the Session IPA and the American Palate.
[Via All About Beer]
Mark Dredge’s thesis, put forth a couple of weeks ago, is pretty straightforward: “I’ve never tasted a Session IPA that’s sessionable in the British sense and they are almost ironically unsessionable; too dry, too bitter, too intense in aroma and flavour – they are unbalanced towards the IPA instead of the Session.” And Jeff Alworth’s reply, “We want them ‘unbalanced toward the IPA'” is equally straightforward. “We” being Americans, and both writers acknowledging differences in culture and palates. But to really understand the cultural differences, read Tandleman’s comment.

Burgundy vs. Champagne: An 18th Century Flame War.
This discussion is not nearly as civilized as the one between Mr. Dredge and Mr. Alworth. For instance, “The wine of Reims is thin, not quite wine-flavored, and acid, which, like most other white wines, has the strength to make urine, but very little to nourish & to warm.” [Via Gargantuan Wine]

#Indie Beer – How the American Beer Scene and The Protestant Reformation Actually Have a lot in Common.
[Via Literature & Libation]
Indie Beer and the Importance of a Name.
[Via BeerGraphs]
There was more back-and-forth on Twitter about the term “Indie Beer” than there were blog posts (or I missed them) than in the beer blogosphere. So maybe we will be spared endless discussions about possible definitions. It does provoke interesting thinking, a) being the analogies from Oliver Gray in #1, and second the conclusion Eno Sarris draws in #2: “There was a reason we started calling some music indie. There was a reason certain crews stopped using that term. There was a reason we started calling beer craft. There is a reason for some to stop using that term.”

Office Space: Did a loss of authenticity doom the Rolling Rock brand to failure?
[Via Reading Eagle]
Bruce Springsteen, ‘The Ties That Bind’, the Working Class, and Authenticity.
[Via PopMatters]
Indeed, discussions about authenticity and beer or brewing can make our heads hurt. But since we just dippied into the Indie music world . . . Was Rolling Rock authentic for you (even if you didn’t like the beer) before Anheuser-Busch bought the brewery? And does considering the relationship between art and authenticity tell us anything about beer? You are not required to care about either, but I spent a fair amount of time thinking about what brewers creating in writing the first chapter of Brewing Local (now working its way through the production process). I wish I’d read the second linked story first.

Working class beer is not a myth, but sometimes it feels endangered. So maybe an art/music analogy tells us something. “Art is the wrench in the gears of authenticity’s easy association with working class music. It creates contradictions and layers of meaning, complexity and ambiguity, and mistakes, misfires, but it’s also how a real voice for the working class can exist in popular music, and most importantly, how that music can be more than the singer’s voice, more than the critic’s voice, more than official history’s voice. If we stop being obsessed by the authenticity of the artist, we might discover the truth in what he says.”