musing

Beer links: Big Picture. Hop fingerprinting. Your choice.

MONDAY BEER LINKS, MUSING 12.14.15

Craft beer – have the big brewers nailed it?
[Via Morning Advertiser]
Gerrymandering the Beer Aisle.
[Via Literature and Libation]
ABInBev Doesn’t Hate You – It Just Wants Sales.
[Via A Good Beer Blog]

There’s some big concept thinking going on in these three links, too big for me to summarize succinctly. I suggest reading them in order. Knowing that you may not, here are the last paragraphs of each one, unfairly presented without context.

I can see why this might cause some consternation for craft brewers and their hardcore fans, for whom craft is a movement, a stand against the corporate dominance of everything. But from a drinker’s point of view, if the big guys are now making better beer, that has to be good news.

As a fine patina sets in and the youthful exuberance fades, I have a sneaking suspicion that the game of beers will start to look a lot less like a righteous war or crusade, and a lot more like the classic Red vs Blue, mudslinging, carpetbagging mess that is our political system. Such is the nature of modern capitalism, and probably why, as they say on the internet, “we can’t have nice things.”

In 2016 as more and more big craft sells out to big beer, organized independent craft will need to catch up with the politics of adapting to market demand, catch up with big beer if it wants to avoid being a blip in history. And it might take as brazen an approach as big beer took in 2015. Not sure craft has what it takes.

The thing about big picture thinking is figuring out where all the little pictures fit in. When the number of breweries in the country doubles in such a short amount of time it is hard to take the pulse of all the new participants. Maybe they are lying, but an awful lot of these people seem to have no interest in becoming the next Golden Road or Ballast Point. They want to make a comfortable living. Some would simply consider themselves brewers, other artisans, some even artists.

Ian Rankin on the perfect pub: The Rebus author tells how pub culture has inspired his novels.
A different sort of little picture. [Via Independent]

Hop tidbit of the week

The conversation started the week before, but continued last week (click on the date to see it all), among other things raising questions about where Fuggle fits in on any hop family tree. The chart pictured also appeared in “For the Love of Hops” and shows the results of molecular studies that indicate the distance between certain varieties. The scientists used AFLP fingerprinting.

Researchers at the University of Hohenheim in Stuttgart employed that same technology to analyze the similarity of Tettnanger hop plants to other varieties in 2002, reaffirming other surveys that concluded that Tettnanger, Spalt Spalter, and Saaz hops are so closely related they may be grouped together as “Saazer hops.”

Among the hops studied at Stuttgart where multiple Osvald Saaz clones, plants chosen from the field because they looked and smelled like the original Saaz, and brewed similar beer, but perhaps yielded more cones per plant or were more disease resistant. Various farmers grew and sold these varieties as Saaz, and happy customers brewed with them as Saaz.

All the Osvald Saaz clones studied at Stuttgart could be more clearly distinguished from each other than the original Saaz could from Tettnanger and Spalter. Three of the clones were quite similar to the landrace Saaz, but Osvald clone 126 was much closer to Fuggle. Nonetheless, all Osvald clones grown in the region around Žatek exhibited very similar morphological traits and aroma components.

Just to be clear, grown in Žatek a plant genetically closer to Fuggle than Saaz passed for Saaz.

‘Drinkability’ & other beer links you might have missed

MONDAY BEER LINKS, MUSING 12.07.15

New words will remain scarce at this url until I’m done sorting out which non-traditional beer ingredients might kill you. Did you know salicin, the active ingredient in willow bark, might have contributed to the death of Ludwig von Beethoven?

Session 106: Christmas Ales Through The Bloggy Years.
I was absent from The Session, shame on me. But I look forward to reading the recap. [Via A Good Beer Blog]

There Are Almost No Black People Brewing Craft Beer. Here’s Why.
“Does it even matter?” Yes. [Via Thrillist]

What Is ‘Drinkability’?
[Via Boak & Bailey]
Drinkability.
[Via Ed’s Beer Site]
The Science of Drinkability.
[Via Ed’s Beer Site]
An Anheuser-Busch campaign back in the day that put the word “drinkability” on billboards did not endear the word to those who would protect the world from bland beers. It may still take rehabilitating, even though it was more than 10 years ago. So before, I think, it was used by that Brazilian doctoral candidate. I’m certain of that because when I was doing the reporting for “Brew Like a Monk” and heard Hedwig Nevin, brewing director at Duvel, use the word digestibility I shook my head to clear my ears. It was a revelation.

The Dirty Secret about ‘Clean’ Plants.
The devil is in the details. [Via Gorst Valley’s Hop Grower’s Blog]

Is the Story More Important than the Wine?
As a consumer my interest in “the story” is different than being fed “romantic back story.” [Via Wine Spectator]

Proposed San Diego County law could change the meaning of ‘local’ wine.
Next up local beer? [Via Los Angeles Times]

This is most of the conversation that started a while back, went dormant, then resumed last week. Click on the 5:10 a.m. link to open it up.

Beer links for ‘honest beer’ drinkers and geeks alike

MONDAY BEER LINKS, MUSING 11.23.15

The Problem with “Craft”
[Via Beaumont Drinks]
What is an “honest” wine?
[Via Steve Heimoff]
The story of the week was “$1 Billion” or maybe just “B” — because the amount that Contellation Brands paid for Ballast Point Brewing was a bigger deal than another used-to-be-small brewery being acquired by a very large company. (Although whether a writer comments “x sells to y” or “x sells out to y” says as much about the commenter as the commentee.)

At All About Beer Jeff Alworth writes “fuller-flavor lagers and ales (what we used to call ‘craft beer’)” because in the magazine and at the website AAB favors letting the word beer stand on its own. I endorse that philosophy, but I also understand that “craft beer” can be a useful term, a point Stephen Beaumont makes quite well. Curiously, although we can blame the “C” word on America it is important to take a non-Americanized view of how it has become used elsewhere. Because he’s recently been to a lot more countries than you and I go ahead and trust Beaumont on this.

But as Steve Heimoff reminds us, semantics can be painful. I know what Ron Pattinson means when writes about honest beer, but I don’t want to start seeing the term used in just about any other context.

Golden Road Relationship Status: It’s Complicated (If you care).
Item 7. “Golden Road is pumping 25 million dollars into the city of Anaheim and will employ over 100 people.” Makes you think about the relationship between “local impact” and “local ownership.” [Via OCBeerBlog]

St. Louis Zoo proposes buying Grant’s Farm; Billy Busch makes competing offer.
Ulysses S. Grant, the Busch family, free beer, and a zoo. This story has it all. [Via St. Louis Post-Dispatch]

GEEK STUFF

Traditional malting in Morgedal.
[Via Larsblog]
Bright Brewer’s Yeast calls for beer ‘wish lists’ as it develops yeasts through selective breeding.
[Via Beverage Daily]
Watch an Electronic Tongue Taste Wine.
[Via Eater]
Sometimes when the “big picture” questions wear you down it is nice to curl up with a bit of technical stuff.

ON WRITING

Wine media and the internet: are we drowning in a sea of mediocrity?
[Via jamie goode’s wing blog]
Wine Needs Curmudgeons Now More Than Ever.
[Via Fermentation Wine Blog]
And to bring this week’s links full circle, Tom Wark writes: “Worrying about consolidation among the big wine brands makes no sense. And if you are a discerning wine drinker, you could care less. There are more wines and wine brands and wineries on the market today than ever before in the history of the world.”