Alan McLeod has posted everything you need to know about his Xth annual Christmas Photo Contest, which this year comes with a bonus beer writing contest.
I’ve had my hopes and dreams crushed many times in past years. I meant to enter the photo at the top (taken in April of 2014) last year, but apparently neglected to. Maybe that’s why it didn’t win.
7 Paths to Development That Bring Neighborhoods Wealth, Not Gentrification.
Think about this in the context of breweries and beer drinking establishments. Or don’t. Either way, it is important. [Via Yes!, h/T Roger Baylor]
Do People Realise Breweries Have Gone?
Boak & Bailey accurately conclude, “Hardcore beer geeks like us obsess over details of ownership and history but, barring the odd scandal, most people don’t, just as we don’t keep tabs on who owns which car firms these days, or which chocolate bar brands.” And that’s OK. But where beer and community intersect both may benefit. [Via Boak & Bailey’s Beer Blog]
Back in black: living beer heritage in the West Midlands.
“As the US-inspired craft beer revolution sweeps the old beer countries of Europe, I’ve found myself hoping again and again that beer drinkers and brewers will come to appreciate both worlds and everything in between, recognising the threads that, despite appearances, link them together. Indeed if it hadn’t been for the Bathams and many other old-established European brewers sticking to styles and methods that well merit the label ‘craft’, we would likely not be enjoying the current abundance.” Related, I think, to both the previous posts. [Via Beer Culture]
How pot and hippie beer explain the future of the American economy.
[Via The Washington Post]
Best-selling business advice from a BrewDog.
[Via Zythophile]
Will craft brewers ever make ads as good as their beer?
[Via Hey Beer Dan]
Yes, The Future of Craft Beer Is In Question. Don’t Panic.
[Via Paste]
New wine film ‘Somm: Into the Bottle’ is ambitious, dangerously selective.
[Via SF Gate]
What It Takes to Be a Master Sommelier.
[Via The New Yorker]
So where are the TV shows and movies about Cicerones?
Why Do Most Languages Have So Few Words for Smells?
[Via The Atlantic]
Why does wine smell?
[Via Palate Press]
More links than musing this week, and not really a full week’s worth. Sorry for any abundantly linkable items I missed over the weekend, but we left for New Mexico on Thursday. I’m confident we are having a good time.
Poppa Don’t Preach: Do We Need ‘Craft Beer Evangelists’?
[Via This Is Why I’m Drunk]
The Cult of Craft.
[Via Literature & Libations
Oliver Gray’s reaction (the second article) to Bryan Roth’s question (in the first) provides a lot to think about, but it is different than mine. Roth writes, “Evangelism is about marketing, but more so, it’s about stories.” Here’s the thing, journalism is not just about stories, but it is certainly about stories. Find a good story, write it well, and you end up doing a marketer’s work. This should give writers pause. I’ve rambled on about this before.
A Reader Asks, I Answer: Lagunitas and Heineken.
In case you were looking for the “us against them” dialogue mentioned in the first two links, here is an example. [Via The Pour Fool]
Drink while you can…these bars are closing quickly.
I missed this when it first appeared (h/T BeerGraphs), but that neighborhood bar’s decline has coincided with a surge in craft beer drinking is troubling. “If you think about the neighborhood pub, it’s not really in a position to offer 35 beers on tap,” (Mario) Gutierrez said. “That tends to be a specialized establishment.” That “bars” and “eateries” are classified differently complicates matters. In our neighborhood a lot of places where you can find good food, a dozen or more beers to choose from and enjoy conversation have benefited from selling a wider variety of beer that costs a little more. [Via CNBC]
Why it is OK to say “Their Beer Sucks”…”
“A critic’s job, nine-tenths of it, is to make way for the good by demolishing the bad.” – Kenneth Tynan [Via Pivní Filosof – Beer Philosopher]
The New Wine Democracy.
The word “snob” is back for a second straight week. [Via Wine Spectator]
Wrecking Bar(n) — How a Georgia Brewpub Bought the Farm.
A “lifetime project.” [Via Good Beer Hunting]
Down the drain: A brewpub fails in just 4 months
Reality check. [Via Joe Sixpack]
And then there was this, which was still happening Thursday afternoon, the retweets and comments piling up Click on the date to see what I mean.
Here, in one photo, is why the term "craft beer" matters. Here's a hint if you don't get it https://t.co/cufndPfeKd pic.twitter.com/11hiPJehV2
— Scott Metzger (@beermonkey) November 2, 2015
This bit of speculation from W. Blake Gray hit my radar too late to appear in the Monday links: “The Judgment of Paris tasting was the single most important event in the history of wine. In a 1976 blind tasting, French judges chose Napa Valley wines over the best of Bordeaux and Burgundy. The repercussions still echo to this day. But what if it never happened?”
His speculation — starting from a slightly different but important perspective, that the tasting happened, but Time magazine never reported it — is both amusing and illuminating. There must be a beer doppelgänger out there, right? Maybe we’re looking at a Session topic. Even though no beer event, event, incident, development, whatever, resonates like “Judgment of Paris” there’s got to be a starting point. What would it be?
Three quick contenders . . .
What if Fritz Maytag had not bought Anchor Brewing in 1965?
What if the committee charged in 1906 with interpreting the meaning of the Pure Food and Drug Act had decided to implement some sort of legal differentiation between all malt and adjunct beer, or enacted a proposal that lager beer be required to lager at least three months? (Both were considered and rejected.)
What if the USDA had not released the Cascade hop variety in 1972? The story.
Things Fall Apart.
[Via All About Beer]
Why Do Breweries Sell Out? (Part One).
[Via St. John’s Wort]
Craft Brew Alliance and the Search for a New ‘Local’.
[Via This Is Why I’m Drunk]
Why beer mergers don’t really matter to drinkers.
[Via MarketWatch]
Yes, but…
I won’t repeat everything from this August post, only a bit: “Twenty years ago Boston Beer sales accounted for 25.1% of craft* sales and the 50 largest craft breweries for 77.5%. Ten years ago, Boston Beer’s share was 19.4% and the 50 largest sold 79.7% of craft. Last year, Boston Beer’s share was 13.2% and the 50 largest’s 68.1%.” The smallest breweries in America are holding their own. Granted, not every brewery owner is content to run a small business, and not every drinker cares about local, but apparently enough do.
* As defined by the Brewers Association at the time.
‘Beer Gets the Connoisseur Treatment’, 1968.
“There are some other interesting general observations: beer, the wine-taster noted, is fundamentally sweet-tasting, despite its reputation for bitterness. The tea-taster was surprised by the importance of ‘nose’ in beer having apparently never taken a moment to give it a sniff before Cyril Ray asked him to.” [Via Boak & Bailey’s Beer Blog]
Top Brewery Road Trip, Routed Algorithmically.
Because there are things like genetic algorithms and the Google Maps API. [Via Flowing Data]
Reclaiming beer snobbery.
Some well made points, but you can’t simply type “a snob is not dogmatic” and have it be true. Sometimes it is not a word that needs to be rehabilitated but people exhibiting boorish behavior. [Via DRAFT Magazine]
Beer merger bets Africans will abandon home brew, switch to bottled beer as they grow richer.
The headline tells most a story that nicely outlines just why AB InBev is willing to pay so much to takeover SABMiller. [Via Associated Press]
Bread is broken.
The premise is pretty simple: Industrial production destroyed both the taste and the nutritional value of wheat, and Stephen Jones intends to fix that. It’s a magazine piece, long and worth the time. I wish I had been able to read it before I wrote “Brewing With Wheat.” Lots of interesting stuff worth stealing footnoting. [Via The New York Times]
‘Craft beer is still a big-city thing – that’s why I’m glad I live in London!’
John Keeling, head brewer at Fuller’s in London, begins a column for Craft Beer London. “Is it a golden age? Perhaps for London, but it isn’t when you’re out in the middle of the country and your local pub has just closed.” [Via Craft Beer London]
If video killed the radio star the internet is killing the writing star — Richard Siddle.
“Why would you think you need to know about wine in order to write about it, but not think you need to know how to write to make a living out of it?”
[Via Richard Siddle]
The Barry Smith interview: what is the nature of wine perception, and is wine flavour objective?
“Philosophers might be interested in whether liking was an intrinsic part of tasting. Is it that whenever you taste something, you can’t separate how it tastes from whether you like it. That is, if you like it, it would taste different from if you didn’t like it. As a philosopher I am interested in that separation. If you can’t separate them, how can you acquire a taste for something?” [Via jamie goode’s wine blog]
Equity for Punks Revisited.
“Equally, now that I have my own brewery, and BrewDog has grown beyond any projections even I would have believed, they are on the verge of being a multinational monolithic conglomerate they rail against. I’ve felt that there is now a tension between us that is barely tangible, but clearly we are viewed as a threat, rather than an ally.” [Via Hardknot Dave]