musing

Trends, naked ambition and other weekly beer links

MONDAY BEER LINKS, MUSING 1.18.16

Why Farm-to-Keg Brewing is the Next Big Beer Trend.
I have a rooting interest here — one chapter in “Brewing Local” is about breweries on farms and the connection they make with drinkers. But some perspective is needed. Lickinghole Creek Brewing, which makes some terrific beers, may have sold about 3,000 barrels last year, but grew enough hops to use in a single batch. [Via Eater]

The Bare Minimum Number of Pubs.
“Thesis: any settlement — a village, estate or neighbourhood — needs, at the very least, two pubs.” [Via Boak & Bailey’s Beer Blog]

Professionalism, or The Role of the Blogger-The Comment
Geez, Louise, I hope this isn’t too complicated, but my favorite bit of reading this week was in a comment. So this link will take you directly to the comment. It’s worth your time to scroll back to the top for context.[Via Seeing the Lizards]

Did Wine Blogs Die Without a Funeral?
[Via Fermentation]
Pffft! That’s the sound of the wine blog bubble bursting.
[Via Steve Heimoff]
And while we’re on the topic of blogging, I’m not sure that searching for the term “beer blogs” is the best way to measure the interest in them, but here is a beer-wine comparison.

China Embraces Craft Beers, and Brewing Giants Take Notice.
“Other advertisements featured Budweiser Supreme being poured in a restaurant by a waiter wearing white gloves. In the summer, women in their 20s, wearing dresses with Corona or Budweiser logos and sometimes long white boots, were often seen milling around the bars and chatting with customers in the upscale Sanlitun area of Beijing.” [Via New York Times]

A Basel Brewery and its Beeronomics
Are craft beer and mass-produced beer complements or substitutes? And here’s why small Swiss breweries won’t be exporting their beer to Germany soon: “Our living standard in Switzerland is very high. We [Swiss] earn a lot so we can pay these prices. But when you go to Germany and offer a price like [you do] in Switzerland, they say that you’re stupid and it’s not possible.” [Via Huffington Post]

Here’s a crash course in craft beer marketing.
And one more about the business of beer. [Via MarketWatch]

Via Twitter

Click on the date to read the responses.

Lew’s back, and so are the Monday beer links

MONDAY BEER LINKS, MUSING 1.11.16

Craft Beer: Big Enough To Fail.
Lew Bryson has resumed blogging and manages to add some fresh thoughts to a topic that had my eyes glazing over. Not sure I agree, but he suggests that small brewers are now big enough to fail. But I do agree with this: “What should you do? Decide what’s important to you. Decide what you want your local market to look like. Decide if you’d rather have a steady, fresh supply of a few brands, or a dicey choice of small local guys who may or may not make what you want, which is going to depend on what your local guys are like. It’s your call.”
[Via See Through a Glass]

Announcing Typology Tuesday: A Session About Styles.
Jay does not do things half way. He’s laid out a plan, announced the first topic and date (barley wine, Jan. 26), and posted a style guide that is really much more than a style guide. More like a biography.
[Via Brookston Beer Bulletin]

Diamonds, dollars and digging for victory in Enfield: The story of AB Inbev’s takeover of Camden Town.
[Via Craft Beer London]
Has Camden Town Brewery ruined craft beer for everyone?
[Via The Guardian]
Highways to a ‘post craft’ world.
[Via Stuff]
For this: “With its buzzing brewery bar, excellent merchandise and astute link-ups with other fashionable breweries …, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Camden is selling a lifestyle as much as a brewery. And historically drinkers are very attached to their local brewery, in the way they are to a local football team. It’s a stronger emotional attachment than you get with a supermarket or a bank.”
And this: “But, why? Why does CTB need to be ubiquitous in Britain, much less internationally? In any serious expansion of a brewery’s capacity, growth is talked about as if it is a self-justifying rationale. But – and this goes to the nub of the ethics around craft beer – beyond a certain point, growth is all about profit, not exciting beer.”
And this: “No matter how big you are, no matter who owns you, when the brewer decides what beer is to be made (and the rest of the company supports that sale, distribution and marketing of that) you’re on the right path whether I want to drink your beer or not.”

Bopping Around Friedrichshain. Or, Berlin-Style Surrealism.
A bit of Berlin’s indie beer scene.
[Via Thirsty Pilgrim]

The Worst Trade Ever.
So this is what it is like to be a beer trader?
[Via Make Mine Potato]

Can Homebrewers Predict the Future in Beer?
So how come they didn’t see Not Your Father’s Root Beer coming?
[Via American Homebrewers Association]

A ‘Definitive’ Guide to the Best Beer of 2015: The Breweries.
A ‘Definitive’ Guide to the Best Beer of 2015: The Beer.
[This Is Why I’m Drunk]
Blame me. I challenged Brian Roth to do this last year, and now he’d done it again.

Number of breweries in Europe 2009 – 2014.
Number of breweries in Europe 1956 – 2014.
[Via Shut Up About Barclay Perkins]
Schrödinger’s Brewery, or The Existential Difficulties of Counting Breweries.
[Via All About Beer]
New Brewery Numbers Do Not Tell the Whole Story.
A Long-Winded Way of Saying: Quit Counting Breweries.
[Via Beervana]
A lot of numbers. And be sure to read Martyn Cornell’s comment. There will be a quiz.

And speaking of numbers

Arguably the country’s premier beer event of January, or at least of the weekend just past, was the 16th Big Beers, Belgians and Barleywines Festival
in Vail, Colorado. No surprise that many members of the Brewers Association staff (the HQ is in Boulder) head to Vail (see below). But not economist Bart Watson. He went to work at the BA in mid-year of 2013, shortly after the numbers had been compiled for 2,347 breweries operating at the end of 2012. He probably didn’t know there’d be 4,144 by the end of 2015, and that they’d all be holding him hostage.

BIPS stands for Brewery Industry Production Survey. The results of the survey are published each year in the May/June issue of The New Brewer. Because most years I write a recap for one of the segments — this year it will be microbreweries — I’ve seen how hard it is to get brewers to report their numbers. There were probably more of them in Vail on Friday than there were at their desks completing the survey.

Session #107 recap posted

The SessionDan Conley has posted the recap for The Session No. 107: Are breweries your friends?

A lot of discussion about social media, which made me wonder what the answer would have been before social media. Of course, that also would mean before blogging . . .

But seriously, when breweries are part of communities isn’t there every chance that a brewer — granted, we’ve gone from talking about a business to talking about a person — and a drinker might be friends? Perhaps, even, that the drinker fixed the brewer’s refrigerator?

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.