musing

Authenticity and the future of Belgian beer

MONDAY BEER LINKS, MUSING 08.31.15

First the important stuff

Meantime stretches authenticity of London Lager.
[Via Beer Insider]
#EBBC15 – Belgian Family Brewers and the Future of Belgian Beer Culture.
[Via Chris Hall | Beer Wrier]
And Chris Hall’s tweets from EBBC.
Questions about authenticity, heritage, transparency. Again. Here, to say that Meantime “stretches authenticity” is being kind — and lack of transparency leads to rumors like the one that the London-brewed Meantime London Lager was being blended with Grolsch to make it go farther. From the European Beer Bloggers Conference, Chris Hall managed to “live blog” the Belgian Family Brewers presentation, then followed with a series of tweets that made me think I’d like to see a transcript of the presentations and somebody really needs to profile Jean Hummler (unless you already did, @Thirsty_Pilgrim, and I missed it).

Yeast terminology, part 1.
Lovely yeast family tree, which helps make sense of sentences like this: “Brettanomyces is a genus, not a species.” [Via larsblog]

In REGION You Must Try BEER
I will leave it to you to fill in REGION and BEER for the U.S., or maybe we just pencil IPA in for each one. [Via Boak & Bailey’s Beer Blog]

A Beginner’s Guide to Drinking Beer in Belgium.
Belgian beer and Airbnb. How hip is that? A useful guide for THOSE who don’t want to visit along side a bunch of beer bloggers (see above). [Via First We Feast]

Tunbridge Brewery Plans to Stay Small.
“We don’t have plans to grow much bigger right now. We enjoy our day jobs, and don’t plan to leave them to go full time at the brewery. The next step for us is to start distributing kegs to area restaurants. We also hope to expand to other farmers markets as time allows.” But what are the consequences of taking that next step? [Via Valley News]

Craft beer scene yields to burgeoning local heroin industry.
“The local beer feel was getting awfully crowded, and even a little bit played out. There’s only so many ways to make an IPA, and once you started seeing tasting rooms opening up in East County, you knew it was time for the next thing.” Yes, at the point I am finding and passing along items like this is it seems fair to suggest I need to get out more. [Via San Diego Reader]

Is gentrification good for more expensive beer?

I’m just asking.

I’d like to see somebody investigate the relationship between the impact of a changing beer demographic and a changing city demographic. It seems interesting to me, maybe even important, but I’ve got things like brewing with bark and what was cream ale sold in New Orleans in 1856 like to sort out.

I thought about this because Next City points to a map tool that can “serve as gentrification warning system.” (Pretty easy to tell where they stand on gentrifcation.) And the example given is San Francisco, Ground Zero for what is now broadly and generally referred to as “craft beer.”

(If you are still with me, you might want to open Tom Paxton’s “Yuppies in the Sky” in a separate window.)

Basically, there is a Next Generation of Beer Drinkers (there always is) and there is plenty of generalizing about what Gen Y and Gen Z value. Is it going to bother young upperly mobile good beer drinking consumers that they are becoming pins on an “Urban Displacement Project” map? If so, what are they going to do about it?

Drinks bibles, ethics and other beery links


MONDAY BEER LINKS, MUSING 08.25.15

Why I Wrote ‘The Beer Bible’.
[Via All About Beer]
How To Write The Bible Of Wine: Karen MacNeil On The Craft Of Writing.
[Via Forbes]
The second link is included because a) some contrast between “The Wine Bible” and “The Beer Bible” should be obvious, and b) to point out “The Wine Bible” has sold a half million copies. Imagine the potential impact of “The Beer Bible.” Jeff Alworth writes, “Americans do brew differently — in an unprecedented fashion, in fact — and it wasn’t until I started seeing how the rest of the world does it that I understood how.” How is answered piece by piece throughout his book, but he provided some examples (via email). Here’s one, from a chapter labeled American Ales:

As American brewing evolved, it began to acquire the characteristics that now define it — and which can be seen acrosss styles and traditions. Americans brew for intensity, a penchant reflected particularly in high hop rates and alcohol strength, but more broadly in ales that are just a bit louder than comparable ales brewd in other countries.

I would not argue with this, but I must wonder if this is always as it must be.


Click on the date to read the conversation, and then proceed to the following links.

Nine Food-Related Companies That Are Changing the World.
[Via Eater}
The blogger blackmail saga.
[Via jamie goode’s wine blog]
How ‘The End of the Tour’ Nails an Entire Profession.
[Via The New Yorker]
The many aspects of ethics.

Guzzling 9,000 Years Of History With ‘The Comic Book Story Of Beer’.
If the authors don’t get every bit of history perfect, and what are the odds of that?, will the Internet cut them some slack because it is a comic book? Or will this from Mike Smith — “A lot of beer books tend to be very serious, and I think the comic medium allowed us to tell the story of beer with a degree of levity.” — land in an uncomfortable part of what he calls geek overlap? [Via npr]

The porter in Majorca tastes like what it oughter.
There are now seven craft breweries on the Mediterranean island of Majorca. More beer from a place. [Via Zythophile]

This Beer Used 77 Hop Varieties, But Not for the Reason You May Think.
Forget the “Guinness Book of World Records” stuff. Great Yorkshire Brewery in England brewed a beer it called Top of the Hops 2012 with what it claimed was 2,102 varieties, using plants that failed in trials at Wye Hops Limited in Kent. At the time, brewery director Joanne Taylor said the brewery wanted to support Peter Darby’s research at Wye. The mix included dwarf varieties, aphid-resistant types, plants with Russian and South African pedigrees, and hops derived from Fuggle and other British varieties. [Via This Is Why I’m Drunk]

HBC-438: New Hop Variety Just for Homebrewers.
This struck me as the biggest news to come out of the National Homebrewers Conference in June, so (even though I wasn’t there) I wrote about it for the AHA website. [Via American Homebrewers Association]

Recreating a classic London pub crawl.
[Via All About Beer]
Beer Awesomeness In, Er, 1908.
[Via beeretseq]
Two from the time capsule.

Nom de Bier – Beer Reviews as Told by Your Favorite Authors.
Going to be interesting to see what Oliver Gray manages to tell us the beers themselves. [Via Literature & Libation]

‘Peak TV in America’: Is there really too much good scripted television?
Anybody for Peak Beer? [Via HitFix]

And this week’s award for best use of more than 11,000 words goes to . . .

10 New Orleanians on How Katrina Changed Their City.
Not beer. Important. [Via Next City]

Stop me if you’ve read this one before

MONDAY BEER LINKS, MUSING 08.17.15

The saga of Biscuit continues.
It starts with a somebody at Sun King Brewing in Indianapolis causing “Tom Brady Sux” to be printed on the bottom of 20,000 cans of beer and goes from there. Sun King does not sell its beer beyond the borders of Indiana, but it is not a small brewery. Oskar Blues Brewing, of course, operates breweries in two states and ships beer all over. But this is definitely not the way to act corporate. And for many people defining what constitutes “craft” includes considering what it is not. (There’s also all this.) [Via Eater]

Danish farmhouse ale.
“So what happened to all this brewing? That’s difficult to say. Most places it had died out already at the time the responses were written. Per Kølster found an old woman on northern Funen who was still brewing in 2005, so probably the tradition is not yet entirely dead, but that’s the only sign I’ve ever seen of it still being alive anywhere.” [Via Larsblog]

Craft Creep.
Practical thoughts. [Via Are You Tasting the Pith]

Inside the world’s most prestigious water-tasting competition.
Started reading, couldn’t stop. [Via The Week]

How ‘Rock Star’ Became a Business Buzzword.
Remember the discussion of brewers as rock stars? Not looking like a compliment these days. [Via New York Times]

Interactive Map Shows America’s Regional Beer Preferences According to Twitter.
Twitter maps show Americans’ beer preferences.
Sorry there aren’t more links this week, but sometimes I look at the accumulated headlines and think, “Haven’t I read this before?
[Via First We Feast and Phys.org]

But there’s still Twitter

and …

Two days late and a few beer links short

WEDNESDAY BEER LINKS, MUSING 08.12.15

Holiday officially over. Jet lag hanging on.

The 2015 NAGBW Awards Now Open.
I don’t know what category I will be judging this year, but I would really appreciate it if there are some well written, interesting entries. I read an awful lot of stuff during the course of a year (even more than ends up here) that should be entered and isn’t. [Via North American Guild of Beer Writers]

On ethics and beer descriptions.
A quick followup to last week’s discussion about beer ethics: Andy Crouch elaborates in the August issue of Beer Advocate magazine. Can’t give you a link, so look for it in print or grab a digital copy. But in the “Let’s be realistic” department I will note that more people care about “Romancing the Beer.” Jeff Alworth writes, “I read a fair amount about beer, and by my lights, the art of beer descriptions is in full flower.” In fact, All About Beer magazine has recently increased the number of beers it describes and I haven’t seen any letters to the editor calling for more stories about ethics. In this space, the best read post this year will “Words to describe the beer you are tasting” and it was written more than seven years ago. (In addition, full credit should go to Merchant du Vin.) The second best read post will likely be about hops, as well as the third. I doubt anything related to ethics is in the top twenty. [Via All About Beer and Beer Advocate]

A Visit to Rochefort brewery.
There’s a bit of news in this report — that Rochefort has begun using Aramis hops. What do they taste and smell like? Oskar Blues Brewery fairly recently added Aramis to the recipe for Mama’s Little Yella Pils. [Via Ed’s Beer Site]

Is Sam Adams too big to succeed in the craft world?
“Brewpubs, for example, are ‘creating a bigger wave of competition,’ [Jim] Koch said. ‘If you have a successful social hall or bar as part of your brewery, you can be profitable at fairly small volumes.’ He said he doesn’t see that trend abating because not only is it profitable, but drinkers like it.” [Via Fortune]

Who Was Joseph Coppinger, Early 1800s US Beer Geek?
“The trouble with finding an old text in isolation like the one I wrote about yesterday is establishing some context. Without it, you are at the whim of the person’s claim to fame as opposed to his or her place.” [Via A Good Beer Blog]

Fun With Numbers: Sums and Sommeliers Edition.
On Cicerones, Sommeliers, and The Cult of The “Expert”
I’m of the opinion that the Cicerone program is good for beer drinkers, but I must also disclose Ray Daniels and I have been friends since before you had to put on sun glasses if you happened to gaze at our unhatted heads. Nonetheless, Jordan St. John has assembled some interesting numbers (supplemented in the comments) that led me to wonder why nobody has added the “How many Cicernones is too many Cicerones?” to the “How many brewers is too many breweries?” question. [Via St.John’s Wort and The Pour Fool]