musing

Closing Time – 2014

The aftermash

So stack those chairs upon those tables
And stack those empties upon that bar
And count your money
And count my money
And hear those bottles ringing
You know where you are

Closing time
Unplug them people
And send them home
It’s closing time

As sung by Lyle Lovett.
Written by Christopher T. Feinstein, Lyle Pearce Lovett, L. Lovett, Jay Joyce.

You can listen to the song on YouTube, from a 1988 concert and worth a look if only for the hair. Or go further back in time (less hair) and hear Nanci Griffith chime in.

Whither Anheuser-Busch Faust v3.0?

MONDAY BEER LINKS, MUSING 12.29.14

The 4 American Originals: Beers From My Past. Chapter 2.
Mitch Steele of Stone Brewing continues his stroll down memory lane with details about the Anheuser-Busch American Originals series he helped create in 1995. Best understatement in the post is about American Hop Ale: “The beer was what I envisioned at the time as kind of an English IPA. I’ve learned a lot about English IPAs since then, but back then this beer fit my understanding of the style.” Probably more than a lot. The American Hop Ale was basically his recipe and it worked its way up the corporate ladder basically unchanged. That was the good news. The bad news was it obviously didn’t capture the imagination of the folks in marketing.

Steele doesn’t have old recipes or specifications, but as he recalls Faust would have had about 28 international bitterness units (IBU). There is a new version of Faust on tap now in St. Louis (at A-B’s Biergarten and the Budweiser Brewhouse at BallPark Village). It might have popped up on your radar a few weeks ago, here or with more details here. It has 35 IBU, so it is more bitter and has more overall hop impact. The recipe includes Saphir, a German hop variety not available in the 90s. (Quick aside: Saphir is an important component in the unique aroma/flavor of Firestone Walker Pivo Pils). It’s a different beer than the Faust of the nineteenth century for the 1990s.

In the first part of his series about beers from his past, Steele wrote, “Lager beers like Faust or Muenchener had little hope of making a dent in those markets (Denver and Seattle). I question why we didn’t focus these beers in the Midwest, they weren’t even available in St. Louis for quite a while after the first release, which made absolutely zero sense to me.”

Your guess is probably better than mine what might happen with Faust v3.0 here in St. Louis, in the Midwest, or elsewhere. It was excellent to be able to have one after Davo McWilliams made the last hop edition in his IPA in the works at the pilot brewery (even nice because he was buying). It certainly will be nice if it is available next summer at Busch Stadium (it was on tap last May at Ballpark Village just north of Busch Stadium). There are already plenty of good choices at the stadium, but you almost always have to walk farther than the nearest Bud Light to find them and not one is a hoppy lager quite like Faust. [Via The Hop Tripper]

Beer Giants Cultivate Their Crafty Side.
You’ve probably read much that is in this story more than once, but it provides this context: “Overall, packaged food manufacturers with less than $1 billion in sales grew 6.2% annually between 2009 and 2012, four times faster than those with more than $3 billion in sales, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers, a professional-services firm.” Large brewing companies are the only industrial giants facing a challenge. [Via Wall Street Journal]

James mcMurtry, billboard, Austin, Texas

Brooks on Beer: Music and beer pairings.
Jay Brooks taps into some of the things Pete Brown has written about pairing beer and music. He also points to a website, Drinkify, that suggests drinks to pair with particular musicians. Just enter in a name and hit the “What should I drink?” button. First thing off, I typed in “James McMurtry.” It returned “One bottle organic red wine. Serve at room temperature.” Not a good start. McMurtry was drinking wine one of the first times we ever saw him, and at a brewery to boot. But since then he’s developed a serious connection with Lagunitas Brewing, as this billboard that went up in Austin earlier this year suggests. (It promotes an album that was to be released in the fall, although we’ll have to wait until February). Notice the bottle. In addition, he’s the producer for a recording Lagunitas founder Tony Magee has in the works. Always the optimist, I gave the app another whirl with Robert Earl Keen (after discovering “Robert Keen” throws it into a loop). It suggested, “THE ROBERT EARL KEEN. 1 bottle Maker’s Mark Bourbon. 1 bottle Egg whites. 8 oz. Tequila Añejo. Combine in shaker and strain into cocktail glass. Serve. Stir quickly.” That was enough. The man has served as an unpaid (as far as I know) spokesman for Lone Star beer, been sponsored by Shiner, and now his own beer. Any of those would have been a better pairing. [Via San Jose Mercury News]

Stretching Your Dollar: Is Elasticity Craft Beer’s Biggest Threat?.
This is the second of two posts (the first is here) tackling price and the role of price in deciding whether to buy local. Bryan Roth points out he’s not an economist, and the notion of “intercraft elasticity” is a pretty daunting concept. But one worth thinking about. [Via This Is Why I’m Drunk]

The Session: The beer book not written.
It is not always obvious what the monthly host has in mind when posting a topic for The Session, but host Alan McLeod made it delightfully clear this month: “What is the book you would want to write about good beer? What book would you want to read? Is there a dream team of authors you would want to see gathered to make that ‘World Encyclopedia of Beer and Brewing’? Or is there one person you would like to see on a life long generous pension to assure that the volumes flow from his or her pen?” And speaking of his blog, McLeod has chosen the winners in his annual Christmas photos competition. [Via A Good Beer Blog]

Beer, agriculture & lifestyles

MONDAY BEER LINKS, MUSING 12.22.14

Random fact not worth a blog post (and that felt too irrelevant to tweet): A comment attempt that ended up in the spam folder (bless Akismet) last week was 33,501 words long. Should have saved it for 28 February.

5 Reasons NOT to Become a Hop Farmer in 2015.
@47Hops has tweeted this link relentlessly and several other tweeters have picked up on it. In the comments (where there’s some excellent reading) blog author Douglas MacKinnon says that on Facebook he received “negative comments about this article saying I’m a greedy dealer trying to keep the market to myself” and based on the tone alone you can see why. It portrays the hundreds of farmers in the country newly interested in growing hops in a rather singular way. I have not been shy here or on Twitter or on Facebook about suggesting people giving hops a whirl should know what they are up against. But many of them do have a clue. Recently and in the coming months there have been or will be educational conferences about everything releated to growing hops in several different states east of the Mississippi. Maybe as important, I remember that less than 40 years ago it was idiotic to start a new, obviously small, brewery. [Via 47 Hops]

Are You Ready for Lifestyle Beer?
All’s Fair.
– Jeff Alworth writes “The rise of lifestyle brewing — less a new thing than the end state of a very old trend — is yet the latest development in that constant tension between hype and authenticity.”
– Dave Bailey writes “at a time when there seems to be many people claiming that we should all shout universally that all beer is good, it seems to me that at least one brewery is ready to fight gloves off. I for one welcome this.”
[Via All About Beer and HardKnott Dave’s]

Why J D Wetherspoon’s is fast becoming my favourite craft beer bar.
“I never thought I’d see the day.” [Via Pete Brown]

Heineken’s Charlene de Carvalho: A self-made heiress.
The mysterious banker behind the world’s best-known beer.
What happens when you are 47 years old and inherit the Heineken fortune and control of a brewing empire that you had almost nothing to do with up until your father died? (The article includes the story about when Freddy Heineken was kidnapped. He said he captors tortured him. “They made me drink Carlsberg.” [Via Fortune ]

Baderbrau rebirth culminates with South Loop brewery.
So what’s next, somebody opens a brewery called Cartwright Brewing in Oregon? How about a Newman Brewing in New York? Nostalgia for failed startups of the 1980s feels a bit strange. [Via Chicago Tribune]

Lo Hai Qu on Wine Magazines.
Per usual, the HoseMaster takes no prisoners. Would I find somebody skewering beer magazines as amusing (given that I work for several of them)? Would you? Because “when it comes down to it, wine magazines are just like the men that read them—fun for a night, but then easily disposable.” [Via HoseMaster of Wine]

The taste of downtown Grand Rapids

Jason Heystek pulls a barrel sample at Founders Brewing

Meet Jason Heystek. His business card identifies him as head cellarman and lead guitar at Founders Brewing.

He’s also the guy in charge of barrels at Founders, the Michigan brewery that stirred up the Internet this week by announcing a it would sell a 30 percent of its company to a Spanish brewery.

In a follow up story, Founders CEO Mike Stevens said, “We were looking for someone who truly understood the soul (of) this brand.”

Which implies they damn well want to retain that soul. How will that work out? I’m making no predictions. I’m not very good at them. Remember Session #67 (the one in which we predicted how many breweries would be operating in 2017)? I typed 2,620, a number far too distant to see in the rear view mirror to see any more.

A bigger deal than who in what country owns what percentage of the brewery — it matters to some people, and in a perfectly valid way, but that is a different discussion — are the plans to make a lot more beer. Three years ago Founders brewed 41,000 barrels and soon the brewery will have the capacity to make 900,000 barrels. There’s no guarantee they’ll reach that target, but they’ve shoved a lot of chips on the table. And they did that before striking the deal with Mahou San Miguel.

It’s a whole different scale. It took some doing, but they figured out a way to scale up production of Breakfast Stout, and All Day IPA is a powerful endorsement for investing a million dollars in a Krones canning line. Quality isn’t easy, but maybe it is the easy part. We start talking about soul when we starting considering the connection Founders has established with its customers.

Stevens understands this. When they announced this expansion that will cost $40 million just earlier this month Stevens said it would have been easier to build a new brewery in the suburbs than shoehorn an expansion onto its crowded downtown site. “It’s important to us ultimately to stay downtown, to stay in Grand Rapids,” he said. “Grand Rapids is where we started our business. We’ve been growing in Grand Rapids. My partner and me were born and raised in Grand Rapids.”

Barrel aged beers are part of that connection. They aren’t as easy to scale up. Sure, there’s plenty of room for barrels at Michigan Natural Storage, a former gypsum mine with six miles of tunnels. And, sure, Goose Island Beer Co. has done a pretty astonishing job of scaling up production of Bourbon County Stout, and its variations. Once again, sure, almost nobody who drinks the barrel aged beers from Founders knows that Heystek climbs around on top of the barrels, checking the progress of the wide variety of beers he puts in them. And, by golly, they pass the place test — brewed downtown and hauled three miles to the same place as always to age.

But there’s something different. Maybe not something you’d taste “blind.” Maybe you need to have met Jason Heystek — a constantly funny guy who is flat out serious about Founders beer. I’m pretty sure a lot of people in Grand Rapids have.

When you’re alone and life is making you lonely
You can always go downtown
When you’ve got worries, all the noise and the hurry
Seems to help, I know, downtown

– From “Downtown” (Written by Tony Hatch, sung by Petula Clark)

Did people really smoke while brewing in the 1950s?

MONDAY BEER LINKS, MUSING 12.15.14

Ed Reisch of Reisch Brewing in Springfield, Illinois

A ‘good mixer.’
The State Journal-Register in Springfield, Illinois, occasionally hauls out photos from its archives. This one is from December 1953. It shows Ed Reisch, the fourth generation of his family to run Reisch Brewing, at a brew kettle. The brewery closed in 1966 and Reisch went to work at Pabst Brewing in Milwaukee. His son, George (his tweet led me to this photo), became a corporate brewmaster at Anheuser-Busch (now AB InBev). His grandson, Patrick, is a brewer at Goose Island Beer Co. in Chicago. I’m pretty sure Reisch was not manning the kettles that day. The shirt and bow-tie are one giveaway; the cigarette in his left hand another. And on a historic note, it seems that Reisch Brewing still had oak fermentation vessels in the 1950s. [Via The State Journal-Register]

Beers from my past-Pt 1: The Anheuser-Busch American Originals.
Mitch Steele — you know, the guy who once brewed at Anheuser-Busch, now oversees brewing at Stone, and who wrote a book about IPA — digs into his garage and his memory to start a series about when he worked in new products at A-B (mid- to late-90s). He plans to include details about Faust, which has been getting new attention recently, in the next one. [Via The Hop Tripper]

Black-Market Brews: Inside the Super-Secret World of Beer Muling.
Who needs lions and tiger and bears when you’ve got whales and mules, oh my? Just when you thought the New Beer World couldn’t get any stranger there’s a story like this. It would have broken my spirit to spend any time reading discussions that followed at Rate Beer and Beer Advocate, but I particularly like this comment on the STL Hops forum: “I feel that actual mules would think that this term is derogatory to them and possibly to farmers and whatnot who actually use mules.” [Via First We Feast]

The King has left the building.
h/T to Roger Baylor for pointing to this. He put it better than I can (not the first time I’ve written those words about his blog): “Writing well is very, very hard, and the best way to approach it is to tell the truth and write what you know. Sometimes, what you know is awfully hard to write with honesty.” [Via Louisville Beer]

Big Beer: Is Consolidation Limiting Your Drink Selection?
Beer family treesSkip to the end for the dire warning: “If the consolidation trend continues to absorb more and more of the world’s brewing market, we could see the same product sold under different brand names in an attempt to give consumers the illusion of choice.” Obviously not happening in our small world. But the real reason I’m pointing to this is it uses a great graphic first posted at Quartz at the beginning of October and until Saturday overlooked by me. Of course, it is already out of date. There’s a Blue Point branch on the AB InBev tree but no 10-Barrel. [Via Business CheatSheet]

Fear Beer? Sometimes the Best Wine is a Beer (or a Cider).
Mike Veseth writes, “I spoke about the trends I have observed traveling the world in the past year and one of them is the rise of craft beer and cider and their growing incursion into the wine space. I see it everywhere and the people I meet are often surprised that it is a widespread phenomenon. I thought it was just something that’s happening here is a common response.” Read that last sentence again. [Via The Wine Economist]

Urban spelunking: Leinenkugel’s 10th Street Brewery.
A reminder that an “ultramodern” and “highly automated” brewery meant something different in 1985, when G. Heileman Brewing built this facility. Today? “At best I would call 10th Street a partially automated brewhouse, some of the temperature controls of the mash and some of the brews vessel to vessel movements are automated – with the brewer pressing a button to start and stop the processes – but that would be it.” [Via OnMilwaukee.com]

New brewery in Thibodaux to offer King Cake Ale.
Cinnamon, vanilla and lactose aren’t ingredients that constitute something specifically local to south Louisiana, so it’s probably a stretch to call King Cake Ale a place-based beer, but it’s probably worth a trip to Thibodaux just to make sure. [Via WWLTV.com]