musing

Is beer still the most democratic drink?

MONDAY BEER LINKS, MUSING 11.17.14

Which side are you on? More from the “Let There Be Beer” campaign, in which Ed Wray writes “There seems to be clear division between whether we should be promoting beer as a premium product or beer for mass consumption.” And, “So beer geeks, the line has been drawn: Which Side Are You On?” Ask a question, get an answer, I guess. A lot of them here, and plenty of back and forth. So many noteworthy comments I thought about making this week’s links/musing just links to them. Pull of a stool — it is worth the time.
[Via Ed’s Beer Site]

What Has Become of Our Beer? Tiah Edmunson-Morton at the Oregon Hops and Brewing Archives has scanned in several late 1940s-early 1950s items she found in The Hopper: the hop grower’s magazine. The last quotes heavily from “TRUE, The Men’s Magazine” and is proof there was at least one beer geek in 1952. He talks about his first brush with beer on a farm in Stelton, New Jersey.

Later there is this: “A man who is a brewmaster at one of the ten largest breweries in the country said to me, ‘The beer we’re making today got no resemblance to the beer we put out after repeal in 1934 and ’35 and ’36. We were making a real beer then, like a pro-World War I beer, and you took a drink of it and got the taste of hops in the back of your throat. Your knew you were drinking a good glass of beer.'”
[Via Oregon Hops & Brewing Archives]

Single Hopped Kentish Ale - TescoSupermarket boost for British hops. Tesco is the first British supermarket chain to sell a beer with the British Hop Association logo on it. The beer features East Kent Golding hops and the back label explains that the EKG variety’s parent was called Canterbury Whitebine and first grown in 1790. The publicity is good for British hop growers (an aside, Ali Capper tweeted it was a great week for UK hops at Brau Beviale), but ask yourself: “What is wrong with this picture?” Not to pick on Shepherd Neame, @MrJohnHumphreys, but geez, what’s with the clear glass? What hop aromas are you trying to showcase?
[Via Protz on Beer]

Illegal Beer Is Brewing a Massive Following in Venezuela. Dozens of small breweries have sprung up in Venezuela over the past five years, and although selling these beers brewed in homes is illegal many do a brisk business with liquor stores and restaurants.
[Via Munchies]

On cellaring, a polite way of saying “forgetting.” I particularly like “The cabinet of all lost souls.”
[Via Community Beer Works]

Extreme Beer Judging. Pete Brown judges homebrew in Italy. For the record, when you judge homebrew competitions in the United States you put your name and email address on every sheet.
[Via Pete Brown]

A Master Sommelier Gives a Winery Tour. Finishing with a bit of levity. And because the only thing better than hearing beer types making fun of wine types is reading wine types making fun of wine types.
[Via HoseMaster of Wine]

Signs of the beer times & European Star winners

Hopsteiner boothSigns of the beer times.

– Boston Beer co-founder Jim Koch delivered the keynote speech today at Brau Beviale in Nuremburg, Germany. It is a massive trade show. I grabbed a photo of the Hopsteiner booth off Twitter to illustrate the point. That’s one booth of hundreds. It looks like an airport bar.

Koch’s statement that “the Reinheitsgebot has served its purpose as a public health measure and it’s almost becoming like artistic censorship” is likely to be retweeted the most often.

But I was struck by something he said at near the end. “Hops will begin to be customized, even for an individual brewer and their needs,” he said. I would not be surprised to see breweries paying breeders and farmers to own the rights to particular varieties, but don’t expect many breweries to own their own — at least not ones you want added to your beer.

– The European Beer Star award winners were later announced at Brau. The competition is not as big at the World Beer Cup, but the quality of entries and the judging panel is damn near the equal. American breweries won plenty of medals, but although Firestone Walker captured four of them its India Pale Ale, Union Jack, finished second after winning the previous two years. Birra del Borgo, an Italian brewery (that should be obvious), won gold with Re Ale Extra.

– From the Triangle Business Journal: “Farm Boy Farms of Pittsboro – a local provider of barley, wheat and malt for craft beer – is doubling in size, which means more local ingredients could work their way into local craft beer.” Hops are sexy, so get most the attention, but local grains (which can then be malted; as you can see the writer might have a small problem with that concept) are just as important in making local beer. And managing them at the local level just as challenging.

– That the Cicerone Certification Program is giving an exam in San Antonio, Texas, next February merits a story in MySA.

Imagine a Barrel 10 New Yorker cover

MONDAY BEER LINKS, MUSING 11.10.14

Remember all that stuff about the New Yorker cover? That is so October. If you follow the people I follow on Twitter and subscribe to the rss feeds that I do the news that AB InBev bought 10 Barrel Brewing in Oregon looked to be as big a deal as when InBev took over A-B. The Internet can fool you that way. It was a big ass local story, but how wide are the implicatons, really? How people reacted to the news might be as important down the road as the news itself. For instance, Jeff Rice has already used it as an opportunity to examine craft rhtetorics.

While we wait for an equally surprising “big” story this week, pig out on 10 Barrel:

– Making sense of Anheuser-Busch InBev buying 10 Barrel Brewing
– Why Anheuser-Busch’s Purchase of 10 Barrel – Brewing is bad for the industry
– The Short Life and Ugly Death of 10 Barrel Brewing
– Craft Rhetorics: the 10 Barrel Brewing Moment
– On Anheuser-Busch buying 10 Barrel
– Interview with 10 Barrel Brewing Founders and Anheuser-Busch InBev CEO of Craft Brands

Elitism, or something else? Millennials and the war on Big Beer. OK, this is why there’s such a fuss.
[Via CNBC]

The Soul of Beer. Jeff Alworth followed up on two posts he wrote about 10 Barrel with this one. There was at time the tagline here read “In search of the soul of beer” before I changed it to “Celebrating beer from a place.” I’m not sure that made my intentions any more clear, but it seemed like it at a time. Neither phrase lends itself to literal interpretation. In the era of the old tagline, I asked several brewers about the notion their beer might have soul. The best answer came from one who pointed out all energy must go somewhere, so a lot of what happens in a brewery ends up in the beer.
[Via Beervana]

There’s A Beer For That. When I was checking into a hotel last week I heard the words “Mosaic hops” coming from the television in the reception area and realized that a Guinness commercial was playing. It seems like just yesterday that we called that hop 369. Now it is part of television advertising, but I’ve managed to otherwise miss the commercial and probably will going forward. The roundabout point here is that I’ve seen numerous posts about the There’s a Beer for That campaign in England, but the advertisements are not part of my life and I’ve struggled to “get it.” This post put things in perspective for me. Your mileage may vary, but there’s a handy list of links at the bottom should you be interested.
[Via Total Ales]

It’s just good business. A reminder, from the Czech Republic.
[Via Pivni Filosof]

Perfect Parker Scores Keep On Coming. Is there similar score inflation going on in beer? This is a story about scores from critics, and in beer the scores of Internet rating sites carry more weight, but maybe this is a job for Bryan Roth.
[Via wine-searcher]

Different perspectives on the meaning of local beer

MONDAY BEER LINKS, MUSING 11.03.14

Hinkle: Brewery deal comes with a hangover. Indeed, it is great news for Richmond, Va., that Stone Brewing Co. chose that city in which to locate a new brewery. It will create a bunch of jobs and pump money and a lot of excellent beer into the community. But it didn’t come free. Just to be clear, nothing against Stone. The company has proved time and time again in San Diego what a wonderful community member it is. But what if the city of Richmond had chosen to use those millions of dollars as seed money for local companies? If city government is going to suggest to its citizens that they should support local businesses then it seems to make sense they’d do the same.
[Via Richmond-Times Dispatch, h/T The Potable Curmudgeon]

Brooklyn Brewery Cofounder Steve Hindy Discusses South Florida’s Brewing Future. “One idea that Hindy put forth was that Miami has had a hard time in the past in becoming a craft beer mecca because of its status as an international city. He sees that in major metropolitan areas like New York and Los Angeles. People are seeking the best of everything, even if it’s just what they perceive as the best, no matter where it’s from. ‘Places like Vermont or Maine or Michigan or even Oregon are very loyal to their local product. International cities are not; [the people] want the best of everywhere. That’s a challenge for craft beer.'” If that is true, I wonder if citizens of those international cities understand the price they are paying.
[Via New Times]

Beer Industry Reacts to ‘The New Yorker’ Cover. I will continue not to write anything about this. I offer John Holl’s post as a public service because it is really a 13-headed monster (which you can read all at once if you drop it into Pocket first), and suggest you then turn to “Craft Beer Mocked on Cover of The New Yorker: Geeks Unsure If They Should Celebrate.” Although I am avoiding comment, I secretly wonder why every headline I read on this topic reminds me of something from The Onion.
[Via All About Beer and Hey, Brewtiful]

The Old House at Home. However, I will use all this fuss about The New Yorker to link to this story from 1940. It turned into the first chapter of Joseph Mitchell’s “McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon.” You can read the whole book as part of “Up in the Old Hotel.” A terrific anthology.
[Via The New Yorker]

Wine Critics Keep Semantic Arguments at Bay—Not So for Beer and Spirits.“The most fascinating battles to watch are the ‘Word Wars’. The battle over word use and semantics that are primarily playing out in the beer and distilling industries over the term ‘Craft’. And here his the kicker/conclusion: “If there were a Robert Parker of Beer or a Wine Spectator of Beer, the meaning of ‘craft’ would be far less important.” Curious idea.
[Via Fermentation, The Daily Wine Blog]

Meet the Twinkie-saving, beer-selling billionaire who has changed the way you eat. This profile of the Metropoulos family details, rather than explains, what the family did with Pabst, the brewing concern it is selling at considerable profit.
[Via the Washington Post]

And because beer is local. Reports from Portland, Maine, and Kansas City.

Is there a craft beer/music on vinyl connection?

MONDAY BEER LINKS, MUSING 10.27.14

Twitter feed, pH

Just to mix it up, I thought about making all the links this week to Twitter. I changed my mind, but it certainly was curious on Friday to see this combination on my feed. Just be clear, Ed Wray’s came first and 47Hops surely didn’t see it before an almost simultaneous tweet.

Does shaming work on Twitter? I’m not sure, but Alchemist founder/brewer John Kimmich sure drew a lot of comments when he posted this photo and tweeted “$42 / four pack. WARM on the shelf. CJ’s Kegs Cases & more in Potsdam, NY. Shameful.”
[via Twitter]

Masculinity, Hipsters and the Miller High Life Man. Perhaps I need to add a little Pocket icon for longish posts you may want to save for later. This is one. Just plain entertaining, plus thoughtful consideration of the “enduring influence of the High Life Man message in the millennial era.”
[Via Punch]

Exploring Drinker Demographics: When Biology and Social Expectations Collide. Speaking of millennials … I posted a link to this story on Twitter, asking for feedback on this thought: “Craft beer is not only a beverage choice; it appears to be a lifestyle choice.” This was the most interesting and amusing thread that resulted. There actually may be a connection between the decision to purchase a particular beer and one to buy music on vinyl.
[This Is Why I’m Drunk]

Craftwork. This was one of many posts from The Beer Nut from Germany, and you can use the Blog Archive on the left of the posts for several other “must reads”™ from his trip. This one examines the “wave of foreign styles that’s destroying traditional German brewing.” Or not.
[Via The Beer Nut]

The Rumpkin Chase. “Even accomplishment means little, in the end, when we beer chase.” Yep.
[Via Make Mine Potato]

Bierquellenwanderweg. It might be enough to just tell you Stonch is back, but if not here’s the explanation: “I live in London. I quit law and became landlord of the Gunmakers Arms in Clerkenwell in 2009. In 2014 I re-opened the Finborough Arms, a Victorian pub in Earl’s Court that had been closed for some time. I started writing this in January 2007, but knocked it on the head exactly three years later. Now I want to do it again.”
[Via Stonch’s Beer Blog]

These requests from abroad, volume four: “May I ask you to send me one set of your beer labels?” Likewise, I’m not sure about the privacy thing, but the “What’s the rest of the story?” question is pretty compelling.
[Via The Potable Curmudgeon]

Top of the Hops. Adrian-Tierney Jones travels a Vermont beer trail. Sets the mood for the next gathering of The Session.
[Via Enterprise Magazine]