musing

MONDAY BEER LINKS, MUSING 10.13.14

Crowd Control: A History of Bar Etiquette Because, can you resist a story with a quote this honest? “The purpose of drinking is to get as drunk as you can without ruining it for other people.”
[Via Punch]

How your local IPA is quietly becoming a leading economic driver in Oregon. A closer look at how the Oregon brewing industry produces $2.83 billion in total economic impact. I like this bit about Block 15 in Corvallis: “Tart cherries come from The Cherry Country near Salem, raspberries from Denison Farms in Corvallis, peaches from Olson Family Farms in Salem, strawberries from Stahlbush Island Farms in Covallis and grapes from Left Coast Cellars in Rickreall.” Ingredients from places familiar to people who live and drink in Corvallis.
[Via 1859]

Beer judging considered harmful. SPOILER ALERT. “So the lesson is: just because you can recognize the chemical and know that it’s sometimes a problem, don’t automatically assume something must be wrong with the beer. Something may be wrong. Or the butterscotch flavour from the diacetyl might actually make it better.”
Via Larsblog

Beer, beer, everywhere … Stop me if you’ve heard this one: “An American walks into a British pub and …”
[Via Boak & Bailey’s Beer Blog

The 40pc leap in capacity at the Doom Bar brewery and the 2014/5 Cask Report. Up front there is the fact that Doom Bar had become a brand one tenth the size of Carling lager. and Martyn Cornell writes: “That might not sound much, but blimey, there’s not been a cask ale brand with that kind of clout in the market for decades.” Beyond that, a summary of the latest Cask Report (kind of a state of the union for real ale in England).
[Via Zythophile]

Concrete Beach Brewery Will Teach You To Love Craft Beer. This is a story about Concrete Beach Brewing in Miami, funded by Alchemy & Science, the collaboration between Alan Newman (ex-Magic Hat) and Jim Koch of Boston Beer Company. You’ll likely take away something different from this article than I did. When I got to the part where the manager of the “Social Hall” said “My first beer ever was a Michelob Ultra” my mind shut down. Wasn’t Michelob Ultra invented like three years ago? (Correct answer is 2002.)
[Via Miami Eater]

John Hickenlooper, Party of One. I’m not sure who you think the best known person brewer-type in American beer is, but Hickenlooper’s place in the post-MaytageMcAuliffe American brewing world is pretty well established and as governor of Colorado he might be a recognizable at Jim Koch. This profile of a guy who keeps his promises points out, “He even fits the zeitgeist—the microbrewery owner who throws an annual tech and business summit to foster Colorado’s start-up scene, the fellow you might have seen strumming a banjo on stage with Old Crow Medicine Show.”
[Via The Atlantic]

Because I was immersed in the insular world that surrounds the Great American Beer Festival I did not participate in The Session #92: “I Made This.” But I thought about the topic several times, like when Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper — addressing brewers before awards were handed out Saturday — said that he had begun homebrewing in 1971. The GABF has become crazy big. It will be even bigger next year, as in 90,000 square feet bigger (how many more breweries might be pouring beer hasn’t been determined). It’s easy to get lost in the forest of beers, but in the midst of this madding crowd there were still plenty of people who spoke with pride about what they’d made. That’s why I keep going back. Anyway, if you are looking for beery links, start at Pintwell.

Young Drinkers Have Abandoned Big Beer – Can It Be Saved? A report from the National Beer Wholesalers Association annual convention in New Orleans, which plenty of brewery representatives at the GABF attended just before heading to Denver. I’m skeptical about this “product life cycle theory” (or maybe it is an example of what happens when a brewery starts making products instead of beers). And isn’t it time to quit saying “not your father’s beer”? Mothers drink too.
[Via Advertising Age]

Multivariate Beer. Using beer to understand data. It’s a little complicated, but in the resulting recipes “More hop aroma represents higher employment.”
[Via FlowingData]

German Pilsner. Ron Pattinson digs into the history books to examine how/when “pilsner” came to describe something other than a Bohemian-Austrian beer.
[Via Shut Up About Barclay Perkins]

Beer and environmental policy entwined. A report from a second-year student of the Bard Center for Environmental Policy interning with Sun King Brewing in Indianapolis.
[Via Poughkeepsie Journal]

Want to Find Out Where Your Fruit Was Grown? Good Luck. It isn’t news that “Big Ag” considers the path from field to supermarket a trade secret. You better believe that the largest breweries in the world know all the origins of their raw ingredients. That’s been less true of smaller breweries. But little things can be important – like how many times and with what insecticides a particular hop field was sprayed.
[Via Mother Jones]

North American Guild of Beer Writers online magazine winners.

The NAGBW writing contest winners were announced at a small gathering Friday in Denver. A complete list should be posted soon at the guild website. Meanwhile, here are links to the online magazine winning stories because — I guess this should be obvious — they are online.

1. The Death of Hunahpu’s Day, by Gerard Walen (All About Beer Magazine)
2. Headbangers Brew: A History of Heavy Metal and Craft Beer Collaborations, by Austin L. Ray (First We Feast)
3. A Brief History of Sour Beer, by Christian DeBenedetti (New Yorker)

MONDAY BEER LINKS, MUSING 09.29.14

Last week Jeff Alworth, Boak & Bailey and Alan McLeod posted thoughts on beer writing, interesting on their own and further provoking interesting comments. Then McLeod followed that up with a must read. (Really, go read it.)

Most of the time, the links I post here are to stuff I read during the week and think you might have overlooked. This week, I tweaked that a bit and focused just on publications that are not beer-specific. That’s because these days I can walk into gas station/convenience store smack dab in the middle of Missouri and choose from dozens of fancy beers. That’s one of the reasons there’s a lot more being written about beer these days in a lot more places and in a lot of different ways.

So Long, Shaker Pint: The Rise and Fall of America’s Awful Beer Glass. This story may or may not contain anything you didn’t already know, and that is the point. This is news to CityLab readers.
[Via CityLab]

Red Brick Brewing Company Turns 21. A long read, north of 4,000 words, and excellent. On the one hand, a 21st anniversary story seems pretty obvious. On the other hand, it is Red Brick, a brewery that long ago was less interesting to write about than a slug of new ones. In fact, its beers weren’t that good. That’s changed. “What many had considered a long-dead, irrelevant brand is experiencing a renaissance amid Georgia’s greater craft beer boom.”
[Via Creative Loafing]

Pliny the Elder: A case study in scarcity marketing. From those guys you listen to on public radio.
[Via Marletplace]

Wine execs concerned about growth of craft beer, specialty spirits. It is business story written for a newspaper audience (and its online readers, of course). It talks about “millennial exploration.” Shouldn’t publications, and individuals who want to write for those publications, recognize those millennials sometimes want a different sort of writing?
[Via The Press Democrat]

Mexico’s Craft Beer Scene Is Exploding. In this case you have Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø of Evil Twin Brewery writing a column, called Nomadic Brews, each month for Munchies, which is part of Vice Media. “Every month, we’ll check in with dispatches from Jeppe’s travels around the world, as he brews in places like Mexico, Taiwan, and Brazil.” Added to remind us all it is a brave new world.
[Via Munchies]

MONDAY BEER LINKS, MUSING 09.22.14

Zut alors! Great British pub may have been invented by the French. Ted Bruning spent 30 years trying to find Britain’s oldest pubs. What he learned and what he writes about in “Merrie England: The Medieval Roots of the Great British Pub” will turn some heads. After the Norman invasion of 1066, a wave of French merchants traveled to and from London to buy and sell wares from the banks of the Thames. It appears the wine bars they set up in the City of London might have been the first pubs in England. They would predate the first English-style “alehouses” by around 150 years. I’ve already ordered the book.
[Via Daily Mail, HT Martyn Cornell]

Billion dollar beer war is brewing. By the time the whole AB Inbev, SABMiller, Heineken story sorts itself out we’re all going to be exhausted. And somehow — don’t you think? — Pabst is going to end up involved. “Although no one quite knows what the next move will be, the beer industry looks to be on the verge of its biggest-ever arms race.”
[Via The Telegraph]

Meet Anne-Françoise Pypaert, the first female Trappist brewmaster. Anne-Françoise Pypaert was the only women working at Orval when she was first hired in late 1992. Now, there are eight women employed at Orval. And Pypaert is the brewmaster.
[Via Belgian Beer Specialist]

Yeast and German Brewing. An interesting premise — that a lack of variety of yeast strains has resulted in a lack of variety of German beer. “In my opinion, the common use of a well-understood single lager yeast strain for bottom-fermenting styles for the last century has resulted in generations of brewers in Germany who see yeast more as a tool for fermentation, rather than a key ingredient in their recipe. Only when the variety of yeasts is understood will German brewers be willing to experiment.”
[Via Brew Berlin]

Old guys: Don’t like the wine list? Eat somewhere else! Since I’m quite often the old guy in the group I try to think twice, or even a third time, before I comment on the new. After you read the gazillion comments following this post, dig into The Empire Strikes Back: Laube Takes on IPOB and you’ll find even more comments. These wine types sure get worked up.
[Via Palate Press and Steve Heimoff]

The Industry Series: Gavin Sacks, Flavour Chemist. Wine at the top, but there’s beer (and hops) later on.
[Via A Tempest in a Tankard]