musing

Oktoberfest begins in Munich on Saturday, as well as in Cincinnati, Denver, Mount Angel, Brooklyn, St. Louis and various other locations. They keep coming throughout the next month.

The photo at the top was taken in Stuttgart six years ago at Cannstatter Volkfest (imagine the Wisconsin State Fair without the agricultural displays but a lot more beer). I’ve written about it before.

The fests in Munich and Stuttgart last as long as a state fair, while those in the United States generally are a weekend affair. Bucket list versus everyday pleasure, I guess. In any event, much preferred to St. Patrick’s Day.

MONDAY BEER LINKS, MUSING 09.15.14

What Happens When Bud Light Takes Over Your Town for a Weekend. After all the hoopla before Bud Light’s “Whatever, U.S.A.” takeover of Crested Butte, Colorado, I was disappointed in the days after the event by the lack of stories about how it went (other than the one, repeated over and over, describing how hard it was for people to get flights home). But then I came across this account from a local in Vanity Fair.,

… anyone who says you can’t get drunk on light beer clearly hasn’t witnessed 1,000 twentysomethings flown from sea level to the mountains and pumped with an endless supply of cheap lager. Illuminated by blinding set lights and stumbling along streets paved in blue, partygoers had an eerie, zombie-like glow about them.

In the aftermath I remembered a story heard long ago at New Belgium Brewing in Fort Collins. Kim Jordan and Jeff Lebesch seriously considered starting their brewery in Crested Butte — well known for its skiing, mountain biking, and wildflowers in the spring — rather than Fort Collins. PR director Bryan Simpson confirmed that it was once on the short list but was eliminated because shipping logistics were “challenging.” If you’ve ever driven there from just about any direction you are entitled to add an expletive before “challenging.”

But think about it. Had New Belgium located instead in Crested Butte maybe it would not have become “Whatever, U.S.A.” But of course New Belgium might not have become New Belgium.
[Via Vanity Fair]

Hegra maltøl at Granås Gård. One pleasant result last week when I solicited input on what constitutes an “indigenous beer” (and input is still welcome) was Boak & Bailey pointed me to Lars Marius Garshol’s series on farmhouse ales and I discovered that my feed reader hadn’t been collecting the latest posts from Larsblog for quite a while. I’ve had some catching up to do. This entry stands nicely on its own, but you might want to set aside some time for several of them.
[Via Larsblog]

A trip to Jester King Brewing

[Via Its Okay to be Smart]

Why pubs are a bit like bananas. Just go read it.
[Via beersoakedboy, H/T Boak & Bailey]

Bohemian Lagers of the 1880’s and 1890’s and The Ease of Misunderstanding Czech Beer. A) The numbers from Ron Pattinson, and B) and first post in a series from Jeff Alworth that, if he succeeds, will result in people throwing their hands in the air, shouting “Why am I satisfied only reading about this?” and booking a trip to the Czech Republic.
[Via Shut up About Barclay Perkins and Beervana]

Here’s How A Six-Pack Of Craft Beer Ends Up Costing $12. This is being shared all over the Internet and on the whole nicely done, giving consumers insight into why beer costs what it does. Thus I don’t want to seem like a picky curmudgeon when I point out an error of fact. However, the story suggests that large breweries use a pound of hops in each barrel they brew and mentions that craft brewers may add up to 4 pounds. Well, the Brewers Association has surveyed members and they average 1.3 pounds, and that’s one key number. More important, brewers worldwide add between 2 and 3 ounces per barrel. If they used a pound we’d be headed for a hop shortage, as Peter Venkman once said, “of biblical proportions.” (“What he means is Old Testament, Mr. Mayor, real wrath-of-God type stuff!”)
[Via Huffington Post]

Garage science: High school teacher opens brewery. Of course this would happen in a garage in Burlington, Vermont.
[Via Burlington Free Press]

Yes, it has been thirteen years and we all still ache.

The column I wrote for All About Beer magazine during the daze that followed.

MONDAY BEER LINKS, MUSING 09.08.14

The origin of Bockbier. Ron Pattinson digs up an alternative story about how “bock” got its name, and it involves “a goat, a sick child and drunken servant.”
[Via Shut Up About Barclay Perkins]

Question of the day. Roger Baylor owns a brewery and a pub, so the question he raises by drawing an anology between the beer and music businesses affects him directly. But I’ve noticed that everybody else also seems to enjoy discussing the “how many is too many breweries” question, about local versus faraway, about big verus small, and therefore the difference between Alan McLeod calls “Big Craft” and everybody else. Baylor’s questions make it a little more interesting.

Why would anyone pour a perfectly good craft beer down the drain? Interesting to contemplate, but the real reason I am pointing to this is one sentence: “There are sober children in China, after all!”
[Via Tampa Bay Times]

The history of Albany as seen through beer-colored lenses. Instead of linking to a post by Craig Gravina, as happens in this space sometimes, here’s an article about him — and indirectly Alan McLeod, co-author of “Upper Hudson Valley Beer.”
[Via All Over Albany]

40 Under 40: America’s Tastemakers 2014. Wine Enthusianst presents this as a slide show (translation: pain in the butt). I’ll save you the time and tell your the three people they picked with direct beer connections: Meg Gill of Golden Road Brewing; Pat Fahey of Ray Daniels’ Cicerone Certification Program; and Travis Benoit, who co-founded CrowdBrewed, a money-raising web site for brewers that apparently is having more impact than I realized.
[Via Wine Enthusiast]

How Culture Shapes Our Senses. “Words to describe the beer you are tasting” — posted more than six years ago — is the most visited pages in the archives here. That may be because “When ordinary people are presented with the smell of ordinary substances (coffee, peanut butter, chocolate), they correctly identify about half of them.” Identifying and then naming them may be even harder. But it seems these things can be learned, because “sensory perception is as much about the cultural training of attention as it is about biological capacity.”
[Via New York Times]

Britain’s hops are bouncing back. I’m rooting for British hop farmers. Ali Capper is doing a great job of promoting English hops, and there’s considerable behind the scenes work going on to provide varieties that English brewers (and drinkers) will appreciate. But we’ll see what the 2014 harvest numbers tell us about “bouncing back.” Hop acreage in 2013 was 32 percent lower than 10 years before, falling to the lowest level since the >eighteenth century.
[Via Protz on Beer]

Reaping What You Sow — Anheuser-Busch and Goose Island Bring a Hop Farm Back to Life. More from the trip I wrote about earlier, with photos you want to turn into a calendar. Intriguing idea about how Goose Island might be changing its parent company.
[Via Good Beer Hunting]

MONDAY BEER LINKS, MUSING 09.01.14

#beerylongreads. The latest round of posts resulting from Boak & Bailey’s request for bloggers to “go long” resulted in to some excellent narratives. Set aside a little time.
[Via Boak & Bailey’s Beer Blog]

Sister Doris: Europe’s last beer-making nun. “Sister Doris is living proof that women are destined for a higher calling than simply serving beer and starring in Germany’s retrograde beer ads.”
[Via CNN Travel]

The Budweiser ironies. Read it with two questions in mind. First, what value do connections to the past have? Second, how might place factor in the discussion?
[Via Beervana]

The personal pursuit of balance. Does stuff like this get discussed at a wine bloggers conference? Among beer bloggers? It should.
[Via RJonWine.com]

The straw challenge. When we were in Poland, we often saw beers delivered with straws in them. At first we thought it was so the server would know which one to serve to which customer — including the time a beer Daria ordered showed up with a straw in it. Then we figured out the glasses most often, by a lot, ended up in front of women and also requently contained beer mixed with something else. This small experiment by Max Bahnhof suggests how bad the idea is. (I must, however, add that I disagree with his statement that “sensory experiences can not be objectively evaluated or quantified.” Trained sensory panels cannot be undervalued.
[Via Pivni Filosof]