musing

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]

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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]

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MONDAY BEER LINKS, MUSING 08.25.14

Of Pints and Prices. Oliver Gray examines the dollars and cents in the price of a pint of beer. The numbers will vary, and I don’t see packaging and marketing costs in there, but he assembles a perfect graphic reminder that there’s more to making a beer than the ingredients. And practically speaking, look at the cost of hops in a pint: 6 cents. There’s been some saber rattling of late, suggesting that higher hop prices will drive up the cost of beer. Even if they doubled, and they won’t, that doesn’t add much to production cost, does it?
[via Literature & Libation]

Kentucky hops farmers are tapping into the craft beer market. Speaking of hops . . . I don’t mean to come off as a curmudgeon when discussing efforts to revive hop growing outside the Northwest (yes, even Kentucky farmers once grew hops; “five or six bales” in 1873). I’m more optimistic about the future of local hops than I was a couple of years ago. But the fact is that farmers closer to the equator (like in Kentucky and North Carolina) have additional disadvantages — hops may grow there but the yields will be lower. One reason I’m more optimistic is meeting farmers who understand what they are up against and have adjusted accordingly. I’m not impressed to read about a farmer who has planted an acre of hops and there is a suggestion he could be harvesting 6,000 pounds before long. That would be a world record, by a lot.
[Via Lexington Herald-Leader]

The world on your sofa. Home drinking.
[Via Boak Bailey’s Beer Blog]

Mexican microbreweries confront beer giants. Confront might seem like a strong word, but consider this: “It took three and a half years but last year they ruled that Modelo and Cuauhtemoc-Moctezuma could no longer exclude craft beers from bars and restaurants.”
[Via Aljazerra]

Does ‘craft’ really matter? The comments following what DRAFT beer editor Chris Staten has to say about Widmer Brothers Rejection Ale (the label at the top, via mybeerbuzz.com) and this screed, “DRAFT magazine does craft beer huge disservice with “Does ‘craft’ really matter,” illustrate how emotional some people still get about “craft versus crafty.” I’m in the midst of researching a related story for a print article, and left to wonder if what in the interest of brevity we’ll call “craft beer” has grown large enough that in some instances we’re talking about “beer trees in a craft forest,” or if it is still small enough that “craft trees in a beer forest” is more appropriate.

Well, she was an American girl
Raised on promises
She couldn’t help thinkin’
That there was a little more to life somewhere else
                – From American Girl by Tom Petty

We come on the ship they call the Mayflower
We come on the ship that sailed the moon
We come in the age’s most uncertain hour
and sing an American tune
But it’s all right, it’s all right
                – From American Tune by Paul Simon

A couple of days ago, Stephen Beaumont spotted a few kids on his lawn and wandered outside, holding a goblet hand blown in Belgium. He chased those rascals off, yelling: “It’s NOT Belgian or Even Belgian-Style. It’s NOT Belgian or Even Belgian-Style. It’s NOT Belgian or Even Belgian-Style.” He then proceeded to quote something he wrote on Facebook.

After my personal déjà vu moment passed (on Sunday I sent this text message to a homebrewer, “You mean an American beer fermented with a Belgian-sourced yeast.”) I got to thinking about how much sense it would be to replace Belgian and Belgium in this sentence:

“Belgian beer is beer that is brewed and fermented in Belgium. Period.”

German beer is beer that is brewed and fermented in Germany. Period.
American beer is beer that is brewed and fermented in America. Period.
Kansas City beer is beer that is brewed and fermented in Kansas City. Period.

That does not leave me feeling satisfied. Just to be clear, I’m not arguing that Mr. Beaumont was wrong. I would have chased those rowdy kids off my lawn, too. But I’m left thinking there’s more to what makes a beer Belgian or Polish or Floridian than if it qualifies for a passport by birthright.

Certainly what it means to be an American beer these days.

MONDAY BEER LINKS, MUSING 08.18.14

The villagers who bought their beloved local pub to save it from closure. Reading this story might make you feel as good as you will all week, no matter how great your week is. (No, really, I hope you have a wonderful week.)

“It’s much more than a pub, it’s the hub of our village,” says John Soady, who is one of the Anglers Rest’s new board of directors.

“It’s at the centre of everything, for families with young children right up to older people in their 80s. It’s an informal atmosphere where people meet and talk rather than just being nameless faces.”

[Via the Mirror]

Why the Micropub Association should be furious with Camra. Perhaps more about the British pub than you think you need to know, but there’s a reason the post has drawn 30 comments (maybe more by now).
[Via Martyn Cornell’s Zythophile]

Craft beer: Tastes great, fewer taxes. About those tax deals cities, counties and states across the country are handing out to either get, or stay, in the brewing game … are they really such a great idea?
[Via Politico]

Meet the Tuppers, D.C.’s Original Beer Geeks. This story is part of the Washington City Paper’s Beer Issue. I pointed to another storty one Twitter last week, the monstrously long, “What Matters More: The Quest for New Beer, or the Beer?” Worth your time, but you need to set aside a little. An interesting pair, the second about the endless search for “whales” and the first about the search for something else.
[Via Washington City Paper]

How Much is Too Much? This must be the topic on everybody’s lips, because it keeps coming up. I understand that it’s inside baseball and it has been talked to death, but this commentary from Harry Schuhmacher includes original thinking.
[Via Beer Business Daily]