musing

MONDAY BEER LINKS, MUSING 07.14.14

The Jim Koch magic eat-yeast-and-don’t-get-drunk trick revisited. NPR’s The Salt invests a lot of time and more than 1,000 words before concluding, “we didn’t learn the ultimate trick to drinking without getting drunk, but we did enjoy monitoring our experience of intoxication.” Including the “sweet spot” for getting buzzed. (0.04 BAC if you are too lazy to read that far.)

[Via NPR]

“All in all, the BJCP system rewards conformity and ‘cloning’ while punishing creativity.” OK, that’s a little bit provocative, but Boak and Bailey put it in boldface midway through their post “On Judging” – so give it a read and see what you think.

[Via Boak & Bailey’s Beer Blog]

Saison. Saison. Saison. In a rather strange post at Slate, Pete Mortensen offers major beer producers suggestions what they should be brewing, including “tart saisons.” Jeff Alworth is not impressed with Mortensen’s thinking, but “here’s the thing: he may very well have a point.” And although the headline reads, “Why We Should Take Beer Styles Less Seriously” Derek Dellinger is really talking about saison(s). I’m a sucker for any posts that concludes, “…. Okay, maybe all I’m really saying here is, if I ever have kids, I want them to grow up having very strong opinions about the microbial content of saisons.”

[Via Slate, Beervana, and Bear Flavored Ales]

Why bars charge what they do for beer. Which is different than why you are willing (or not) to pay the markup.

[Via serious eats]

Mexican Logger: Simply What Beer Is All About. My favorite post of the week, and the thought I want to leave you with.

I’ve had Double Black IPA’s aged in oak barrels, beers with two adjunct ingredients for every color in the rainbow, IPA’s steeped in hops in a french-press, sours that are fermented with 100% Brett yeasts, pumpkin beers that bring in money for local non-profits, beers aged in rum barrels, beers made with ingredients from local hikes, I’ve had beers that are taken and aged five different ways, beers that were a collaboration between over ten Colorado breweries, and I’ve had some of the tastiest cask beers ever (I never did get to try those mushroom beers though). The beer that stands out above them all is Ska Brewing’s Mexian Logger. To put it plainly, it’s the only one that made me realize that sometimes in my effort to try everything that is new and special, I miss out on the great beers that I can drink repeatedly, all night long while hanging out with my pals. This beer reminded me that sometimes beer is simply about drinking with friends, relaxing, and enjoying the end of a long day.

[Via Focus on the Beer]

MONDAY BEER LINKS, MUSING 07.07.14

England’s Franconia. Add Dudley and the Black Country to the list of must visit destinations in England. Next time somebody asks for an example of beer from a place I’m pointing to this URL.

[Via I Might Have a Glass of Beer]

Why Beer History? Tom Cizauskas turned his blog over to historian Maureen O’Prey for The Session (it was Friday; I lose blogging karma points because things were silent here). She sets the bar high, “As a historian, my mandate is to unearth the accounts of these brewers and share them with the world. Every brewer’s story should be documented, however grand, or seemingly inconsequential.”

[Via Yours for Good Fermentables]

The Art of Craft Beer. Who is Art Larrance (other than the buy who started the Oregon Brewers Festival)? A profile.

[Via Oregon Beer Growler]

Cal Poly Pomona to offer new beer brewing class, build microbrewery on campus. I’m passing this along mostly because I didn’t know that California was considering a “sip and spit” law that allows students younger than 21 to taste beer (and wine) when they take particular college course. But it also reminds me of a question that Dr. Michael Lewis (who started the brewing program at UC-Davis before Sierra Nevada Brewing was even open) asked at the Craft Brewers Conference: Who will be accrediting the institutions that are accrediting the brewers?

[Via San Gabriel Valley Tribune]

Anthony Bourdain’s Theory on the Foodie Revolution. What if you replaced the words food, cooking and eating with beer, brewing and drinking in the first paragraph? “It won’t be surprising if cultural historians look back on the first two decades of this century as The Era of Crazed Oral Gratification. I’m speaking of the fetishization of food, of cooking and eating, of watching other people cooking and eating, that has become omnipresent across all platforms, all media, all screens and all palates in our great nation.”

And that’s before Bourdain cuts loose.

[Via Smithsonian magazine]

MONDAY BEER LINKS, MUSING 06.23.14 & 6.30.14

OK, it’s Wednesday, not Monday, but I have some catching up to do.

First, a quick combination from print. In the July issue of Beer Advocate magazine Andy Crouch writes “We are unquestionably in the Age of IPA” and suggests that there is “some hazard in letting a single style define craft beer so completely.” I don’t think that’s going to be a problem, in part because of what he hits on at the end. Flavor is driving escalating sales of beers with flavor. That reads a little simplistic, I know, but the point is we’re talking about new flavors, not just hop aromas and flavors. Meanwhile, Josh Bernstein writes about the evolution of IPA in Imbibe magazine (linked because it is online, but you might want to buy the magazine to get the nice timeline that accompanies the story).

Now, two weeks worth of links and a minimum of musing.

Is Sam Adams Too Big to Be Craft Beer? I missed the press release while we were in Poland, but apparently Tony Magee of Lagunitas is now in charge of determining what constitutes “craft beer.” From the article: “Magee said that Sam Adams has ‘so little to do with what beer is doing today.’ In other words, Sam Adams may have once been craft, but its size and lack of innovation mean it can no longer qualify.” Enos Sarris, who wrote the article, apparently agrees, concluding, “It started a craft beer revolution, and then craft beer’s evolution passed it by.” Musing: Bullshit. [Via FiveThirtyEight]

When Craft Beer Becomes a Commodity and Big Brewers Making Specialty Beer: Lessons from MillerCoors. A combination from Jeff Alworth meant to be read in combination. Musing: Sierra Nevada Brewing will make more than one million barrels (as much as the entire “craft” segment minus contract-brewed Samuel Adams and Pete’s Wicked Ales just 20 years ago) this year. Friday night at The Second City in Chicago I expect to have a hard choice to make between drinking Sierra Nevada Pale Ale and locally brewed Half Acre Daisy Cutter Pale Ale. They are not interchangeable. [Via Beervana]

Is Sierra Nevada Overvalued? The Curious Case of the “Boring” Beer. Musing: See above. [Via This Is Why I’m Drunk]

Style from Adrian Tierney-Jones provokes What Are the Elements of Style? from Alan McLeod. Musing: Strunk and White would be proud. [Via A Good Beer Blog]

Rising Hops Prices Make Craft Brewers Jumpy and The real value of hops. The first one is behind a firewall, so if the link doesn’t work be creative. The second provides perspective. Musing: Things are just starting to get interesting. [Via Wall Street Journal and Brewer’s Guardian]

Your Favorite Local Brewery is Not Selling Out. Musing: I expected more after seeing the headline, but the comments add another layer of persepctive. [Via The Full Pint]

Blind Tasting: Unreliable but Necessary. “That is one of the most useful features of blind tasting: to be disturbed. To ask yourself, do I really like what I like? Or do I like it because I think I should?” Musing: I drink plenty of beer “blind” because I judge beer, and I usually don’t end up knowing what those beers were. I find myself less interested these days in learning what I might in a blind tasting than I will seeing, and learning about, just what I am drinking. [Via Palate Press]

MONDAY BEER LINKS, MUSING 06.16.14

Ten vital commandments for localism in beer. The list itself is from 2012, so start with the preface.

[Via The Potable Curmudgeon]

Local ingredients, but not so local drinkers. Belgian brewer André Janssens grows his own barley and some of his own hops. But he ships 90 percent of his beer to America. How do you think these first two links fit together?

[Via Larsblog]

If You Want To Know What’s In Your Beer… I tweeted once on the way to the National Homebrewers Conference and once from the conference (a picture with a fictional caption some people seem to have believed), an indication that I’m not all that good a social media, and — the point here — a reminder how insular such events can be. Thus when I briefly noticed considerable fuss related to the latest blathering from the Beer Food Babe I shrugged. It’s amazing how one of Jeff Carlson’s sublime ciders can change your perspective.

But as I was catching up with my feeds on Sunday I was struck with the questions Alan McLeod raises. Transparency is good, be it brewery operators revealing what’s in the beer they sell and how they make it or or others who may have a vested interest selling, boosting, writing about, litigating for or against, whatever. Ever since Frank Prial at the New York Times let Jack McAuliffe say that he his made his beer without preservatives and other chemicals that Big Brewers employed smaller (and not so small anymore) breweries have benefited from the notion the beer they sell is more pure. In a sense, lack of transparency on the part of larger breweries makes this easier. When Anheuser-Busch — or Yuengling or Boston Beer or Lagunitas — details all the ingredients they use and all the chemicals (and things like chemicals) that are involved in the process of growing ingredients, brewing beer and so on (it is quite the list) then it is easier to ask the brewer at your local just which of those were also involved in the production of your beer.

Surprise, surprise, surprise.

[Via A Good Beer Blog]

Evangelise Jolly. Adrian Tierny-Jones writes, “It’s your sacred duty to evangelise about beer, someone said to me recently, drunk of course, both of us drunk …” A sacred duty to evangelise about beer? Quite a question. Adrian has quite an answer.

[Via Called To The Bar]

If we were starting a new blog tomorrow. Each Saturday, Boak & Bailey post a variety of links, often longer reads, that may even overlap with the ones I’ve collected (thus “scooping” my Monday links). This weeks’s examples address the current state of beer blogging, at the end offering a bit of advice. Don’t skip straight to the finish — read the links along the way.

[Via Boak & Bailey’s Beer Blog]

MONDAY BEER LINKS, MUSING 06.09.14

Can You Taste An Old Growth Forest In This Beer? Adventures with Eric Steen of Beers Made By Walking. I’d answer the question in the headline, “Yes, if you’ve tasted it before.” I’m goofy enough that were I doing this I’d want to spend the summer tasting the same “parts” over and over, mixing and matching, learning which work together, which suit my taste.

[Via Oregon Public Radio]

Do We Owe a Debt to the Regionals? Do breweries deserve to be supported just because they managed to remain in business when others were closing? This isn’t exactly the question Boak & Bailey are asking — “real ale” is involved, CAMRA, a smaller country — but that’s the question their post had me asking myself.

[Via Boak & Bailey]

You won’t believe this one weird trick they used to fly beer to the D-Day troops in Normandy. As all dispatches from Martyn Cornell, thoroughly fascinating.

[Via Zythophile]

Bill’s UK Adventure: American Craft Beer Across the Pond. I’m not sure I believe Bill Covaleski of Victory Brewing visited five towns in the UK, top to bottom, over nine hectic days (while his family grew frustrated and his lawn turns into a jungle) just so we could read about it. But he writes, “… really, I did. You’d only be reading this if a) you are interested in beer and its future, or b) you live vicariously through the internet.”

[Via Victory Brewing]

Could Rising Costs Mean the End of Craft Beer Brewers? Just to answer the question in the headline: “No.”

[Via Entrepreneur]