musing

Today is a day off for many workers in the United States, but not those where hops are grown. Harvest has begun, and Monday is just like Sunday or Tuesday.

The image at the top was created by Christie Tirado, whose artwork is being featured at Dry Dock Brewing in Aurora, Colorado, as part of National Hispanic Culture Month. She’ll be at the brewery to talk about her art and her mission on Friday. Details were in my August Hop Queries.

Since it is Monday, here are a few links:

– Cold IPA is not a style.
Huh?

Although it is not defined in the 2021 BJCP Style Guidelines, guidelines principal author Gordon Strong recently summarized a way to tell a drinker unfamiliar with “cold IPA” what flavors to expect. That’s the goal of having “styles,” right? It is a cross between an IPA and an American light lager.

– Protected Geographic Indication (PGI) style guidelines.

– Of course it took “took several months of planning and tests to find the perfect mix of biscuits, strawberry puree, grain, hops, yeast and water.”

– Pub love.

– Tmavé Pivo.

“(They) are meant to get people talking about beer, not to encourage people to be beer police.”

– Gordon Strong, speaking at Copa Cervecera Mitad del Mundo in Quito, Ecuador.

Read last week: What Would Beer Taste Like Without The Internet? – A Rebuttal, from Jordan St. John, replying to a post by Jeff Alworth.

I pass it along not only because I think the combination of five words at the top should be put to music, but because it helps explain why the speed at which beers that don’t taste like beers that came before are being introduced.

Fifty years after Fritz Maytag bought control of Anchor Brewing Company in 1965, he talked about the importance of tradition, at least in his mind. “Mind you, there was no beer in the world more traditional than ours. Pure water, good yeast, malted barley, hops. Period,” he said in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle. “No additives, no chemicals, no nothing. That was a theme we felt strong about. To make old-fashioned beer in a pure, simple way.”

Although I might like the beers being referred to, I also have reservations about the phrase “beer flavored beer.” Mr. Tradition shouldn’t act as a gatekeeper.

With that in mind, from St. John:

“[Today] you’ve got tens of thousands of brains working on creation in concert in what may as well be a massively decentralized iteratively developmental simulator, sharing their data with each other in real time via social media. The technology has turned us into a computational device.

“When you see a brewer or brewery post on social media telling you about their product, whether it’s the strength, technique, malt bill, hop varieties, hopping rate, etc, they’re not only trying to position it to the consumer, they’re participating in a larger evolutionary discourse that is extant across an entire industry which has more participants than at any point in global history.”

You might also find these interesting:

– When friends actually did let friends drive drunk.

– Josh Noel confesses he owns 147 hard plastic beer can holders. I’ve always taken them back to breweries (not necessarily the ones they came from) when I was buying beer at their door. I would be happy to trade them for a pour.

– Interesting observations in a story about the young bosses of Silicon Valley who rode their unicorns to fame and fortune. May apply to some brewing industry members.

A reckoning. “Patience for visionaries wore thin. Founder-led companies started to seem like liabilities, not assets.”

A familiar attitude. “In start-up lore, Mark Zuckerberg pioneered the modern boy boss. Carrying business cards that read, “I’m C.E.O., bitch” and ruffling Wall Street feathers with his ‘disrespectful’ hoodie . . .”

I did not find what I was looking for earlier this week thumbing through wrinkled pages of All About Beer magazines (a reminder of the time it rained a lot in New Mexico — shout out to “Better Call Saul” fans — and our garage flooded), but I did find a story from 1998 making predictions about what’s next.

(Being old and a creature of habit, I will likely continue to dig through boxes of paper, magazines included, when I am poking into the past. You don’t have to. The resurrected All About Beer archive, which as I type this goes back to 2002 and continues to grow, will serve you better.)

I love these sorts of stories, because they get things wrong and make us laugh. Except this one actually stands up surprisingly well.

Here’s the tl;dr version:

1. Macro micros are out; local beers are in

2. Lagers, lagers everywhere
Some came true faster than others

3. Domestic imports
”Foreign” beers would be brewed in the US

4. Here come the Corona clones

5. New beer hot spots, and must-have beers

6. Blurring the distinctions between micro-breweries and brewpubs, between contract breweries and brick-and-mortar breweries.

7. Mergers and buyouts will continue

And now, Greg Kitsock wrote, “let’s go out on a limb . . .”

8. Great availability of craft beer in cans

9. Non-alcohol craft beers

10. Small brewery-distilleries

He picked the right limb.

Parts of this press release could have appeared in print in 1988 (at least in the United States), or during any of the last 30-plus years. I’m posting it in total, but if you’re feeling busy here is a summary:

– The winner of the competition did not come for Generation Z or Generation Y, but Gen X.
– He brewed a 16% ABV stout, the strongest beer ever to win a CAMRA award. It aged for five years before it was judged.
– It was the first beer he brewed.
– He’s going to start a brewery.

But of course . . .

And now the press release.

The “brewer of tomorrow” has been unveiled at the Great British Beer Festival at the first-ever homebrew competition hosted by the prestigious event.