If you guessed the beer on the far right, sorry, you are wrong.
The styles, left to right at Angry James Brewing Company in Silverthorne, Colorado, are: IPA, a hoppy light lager, German pils, and hefeweizen (a very good one, in fact).
When I asked, before ordering, if Tricentric IPA (the beer on the left) was a see-through beer the man behind the bar did not hesitate. “West Coast IPA.” That’s the world we live in.
The other day, Em Sauter at Pints & Panels tweeted, “Would love to do a book filled with illustrated drawings of the best places to drink beer around the world. This is my favorite from Brussels- A la Mort Subite.” And posted a drawing of said drinking establishment.
I suggested an additional idea: How about a pop-up book?
What came to my mind when I saw her drawing of Mort Subite and thought about what her vision of McSorley’s Old Ale House might look like was “The Pop-Up Wine Book” by Hugh Johnson, published in 1989. We have many pop-up books, and this is one of the least engaging. In fact, it has been so long since I opened it that I had forgotten there is only one building, the “chateau,” inside.
What I am really wishing for is something better, with both breweries and pubs/cafes/taverns/saloons/taprooms. It should be a really fat book.
Perhaps the wires in my brain simply got crossed this week. I have no interest in commenting on the news after news after news related to the business of beer that just keeps coming. (Take a look at Brewbound and keep scrolling if you think you missed something. Or, if you recently did something you feel you should be punished for, go directly to Beer Twitter.)
Instead my thoughts keep going back to June of 2020, when economists Lester Jones (National Beer Wholesalers Association) and Bart Watson (Brewers Association) discussed what was going on with beer sales only a few months after the world shut down. Jones planted this seed:
“When you look how the brewing industry has evolved . . . in that 2008, 2010 recession we saw a lot of different business models. We saw people who were a little bit more of the taproom model, where they wanted to be small, they wanted to be local. They had certain business models they were pursuing. Then you had players who were a little more lifestyle oriented, and they were the guys working on their second careers. They were doing it for a lifestyle versus other people who were doing it for a living.
“I think at this point we’re going to see a division in the industry as the people who were in it for the lifestyle of having a small little brewpub in a local community versus the people who were in there with the intentions of growing a real brewing business, widely distributed, with a widely recognized brand. These two business models are going to split off. This is the event that will do it.”
The beer business and culture. Culture and the beer business. Can they be separated?
There will not be a quiz.
– Jenny Pfäfflin kicked it off last Friday with this tweet that when I last looked had 508 likes.
I don't have much to do today pic.twitter.com/ASlM1ATV6o
— Jenny Pfäfflin (@jennypfafflin) November 26, 2021
– Joe Stange followed with this.
As happens, threads shot out in different directions. Feel free to explore.
– Yesterday, Alan McLeod pointed to to all of this in his Beer News Notes, choosing to highlight a comment from Garrett Oliver:
“I don’t ‘know’ a lot about jazz, but I still enjoy jazz. And I really don’t care what a jazz critic thinks I need to know – I’m having my own good time and I will not be fenced in by anyone. I’ve worked to demystify beer for more than 30 years. It’s supposed to be fun. And it is . . .”
– His post alerted Jeff Alworth to all this ruckus and he honed in on another Oliver comment (why in a moment):
“Because once your definitions and terminology mean nothing, your culture is ruined and cannot be recovered. Ask the French how they won. And then take a good hard look at the German brewing industry. Words have meaning (ask the Republicans). And nomenclature is culture.”
– And Stephen Beaumont joined the conversation, choosing still another Oliver comment:
“Yes, and that communication is super powerful. The French know this. Champagne is Champagne, period. Caviar is caviar. Diamonds are diamonds. If your words mean nothing and it’s the Wild West, you lose. Period. Might take a while . . . but you lose.”
[Last dash] Back to Alworth. Wednesday he asked: “What is ‘good’ in the context of a hazy IPA?”
I’m staying out of this. I’ll leave it to Tom Vanderbilt, author of “You May Also Like: Taste in an Age of Endless Choice.” (In Chapter 6 he writes about “beer, cats and dirt,” visits the Great American Beer Festival and talks with judges. They included Oliver, who also shows up elsewhere in the book. Vanderbilt also mentions beer in an opinion piece in The New York Times. But the beer references are not essential to his theses.)
So from the Times article (oops, I lied, more dashes):
– “The human brain is a pattern-matching machine. Categories help us manage the torrent of information we receive and sort the world into easier-to-read patterns.”
– “When we like something, we seem to want to break it down into further categories, away from the so-called basic level. Birders do not just see ‘birds,’ gardeners do not just see ‘flowers’; they see specific variations. The more we like something, the more we like to categorize it.”
– “When we struggle to categorize something, we like it less.”
Not sure this explains the popularity of IPA, hazy IPA or hard seltzer — but maybe I am missing something.
Following up, as promised, on a discussion about The New York Times article headlined, “Last Call for the Beer Bar?” it seems fair to start with words from Josh Bernstein, who wrote the article that might otherwise been headlined, “The Evolution of the Beer Bar.”
“There is most definitely a place for beer bars that are integrated into a community and serve it well, with well-chosen beer and other beverages,” he wrote on Twitter.
Isn’t that the way it has always been? Flip through the “Bars of Reading” (1988), Pat Baker’s “Beer and Bar Atlas” (1988), either of the two books on the subject Daria Labinsky and I wrote, “Beer Travelers Guide” (1995) and “Beer Lover’s Guide” (2000), or others that have followed in the same vein since and that is pretty obvious.
Does the draft selection need to be “better” than the Northeast Taproom in Reading? When Pete Cammarano bought the place in 1983 the draft choices were Budweiser and Schmidts. By the time “Bars of Reading” was published five years later Pete offered the best beer selection in Berks County. Authors Suds Kroge and Dregs Donnigan wrote, “Pete is the answer . . . but we forget the question.”
We first visited in 1994 and fell in love with the place. We went back in 1997 and fell in love again. The beer selection had evolved. Pete sold the place long ago, but this picture from the taproom’s Facebook page suggests beer is still taken seriously.
At the end of 1987 there were 73 U.S. breweries operating that opened after Fritz Maytag bought Anchor Brewing in 1965, plus Anchor itself. Forty-four of the 55 small breweries that began selling beer in 1988 were brewpubs, compared to only 29 brewpubs total when the year started. Several of those brewpubs grew into very large breweries, and they are well known today (Goose Island, Deschutes, North Coast, Great Lakes, etc.).