Lew’s back, and so are the Monday beer links

MONDAY BEER LINKS, MUSING 1.11.16

Craft Beer: Big Enough To Fail.
Lew Bryson has resumed blogging and manages to add some fresh thoughts to a topic that had my eyes glazing over. Not sure I agree, but he suggests that small brewers are now big enough to fail. But I do agree with this: “What should you do? Decide what’s important to you. Decide what you want your local market to look like. Decide if you’d rather have a steady, fresh supply of a few brands, or a dicey choice of small local guys who may or may not make what you want, which is going to depend on what your local guys are like. It’s your call.”
[Via See Through a Glass]

Announcing Typology Tuesday: A Session About Styles.
Jay does not do things half way. He’s laid out a plan, announced the first topic and date (barley wine, Jan. 26), and posted a style guide that is really much more than a style guide. More like a biography.
[Via Brookston Beer Bulletin]

Diamonds, dollars and digging for victory in Enfield: The story of AB Inbev’s takeover of Camden Town.
[Via Craft Beer London]
Has Camden Town Brewery ruined craft beer for everyone?
[Via The Guardian]
Highways to a ‘post craft’ world.
[Via Stuff]
For this: “With its buzzing brewery bar, excellent merchandise and astute link-ups with other fashionable breweries …, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Camden is selling a lifestyle as much as a brewery. And historically drinkers are very attached to their local brewery, in the way they are to a local football team. It’s a stronger emotional attachment than you get with a supermarket or a bank.”
And this: “But, why? Why does CTB need to be ubiquitous in Britain, much less internationally? In any serious expansion of a brewery’s capacity, growth is talked about as if it is a self-justifying rationale. But – and this goes to the nub of the ethics around craft beer – beyond a certain point, growth is all about profit, not exciting beer.”
And this: “No matter how big you are, no matter who owns you, when the brewer decides what beer is to be made (and the rest of the company supports that sale, distribution and marketing of that) you’re on the right path whether I want to drink your beer or not.”

Bopping Around Friedrichshain. Or, Berlin-Style Surrealism.
A bit of Berlin’s indie beer scene.
[Via Thirsty Pilgrim]

The Worst Trade Ever.
So this is what it is like to be a beer trader?
[Via Make Mine Potato]

Can Homebrewers Predict the Future in Beer?
So how come they didn’t see Not Your Father’s Root Beer coming?
[Via American Homebrewers Association]

A ‘Definitive’ Guide to the Best Beer of 2015: The Breweries.
A ‘Definitive’ Guide to the Best Beer of 2015: The Beer.
[This Is Why I’m Drunk]
Blame me. I challenged Brian Roth to do this last year, and now he’d done it again.

Number of breweries in Europe 2009 – 2014.
Number of breweries in Europe 1956 – 2014.
[Via Shut Up About Barclay Perkins]
Schrödinger’s Brewery, or The Existential Difficulties of Counting Breweries.
[Via All About Beer]
New Brewery Numbers Do Not Tell the Whole Story.
A Long-Winded Way of Saying: Quit Counting Breweries.
[Via Beervana]
A lot of numbers. And be sure to read Martyn Cornell’s comment. There will be a quiz.

And speaking of numbers

Arguably the country’s premier beer event of January, or at least of the weekend just past, was the 16th Big Beers, Belgians and Barleywines Festival
in Vail, Colorado. No surprise that many members of the Brewers Association staff (the HQ is in Boulder) head to Vail (see below). But not economist Bart Watson. He went to work at the BA in mid-year of 2013, shortly after the numbers had been compiled for 2,347 breweries operating at the end of 2012. He probably didn’t know there’d be 4,144 by the end of 2015, and that they’d all be holding him hostage.

BIPS stands for Brewery Industry Production Survey. The results of the survey are published each year in the May/June issue of The New Brewer. Because most years I write a recap for one of the segments — this year it will be microbreweries — I’ve seen how hard it is to get brewers to report their numbers. There were probably more of them in Vail on Friday than there were at their desks completing the survey.