Monday beer briefing: Ted, Harvey’s & Afro.Beer.Chick

09.16.19, BEER & FERMENTATION LINKS

1) Racist email sent to Chicago beer writer leads to positive international Twitter response: #IAmCraftBeer.
The disclaimer: Chuck Klosterman commented on a podcast recently that journalists tend to overrate the importance of what they see on Twitter, and I certainly understand the world does not look like my Twitter feed. I follow @afrobeerchick
 and @jnikolbeckham so I watched this unfold, first seeing familiar names/faces in my feed, then new ones as awareness increased. Change is a process, and I think it is OK to be optimistic this will speed the process. I recommend (again) you also read what Afro.Beer.Chick wrote after Fresh Fest, and listen to Garrett Oliver on the Drinking Partner podcast.

2) Beer Culture Summit.
Read the agenda and plan accordingly.

3) Cream of the crop.
4) Inside Harvey’s.
Jeff Alworth teases us with beautiful pictures in 4), promoting an upcoming podcast interview. While waiting, consider the questions The Pub Curmudgeon asks about why Harvey’s has found favor with the craft fraternity. “Going back forty years, they were just a small curiosity in the roll-call of independent breweries, to be be filed alongside the likes of Burts and Paines. According to the 1978 Good Beer Guide, they had a mere 24 pubs, of which only half sold real ale. They also provided beer to the 26 pubs of their erstwhile local rivals Beards, who had closed their own brewery in the early 1950s due to a yeast infection, but only half of these had real ale. Yes, their beer was good, but in the South-East south of the Thames Gales, King & Barnes, Youngs and Shepherd Neame were more highly regarded.”

5) Chicago craft pioneer Golden Prairie returns 20 years later. Has its time passed or finally arrived?
Yes, there are young brewers who will tell brewers who were making beer 25 years ago that their beers are irrelevant. There is every chance they will be wrong. Because, “Ted was the artistic one.”

6) How the Hell is White Claw Hard Seltzer Outselling Budweiser?
Selztergate is official. Lew Bryson chimes in. And asks: “So, will hard seltzer be around next summer or even this winter?”

KVEIK, NOT KVEIK

7) 10 Picks from Burnt City & Omega Yeast’s Inaugural Kveik Fest.
I had hoped to find a recap of the festival that was about more than a few of the beers, but this list is an excellent reminder that kveik has a value well beyond trying to recreate Norwegian farmhouse ales. I do wish, though, there was more detail about how using kveik made the beers different than they would have been were they fermented with a different yeast strain.

8) Muri: A Mystery Solved.
“It has nothing to do with Norwegian farmhouse ale, and was just an honest mistake by someone trying to rescue an old family yeast.”

WINE

9) How the Orange-Wine Fad Became an Irresistible Assault on Pleasure.
10) Orange wine is not ‘an assault on pleasure,’ it’s a window into our changing tastes.
So much fun. “New York Times wine critic Eric Asimov called the article ‘the equivalent of a mad Yelp review.’ It was ‘largely uninformative, slightly misleading,’ according to Rachel Signer, editor of the natural-wine magazine Pipette. ‘Without context these trend pieces perpetuate cultural erasure and undermines a subject people obviously care about,’ wrote Whetsone magazine founder Stephen Satterfield. So what was the point?”

FROM TWITTER

MORE LINKS

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