Some good reading from the past week after a reminder that Alan McLeod will host “The toe in the water revival edition of The Session.” The topic is “What is the best thing to happen in good beer since 2018?” Participation is welcomed.
LEDE OF THE WEEK
Alcohol research has a problem with pleasure. On the one hand, pleasure is a difficult phenomenon to research, at least from an epidemiological or clinical perspective. On the other, because of its predominating focus on harms, public health-oriented alcohol research and advocacy can appear to find pleasure problematic in the moral sense. Although most people drink because they enjoy it, much public health discourse downplays pleasure as either marginally significant or as a kind of misperception driven by external forces including marketing, custom, social norms and peer pressure.
From Taking pleasure seriously: Should alcohol research say more about fun?
This is something of a cheat. The link is to an academic paper (h/T Phil Mellows). There have been plenty of posts the past week related the surgeon general’s warning about alcohol and risk of cancer. Lots of good, bad and ugly. I am linking to none of them. There is no denying the negative impact alcohol has on your body. It is stupid to claim otherwise. The rest I leave to Mary-Chapin Carpenter.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“When I know I’m lighting the fire, that’s when I love to have (Leann Folláin). It’s a beer to savour and enjoy. I’ll make sure the doors are closed, that I’m not going to be disturbed. It’s something you want to spend a bit of time with.”
— Ed Cahill, who runs Tully’s pub in Carlow town
From The Irish for Stout — O’Hara’s Leann Folláin and the Making of a Cult Classic
YOU MIGHT ALSO ENJOY
Rule #1: Beer Is Almost Never About Beer. “The idea of having a beer comes with guilt, obligation, wonder, intellectual curiosity, respect for tradition, desire for novelty, camaraderie, budgetary concern, the potential to do someone a good turn, and the sheer joy of bouncing around the city like a pinball. The promise of an idle afternoon that might be wasted but isn’t frittered away. Hopefully people will be happy to see me.” To which I will add, it’s also OK if at least sometimes it is about beer.
In the year 2050. Jeff Alworth followed up on the Taplines discussion between Dave Infante and Maureen Ogle that I linked to last week. You’ll have to click to learn what he expects to see in 25 years, influenced by considering what has changed in the last 25 years. That got me thinking in more specific terms. What will be the best selling beer from Sierra Nevada? Will Marika Josephson and Aaron Kleidon still be making beer at Scratch Brewing? Will Cannonball Creek Brewing sell hazy beers?
Hop Water Is Poised for a Breakout Year. I am a fan of hop water, but am more interested in local products than those that are widely distributed. I was particularly impressed last year by ones from Austin Beerworks and Noon Whistle (suburban Chicago). Hoplark (mentioned in the story) is about a 30-minute drive from our house. I visited there in spring of 2022 and wrote about it in Hop Queries. Sorry, that’s not archived, so I will pass along something co-founder Dean Eberhardt said at the time: “When you take away the sweetness (found in beer) the taste becomes so personalized.”
More hops. Not only does Josh Bernstein write for the New York Times, but they write about him. I would apologize for pointing to a list (ick) of trends (double ick), but one that includes provenance and the environment (see Brewing Local) and new hop products (see Hop Queries) . . . well, it turns me into a sell out.
Influencers And Social Media Are Making Whiskey An Unwinnable Game. Where have you heard this before? And where does it all end?
ALWAYS FOR PLEASURE
Punks, pool and arty postcards – crawling the pubs of Easton. “From the outside [the tavern] doesn’t look anything special, or especially inviting.
“The moment we walked through the door, however, we realised we’d read the signals wrong. It was busy, warm, and lively. The crowd varied from twentysomething to 70+, from work boots to student scarves, from chess players to pool players, from tattooed cider punks to rockabilly hipsters.
“It felt like a pub balanced on the sweet spot between traditional and gentrified, where incomers to the neighbourhood had been made welcome but not allowed to dominate.”