Monday beer links, courtesy (in part) of the Town Crier

Thinking about Monday beer links

True? Not true? Has hard seltzer brought us to this?

In his substack newsletter Fingers, Dave Infante reaches this conclusion:

“[Flavored Malted Beverages] aren’t just changing drinking habits. They (will) also swing beer business’ collective center of gravity away from brewers (“all about the liquid”) and back towards marketers. Or, to put it another way: from craft back to commodity.”

OK, collective center of gravity leaves room for beers left of the dial, but how much?

Also last week, I pointed to a podcast/transcript about “How Hops Got Sommified.” In it, there is some discussion about brewers prominently listing hop varieties.

“That is done under the guise of giving the drinker more information. In fact, you’re kind of making people feel dumb because they don’t know what to do with that information,” says Zach Geballe. “To me, it is analogous to this thing in wine that I find incredibly frustrating, when you go to a winery or event and all the person talking to you about the wine can do is recite the technical data of the wine.”

Fairly or not, at a point during the conversation I thought of a brewery (Flossmoor Station) blog post from long ago (2008) written by an actual brewer (Matt Van Wyck) about “Over Analysis Syndrome.”

At the risk of being part of that problem, I’ll simply disagree with the idea that providing drinkers with information about the raw materials used to make their beer is a bad thing. As I wrote last Wednesday, when a consumer knows a hop by name she is less likely to be considered a commodity — as is the beer to which she adds aroma and flavor.

Hard truths
T-rex hates craft beer
[From DC Beer.]

Boak & Bailey nicely summarized the “tussle over the attendance of breweries at a festival organised by Danish brewing company Mikkeller.”

This is, as they say, an “ongoing story.” You’ll find the list of breweries originally scheduled to attend or pour beer here, and see the breweries that have withdrawn here (scroll to the bottom).

Hard truths II
“Knowing what I know now, I wouldn’t do it. A brewery is a black hole you throw money down. Advice for someone opening a brewpub is: Expect to work long hours. Be determined and have patience. It may take years to establish your brewery and make a profit.”
– Lost Coast Brewery founder Barbara Groom, interviewed in Los Altos Town Crier.

A mission
Just your typical brewery origin story: An orchestra conductor and businessman meet coaching their sons’ baseball team, solidify their friendship while homebrewing and decide to open a brewery. The profits will go to paying for music lessons and instruments for Minnesota kids whose families couldn’t otherwise afford it.

Kernza
“Kernza is a potentially revolutionary grain — a self-sustaining, climate change-fighting wheat that can boost soil and water health and keep carbon locked in the ground.”

So how long before a brewery will use it to make beer? Wait. That’s already happened.

Hazy beers=Disco?
Go for this sentence — “In other words, Sierra Nevada launching a hazy IPA was like the Rolling Stones getting down with the kids and turning to disco at the end of the ‘70s” — and stay for the rest of the story.

RIP
Ed visits the (soon to be former) Eldridge Pope brewery. Plenty of pictures. Plenty to be sad about.

Daria and I visited the brewery in 1994, and by a bit of luck spent a late afternoon rambling in the nearby countryside with brewery chairman Christopher Pope. According to the Wayback Machine, “As the sun set, the sheep actually glowed. ‘Very Hardy-ish,’ Pope said.

Not beer
Another 900 pages, another “Oxford Companion,” this one about spirits and cocktails.

“One of the things that you’re taught if you hang around master distillers is that distillation is extremely precise work. Then you read a description of someone in the mountains of Peru in 1900 making a still out of a clay pot, the broken bottom of another one, a bamboo tube and some mud and making a perfectly acceptable sugar-cane spirit.”

Always for pleasure