Monday beer links: Disclosure is not the point

MONDAY BEER LINKS, MUSING 08.03.15

We are on holiday (as opposed to a “beercation”) so here are links to a few stories posted by early last Friday morning. In addition, this will be the only announcement that Monday Beer Links will be totally on holiday next week. I’m sure glad Boak & Bailey promised to be back first of August.

Critical Drinking — #lookatmyjunket
[Via Good Beer Hunting]
Full Disclosure, False Dichotomy.
[Via Literature & Libation]
For the record, I am certain that neither Michael Kiser nor Oliver Gray has sold his soul to AB InBev and that they each genuinely feel their integrity has been unfairly questioned. But their protests are so long and so earnest I half expected them to lapse into iambic pentameter.

Up front I’ll admit I come from a different era. About the same time I learned about the importance of journalistic independence I perfected the ability to read type cast in metal upside down and backwards, and that did not turn out to be an essential life skill. Curiously, it seems to me the value of the former should be particularly easy for fans of what’s called craft beer to understand, because independence is on its cornerstone (it’s also part of the official definition, but that’s coincidental). Transparency and disclosure are only part of a process that begins with questioning yourself — about your motives, your biases, and anything else you don’t care to admit — long before readers get around to it.

Fair or not, readers’ low expectations come with the territory. Consider a few sentences from Leonard Shecter’s “The Jocks” (written in 1970): “No matter what has gone before, I question the necessity for bribing a sportswriter. George Weiss, recently retired president of the New York Mets, once put it this way: ‘To hell with newspapersmen. You can buy them with a steak.’ This might be overstatement. Sports reporters who like their jobs so much have a tendency to want to please the management of the sport organizations.” Unfortunately, “You can buy them with a beer” has quite a ring to it.

Related: A (beer) critic’s job? Demolishing the bad? From more than 8 years ago.

Are Alabama’s breweries making a profit? ‘It depends.’
“I don’t know that anybody in the state owns a yacht based on their brewery.” [Via AL.com]

Creating a ‘Beer From Here’.
A fad or a trend? You know where I stand. [Via All About Beer]

A Farewell to First Drafts.
Eric Gorski is one of the voices who has made First Drafts an essential source of accurate information about brewing in Colorado. Moving on, he departs with a particularly lovely anecdote. [Via The Denver Post}

Guest blog: Craft beer? The bubble has burst.
I’m generally a defender of hops, but I still had to laugh at this: “But like a prog rock band with an excellent drummer, the hopping turned into a 15 minute drum solo.” [Via Stonch’s Beer Blog]

Who drinks what?

Google will translate the story for you, but the illustration is what interests me. See, “craft” is now a style. [Via PressePortal, h/T Joe Stange]