Monday beer links: Institutional amnesia?

BEER AND WINE LINKS, MUSING 08.27.18

Aministrative note: Monday links will be on hiatus for, well, I’m not quite sure how long. Upcoming travel and work plans don’t align with collecting links and posting them on Mondays. I hold out hope that I will have time for an occasional post (and those have been rare, to be honest) from Norway and other destinations. After I mentioned last week I wasn’t finding much new of note recently Alan McLeod commented I was starting to sound like him, but that’s not the reason for the hiatus. (And I might point out there are other curmudgeonly voices chirping away too.) Before I begin packing, just one bit of musing this week, before some more links as thanks for showing up.

– It’s Lit — The Unfortunate Trend of Exploding Cans in Craft Beer.
– Craft Beer Was Built on an Us-Versus-Them Ethos. Now It’s Tearing Us Apart.
This one-two punch left me thinking about community. No, not beer community. Community. I had a wonderful rambling conversation with Mark Jilg at Craftsman Brewing about this a few years ago, some of which made it into Brewing Local. He talked about the symbiotic relationship that develops when beer is consumed locally. Brewers care about what their friends will be drinking, and consumers take pride in consuming beer made by people they know. In such a setting a beer that might blow up cans would not be served, would be served on draft, or a brewery would go to the trouble and expense of acquiring and using bottles guaranteed to withstand higher carbonation.

I tread carefully when writing about what’s “good for the industry.” There was a bit of a ruckus back in 2014 when Brewers Association director Paul Gatza told Craft Brewers Association attendees that the image of all breweries suffers when even a few sell beers with obvious flaws. Instead, I’ll point to events that occured before anybody spoke the term craft beer. Henry King served as president of the United States Brewers Association for 22 years, leaving in 1983. He was in charge when the USBA discovered some of its members were adding compounds to beer that made them unsafe to drink. He discussed what happened a few months before he died.

If it wasn’t clear who was in charge after he’d been on the job four years, it was after one long three-day stretch in 1966. The deaths of 16 men where linked to cobalt salts that Quebec’s Dow brewery put in its beer to promote foam stability. That caused liver damage among frequent drinkers, the brewery’s best customers, and Dow ended up closing.

After King learned the deaths were related to cobalt, he spent 72 hours locked in his office, always on the phone, talking to every brewer in the United States.

“In retrospect, for what I did, I probably could have been sued,” he said. “We gave the brewing industry 72 hours to discontinue the use of cobalt in their products. We never asked a brewer whether he used it or not. We just made him give us an affidavit to give to the government that said on a given date 72 hours later, he was not using cobalt.

“We beat the federal government by seven weeks. We reported the cobalt problem, we were out of it and no longer had production seven weeks before the Food and Drug Administration even got their act together on it.”

He acted decisively not just because it was good for the beer industry, but because it was right. When the nitrosamine proved to be a carcinogen in the 1970s, King again moved swiftly. The USBA spent $1 million buying all 2,600 brands of the beer on the market and had each analyzed.

“Then I asked every brewmaster what they were using,” he said. “Three of them gave me false reports. I called the president of the brewery and told them that they had 36 hours to clean up their act. Boy, were they furious.”

By then, King had put a medical advisory committee into place. The same committee laid the foundation for the USBA’s Alcoholic Beverage Medical Research Foundation.

King, who died in 2005, helped push through legislation in 1976 that gave smaller breweries a tax break, laying the foundation for the “craft beer renaissance.” H.R. 3605 reduced the federal excise tax on beer from $9 to $7 per barrel on the first 60,000 barrels produced, provided that brewery output was less than two million barrels per year. Equally important, the small brewer’s tax remained at $7 per barrel in 1990 when the federal government doubled the regular excise tax.

He returned to the industry in 1992 as executive director of the Brewers Association of America, retiring in 1998. He played a significant role on the growth of smaller breweries, but he didn’t baby them. “My belief is that many microbrewers lack institutional memory,” he said in 1996. “They don’t know how big brewers have saved this industry.”

BEER

– The Beer of the Future, 1924.
– Leap of Faith: Is Craft Beer the New Church?
– It’s Not Easy Being Green — Breweries Explore How to Market Marijuana-Themed Beer.
– A proliferation of flavors generates interest — and sales — in beer. What’s next?
– Beer In “A Dictionary of Slang and Colloquial English”
– KVEIK: Fancy Hefe aus Norwegen.

And a headline you couldn’t make up:
– Coney Island Brewery Collaborates with Café Grumpy on Freaktoberfest Big Ol’ Pumpkin Ale.

WINE

– How a California cult created one of the country’s great wineries — and then lost it.

FROM TWITTER

MORE LINKS

Alan McLeod most Thursdays.
Good Beer Hunting’s Read Look Drink most Fridays.
Boak & Bailey most Saturdays.