Monday beer links: Missile silo brings new meaning to concept of beer terroir

MONDAY BEER, BREAD AND MORE DRINKS LINKS, MUSING, 10.03.2016

Appellation Beer will be on hiatus for the rest of the month. See you in November.

Stock (ale) answers from Goose Island and Ron Pattinson.
Martyn Cornell provides the story behind Brewery Yard, a beer made at Goose Island Brewery in collaboration with Ron Pattinson. Ron has only written a little about the beer itself, but his posts about a trip to Chicago for the beers debut makes delightful reading. Here’s Day One of four. [Via Zythophile]

In Rwanda, Craft Beer Opens the Door to Female Empowerment.
Steve Beauchesne of Beau’s All Natural Brewing Company was looking for a legacy project to celebrate Beau’s 10-year anniversary, and a brewery in Rwanda sounded like the perfect fit. “We were looking for something that’s in our wheelhouse,” he said. “We’re brewers. We’re not well diggers.” [Via Take Part]

‘The line is crossed, and it’s crossed daily’: The struggles of female bartenders
This is a story about bartenders in the cocktail world, but that doesn’t mean beer is free of bias and harassment. [Via The Washington Post]

Meet the only female beer brewer in the Middle East.
And then there’s this challenge. [Via The Telegraph]

Beer Nerds Drive Hops Innovation, And That Should Matter To You.
[Via Vinepair]
Trouble Brewing in the Craft Beer Industry.
[Via Wall Street Journal]
If you’ve hung out here the last couple of years none of this will not look new. But I do find the tagline on the WSJ story a little troubling: “Proliferation of small breweries has left owners struggling to find enough specialty hops, contributing to a drop in sales.” Sales are not dropping. They have slowed overall, but for smaller breweries they are booming. The same breweries who may not be getting as much Citra or Mosaic or Amarillo as they would like. In addition, although this alternative is expensive there are thousands of pounds of those tough to find hops for sale at The Lupulin Exchange. They are hard to get, but they are not impossible to get.

One-on-One with La Cumbre President Jeff Erway.
The disclaimer here is that Jeff and I are friends and he says nice things about me in the story. I pass it along because it might be relevant to the discussion in the comments at A Good Beer Blog. This is a Q&A, so not nearly the interesting narrative it could be, but one answer (relative to Bailey’s comment at 3:58 AM) all of a sudden reveals something you don’t see every day.

Q: A lot has been made of how collegial the craft beer scene is. Is that changing with the number of new breweries?

A: Yes.

Q: How so?

A: I think the old guard has become a little bit more competitive with each other. There’s a little less of the sharing. There’s friends of mine I have in the industry that still to this day walk right into my brewery, try a beer and say, “Hey, can I see the recipe for this?” I say, “Here you go,” and that’s wonderful and I hope that continues. I hope I don’t ever lose any of these friends just because we’re trying to compete for the same customers. But there definitely is a little bit more of a sense of competition as the market tightens. Then, of the new breweries in town, I know very few of them. It used to be I had any of the brewers in town, every single one of them, I had on speed dial. Now, there are breweries I don’t even know who the brewer is.

[Via Albuquerque Journal]

Lake Placid brewery uses old missile silo to age new beer.
They ask the question “Does location make a difference when brewing beer?” As you know, I love that question. But I had never thought of it in the context of Dr. Strangelove. [Via WCAX.com ]

NOT BEER

‘Modernist Bread’ Is Six Volumes of Extreme Bread Geekery.
2300+ pages, more than 3,000 photos. It will cost you $625. “Today there is no recognized Modernist bread movement, but there should be,” It would seem so.[Via Eater]

Barefoot wine: Why it’s so popular.
Is this why when a customer walks into an airport bar she or he asks, “What IPAs do you have?” [Via Wine Curmudgeon]

FROM TWITTER

It is harder to walk a dark muddy country path when you are drunk but, because you are drunk, you care less. Beer, it always finds balance.

— Pierre van Klomp (@brouwervanklomp) September 28, 2016