Monday beer links: News, terroir & finding new paths

BEER AND WINE LINKS 01.15.18
NEWS/TRENDS

– Front and center because the “underbelly of misogyny” still lurks. Related: Good Beer Hunting followed up its “What Boyz Like” post with several supporting essays last week, and in addition Austin Ray provided to link to this one with serious “questions of privilege, whiteness, power, and masculinity.”

– Sobering details about the “craft beverage” tax cut. “For every $20 of alcohol tax cuts in the legislation, only about $1 actually goes to the true craft brewers or small distillers.” (I should have spotted this for last week’s links, but important enough to suggest reading anyway.)

– New Zealand has added craft beer to the basket of goods it monitors to measure inflation. Meanwhile DVD players and sewing machines were among items removed from the Consumers Price Index.

– Lyft-branded beer offers ride discounts in Chicago. Lyft has long had what it calls a “safe ride” program, including one with Anheuser-Busch, which for two years has offered up to 150,000 round-trip Lyft rides during weekends and holidays. For the beer it is calling Five Star Lager, Lyft wanted to team with a smaller brewery — “a brand that has more impact with locals.” It went with Baderbrau in Chicago, but if this program is a success there expect different local beers in different cities.

TERROIR

– “Craft beer is becoming the wine of New England.” Terroir. Terroir. Terroir. Includes a new favorite concept, “networked ecologies.”

– Almost missed this because it shows up near the end of a story about beer trends in Brooklyn. Really clear thinking from Jason Sahler at Strong Rope Brewery, which uses nearly 100 percent New York grown ingredients to make its beers. “Our desire for local has allowed us to connect back with the farms that are the lifeblood of our industry. It has also allowed us to really put a face, a name and more importantly a relationship to our process and products,” he says. “I think we’ll see more breweries doing this in 2018 to get back to the true nature of beer being a local and regional product, which could lead to the possibility of new and exciting styles grounded in location. You can’t expect to find any new ground in brewing when you tread on all too familiar paths.”

HISTORY

– Actually, it seems to me it might be fun to “string these last fragmentary references to beer and brewing into a likely false and certainly shallow narrative.”

BUZZ

– This can also be true for beer.

FROM TWITTER