Monday beer links: Severance, elitism and bits of pleasure

First, don’t forget that Alan McLeod will host the first gathering of The Session since Dec. 12, 2018. Here’s everything you need to know to participate. And please do.

The most interesting story of the week, at least to me, is that American Homebrewers Association will operate autonomously from the Brewers Association. There are plenty of “what next?” questions. Some are answered at the AHA website.

Before the AHA and BA are severed, it is worth a few minutes to consider how important homebrewers were in establishing what became the Brewers Association. You could start with the timeline: The AHA was formed in 1978 (and announced in Zymurgy magazine), the Association of Brewers was organized to include the American Homebrewers Association and the Institute for Brewing and Fermentation Studies in 1983, and Association of Brewers and the Brewers Association of America merged to the Brewers Association in 1995.

That merger did not come easily. Steve Hindy provided details in The New Brewer magazine in 2006 and later in “The Craft Beer Revolution.” Negotiations went on for about two years, the meetings “intense and sometimes contentious.” Randy Mosher was on the BAA-AOB task force formed to consider the merger.

“It was a culture clash,” Mosher told Hindy. “Both partiers had long eyed each other with suspicion. . . . I think it’s fair to say that the BAA approached things very much from the tactical, business point of view, along the lines of a traditional trade organization. The AOB approached things from a wider perspective. Its programs and activities of festivals, competitions and publishing, and the inclusion of homebrewers, sough to promote beer as a cultural resource, a position important to the continued success of craft brewing.”

Many of the packaging brewers questioned the participation of homebrewers, Hindy wrote. “What role could a bunch of hobbyists play in a brewing industry trade association? Complicating the discussion was that the AHA was losing money. The AOB was subsidizing it. Mosher and (Rogue Ales founder Jack) Joyce argued that the homebrewers were the biggest fans of craft brewers, the first line of defense in any attack on the industry.”

In the agreement that eventually followed, the membership would elect seven packaging brewery board members, four brewpub members, and the AHA would choose two board members.

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QUOTE OF THE WEEK

“Beer judging is one of the most elitist facets of an already elite industry. Beer judging is usually—unlike on this occasion—voluntary so only the richest of so-called experts sign up especially if you factor in the array of expensive qualifications that supposedly make a person more knowledgeable about flavour. If you think about that, what all previous beer judging competitions have said is ‘richer people have better palates’. So I think my criteria will draw on four decades of drinking beer, and numerous years spent talking to brewers and publicans.”

          — David Jesudason
From Exploring the Soul of Desi Pubs: A Conversation with David Jesudason

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ALWAYS FOR PLEASURE

“I spread Marmite on my toast (wholemeal, the best toast for Marmite) and as it melts into the butter I am taken to the paving slabs of an Edinburgh street, a thin rain falling as the winter wind brings a warming and familiar scent my way. Sweet and yet deeply savoury, an edge of bitter roast. The smell of breweries and distilleries is the smell of winter, to me.

“In Luthermuir, the fields would be covered by used mash from the Fettercairn distillery. On frosty mornings from the school bus I saw steam rising from the piles of spent grain as they continued rotting and fermenting on the stubble, and wondered what it would be like to plunge my chilly hands into them. The smell was sometimes overwhelming, a sickly, vegetable earthiness, like oatcakes being baked alongside a stock pot over-simmering.

“The smell of breweries has followed me around all my life. Growing up near Lancaster while the Mitchell Brewery was still in operation gave me a weekly dose of stewing malt while we shopped in town on a Saturday. I could never tell if I liked the smell or if it made me sick — the stickiness of it seemed to stay inside my nostrils long after we’d gone back home.

From The Smell of the Mash

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YOU MIGHT ALSO ENJOY

– How Vault City is Challenging the Conservatism of Britain’s Beer Culture. The Edinburgh brewery makes British beer accessible, but is still mocked for brewing sours and stouts inspired by childhood sweets and drinks. “We love traditional beers ourselves,” says Jeremy Fox, who is the brewing and cellar manager, “but we feel there’s not much point in always making new traditional beers. If we did that we would be just like everyone else.”

– Six Hills Brewing: “Living in this country has been snatched away from me.” This might appear to complete a David Jesudason trifecta (the quote of the week, the story above and this), but actually he turned over his Substack to Noora Koskinen-Dini, who has recently been dismissed by Six Hills Brewing, so she could tell here story.

– Remembrance: When the pub and the hand of history collide. “I sat in the corner, and thought about the death of a man I didn’t know but who was known to many that visited this pub a lot more than I did. One evening you were in the company of others, taking your time with a pint or two and the next day your system was in shock and the end was near. That experience of talking one evening in the pub with someone and then hearing about his death the next day had happened to me once.”

– Pyongyang Common. The story of how North Korea’s national beer style became Steam Beer.

– Time for another installment of 1980s socialist nostalgia. Ron Pattinson on beer in Czechoslovakia in the 1980s. “People go on about crap like ‘mlíko’ pours – something I never came across in the 1980s and which I suspect was just made up recently.”

– The ongoing demise of pub grub. “Pub grub has become the preserve of chains who can still squeeze profit out of it through centralised supply chains and carefully costed menus.” Sounds like a job for food trucks.