Monday beer links: Sexism, authenticity, and space beer

MONDAY BEER AND WINE LINKS, MUSING, 01.23.17

Thank You for Not Putting Down Women.
[Via Not My Father’s Beer]
Beer industry personnel – Come to daddy!
[Via Beer Compurgation]
Wine, Women and Subtle Sexism.
[Via wine-searcher]
Why I spent a weekend brewing with just women.
[Via The Growler]
Meet the Women Bringing Monumental Changes to the MSP Craft Beer Scene.
[Via Thrillist]
Sigh. It never ends, does it? I’m trying to figure out what constitutes progress and how we’d measure it.

– At the top, Leslie Patiño asks, “How about recognizing these women for their golf skills?”
– In the The Growler, Sarah Batermann Beahan writes, “I am familiar with mansplaining. I am a woman and haven’t spent thirty-something years living under a rock. But I have never experienced the phenomenon with such frequency until I started working in the craft brew industry. I’ve bought homes, spent a decade in academia, and a summer working landscaping gigs on construction sites, and still nothing tops the condescending note of a bearded, owl-eyed dude quizzing me on hop profiles or attenuation, or the slimy feeling of being told that I’m good at my job because I’m good-looking.”
– And the Thrillist prefaces a very nice collection of mini-profiles this way: “It’s a pervasive association – find the beard, find the person who knows what they’re talking about. Meanwhile, entire populations of the craft beer world are being ignored.”
     But I don’t think we are “there” until we don’t have to group women together to write about them.

What Comes After the Beer Snob.
Is this true?

Maybe if macro brewers dialed back the populist messaging, and if so many craft brewers didn’t lean into the whole flavor-exploding-iconoclast thing so much, the beer world wouldn’t feel so binary.

I like analogies more than most, and I think music poptimism is a fine topic to debate over beer. But I don’t think beer poptimism explains why you’ll see bearded men who make beer drinking Stag at festivals where they are pouring that beer. And if there is a “newfound currency of macro beers” why are their sales continuing to dwindle? [Via Eater]

How craft beer lost its craft and gained layoffs.
[Via MarketWatch]
Making Snowflakes: An Exploration into Rarity, Beer Quality and Industry Authenticity.
[Via This Is Why I’m Drunk]
I couldn’t decide which of these you should read first, but Bryan Roth’s deep dive into all those things in the second headline is more than 3,000 words so that’s a reason to tackle it second. Roth makes a case for the shared psychological and sociological effects of authenticity and rarity. But I’ll add this from Mike Kallenberger of Tropes Brand Consulting, who previously worked 30 years at Miller and Miller Coors and now has several craft beer clients. He talked about this in a story I wrote for All About Beer magazine about the history of the term craft beer.. Kallenberger pointed to a link between authenticity and autonomy. “Here’s how I define it: doing what you do, not because of others’ expectations or even money, but because it come from with, from your heart, from you own internal passion,” he said. “Authenticity, then, is rooted in autonomy and independence.”

And I’ll add this from the story as well: “Neal Stewart was 28 years old in 2002 and a brand manager for Pabst Brewing Co. when the beer underwent a revival so astonishing that the story ended up on the cover of a New York Times Sunday magazine and was a part of several books studying marketing successes. Pabst sales grew 45 percent from 2002 until 2006, when Stewart left the company. Stewart went to work at Dogfish Head Craft Brewery in 2014 as director of marketing. The main difference between his job at Pabst and his current one, he says, is that Dogfish markets around what it does, primarily brewing, and Pabst markets around what others do. Pabst hasn’t brewed its own beer since 2001. ‘We’re far less wrapped up co-opting (consumers’) cultural interest to gain favor. We’re more interested in telling our authentic story day to day.'”

Engineering students design experiment to test whether beer can be brewed on the moon.
There is something totally delightful in the group of students who want to test the viability of brewing beer on the moon. They call themselves “Team Original Gravity” but acknowledge that you can’t measure original gravity when there is no gravity. [Via Phys.org]

WINE

California wine and balance.
“After all, technically you can manufacture balance, if you are so minded, in a laboratory. Thrilling flavours need a thrilling vineyard to come into being. Well, California is full of thrilling vineyards. It’s just that the definition of ‘thrilling’ is changing.” In beer as well. [Via Decanter]

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