Monday beer links: What would a lifestyle brewer look like?

BEER AND WINE LINKS 03.12.18

WINE

Rich People Are Ruining Wine.
“Lifestyle vintners.”

What would a lifestyle brewer look like? (Beyond the beard.)

BACK TO BEER

Brew Dog was at the center of the story of the week (or stories of the week or stories of the weeks; hard to keep track). Head over to A Good Beer Blog or Boak & Bailey’s Beer Blog for complete converage. More would be overkill.

Closed, Thanks for the Memories — An Argument for Historical Preservation.
First a disclaimer. I sleep with an archivist. (In fact, the opportunity for her to work at a presidential library is why we moved to Atlanta.) Now another disclaimer. I wrote this in Brewing Local: “The earliest complete description of steam beer production is from 1898, and until a diary is found by the great-great-grandchild of a mid-nineteenth-century Bay Area brewer, it won’t be clear how the process evolved during the previous 50 years.” As somebody who wants to write about such stuff the lack of information pisses me off.

Next month, Urban Chestnut Brewing Company in St. Louis will host a festival showcasing beers brewed with recipes supplied (for the most part) by Ron Pattinson. The lineup will include an 1870 Bohemian Summer Beer, 1866 Munich Bock, 1879 Kulmbacher, and so on. The opportunity to organize a festival where the brewers use authentic recipes may not be the best reason to support historical preservation, but it sure draws attention to the initiatives Brian Alberts suggest we consider.

Related: Oregon State University’s Resident Scholar Program. Stipends will be awarded to researchers whose proposals detail a compelling potential use of the materials held in the OSU Libraries Special Collections and Archives Research Center. I may have mentioned here, or on Twitter, that the Fred Eckhardt archives are there waiting for some enterprising author to give them the Julia & Julia treatment.

Quenchers Saloon, Chicago

Quenchers owner looks back on 39 years, hopes pioneering Chicago bar will endure.
Another disclaimer. Earle Johnson was one of the first subscribers to the Beer Travelers newsletter Daria Labinsky and I self-published in the mid-1990s. We revisited Quenchers about a year and a half ago. It was early afternoon on a Sunday, so it’s not like we expected to run into Johnson. A Cubs game was showing on the TV. Draft beer choices included selections from some of the city’s newest, hippest breweries. But most of the patrons were managing glasses of spirits, medicinal choices apparently.

A bar serves a very important function in society, particularly in an urban culture. There are a lot of people who need to have interaction with other people and a bar is one of the places to do that. For some people it’s church, yoga, community organizations, bicycling — different kinds of subcultures. Over the years we’ve built this community. It spans generations.”

Related, sadly: Bridgid’s closes, and is one of several restaurants up for grabs in Brewerytown and Fairmount.

MORE BEER; JUST THE LINKS

– Under The Influencer.
– All The Good News Beer News For 03Q218.
     Not surprisingly, in the second, Alan McLeod comments on what Pete Brown writes in the first.
– Parents, Think Twice Before Bringing Your Babies To Breweries And Bars.
– Distress in Delivery, Pt. 1 — Why Distributors Need to Adapt.
     You should be able to find parts 2 & 3 easily.
– The Best Places in Berlin to Break Germany’s 500 Year-Old Beer Laws.
– Pints With a Side of Politics: Why Beer Is Becoming Political.
– Albuqueruqe brewery run (or bike or walk).

FROM TWITTER