This past week, Katie Mather asked, “I love leading tasting sessions, but do people actually want to know about cryo hops and malt varieties?”
The short answer is, “Some do, most don’t.”
Mather wrote, “I truly think there’s a wall between the beer world and the average drinker, built by lack of info but conversely, by a vast, impenetrable-seeming pile of details. That’s why I like running tasting sessions. It feels in that moment like I’m knocking that wall down.”
That hasn’t necessarily changed in the past 40 years. “People forget you had to explain beer styles 50 times a night,” said John Hickenlooper, co-founder of Colorado’s first brewpub, Wynkoop, and now a U.S. senator. “It was like being the first one on the Santa Fe Trail . . . a lot of boulders to move.”
I thought of this Saturday in Seattle. We were at a brewery when Daria pointed out to me that Untappd offers users an imposingly complete list of words to describe the beer in their glass. That’s a screen shot above, turned sideways, so you can see some of the C words. Impenetrable? Perhaps not, but it does suggest that appreciating a beer requires some special skill. It does not.
Our last stop was Brouwer’s Cafe, one of the premier beer-focused bars in the country, only hours before it was to close for good. The reasons it is shutting down after 19 years are related to the same challenges restaurants and bars in Seattle and elsewhere fact post-Covid. That does not mean craft beer is dead (see Lede of the Week, and read the story).
Saturday provided the last chance for regulars to get together at Brouwer’s. Outsiders, from the balcony above, we watched bartenders open large bottle after large bottle, fill a dozen small glasses at ounce, and hand them out. Friends posed for group photos. These are people who will get together again and drink the special sort of beers Brouwer’s poured again—perhaps their own bottle of Hair of the Dog Adam From The Wood 2014 they have squirreled away.
Not every conversation eavesdropped on at breweries earlier in the day was about beer, but I was a bit surprised how many were. Yes, I did actually hear somebody say, “I am so every hazies.” And there was the story about how proud the story teller was about how much Guinness he drank one night and was still able to find his way home. Then he learned that Guinness is a relatively low(certainly to American IPA these days) alcohol beer. “I had to rethink everything about myself,” said. I am not making that up.
Perspectives differ, as Boak & Bailey wrote Sunday in, “Brew Britannia 10 years on: progress in a pint glass?” Their’s is a post worth spending time with.
P.S. – Just to keep my geek cred in order . . . I really wish the folks at Balance Brewing would store their hops (in the boxes on the left, with green stripes) some place colder.
LEDE OF THE WEEK
Remember the glory days? When we all had skinny jeans and immaculate beards and wore beanie hats, even in summer? When going for a pint meant nine percent porters, pink rhubarb sours and whatever a ‘saison’ is. It meant tasting each and every beer on tap to make sure they weren’t ‘too hoppy’. It meant, perhaps more than anything, bright, graphic labels and deeply silly names.
Nowadays, trips to the pub look a little different. Rows of pastel-coloured IPAs have been swapped out for classic lagers and big boy beer brands, all seemingly owned by one omniscient beverage uber-corporation. Craft beer options are few and far between (often rotating on just one tap) and if they’re there, you’re probably going to pick the cheaper option anyway. But as a nation of beer drinkers, when did we lose our appetite for naughty, funky pale ales and ‘proper’ craft beer? And is it over for good?
— From RIP IPA: who killed craft beer?
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
The Bend Bands & Brewers Bash “is admittedly visceral and nonlinear, but I always believed it would work because for all the science and math that goes into creating beer and creating music, it requires an artistic soul and no one admires other artists than fellow artists.”
— Festival founder Brian Yaeger (in this case “is” is actually “was” because the festival was this past weekend
YOU MIGHT ALSO ENJOY
If I haven’t already post photos on Instagram from northern Washington by the time you read this, I will soon. Thus the brevity. A lot of good reading, so be bold and click away.