This images was taken from a greeting card, and was captioned, “Where hipster gnomes gather; ‘Yes! More small batch beer and hancrafted sausages for all!” Perhaps this will cause you to think about hipster beer drinkers in a different way. See below.
More than 15 years ago, The New Yorker published “A Better Brew: The Rise of Extreme Beer.” Last fall, Dave Infante interviewed Burkhard Bilger, who wrote the story, for Taplines. Read the article, listen to the podcast, when you have a chance.
The New Yorker invested a good chunk of change to put this story on the page. Bilger went to Europe, to Delaware, to the Great American Beer Festival and elsewhere, across many days of work. How many stories in small beer-focused publications would have been funded with what was spent on a single story? It was and is an outlier, but toss it into the mix when you write a blog post in your mind based on:
– What Boak & Bailey wrote about “beer writing” in their most recent newsletter.
– Alan McLeod’s comments and further thoughts.*
– Evan Rail’s still fresh essay about the same subject.
– Matthew Curtis on publishing and sustainability.
This week’s dispatch is short because Daria and I are headed home after a week in Atlanta. She was doing the sorts of things people get regular paychecks for. One of these months, I’ll write about what I was doing. For now, one observation.
On a Friday night longer ago than I want to admit, I was at a newspaper staff party, talking to a doctor who was married to a woman I worked with. What sits inside quotation marks is really a paraphrase, after all it was that long ago. “Is work all you ever talk about? This isn’t what happens when the people I work with get together. You all are obsessed,” he might have said.
It can be a burden, having something to say and nowhere to say it.
* Pardon the McLeod asterisk, but I am embarrassed, flattered, and a little surprised (perhaps skeptical) by the idea he does the sifting for me. The takeaway, to his credit, is a reminder of something all writers should remember: who the heck they think they are writing for.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“In New Jersey about 10% of our tap handles are dedicated to in-state breweries. The national average is 26%, and in states where they really support craft beer, it can get as high as 50%. We are at the absolute bottom, and the bottom line is, New Jersey bars and restaurants do not support local breweries.”
— Ross Coczza in “NJ breweries continue to close. Here’s why it will keep happening.”
YOU MIGHT ALSO ENJOY
– Hipster Beer Is Dead. Long Live ‘Lifestyle’ Beer. I think the relationship, if there is one, between hip and hipster has me confused. Were the bike messengers who drank PBR hip, hipsters, or something else? Was PBR itself ever hip?
– A new twist on “slow beer.” Seventeen years ago, Boston Beer introduced the Samuel Adams Boston Lager drinking glass, suitable for drinking other beers as well. It arrived with a certain amount of hoopla, and drinkers still use the glass today. Now, Yoho Brewing in Japan has invented a, well, stranger looking glass. It is also meant to deliver a pleasant drinking experience, but, as important, to “put the brakes” during the drinking process. This after a survey by the company found that the No. 1 reason for excessive drinking, at 57.2 percent, was, “I tend to drink at a faster pace when I drink with others.”
– Douglas Lager: When Micros Go Macro. I think this might be related to the hipster story. “We love bottles. We were only going to do bottles so people could see the branding and see that it was old-school.”
– Munich to open alcohol-free beer garden. It is called Die Null (The Zero). It will operate until Sept. 15, one week before Oktoberfest begins.
man, I almost forgot about the era of ‘hipster beer’ and PBR being a bit of an affectation. Was it ever hip? If the craze hit a few years later it’d be millennial beer, or just whatever other “kids these days …” term existed at a certain point in time.
But I do like that there seems to be a genuine, unironic appreciation for industrial lager nowadays. Sometimes it scratches an itch that ‘good’ beer doesn’t.
I suspect if you were to perform some sort of sensory analysis (or even one that charted the compounds within) of full-flavored (versus light) lagers and their craft counterpaprts that they would cluster relatively close together. But the industrial lagers would cost less.
Never be skeptical! My point is there is someone you want to be writing for – not to please or anything but to meet an imaginary expectation.
BTW, my recollection was PBS was the anti-hipster beer, the garage band as opposed to craft’s disco balls of ever expanding styles of and yet mind numbing confused constructs of IPAs.
I think discussions about PBR and hip go back to this NYTimes story:
https://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/22/magazine/the-marketing-of-no-marketing.html
In 2003, IPA was still more than a half dozen years from surpassing pale ale and “Extreme Beer” was an outlier.
Surely, my international exposé was the key moment: https://abetterbeerblog427.com/2006/07/24/beer-science-pabst-against-pabst/
But, of course.