MONDAY BEER LINKS, MUSING 03.02.15
Organizing the links this week I figured out what was missing.
Making & selling beer
Inside The Ram Brewery.
Whoa! There’s a nanobrewery inside the Ram Brewery, the place where Young’s and Co, made beer 1831 and 2006. Here’s the tour: “We’re shown a set of cast iron grain hoppers, over a century old. These barley grains have sat in this chamber since the 1970s.” [Via Londonist, h/T Stonch]
Houston’s craft beer king opens up on staying relevant, the Sam Adams controversy and a greedy new wave.
A lengthy interview with Saint Arnold Brewing co-founder Brock Wagner delivers all that’s promised in the headline and more. Right up front, Wagner says, “We also don’t believe that our being here for 20 years is particularly relevant to the craft beer drinker.” I don’t know if it is a left brain/right brain thing, but he’s an MBA/homebrew enthusiast, so properly practical but with an appreciation for a business that makes it something beyond selling more beer than last year. [Via Culture Map]
Making diastatic brown malt.
This is Ed Wray’s contribution to Boak & Bailey’s call for #beerylongreads (the last round, for a while, at least). The others mostly appeal to a wider audience but I point to this one because it is authoritative. After I recommended Randy Mosher’s “Mastering Homebrew” I noticed a review at Amazon that concluded, “The advance brewer is likely to find a few things that s/he did not know but that can be found in web sources as well.” Not to come across as an author defending his turf (“You can’t trust what you read on the internet — buy the dang book”), but when you are following somebody else’s instructions on how to do something you really appreciate it when they are authoritative. Sorry, I don’t have a perfect way to sort out what is and is not. But this is. So there you have it. [Via Ed’s Beer Site]
Why Greene King doesn’t care that the haters hate its IPA.
A) This is how the beer market works. B) “A small rant directed at all those idiots who keep chuntering on about how Greene King IPA is ‘not an India Pale Ale’ and how IPA has to be ‘strong and strongly hopped’, so it would survive the long journey to the Indian sub continent, over 200 years ago. You don’t have a clue what you are talking about.” And C) 97 comments. [Via Zythophile]
Seminary students make beer-making part of daily work.
Brother Albert Marie Curtis, 21, is in charge of the brewing. “He learned from another brother for a year, then took over the operation himself. Since he’s nearing the end of his time at the seminary, he is now training two other brothers to brew.” [Via LaCrosse Tribune]
Growing beer
Michigan’s hops acres to double.
What does it mean when an investment group that typically invests in commercial real estate plan to start 400-acre hop farm? It’s happening in Michigan, which already had more acres of hops under trellis than any other state outside the hop-rich Northwest. “It’s all about economies of scale,” Jason Warren, president of the investment group, said. “If you’re going to do it in a meaningful way you have to set yourself up for this size of a farming operation.” Farmers in the Northwest do operate on a larger scale, but the approach for the revived hop industry elsewhere has been to follow the German model. There the average farm has 34 acres under trellis. [Via Traverse City Record-Eagle]
Brewer’s Choice, SMaSH Beers, and NY Agriculture.
In this case SMaSH stands for State Malt and State Hops. Here’s what the Farm Brewery license does: it that allows breweries to sell beer by the glass at their own facility and elsewhere, including farmers markets. To qualify for the permit at least 20 percent of the hops and 20 percent of all other ingredients a brewery uses must be grown or produced in New York State. That percentage increases to 60 percent in 2018 and 90 percent in 2024. Those are going to be tough numbers to reach. [Via BeerGraphs]
R.I.P. Acadian Farms & Brewery has Closed.
But you can own it for $275,000, one-barrel brewing system included. [Via The New School]
Writing about beer
“Click Bait!” Not Really Code For Good Beer Criticism.
And don’t miss the Pete Brown’s comment. Having watched this from a distance for several days I have concluded I have nothing to add. [Via a Good Beer Blog]
Thanks Stan.