Beer links 05.15.17: ABI & ABI-free

There’s enough op-ed in several of these posts I’ll mostly forego musing this week.

EVIL EMPIRE (UNLESS IT’S NOT) RELATED

Killing Craft? AB InBev Blocks Sale of South African Hops to American Craft Brewers.
[Via Craft Beer & Brewing]
AB InBev is Coming for All Your Hops, Unless They Aren’t.
[Via This is Why I’m Drunk]
I will be in South Africa in July. Although we won’t be near the hop growing region I hope to talk to some farmers, because I haven’t seen a report in which somebody does. After all, they are central to the story. (Added May 16: Lucy Corne reports from South Africa for All About Beer.)

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Beer links, musing 05.08.17: It’s different this time

Sour beer summit in St. Louis

On the Wicked Weed Brewing Purchase.
[Via Jester King Brewery]
What it’s like to work for a brewery that “sold out”
[Via DRAFT]
Watch the Hands, Not the Cards — The Magic of Megabrew.
[Via Good Beer Hunting]
If you somehow missed the news last week that AB InBev acquired Wicked Weed Brewing take a moment to google a few of those words. It happened. The reaction was swift, much of it like when AB InBev bought 10 Barrel Brewing, like when AB InBev bought Elysian Brewing, like . . . you know the drill. It’s happened enough that several bars were quicker to announce they’d no longer be serving Wicked Weed beer. At the same time, drinkers across the country asked if it was OK to be excited to think about Wicked Weed’s highly rated beers showing up in their hometowns — just as 10 Barrel and Elysian already have. In addition, DRAFT magazine and Good Beer Hunting posted insider written stories that told us something new. They both come from a point of view.

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The Session #123: All along the information superhighway

Four Corners

The topic for The Session #123 is Cyberbrew – Is the Internet Helping or Hurting Craft Beer?

That’s a pretty easy question to answer. But I’ll leave it to Steve Hindy in The Craft Beer Revolution.

The internet has arguably been the greatest ally of the craft beer revolution. Daniel Bradford, the former marketing director of the Association of Brewers (AOB), and now publisher of All About Beer magazine, recalls surveying Zymurgy readers in 1986.

“I sent out a survey to try to figure out, other than homebrewing, what books did I have—how could I talk to these people, how can I find more people like them to read Zymurgy,” he said. “And other than [that the overwhelming majority were] white, middle-aged guys, twenty-five to forty-five [the sruvey showed] almost 100 percent had a personal computer. This is in the eighties . . . . The home-brew revolution was simultaneous with the personal computer revolution, and I’m convinced it continues to this day with all these bloggers and social media.”

Host Josh Weikert expects more of an answer (for instance to questions like, “How are beer reviews affecting what gets brewed and drank?”) so head to his blog to read more responses.

Or if you want to take it very seriously read this. You’ll need a beer by the time you finish get halfway through.

The internet doesn’t coddle you in a comforting information bubble. It imprisons you in an information cell and closes the walls in on you by a few microns every day. It works with your friends and the major media on the outside to make a study of your worst suspicions about the world and the society you live in. Then it finds the living embodiments of these fears and turns them into your cell mates. And good heavens it is efficient.

Myself, I’m simply going to provide a year, a “Halt and Catch Fire” moment, and let you fill in the beer blanks. As in, “1982, Bert Grant opened Yakima Brewing and Malting Company.” Now I’m going for a walk. I won’t be checking my phone.

1971 – Email
1977 – PC Modem
1978 – Bulletin Board System
1979 – Usenet
1982 – Commodore computer
1985 – Virtual communities
1991 – First web page created
1993 – Mosaic, 1st graphical browser (the photo at the top was taken in 1993)

2003 – My Space
2004 – Facebook
2006 – Twitter
2010 – Instagram
2011 – Snapchat

Less is more: This is your brain on hops

Your brain on hops

Chatter about the increasing popularity of pilsner, maybe even pale lager, is pretty constant on Twitter, but got a little louder following a recent story in The Washington Post (“Make room, hoppy IPA. Pilsener is the buzzy new craft beer”). In it, Matt Brynildson makes it clear that Firestone Walker’s Pivo Pils is a hoptimized, Americanized version of a pale lager.

But time moves on and memories fade. After drinking fresh Pilseners on trips to Europe, Brynildson decided he wanted to bring one back to Southern California. That became Firestone’s Pivo Hoppy Pils, which uses German hops, malt and yeast, but adds dry-hopping with spicy, citrusy Saphir hops, a technique not used in the old country. “I put it under the nose of a German brewmaster, and they say, ‘This is nice, but this is not a Pilsener,'” he laughs. “Pivo is just too aromatic, too hop-aroma-forward for Europe.” It does well in hop-crazy America, though: Pivo won gold medals at the Great American Beer Festival every year from 2013 to 2015. For IPA lovers who are just moving into Pilseners, there’s something more recognizable from the level of hops, even if they don’t taste the same as the tropical hops in, say, Firestone’s Luponic Distortion IPA.

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