Just in case Florida isn’t the next hop powerhouse

Conveniently enough yesterday @BeerAdvocate tweeted to a link to a story I wrote for the magazine not quite two years ago. It began, “The American hop market seldom finds a comfortable equilibrium for very long, simply because as essential as hops are in brewing beer, they serve almost no other commercial purpose.”

Business was booming then and it is booming now. Last week I revisited one of the reasons why, and Bryan Roth is posting about hops every day this week. In addition, last week Good Beer Hunting took notice of how acreage outside the Northwest is growing and All About Beer had a story about an attempt to grow hops in Florida.

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Session #116 announced: Anything Gose

The SessionHost Derrick Peterman has announced the topic for The Session #116 is “Anything Gose,” and suggests you learn how to pronounce it.

I choose the Gose style in particular since it can be approached in so many different ways. Want to talk about the history of the Gose? How about how American breweries are taking this style and running wild with it with different spice and fruit additions? How else has the Gose manifested itself outside its German homeland? Is the Gose here to stay or will it go the way of the Black IPA, once the hot style but slowly becoming a largely irrelevant curiosity? (OK, that might not be your opinion of the Black IPA, but you get the idea.) Of course, we’re all on the look-out for a good Gose, so if there are any you particularly like, we’d love to hear about them.

If you want to learn more about the history of the style, I can recommend a good book.

Monday beer links: Craft writing reminder & a German drinks in Denver

MONDAY BEER, WINE & WALKING LINKS, MUSING, 09.19.2016

How the Denver beer scene made a German beer connoisseur realize he didn’t know much after all.
I sure hope there is a follow up from Fabian Reinbold, an editor at German magazine Der Spiegel and right now an Arthur F. Burns fellow at The Denver Post. In this article he writes mostly about beers themselves (within the context of his own palate). I’d really like to read his observations about the settings where they were consumed. [Via Denver Post]

The curious case of sports writers who switch to wine.
[Via Columbia Journalism Review]
Craft Beer and Writing? Not the Unusual Pairing You Imagine.
[Via University of Kentucky News]
I saved the Columbia Journalism Review article a while back because I intended to write about storytelling and selling beer. But because I just did a reset on the mission statement here (which restricts navel gazing to Mondays) and because I want to repeat, while you still have time to make plans, that you’ll have a great time if you head to Lexington for Craft Writing: Beer, The Digital and Craft Culture now seems like the time to consider what the CJR story has to say about writing about sports and writing about alcoholic beverages.

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Beer history geek alert. Monday. Boulder.

Nestor's Cup, Avery BrewingThis press release from Avery Brewing in Colorado just landed in my inbox:

Did the Greeks brew beer? Our Beer Archaeologist and Special Projects Brewer, Travis Rupp, believes they did! Join us this Monday, September 19th at 6:30 pm for an examination of Bronze Age Brewing paired with Ancient Greek foods. During the dinner Travis will present and discuss evidence for brewing in the Minoan culture through a recreation of Mycenaean beer, Nestor’s Cup, the first in Avery’s Historical Ale Series!

This inaugural guided tasting will be paired with a series of Nestor’s Cup beer. Monday, September 19th at 6:30pm. Tickets are $30/person in advance and include three versions of Nestor’s cup beer served with three Greek influenced plates. Order tickets below. Call 303-440-4324 for more information for this special event.

The dinner is at the brewery in Boulder. Ticket details.

Travis spoke immediately before I did at Ales Through the Ages last March in Williamsburg, Va. Pro tip: If you find yourself making a presentation an event where Travis is also on the agenda ask for a spot other than directly after him. He killed it, as he has in two seminars at the National Homebrewers Conference.

The only thing that could have made them better is some recreated beer. And now Avery has remedied that.

Not if an American brewer is adding the hops

Hallertau hop harvest

Reading this passage in “an alternative beer pilgrimage in Bavaria” I had to haul out my calculator (well, use the app on my phone), because nine million pints really does seem like a lot from one little patch of ground.

There are several moving parts, so I won’t share my math lest you can tell me what I did wrong. We are talking hectares (2.47 acres), metric tons (2,200 pounds), UK pints, hop varieties that yield different amounts per acre, and hop varieties with different percentages of alpha acids.

But it seems to me those would be nine million pretty un-hoppy pints. You’d definitely be at the left end of this chart showing the amount of iso-alpha acids if various beers (from Brauwelt, using numbers German hop broker Barth-Haas compiled about half a dozen years ago).

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