The Session #110: What would the BeerHunter tweet?

The SessionThe topic for Session #110 topic is Twitter. And, among other things, host Sean Inman suggested considering “brevity and how it affects writing about beer.” I’m not sure the example Inman uses, a long thought that Ray Daniels broke into tweetable parts, is the best example. He didn’t try to condense it into one 140-character passage (or even two or three).

In another life, I was briefly in charge of a newspaper photo department. Photos are often a better way to tell a story — you know, the picture is worth . . . thing — but newspapers have a finite amount of space. So there were conversations with questions like, “Can you tell this story in five pictures? Three?” Some of the most powerful stories turned out to be just a few photos, or even one.

Another example of powerful shortform writing, of course, is song. The first time we saw Joe Ely perform Robert Earl Keen’s “The Road Goes on Forever” and he introduced it as a novel in 4 minutes and 33 seconds. He was write. The lyrics fit on a t-shirt. I know; I own one.

Twitter can work that way, striking a blow for brevity. But often a tweet includes a summary of something longer and a link to the rest. So is that really brevity? For the Craft Writing conference in Lexington, Kentucky, a couple years ago I put together a few pseudo tweets from Michael Jackson. Pardon the less than perfect artwork and the fact that they don’t include links to longer articles. I think you’ll get the point.

Michael Jackson Beer Hunter tweets

The first excerpt came from a story Jackson wrote for Slow magazine (from Slow Food) that no longer seems to be available online. The second from his last book. It stands nicely alone, but the first reminds us that context matters and some stories deserve more than 140 characters.

The essay titled “The Pub Door” first appeared in Slow, Slow Food’s journal. The Beer Hunter as beer expert appears only briefly, well into the story to provide a quick introduction to Brettanomyces, a so-called wild yeast that can add positive or negative qualities to a beer. “Today it is part of my job to taste beer professionally,” Jackson wrote. “A colleague will sometimes ask: ‘Do you get Brett in this one?” From a scientific viewpoint that conclusion might be sufficient.”

The story began with his mother picking up the pace each time they neared a pub in the town where they lived. “I was four years old,” he wrote. “My legs could scarcely keep up the pace. I felt as though my feet would leave the ground. Had I been in a cartoon, they would have done. I would have been dragged horizontally. I doubt my mother would not have noticed.”

He later asked her what people did in the pubs and she said only that she did not know. “Whatever was going on in there my mother seemed to deem worthy of Dante,” he wrote. “If it was that bad, it must be good, I concluded. She pulled me away, but it was too late. Every time a pub door opened, I had noticed a distinct aroma. I had smelled the whiff of wickedness.”

The first time he knowingly smelled Brett the aroma was exactly the same. He wrote: “I have not yet managed to summarize in a tasting note the images that are triggered when I smell Brett: neither the big picture, the rise and fall of British industrial might, nor the cameo, the alienation experienced by my mother.

“If I could distill her story and mine, they would not be experiences shared and understood by every reader. We each have our own repertoire of memories and emotions triggered by smells and flavors. The most personal I can hint at, but little more. The more general I hope stimulate the senses.”

He usually did.

Here are three more that illustrate what he might have done just fine tweeting:

* “Ales are a persecuted minority.”

* “It was a great night of drinking Gose, but I am not sure it did much for my sexual potency.”

* “Is alcohol good or bad? We have had it for thousands of years, and still don’t seem to know.”

At the end I am left wondering: Should a tweet leave you wanting more? Or should it stand on its own?

*****

To confuse me further, there was this in The Beer Nut’s contribution to The Session: “I’m a big fan of the microblogging platform and it has certainly had a huge impact on the beer scene, even though a lot of that is to the detriment of blogs.” Is that true? Or true some places, not others? Is it function of form or function? John has given me plenty to think about.

Session #110 Friday: Tweet it or blog it?

The SessionI’ve been absent from the last couple of Sessions — I point this out because I doubt you noticed — but plan to be on hand Friday when the topic is Twitter.

You may recall that Twitter’s 10th anniversary was last week and in the months before there were suggestions it would lift the 140-character limit on tweets. Not happening. That announcement came after Session No. 110 host Sean Inman had picked the April topic.

So, before the 140 letter limit is lost, how about us in the beer blogging realm take one last crack at “original” Twitter.

Some possible routes to take:
-write your own beer theory in multi-parts. Be it 1/15 or 1/20
-use Twitter for your own craft beer April Fool’s Day prank
-channel your inner web troll and go all negative on a topic
-debate or applaud the points made by Daniels in under 140 characters
-talk about brevity and how it affects writing about beer

The references to (Ray) Deniels and a multi-part beer theory are explained in the announcement. He suggests posting on “Twitter or on your own blog or both. Just no Instagram.” However, I would think Storify would be an option.

Monday beer links: Science & the Beer Tribe

MONDAY BEER & WINE LINKS, MUSING 3.28.16

The science behind why you like (or hate) certain beers, if at all.
“Part of what we are trying to get at here is not what experts think works but, in real practice, experience what people like,” says Cicrone program founder Ray Daniels, who is part of the Beer & Food Working Group that organized this “crowdtasting.” The tasting was Friday and the results will be discussed at the Craft Brewers Conference in May. I’d like to say I will report back then, but should I attend that presentation or one about using hops more efficiently at precisely the same time? [Via The Denver Post]

Tribal Drinking.
Crowdtasting will not provide all the answers to understanding why we drink what we do. Lew Bryson writes, “But thinking about why you do can be rewarding, and maybe lead you to a better understanding of what it is you’re looking for from beer, and that can help make you a happier, more directed person.” [Via All About Beer]

Time to Let The Old School Rejoin the Party?
Relevant to what Lew had to say, but it also made me think of the three-tap lineup at Rich’s Public House in New Albany, Indiana back in 1995. One was for Guinness, one for Pilsner Urquell and the “middle tap” rotated. [Via Boak & Bailey’s Beer Blog]

Worthington White Shield.
[Via Paul Bailey’s Beer Blog, h/T Boak & Bailey]
Pale and hearty.
[Via Michael Jackson’s Beer Hunter]
It’s strange how dots sometimes connect. Boak & Bailey’s weekly roundup led me to Paul Bailey’s post about White Shield. In turn I thought about Bill King and King & Barnes, then Steve King (who is not at all related). Steve King, a beer distributor in Peoria, Illinois, was way ahead of the game in the late 1980s, making more interesting beer available to drinkers in central Illinois than most were ready for. That included beers from King & Barnes. I haven’t seen Steve King in several years, but Saturday we’ll be on a panel together. The American Spirits: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition traveling exhibit is at the Peoria Riverfront Museum. Related events include “Speakeasy Saturdays.” The one five days hence will focus on “Rise of Craft Beer.” But enough nostalgia. White Shield is more interesting, and I remember the King & Barnes version quite fondly.

The Hottest Trend in Craft Brewing Is Beer That Doesn’t Taste Like Beer.
[Via Time]
Craft Brewers Embracing the Nutella Craze.
[Via CraftBeer.com]
No comment.

The aggressive, outrageous, infuriating (and ingenious) rise of BrewDog.
“In its brief history, BrewDog has upset, variously and sometimes repeatedly, rival breweries, drink industry associations, health organisations, the Advertising Standards Authority, even LBGT groups.” Even if you remember most of this stuff and BrewDog pisses you off just on basic principles this is a good read. There’s a reason that people want to go to work for “BrewDog” beyond the fact that James Watt is “not … troubled by self-doubt.” [Via The Guardian]

Bamberg, Germany: A city of just 70,000 people but nine breweries.
Regulars here do not need to be reminded about the charm of Bamberg, but as Will Hawkes concludes, “A beer culture this rich is good for the soul.” [Via The Washington Post]

NOT BEER

Cheap wine – good, or no good?
“If you can buy perfectly good Sancerre Rosé for less than £10, why pay more?”

Well … exactly. Why indeed? [Via Sediment]

Song Review – Sturgill Simpson’s “In Bloom” (Nirvana Cover).
“In the end the task of the singer is to sing, and the task of the audience is to listen.” [Via Saving Country Music]

FROM TWITTER

How old is your brewery? Was it on MySpace?

Earlier this week Tom Acitelli wrote about when breweries started tweeting for All About Beer.

I’m certain that there is as book focused entirely on beer, breweries, brewers, and related hangers on as good as “Food and Social Media: You Are What You Tweet.” I hope somebody goes for it.

Thinking about it sent me digging through a few stories I wrote for New Brewer magazine, a trade publication for members of the Brewers Association. First, from 2009:

2007. Nobody talked about Twitter at the Craft Brewers Conference and it was lumped in with other social media such as YouTube and Second Life in a story in this space later in the year (full disclosure: I wrote that story.)

2008. A panel about using the Internet consisted of two distributors talking about tracking sales on the web and using it as a broadcast tool and Neal Stewart, then Prime Minister of Marketing for Flying Dog Ales, as the lone spokesman for social media. He wanted to document what he learned during the conference using Twitter, but the technology wasn’t in place and he had few followers in the craft beer business.

2009. What a difference at the CBC in Boston. Stone Brewing CEO Greg Koch tweeted during his keynote speech and later used Twitter to spread the word that the “I Am a Craft Brewer” video could be watched on the Internet. In providing an excellent how-to on “New Media and the Brewpub” Dan Browell and Mike Hiller included a Twitter primer. And during a panel discussion about “Beer on the Web” the panelists did a bit of tweeting. Additionally, many attendees tweeted throughout the conference, using hash tags so others could easily find their posts. At the beginning of 2009 perhaps 50 American breweries used Twitter. By July more than 200 breweries had Twitter accounts, far more than maintain active blogs.

Ah, 2007. Simpler times. New Belgium had a MySpace page, but it was run by a fan. Here’s the beginning of the New Brewer story I wrote that year:

Fred Bueltmann rightfully considers himself a now, aware kind of guy. The director of sales and marketing at New Holland Brewing, he still stands in with bands that play at the brewery’s pub, he’s tech savvy, he works in an industry that’s currently trendy . . . and his company even has a MySpace page.

The thing is Fred was a little surprised when he found out this last fact. Isaac Hartman, who works in sales for Bueltmann, created the space. Hartman is 26; Bueltmann is 38, and when Bueltmann looked at the carefully designed and focused New Holland web site and then at the anarchy that characterizes MySpace he didn’t feel quite as hip.

“I felt a little dated. I had to figure out how to register,” he said. “Certain forums are new to my generation. There’s another generation that’s doing things that surprise me. We’re being brought in rather than being on the cutting edge.”

Bueltmann had a decision to make. “There are some good reasons to roll it up and make it part of your company approach,” he said. “Your other instinct is, ‘Let’s go with it.’ You empower different parts of you team – this was his initiative.” New Holland “went with it” and in mid-June had more “friends” on MySpace than all but one other craft brewer, Flying Dog, which has made MySpace an integral part of its Internet marketing.

(At the time MySpace was the largest of the social networking websites – with somewhere between 50 million and 70 million different visitors in June, depending on which data tracking site you believed. New Holland Brewing had about 2,500 MySpace friends when the story was written. Now back to 2009: At the beginning of July Stone Brewing had 6,005 Twitter followers and 5,419 Facebook fans. All things are relative, given that Ashton Kutcher had 2.6 million fans at the time and Oprah Winfrey 1.8 million, but for comparison’s sake: Dogfish Head Brewery 6,529 Followers and 16,432 Facebook Fans; Flying Dog Brewery 7,294 and 4,293; and Magic Hat Brewing 7,539 and 13,546.)

Beer and social media should be a part of the next book about on the history of the industry. But a book that focuses only on Twitter could be a lot more fun.

So for the historians in the crowd, one quick point of order. Acitelli reports that Lagunitas started tweeting in 2014, but Tony Magee was there much earlier as LagunitasT.

You might recall he officially quit Twitter at one point, then came back. That’s part of the story.

And, in case you were wondering, my first tweet was not about beer, but did mention MySpace.

Some bitterness to balance all those hops, please

All About Beer magazine - Please pass the bitternessI should probably wait to comment on Jeff Alworth’s story until our postwoman delivers the latest All About Beer magazine (John Holl tweeted this photo of the cover yesterday), but he hinted at the contents when he posted “How American IPAs Evolved” at Beervana.

At the heart of his blog post you have this: “There has been a shift from very bitter IPAs to IPAs marked by flavor and aroma, but it has happened around the country as brewers each made natural discoveries on their own.”

You’ll notice the cover also says “Trending: Fruit IPAs.”

More data points:

– New Belgium Botanical Imperial IPA.

Straight from the press release (or you can watch the video): “Using the fresh aroma of the spring landscape as inspiration, New Belgium Brewing’s Botanical Imperial IPA uses a blast of essential oils from backyard botanicals. basil, sage and juniper help create the freshest IPA around, with Bravo, Cascade, Sterling, and Willamette hop varieties delivering a potent hop punch.”

“The essential oils intensify the citrusy, herbal and spicy hop flavors,” noted Ross Koenigs, New Belgium pilot brewer. “The idea for a botanical IPA came from our love of both IPAs and gin. So back in 2014, we had our hop chemist run a bunch of gin botanicals alongside different hop varieties and then we started beta testing how those different herbs and spices played with the hops. The result offers notes of citrus, pine, wood, cedar, mint, and a little spice.”

– Hops Oils & Aroma: Uncharted Waters.

It seems a little weird linking to a story I wrote for Craft Beer & Brewing, but it saves me pounding out 1,200 words again to explain some of the science behind what New Belgium is up to.

– YCH HOPS Hop Varieties.

If you take a look at a few varieties (I suggest HBC 291, a hop that really needs a name) you’ll see that YCH HOPS has increased the amount of information itprovides about at least some varieties. It now provides data on linalool and geraniol. This is fun. For instance, notice that New Belgium is using Bravo, a variety with above average oil content and thus more geraniol than the average bear. It’s a hop that brewers can use to create an interesting blend — rather than wasting their time moaning, “Wah wah wah, I can’t get Citra.” Just remember, as the story points out, there’s a lot hop scientists are still figuring out.

Late hopping preserves these oils — about 50% of essentials oil evaporate during just 10 minutes of boiling. Although, as Alworth points out, brewers don’t necessarily need to boil hops as long as previously thought to extract bitterness (technically, they aren’t really extracting bitterness, they are orchestrating a conversion) too often they are creating beers that I find not bitter enough. Part of the reason is those big, juicy, tropical aromas and flavors create an impression of sweetness.

I’m no more interested in fruit bombs than I am bitter bombs.

So I was delightfully surprised last Friday when we dropped by the Virginia Beer Company in Williamsburg after the first session of Ales Through the Ages. I think their grand opening is this Saturday, but they’ve been throwing open their doors for a series of soft openinngs.

Brewer Jonathan Newman’s beers are ready. I didn’t love every one of them. For me, Nelson Sauvin hops and saison yeast may never work together (I am probably in the minority). But the rye saison with Amarillo hops was sublime. Every one of the beers, even the one with Nelson Sauvin, was balanced and nuanced. And, for those of you keeping score at home, even though they are unfiltered every one of them poured bright.

But my favorite moment was after I’d tasted the IPA, Newman asked me if I thought it is bitter enough. It has all the flavor and aroma you expect in a 2016 IPA, but, yes, it is bitter enough.