Credit to occasional commenter Dave Lavery for this first bit of fun reading: An Interaction with Scotland’s Most Inane Bar and Restaurant Manager, and its Aftereffects.

I have no words, other than the thought in the headline.

Labor Day
Dave Infante has done the heavy lifting with a wall-to-wall worker special in honor of Labor Day 2023. It’s a free edition Substack newsletter, and he would appreciate it if you consider buying subscription.

If it can happen in Denver it can happen anywhere . . .
– Brewery Closings Are on the Rise — Is the Local Craft Beer Scene in Trouble?
– Last call: Two Pittsburgh-area breweries are closing their doors.
– As national craft beer market contracts, Grand Forks brewers feel the squeeze.
More breweries will open in 2023 than will close, but this is also a fact: “In Grand Forks, the microbrewery scene — known for being tight-knit and community-oriented — is often making ends meet by the skin of its teeth.”

You might also enjoy
– Soil To The Sun — Long Man Brewery’s Regenerative Agriculture. Interested in trying a beer made with grain grown using regenerative farming techniques on this side of the Atlantic? That’s how Wheatland Spring Farm + Brewery in Virginia grows the grains on its property. The brewery also cooperates with Virginia Tech to breed barley better suited for the region (that’s a test plot in the photo at the top). The farm brewery is located not far north of Dulles International Airport, but their beer also shows up at places elsewhere on the East Coast, such at Tørst in Brooklyn.

– Brewing Craft Beer for an Underserved Audience. This is one of several posts from SevenFiftyDaily focusing on “innovators,” many of confronting equity issues.

– Breweries, College Athletics Try to Cash In With Co-Branded Beers. “The same university that sued a Georgia beer company is now seeking out sponsorship deals with alcohol companies. It shows you how far this has come.”

– Nostradouglas’ Fall Predictions. Passed along to give me an opportunity to write I don’t care about Black IPAs.

– Where Are All the Celebrity Beer Brands? Once again, I don’t care.

Back in 2011, Joe Stange asked this question in The New York Times: So is there a limit to the number of craft brewers that locals are willing to support?

“Seriously? It’s beer,” answered Dylan Mosley, the head brewer for the Civil Life Brewing Company in south St. Louis. “You know how many people drink beer? If I opened a hamburger joint, nobody’s going to be, like, ’Hey, you know how many hamburger joints there are?’ They’d be like, ’Sweet! Another hamburger joint!’”

The hamburger joint-brewery analogy has lived in my head since. Hamburger joints close for a lot of reasons, often with barely a mention why. Now that there are more of the 9,000-plus breweries in the country and many have been around for decades, sometimes they close just because it is time.

That seems to be the case for LowDown Brewery & Kitchen in Denver. Owner Scott O’Hearn said the brewery, which will close this week, was not struggling and was profitable. “When you look five years [out], it becomes a little riskier. Not necessarily to lose money, but to not make enough to be worth staying open,” he said.

On the other hand . . . here’s an interesting take on Epic Beer entering liquidation in New Zealand. “There is a sad reversion to historical reality happening, whereby as the consumer becomes more price-conscious, they tend to shift back to beers put out by the very major breweries that brands like Epic existed to challenge. And in so doing they wear away at the spirit of innovation which helped fuel the craft brewing movement.”

But . . . Epic lives on.

“Well it sure has been an intense roller coaster ride over the last month,” founder Luke Nicholas said. “But we now can see some light at the end to this liquidation process with a successful purchase of Epic Beer. It means Epic will continue and I will be involved going forward. Exactly how and what this means still needs to be determined.”

Public service

Eight San Francisco Bars Where You Can Still Buy Anchor Steam Beer. Including the current status of what is in inventory. Generally, not much.

You might also enjoy

– Workers at Elysian Brewery Vote to Join Teamsters Local 117. “This is an opportunity for us to shape the future of the industry and to pave the way for other breweries by showing them that union representation is possible. It’s time for us all to stand up for what is right and make history in the process.”

– The New State Fair Beers of 2023, Ranked by Their Minnesota-ness. Where to start? Kirby Pucker Lemon Blueberry. Vacation Mullet. The Funnel Never End.

– Wayward Lane Brewing and the History of New York’s Hop Houses. Brewing in a former hop house is much cooler than in a railway arch.

– If it’s Tuesday, this must be Kölsch. Martyn Cornell joins a tour that takes him to Cologne, Dusseldorf and several other places, including almost a complete set of Low Countries brewing abbeys AND St Bernardus, one of his favorite breweries. Part One is followed by Part Two and Part Three. He’s not done.

– Book review: Cask by Des de Moor. “It’s not a beer or pub guide but an attempt to think about cask from every angle: its history, the culture that surrounds it, the science, and the appreciation of the beer itself.”

– An Israeli beer brewed with 3,000-year-old Philistine yeast strain. “You might have seen headlines that declared: ‘Want to get drunk like a Philistine?’ or ‘Drink the beer that Goliath (or Cleopatra or the pharaohs) had!’ or even ‘A taste of history in every gulp!’You might have seen headlines that declared: “Want to get drunk like a Philistine?” or “Drink the beer that Goliath (or Cleopatra or the pharaohs) had!” or even “A taste of history in every gulp!'”

If you visit semi-regularly you’ve learned there is no established Monday format here. At times I’ve called the collection of links to stories from the previous seven days That Was The Beer Week That Was and might again. This week, it is more like one great read and things that might be filed together.

Read this: Thomas Walker, Victorian London’s “female barman”

“At the time, Thomas Walker tended to be talked about as a rogue and adventurer, living an outlaw life. With hindsight, we can sense that it was a pretty desperate existence.”

Must these things be true?

– “Creatively speaking, craft beer now finds itself at the lowest point it’s occupied in several decades.” The headline on the story rings a tone that is just as hopeless, and the post itself will remind you of what seems to be an ongoing discussion.

I am left considering what it means for a brewer to be creative, or what it takes for a beer to be considered new, even novel. New Image Brewing, located in an adjoining town, currently has a terrific helles called Do Less on tap and in cans. It is brewed with malts from Troubador Malting here in Colorado, and thus probably tastes more familiar to me than to you. The malt flavor in Do Less is different than the malt flavor in Bierstadt Lagerhaus Helles, brewed less than 10 miles from New Image.

Bierstadt Helles, to me, is pretty much a perfect beer. I’m not going to quit drinking it because I’ve found something new (and practically speaking, Do Less is probably a one-off). But new, interesting and good, to me, that is creative. It would be greedy to ask for more.

– “At this level, the beer business is mostly a game of scale and operational efficiency.” The context here is the sale of a bunch of breweries that now will be called craft again. I would not argue that operational efficiency does not matter, but I do wonder how much and what other variables there are. Being big has advantages; so does being small.

Last week, Brewers Association chief economist Bart Watson estimated that sales of breweries the association classifies as craft declined two percent in the first half of the year (compared to 2022). However, breweries that sell fewer than 1,000 barrels per year reported positive results. That’s most of the breweries in the country. There are something like 3,500 microbreweries and taprooms that produced fewer than 1,000 barrels in 2022, as well as 2,300 brewpubs. (Additionally, more than 800 breweries choose not to have their annual production published, and many of them are pretty small.)

Granted, many of those breweries have business plans that suggest they will eventually need to regularly sell more than 1,000 barrels to be profitable. But there are other plans.

West Coast IPA

– Your homework. One way to make sense of the chatter about West Coast IPA is to taste a few examples. The results of the Best of The West Coast IPA National Throwdown point to examples to look for, some of which are available well beyond where they are brewed.

– Primer #1. American? West Coast? Hazy? What’s the Difference? There are official guidelines.

– Primer #2. Jeff Alworth asks “When you see [West Coast IPA] on a menu, what do you expect?” Then he examines how pFriem Brewing went about building one.

Not beer

– A $400 million Contraction in Wine Sales is Coming. This amounts to a reduction of $54,800,000 in payments to growers for grapes. Another example of scale.

– How an obscure piece of lab equipment ended up in cocktail bars from London to Shawnee, Kansas. This gadget is being used “to capture the essence of various ingredients and enhance the flavor profile of cocktails in a cleaner format.” Moving from not beer to beer, that’s what some advanced hop products are also designed to do.

– Is Whiskey Twitter Dead? We once went to a WhiskyX festival in Denver because it included an hour performance by Drive-by-Truckers. There were spit buckets, but nobody was using them. I like malted alcoholic products, but I don’t think I am tough enough to do that on a regular basis.

– Mead has a long history and a future as a sustainable beer alternative. a) Stories about mead as an emerging drinks category have been around for at least 30 years. b) Lars Garshol pointed out on X that we are going to need a lot more honey bees for that that happen.

For your pondering pleasure this Monday morning, two links.

– #MyDreamBrewery. From Jeff Alworth, and his is actually a pub/tavern.
– How Unionizing Anheuser-Busch’s Craft Breweries Could Change the Industry.

Alworth invites readers to participate in a game that begins with this question, “Without worrying about pesky concerns like ‘solvency’ and ‘funding,’ what’s your dream brewery look like?” That his own fantasy establishment is a sprawling tavern is merely a nuisance.

No surprise; my thoughts won’t fit in a comment. Perhaps this shows a lack of imagination on my part, but my fantasy brewery would be smaller. A world tour in a single building does not appeal to me. (Each of) mine would be a brewery, with a taproom. The beers would be well made, with proper foam (see above). The people who work there would be paid a fair wage, with proper benefits (see link #2). The customers would look like the surrounding community. The beer would be affordable.

(Two quick points of order:

– I should point out that if you poke around Beervana you will see that Alworth has written extensively about these matters. He maintains the Diverse Breweries Database. He is not oblivious to these problems. This game is better enjoyed as a frivolous diversion, even if I choose not to. In the final paragraph he writes, “This tavern, which is impossible, will somehow earn enough money to stay solvent and pay its staff a hefty salary. . . . All are welcome, and all feel welcomed.”

– Affordability is not the biggest reason why beer has a diversity problem. People who look like me, except younger, are good at excluding all sorts of people who are different than them but can afford what many call “craft beer.”)

As important as all of the above, “all would feel welcome.” That doesn’t happen by accident. I expect my dream brewery to be an active community member. There is, after all, a community within the brewery and within the taproom, and surrounding the brewery.

I am, in fact, imagining thousands of breweries that check all the boxes, but that are different. Some might have live music, and it could be hip hop on a Mondays or alt-country on Wednesdays, depending on the community. But I would always expect James McMurtry to be featured at the annual anniversary bash. One in the Walnut Hills neighborhood of Cincinnati will naturally be different than one in Fairbury, Illinois.

Which brings us to Link #2. I won’t rehash what I wrote back in January about unions (TL;DR, on the side of angels). The post does not pretend to answer the “what then?” might happen elsewhere were ABI-owned craft breweries to unionize.

Would it matter? Does it matter more than it did in [picks random year] 2017?

Last week, the news broke that Culmination Brewing in Oregon is up for sale. In a story about why co-founder Tomas Sluiter cites the rising cost of labor, and the supports the thesis that workers at smaller brewers have begun “realizing that their jobs were neither as swell as they’d been told, nor the stepping stone to the greener pastures of owner-operatorship they’d hoped.”

“Before COVID, people had the mentality that, I love this business and I love working in it and I’ll take whatever amount of money for it,” he said.

“A lot of people were working for less than their value, and that was a mindset correction after COVID hit. Afterward, people weren’t coming to work for $35,000 a year, and rightfully so.”

What makes #MyDreamBrewery a great place to work is as complicated as what makes it a great place to be. But I’m pretty sure that when an operator says “a lot of people were working for less than their fair value” that it is time to wake up.

You might also enjoy

– Does the Beer Industry Seem Weird Right Now? You’re Not Alone. “In the early days, I spent a lot of time chasing down new releases and sharing them on Instagram. That all changed with the pandemic, and I haven’t had the desire to return to that way of life. Instead, I look for new ways to enjoy beer, like diving into the history of my favorite styles or attending festivals and events that deepen my knowledge.”

– Seeking Forever in a Temporary World. “We don’t say ‘traditional’ here. We don’t say ‘craft.’ We’re not a ‘craft brewery.’ We don’t make traditional lagers. Nothing about this is traditional to me. Nothing about this is Old World. I hate that people classify it as that.”

– When did people stop being drunk all the time? A lot of tables, a lot of numbers, to absorb.

– The Great British Beer Festival 2023. Wrapping it up with the paragraph of the week:

“And though the next day was a bit of a struggle it was brightened by the return of twerps whinging on about the GBBF on twitter, this time because Abbot Ale got overall second place in the CBoB. CAMRA and the blind tasting panel are in the pay of Greene King it seems. Which I suppose makes a change from Wetherspoons. To me the twerps are just showing their ignorance. The wonder of cask beer means that at times it can elevate beers to highs you would never have expected. If people spent less time suckling at the devil’s drainpipe and more time drinking beer served as god intended they would realise this.”