Monday morning brewery dreaming & 1 great paragraph

Foam on a beer glass.

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.”

Beer writing last week, one paragraph at a time

The question of the week last week was “Has the thrill gone?” The comments when I shared the question on Facebook pretty much took the words out of my mouth.

Jeff Alworth had many thoughts of his own. Many thoughts. They weren’t just about the question Boak & Bailey ssked, but also sparked by a comment by a regular at Beervana that, “Craft beer has very few stories left to tell.” I agree with Alworth that there are many new interesting stories to write about beer and the surrounding culture. But I’m not sure if that was what B&B were asking about.

[Added Monday afternoon (in Colorado): The flatness of beer part 2: the opinions of others]

In any event, there were some lovely drinks-related paragraphs written last week. Here goes . . .

Craft Central offers regular flurries of brightly coloured American tins at exceedingly high prices, largely made up of hazy IPAs in the way that beer these days generally is. I have little interest and usually scroll on past, but . . . maybe I should be checking in now and again to see if there’s value to be had. These, presumably, are the beers that everyone else around the world is copying, right? OK, I’ve convinced me. Here’s two IPAs from the less obscenely priced end of the spectrum, both from New Jersey, a lonely state, lacking a New Guernsey or New Sark to keep it company.

— From The Beer Nut

Making wine is science. Drinking it is not. The amount of time a given wine has spent in a barrel is an unalterable fact, my ability to detect that oak is a skill, but my judgement on whether that oak is well integrated and how good the result tastes is entirely subjective. Confusing facts with opinions is not, unfortunately, restricted to the wine world, but a social activity such as wine tasting that revolves around a very complicated technical process may be especially ripe for misunderstanding. This, surely, is why a liquid that is both a chemical and a metaphysical source of happiness ends up causing so many arguments.

— From Club Oenologique

“I wanted to highlight time and place in both the ingredients and the concept of the beer I brew,” says Josh Chapman. “It’s important for me to be excellent without being exclusive. I don’t want to be perceived as pretentious, especially as the first brewery on the Eastern Shore. There are lots of Bud and Miller drinkers here, and so I wanted something relatable but adjacent to what they are used to.”

— From Pellicle

Scholarship programs are part of a larger push within the beer industry, from individual breweries, trade groups and nonprofits, to increase representation among people of color in beer. Scholarships benefit the recipients, of course, but they also critically benefit the companies and industry that employ them. Repeated studies conducted by workplace consultancy McKinsey & Co. since 2014 show that companies with more diverse leadership financially outperform those with low racial and gender diversity among their leaders. That message has become critical as breweries feel less public pressure to keep issues of race and inclusion front and center.

— From Good Beer Hunting Sightlines

“For the very first Fourth of July, Worthington was a temperance town. One of the temperance people in Tallinn had busted open a barrel — Professor Humiston was his name — some settlers had brought out to celebrate the Fourth of July. Well, they didn’t take too well to that, and so they marched down and got another keg of beer. They took the other keg of beer that he had busted open, and they dug a hole and buried it in his front yard, placed the new barrel on top of where they had just buried that barrel of beer. They proceeded to stand around and guard the barrel so he couldn’t bust it open, and they invited everybody out to have a party on Professor Humiston’s lawn — that’s where we got the name from.”

— The origin story of Forbidden Barrel Brewing in Minnesota, from Dakota News Now

In Memoriam
David Geary, founder of the D.L. Geary Brewing Company in Maine, died last week. There are many reasons to remember him, but his keynote at the 1996 Craft Brewers Conference has to be in the top 10.

You might also enjoy
– Mapping historic breweries in Bamberg

– How London’s First Black Pub Landlords Changed the City’s Drinking Culture

– Big Trouble in Little Kortrijk?

– A musing on menace

– Major new guidance on beer styles for consumers

– Creating Safer Spaces in Craft Beer, Part Seven — Brewing Beers That Make a Difference

This is what ‘after the thrill is gone’ looks like

After the thrill is goneAs seen at Coors Field in Denver.

A question and a request from UK bloggers Boak & Bailey arrived Monday in their monthly newsletter.

The question: Has the thrill gone?

The request: You tell us.

The newsletter includes a white board intended to examine what might make beer more exciting. You really should take a look.

I shared their questions on Facebook. Forget AI. I had intended to answer the questions with this post, but outsourcing them provided most of the answers I was thinking of.

I’m still considering the last question—What beer experience last gave you a full-on thrill?—and trying to decide if I want beer to thrill me, or if I expect something more.

Scientists muck with beer & other Monday am reading

Arnold's, Cincinnati, Ohio

The New York Times and Wired magazine posted stories this past week about how science may, as it has for centuries, change beer. In one case, the goal is not to change the flavor. In the other, the goal is both to eliminate an unwanted flavor and to enhance new exotic ones.

“As water sources, particularly in the western United States, dry up from overuse, drought and climate change, supporters of direct potable reuse — the use of treated wastewater in the drinking water supply — are pitching it as part of the solution,” The Times reports. “Increasingly, they are turning to beer as a way of getting people beyond the ‘ick factor’ that has been a hurdle to its broader acceptance.”

There is a “toilet to tap” perception problem . . . even though in Scottsdale, Arizona, the purifying process “involves ozone infusion, microfiltration and reverse osmosis, in which water is forced across a membrane to remove dissolved minerals and other impurities. The water is then zapped with ultraviolet light.”

The Wired story begins with details about how modified strains from Berkeley Yeast eliminate diacetyl. It barely touches upon other products from Berkeley responsible for freeing compounds that add to tropical aromas and flavors top hop-forward beers, be they hazy or clear. And it doesn’t mention Omega Yeast at all, which any story about modified yeast strains should.

I can’t get behind the headline that asserts “Gene-Edited Yeast Is Taking Over Craft Beer” but they certainly point to an aroma/flavor destination that interests brewers and drinkers. It is one that hop growers are certainly paying attention to. “I believe we could see an even bigger push toward hops that work with these new yeast strains,” says Brian Tennis, the founder of the Hop Alliance. “As hop growers, we need to make sure we are growing what the market demands.”

You might also enjoy
Beer lessons learned in Oklahoma. Jeff Alworth admits “parachuting into any region is never going to provide me the nuances of a place,” but nonetheless he shares many thoughts. Also, a) I really want to visit Big Friendly, and b) perhaps this reflects my Midwest heritage, but I do not recall Joe Prichard’s accent being particularly thick.

New Jersey’s Governor Is Screwing Its Breweries. When we were in New Jersey earlier this month, brewery operators I spoke with thought the a bill that would enact changes intended to benefit them would be signed in law by now. It hasn’t been, and the explanation is not simple.

One of Colorado’s ‘brightest risers’ is suddenly closing. How tenuous might things be for some small breweries? Apparently, a rainy June did in Uhl’s Brewing in Boulder. [Additional reading.]

The price of beer. “Super-deals of EUR 9.99 (USD 11) for a crate of beer (10 liters) have become a rare sight” in Germany. And draft half liters cost a heck of a lot more. In the UK, a pint of beer is 127% more expensive than world average of £2.60. The United States is the ninth most expensive country for beer on average, with a pint costing £6.22 ($8) on average. They aren’t that expensive at Arnold’s (pictured at the top) in Cincinnati, even before a $2 discount during happy hour.

Separated at birth

Atriveda Brewing, Colorado Springs, CO
The tap handles at Atrevida Beer Company in Colorado Springs, Colorado, remind customers the brewery is veteran friendly.

Cartridge Brewing, Maineville, OH Cartridge Brewing in Maineville, Ohio, is located in a former cartridge factory. Hence the handles.