Session #102: The Landscape of beer

Budville, New Mexico

WE’RE NOT IN BUDVILLE ANY MORE

 

The SessionJack Perdue has posted the roundup for The Session 101 (“Bottles, Caps and Other Beer Detritus”) and Allen Huerta has announced the topic for the next Session will be “The Landscape of Beer.”

He provides several suggestions (“How do you see that landscape now? What about in 5, 10, or even 20 years?”) for a potential post, but the title itself provokes several ideas. For instance, it could be an opportunity to review The Geography of Beer: Regions, Environment, and Societies. Or to dig into one of the chapters, such as “Microbreweries, Place, and Identity in the United States.” Or to use suite of stories from the spring issue of American Brewer (“Tectonic Shift: The Changing Landscape of Brewery Ownership”) to add context to last week’s Duvel-Firestone Walker deal.

The next Session is Aug. 7.

Why Wilko Bereit is my new beer hero, and other Monday links

MONDAY BEER LINKS, MUSING 07.20.15

While waiting for interesting posts that might result from the 2015 Beer Bloggers Conference in Asheville …

CRAFT Magazine – An embodiment of the German craft beer zeitgeist?
I posted a photo of the cover of this new magazine after Barry Masterson broadcast it via Twitter. He was followed up with this rather complete summary of what’s in the magazine. Now I really wanted to buy a beer from Wilko Bereit: “He wants to expand, but no more than 4000 HL a year, as he wants to stay micro. He uses only organic ingredients, but does not care for certification for his beers, as he just does it because he feels the beer tastes better, not to gain any marketing advantage. He and his partner talk to every one of their 70 customers selling their beers, as communication and partnership is key. But I do him a disservice. He don’t like using the craft label, at least in the German sense, as he considers it a term that is too, well, unthinking.” [Via The Bitten Bullett]

Smell your beer. Does it reek of gimmickry?
Joe Stange elaborates on his thoughts about “sincere beer” (linked here a couple of weeks ago). He poses a bunch of questions, and here are a few:
– Do you know where your beer is made? Are you sure?
– Is the label clear about the beer’s origins? Is it clear about the ingredients?
– If the beer is made locally, does the name include a foreign city?
– Any yeast in there? Is the beer alive, or merely embalmed by refrigeration?
– Would your grandpa have liked it? Do you think it might still be around for your own grandkids to try one day?

He also did some wondering out loud that I answered on Twitter: “That reminds me of one of the classic pieces of advice for writers, which I received as a young reporter: Imagine your reader. Name him. Talk to him. I wonder if many brewers imagine their drinker.” On Thursday the answer was Nathan Zeender at Right Proper in DC, and on Friday it was Rod Murray the The Public House down the road in Rolla. I’m pretty sure I could crank out one a day for a very long time. [Via DRAFT]

Beer with a Sense of Place.
One convert at a time. [Via The Public]

Tapped in: Craft and local are powerful trends in the beer aisle.
“According to a recent Nielsen study of craft beverage alcohol conducted online by Harris Poll, 35% of adults 21 and older say they’re more interested in trying an adult beverage labeled craft. Among men 21-24, that figure jumps to 46%. But craft can often mean different things to different consumers. Overall, most people who buy alcohol are most likely to associate the term with three main traits as it relates to alcoholic beverages: a) coming from a small, independent company (56% of people surveyed); b) part of a small batch (50%); c) handcrafted (43%).

And, “22% of beer drinkers said they think the importance of being made locally has grown over the last couple of years, compared with 14% of wine drinkers and only 5% of spirit drinkers.” [Via Nielsen]

Pabst will brew beer again in Milwaukee at site of historic brewery.
Not to be a curmudgeon — after all, I’m a sucker for a feel good story and like the idea of Pabst actually making some of its own beer, brewing it the city where it was born, tapping into historic recipes — but the brewery and tasting room will have five to 10 employees. When Pabst closed its Milwaukee brewery in 1996 it eliminated the last 250 jobs. In the 1960s, according to The New York Times, there were thousands of brewery workers in the local union (that included workers at several other breweries). [Via Milwaukee Journal Sentinel]

PBR is dead.
Not so sure about this, but an interesting companion to the story above. Plus, for this line “Not only did the new beer (Narragansett) lack the metallic aftertaste of PBR, it exuded authenticity rather than irony.” [Via NY Post]

Toppling Goliath brewery puts Decorah Iowa on the beer map.
“Taproom manager Todd Seigenthaler estimated that 80 percent of the people who walk through the doors of Toppling Goliath’s taproom are out-of-towners.” And it’s not liking getting to Decorah is easy. Interesting report about how beer tourists (and Internet noteriety) have created interest among local in their hometown brewery. The story really should have included the rather public dispute between owner Clark Lewery and brewer Mike Saboe, who wrote the recipes for what turned out to be a silly number of cult beers. Saboe left the brewery in February and did not return to brew until last month.
[Via Chicago Tribune]

Tasting notes are really bad, aren’t they?
If this is true for wine it is likely true for beer. “Tasting notes scare people away from wine.” [Via jamie goode’s wine blog ]

The future of hops – a graphic prediction

The Barth Report, hops 2015

There went my Friday morning. No time to read hundreds thousands of tweets hypothesizing about the implications of the Duvel Moortgat/Firestone Walker deal. The Barth Report for 2014-2015 is available to download, and to print, because the best way to make sense of all the information included about hops it is to underline the key passages using different color pens.

Some of the news isn’t as newsy in the past. These days, the US June acreage report gets quickly publicized and dissected and the Barth-Haas Group, the world’s largest hop broker, issues a similar world update even before its annual report is out. But this is the one published since the nineteenth century, with reports going back to 1909 available online. Each year it collects statistics about the businesses of brewing and hops everywhere, and over time that provides important context.

Meanwhile, the cover (pictured above) says something about right now. “A Firework of Hop Varieties” occupies the space at the end of the report reserved to look at current issues (for instance, organic hop farming in the 2010-2011 report). Depending how deeply you have already descended into the hops rabbit hole this could look very 2012 to you, but for many in the beer world it is still uncharted territory:

“From a state of insignificance in regard to taste and appreciated mostly for their bitterness, hops have worked their way to the gustatory core of most craft beer recipes. Today, brewers exchange opinions on the sensory impressions of a wide range of hop varieties in a depth and with emotions which until recently only wine connoisseurs were known. Demand for new hop varieties is showing no sign of abating and is inspiring hop breeders all over the world. Regardless of the time-consuming process of traditional hop breeding (8 – 10 years until a new variety is ready for the market), in the past five years, many new hop varieties have been brought to market at shorter intervals. A common feature of virtually all the new varieties is that they are able to offer particularly sought-after fruity notes.”

Craft bier – it’s everywhere

From All About Beer (and to quote myself), Vince Cottone did not envision in 1984 “that his terminology would work its way so deeply into American beer culture, that craft beer would be used both as a marketing term and an anti-marketing term, or that some would still embrace at least parts of his rather specific definition, and others would find their own entirely different one.”

Oh, and spread around the world.

Craft - Magazine Fur Bierkulture

h/T @BarMas

Loose ends, beery and otherwise

Some short items that don’t fit neatly into Monday beer links or that, oops, I overlooked.

  • When I pointed to Ron Pattinson’s “The Haight” last week and suggested you might find his travel books of interest I had no idea a new one was in the works. “Tour!” chronicles his travels through the United States during the last year-plus. I sure hope somebody at the Beer Bloggers Conference later week this points to the book (or the posts it represents) as the kind of blogging it would be nice to see more of. Because Pattison combines an actual point of view with clever writing.
  • The downside to “hands on” brewing: brewers get hurt. Kerry Thomas, the brewmaster at Edge Brewing Company in Boise, Idaho, suffered 2nd and 3rd degree burns over 30 percent of her body while brewing Friday. Her friends and family have set up a relief fund at GoFundMe. Accidents involving burns are more common that most drinkers realize. Teri Fahrendorf has written about her own experience, an accident that occurred in 1989. (h/T @scratchbeer)
  • Lagunitas founder Tony Magee is now blogging. Longer posts from a guy already adept at raising a ruckus 140 characters at a time.
  • Jamie Goode has done the math and it works out that the grapes in a bottle of wine that sells for £3328 (about $5,154) cost £5.32 each (about $8.24). I tried to come up with some analogy that included hops or bourbon barrels or something and beer, but there really isn’t one that makes sense. Which is a good thing.
  • Ingredients of the month: Cattails and rhubarb.
  • Overlooked: pricenomics analyzed the beer listings of 6,000 bars and restaurants across the country and lists which beers predominate menus in which states. All this data must have left Bryan Roth in tears. Shocked Top Belgian White No. 1 in Idaho? Sierra Nevada Pale Ale tops in New Mexico but not California (Stella Artois instead)? And why does the PBR distributor in Houston still have a job?