The most disruptive brewery in America?

I didn’t take long for me to abandon my plan for posts specifically related to “beer from a place” — whatever that means — each Wednesday.

Instead, a link and something for you to think about.

At the conclusion of a thoughtful post about how Goose Island Beer Co. has and has not changed since AB InBev bought the brewery in 2011 Jeff Alworth suggests, “But the truth is that the most disruptive brewery in America right now is Goose Island.”

Whoa! That’s a Truth with a capital T if it is The Truth.

Got me shaking my head.

*****

Upon further review, the beers he is writing about do come from a specific place — the Fulton Street brewery — do reflect that place, and are the result of what I am choosing to call post-industrial brewing.

Monday beer links, musing 01.06.14

– “I Had Just Three Things To Do.” Alan McLeod’s contribution to The Session #83. Because he’s being hounded by spammers, comments are unfortunately closed. So I’ll ask the question that pops to my mind here: If beer writing becomes less about community and more about individuality could that have an impact on the communal aspect of beer?

– Beers: Baltic and imperial porters, strong enough for cold winter nights. A story in which flavorful beer and humans interact.

– Beer Business Daily Predictions for 2014. Since it seems there’s no escaping discussions that are really about business — will “craft” sales continue to increase? how many openings? how many closings? rising or falling prices? — might as well read what Harry Schuhmacher has to report, because these are things he probably knows more about than anybody. BTW, he’s not the only one asking of legalizing weed will affect beer sales in Colorado.

Schuhmacher’s column in the current (dated January) All About Beer magazine is also an excellent read. Headlined “The Light of My Life is Dimming” it begins:

Everybody I know these days hates light beer, except those who don’t. It’s not just that they don’t prefer light beer or that they like more flavorful beers: They actually actively and morally despise light beer. It’s as if light beer was once a significant other who wronged them somehow — cheated with an import, say — and forgiveness is out of the question.

And of the cheating tarts out there, none is more despised these days, it seems, than poor old Miller Lite. You can forgive Bud Light, who was just a friend with benefits… You can forgive Coors Light because that was just a youthful dalliance… Corona Light was just a hookup on the beach, and Amstel Light was an uptown girl you couldn’t afford anyway. Natty Light and Keystone Light? Well those were just one-night stands and you consider yourself lucky for not getting the clap.

But Miller Lite? That’s the one you thought you’d marry for life.

The column itself is worth the price of the magazine (although as a bonus you get my story about “The Class of ’88”).

– Another prediction: Wine will continue to lose market share; craft beer is on the rise. Yep, linking to wine writer Jamie Goode for the third time in four weeks. And not just because he writes, “You can now get some great flavour experiences from beer for relatively little money. The same isn’t true of wine, and those who make mid-priced boring wine are the ones who will suffer loss of market share.” The whole list of wine predictions is worth reading, but remember he’s in the UK. The US “craft beer” market is arguably more mature, so we might wonder if the “commoditization of wine” he writes about could spill over into beer.

– German brewers push into the craft beer market with new hops. Pardon the hubris, but I told you so.

– You Are Not A Brewer, You Are A Panhandler With A Kickstarter Account. I aim to post five links a week here, bookmarking contenders during the previous week or saving them to Pocket. This popped on my radar Thursday and by Friday it had, as we used to say back in the day, “gone viral.” I expect you may have already seen it, but in case it got overlooked in the holiday bustle . . . a “bonus” sixth link.

Session #83: Against the grain

The SessionToday we gather for The Session #83 and the topic is “Against the Grain.” Rebecca at “The Bake and Brew” has a few questions: “How much is our taste or opinion of a craft beer affected by what friends and the craft beer community at large thinks? What beer do you love that no one else seems to get? Or what beer do you say ‘no thanks’ to that everyone can’t get enough of?”

Well, four years ago when Adrian Tierney-Jones was working on the first edition of 1001 Beers You Must Taste Before You Die one of my contributions was Boulevard Brewing’s Smokestack Two Jokers. It hadn’t even been released when I wrote the book entry. I’d tasted it from a tank and was smitten. What a fool.

Here is what I wrote at the time:

It makes sense that Boulevard Brewing, located in America’s bread basket, would include wheat as a major ingredient in seventy percent of the beers it brews. Boulevard Unfiltered Wheat, a 4.4 percent beer perfect for humid nights in Boulevard’s home of Kansas City, accounts for most of that, but the brewery makes a full spectrum of wheat-based beers, including Two Jokers Double Wit. “The beer and the name is based on duality,” said Boulevard brewmaster Steven Pauwels. “On one side you have the old-school way of making a tart white beer while on the other side you have the U.S. craft beer movement to make everything bigger, more complex. This beer is an approach to overcome these differences.”

He uses what brewers call a “sour mash” to create much of the tartness in this beer, a method employed in Belgium at the beginning of the twentieth century instead of using “wild” yeast. “I like the idea of tartness in white beers,” said Pauwels, who is Belgian-born and trained. “Nowadays we tend to over spice these beer to reach that goal, while they were pretty simple beers at that time (in the nineteenth century).” The recipe for Two Jokers includes both malted and unmalted wheat and a bit of oats. It is spiced with coriander, orange peel, cardamom and grains of paradise, but none in quantities that make them easy to pick out.

Two Jokers is part of Boulevard’s Smokestack Series, a collection boldy flavored beers sold in 750ml bottles. “I think that Midwestern beer aficionados are on par with Belgian beer drinkers. There is a lot of tradition in Belgium while there is a lot more experimentation going on here (the United States),” he said.

I wasn’t the only one who liked the beer. After Boulevard quit making the beer (it was only a seasonal) #TeamTwoJokers popped up on Twitter. But that Boulevard quit making the beer indicates something. Like that I might have been a bit premature in suggesting commercial greatness for it.

However, there is a postscript. Boulevard is bringing it back this summer. There’s a chance for you to drink it along with 1,000 other beers in the book and die in peace. Or at least to go against the grain. It is, after all, a wheat beer.

Monday beer links, musing 12.30.13

– On beer writing. Inside baseball, for sure — in fact, Adrian Tierney-Jones wrote this first as the “Industry Insider” column in CAMRA’s What’s Brewing magazine — but lots of fodder for discussion Feb. 15 in Kentucky.

I am particularly interested in seeing what sort of future there is for narrative beer writing, both in print (including magazines as well as books) and in digital form. Be sure to read the comments from Pete Brown and others.

– Looking for crossmodal correspondences between classical music and fine wine. “Tchaikovsky’s String Quartet No 1 in D major turned out to be a very good match for the Château Margaux 2004 (red wine). Meanwhile, Mozart’s Flute Quartet in D major, K285 was found to be a good match for the Pouilly Fumé (white wine).” When will Flavour publish a similar study involving beer?

– South Africans Search for Flavor in Their Beer. Nothing wrong that South African hops get no mention, but I’ve had some excellent beers this year made with varieties bred on the SAB Hop Farms. They are available to smaller breweries, giving them what seems like an excellent opportunity to create “indigenous” beers.

– Slovenian beer turns sour as state fire sale looms. Not that Lasko is a great beer, but this is a sad story.

– Joe Sixpack’s beer highlights of 2013. I’m not a fan of lists, but will make an exception for Don Russell.

Monday beer links, musing 12.23.13

– Terroir and the Making of Beer into Wine. I commented on the original post (leaving a typo; sigh) because it is a topic obviously dear to me. However, and I might wear you out with this, using the word terroir when talking about beer from a place just confuses the conversation. To cite Jamie Goode for the second week in a row, he once described the concept of terroir in wine as “blindingly obvious and hotly controversial.”

Find a word to use other than terroir and the conversation may change. Read the other comments and also head over to a discussion that popped up at Beer Advocate with that in mind. And particularly this post from VitisVinifera, which takes things in another direction.

until a brewer:
-grows their barley/wheat/whatever right there
-grows their hops right there
-gets their water on-site
-completes all of this with a contiguous on-site brewery

I will consider this an unanswered question

My argument would be that a beer can taste of a place, represent a place, and be unique to a place without every damn ingredient being from that place.

– Does beer need editing? Boak and Bailey ask that question and more: “Who is there to stop a brewer releasing a bad beer? To say, before it reaches the public, that it is simply not good enough?”

– International Gruit Day. Circle the date on your calendar: Feb. 1. But celebrate responsibly, because there’s little nastier than a Ground Hog Day hangover.

– There are at least two different “wine communities” – and they don’t talk to each other. Arguably at least three beer communities. Can you name them?

– Best Beer Writing Contest. Sponsored by the Beer Bloggers Conference and the National Beer Wholesalers Association (NBWA). Twenty-five entrants receive free registration to the 2014 Beer Bloggers Conference and the overall winner gets a free trip for two to attend NBWA’s 77th Annual Convention in New Orleans. A new blog post, dated after Dec. 19, is required, one that discusses the topic of “America’s Beer Renaissance: Consumer Choice and Variety in the U.S. Beer Market.” One of the suggested topics — and if you want to win you should consider their agenda — is, “How can beer writers partner with brewers, beer distributors and retailers to promote beer in their communities?”