Seen during our travels the past year.
Nafplion, Greece.
Waitomo, New Zealand.
This doesn’t happen if Heineken did not own Lagunitas Brewing. Meanwhile, Heineken is not sold at either of these places.
Beer aroma pools
Imagine hiking in the mountains of wherever, emerging from a stand of trees and seeing a half dozen pools on the flat rock surface ahead. And that the smell that filled the air was just like your favorite beer.
Yet when you sidle up to them individually, getting close enough to sort out what each of them contributed on their own it is obvious they are unique.
Might you call them beer aroma pools?
Randy Mosher introduces this idea—that is aroma pools, sans the mountains—in the current (Spring 2023) issue of Craft Beer & Brewing. The inspiration comes from a research article with the roll-off-your-tongue title of “A New Classification of Perceptual Interactions between Odorants to Interpret Complex Aroma Systems. Application to Wine Aroma.” You may download it here, but I recommend skipping directly to Mosher’s beer version.
Let’s start with the odor activity value (OAV), which you might recall is discussed in “For the Love of Hops.” The OVA equals one when the threshold of detection of a compound is equal to the quantity present.
In the wine study, researchers blended single chemical compounds to create a model wine aroma. They then began removing them to determine which ones really matter. The model included 14 ethyl esters, only six of which had an OAV greater than 1. They were able to remove every ester except one and still maintain the same fruity character as long as they increased the quantity to match the original intensity.
Mosher writes, “As a group, the esters were so resilient that scientists termed them a ‘buffer.’ Even though many of the original esters were far below threshold values, they were strongly interacting—demonstrating superadditivity, a kind of synergy.”
He asks, “Is beer odor structured similarly?” The answer is yes, and he makes the case. So I suggest you track down a copy of the magazine. As you might expect, Mosher has also created lovely diagrams of how to think about both wine aroma pools and beer aroma pools.
You can find it here, or subscribe.
A bit of a disclosure. I occasionally write (and thus am paid by) Craft Beer & Brewing. I write about hops regularly for Brewing Industry Guide, which is produced by CB&B.
TWTBTW: Brewery succession & small Kansas town successes
This tiny room next to the kiln where hop farmer Brent McGlashen sleeps during harvest season. See explanation below.
The sale of Lazy Magnolia, the first packaging brewery in Mississippi, was announced last week. These things happen. Look at the list of “21 iconic breweries” below and count how many are run by their founders.
At some point breweries become “too big to fail.” They aren’t going to simply disappear. But there are thousands of smaller ones and eventually there must be a change. The kids inherit the place or a new owner takes charge or, in fact, they simply disappear.
I’m making no predictions about what happens next at Lazy Magnolia, if the new owners really will take “the brewery to new heights while maintaining its community roots.”
Lazy Magnolia opened in 2005, the same year at Ballast Point, Captain Lawrence, Dry Dock and 23 other microbreweries. Eighty breweries, 18 microbreweries and 62 brewpubs, closed that year. Put another way, 72 breweries came, 80 went and 1,310 remained the same.
In 2005, Boston Beer sold almost 20 percent of what the Brewers Association classified as craft beer and the 50 largest breweries almost 80 percent. In 2021, Boston Beer sold 7.3 percent of “craft beer” and the 50 largest breweries 50 percent.
Of course Lazy Magnolia had a story to tell. Leslie Henderson gave her husband, Mark, a homebrew kit for Christmas about 2000 or so. She ended up being the brewmaster. Hurricane Katrina shut down the brewery in 2006, but they survived. Their Southern Pecan Nut Brown Ale is made with whole roasted pecans and gets regular Untappd checkins from all over the American South.
Lazy Magnolia brewed 14,508 barrels of beer in 2012, but business had already begun to falter before the pandemic. They produced 11,450 in 2017 and 7,392 in 2021.
The brewery is one data point among thousands, but those thousands are the ones to watch when talking about the future of locally brewed beer.
In Kansas, small town means small
The “transformational potential of a small-town brewery” is particularly evident at The Farm & the Odd Fellows in Minneapolis (a town in Iowa). “The Swishers are rural Kansas natives who met at Bethany College in Lindsborg, moved away and boomeranged back to central Kansas in 2009. They have two kids and are both medical professionals by trade. Keir is an ER doctor in Salina, about 20 miles south of Minneapolis. Ashley is a dentist who bought a dental practice in downtown Minneapolis in 2010.
“Roughly 70% of Ashley’s patients come from out of town, and many of them are undergoing sedation during their visits. ‘If you’re getting a root canal or a crown, your driver is going to have a couple hours to kill while waiting for you,’ Keir said. ‘And there wasn’t a lot to do, or eat or drink in Minneapolis. So in 2019 we thought, why not buy this old building and figure out something to do with it for the community?'”
Lists
– 21 most iconic American breweries. Boston Beer is the only one on the list you’d call lager-centric. Just an observation. By chance, you can read more list-member Allagash here./a>
– 8 of the best beer cities around the world. Not everybody will agree with the two US choices, Portland (Maine, that is) and Denver. And a note about the Denver entry – Black Project closed last September.
Festivals
– Clear Beer Fest. Just what it says. How’s that for transparency?
– The Freshtival 2023. All of the beer poured will be less than 7 days old.
Good listening
Hosting an All About Beer podcast focused on hops grown in New Zealand, Em Sauter and Don Tse began by thanking Brent McGlashen of Mac Hops for being up at 7 a.m. New Zealand time to talk with him. I had to laugh, because by his own account McGlashen doesn’t sleep much.
And he sleeps even less during harvest, which just wrapped up. Most nights his young children come tuck him in before going to bed (their house is nearby). He might sleep two hours in the tiny room (pictured at the top) next to the kiln that runs 24 hours a day during harvest.
Mac Hops is by no means a tiny operation, but, as you can see, is still hands on. I’ll be writing a bit about New Zealand hops in the next Hop Queries newsletter as well as elsewhere . . . likely for the next several months.
Really good stuff I read this week
They have nothing to do with beer, but they have something to do with how we think about new things (which might include beer). And how we think about writing about beer.
– The curious love affair between Jason Isbell and America’s sportswriters
– Is Ashely Nicole Moss the future of sports journalism?
Because this.
“But maybe, just maybe, I’m old as fuck. Maybe I’m a dinosaur who needs to accept that times (and approaches) have changed. Maybe my way isn’t the only way. Maybe my way isn’t even the right way.”
Cue (or queue) up Jason Isbell’s “Maybe It’s Time.”
Beer, blanding, cool kids and globalizing inspiration
You know that thing where the time machine doesn’t drop you exactly where you expected? We departed Auckland late Sunday evening and arrived in Los Angeles not quite early enough Sunday afternoon to continue our planned journey home. In other words, we missed our connecting flight and did not enjoy the next 20 hours all that much. It would be obnoxious of me to complain after three weeks in Aotearoa (New Zealand), so I won’t. The country is spectacular.
I pass it along only to explain why I had extra airport time, some of which I used to catch up on reading. That Was The Beer Week That Was will not return until next week, but I wanted to give a nod to a couple of beer visiting OGs and include links to two that may or may not be related.
First, Chris O’Leary visited this 300th brewery and VinePair wrote about him. That he is racking up these numbers pops up every once in a while on Twitter or elsewhere and somebody comments that surely nobody else has done this. But Dan Forbes and Dave Gausepohl have, so I feel obligated to point to a story I wrote about Beer Dave more than seven years ago.
At the time he had visited more than 3,400 breweries. He is closing in on 5,000 now. Forbes, who Beer Dave he calls a mentor, visited more than 6,000 before passing away earlier this year. Those started going to breweries when you couldn’t knock off 50 during a long weekend in Chicago. Forbes and his wife also visited every county in the United States.
Second, are these two circumstances related?
– Jeff Alworth writes about craft beer “crapping out”: “Let’s start here: I think craft’s malaise is a thing. I don’t see this as a temporary downturn. Craft beer is suffering an identity crisis and it won’t snap back to being the cool kid’s drink anytime soon.”
– Alex Murrell argues “that from film to fashion and architecture to advertising, creative fields have become dominated and defined by convention and cliché. Distinctiveness has died. In every field we look at, we find that everything looks the same.”
Bar mat alert
It is early in the year, but this bar mat from Sawmill Brewery will be tough to beat in the annual “best bar mat I’ve seen this year” contest I hold in my head. As seen at The Brewers Co-operative in Auckland. I want a place like the co-op within walking distance of our house in Colorado.