Scratch Brewing has been one of our favorite places to be since Daria and I first visited nearly 10 years ago Simply to be. Full stop.
So it seemed a bit jarring Wednesday when James Beard Award semi-finalists were announced to see Scratch as a contender for “Outstanding Bar.” They have a bar top, but eight tasters will fill up half of it. (There was a ninth glass to the left; when you can only visit once every 15 months or so, in this case last February, you order everything on tap and buy bottles to go.) And they have beer.
But people go to a bar to watch the Super Bowl. I’ve been at Scratch on Super Bowl Sunday, but there is no TV, and the people playing Cards Against Humanity did not seem to care. People scribble graffiti on the walls in bar bathrooms. Not at Scratch.
There is an explanation. Scratch co-founders Marika Josephson and Aaron Kleidon were semi-finalists for “Outstanding Beer, Wine and Spirit Producer” in 2020, the year the Beard Awards were canceled. They canceled 2021 at the same time and since then there have been many changes. Last year there was Outstanding Bar Program category and this year there is simply Outstanding Bar. The criteria: “This award is presented to a wine bar, beer bar, cocktail bar, coffee bar or any other business whose primary offering is beverage and that demonstrates consistent excellence in curating a selection or in the preparation of drinks, along with outstanding atmosphere, hospitality, and operations while contributing positively to its broader community.”
Scratch definitely qualifies, but I still would not call the brewery on a farm a bar. And I don’t think the people who were there two days after Thanksgiving of 2020 would either.
I know I am doing this wrong. That I should be retweeting, maybe adding my own thought. But I have no urged to get sucked back into Twitter personally, and in this case I am passing on “the link + quick comment” philosophy behind #nottwitter. I just want you to read this excellent thought from Stephen Beaumont (@BeaumontDrinks) that happened to be posted on Twitter:
“Of course White Claw is coming out with a vodka. Per @ShankenNews, 50% of White Claw Seltzer drinkers drink vodka weekly, and 77% of them mix vodka with hard seltzer. It’s the bland leading the bland, folks.”
This lovely essay from Eoghan Walsh is not about Fat Tire. That it arrived the same week so many were moved to comment on changes in Fat Tire was a coincidence. There is, in fact, much more to what Walsh writes than these three sentences, but, dang, they seem relevant to the Fat Tire conversation.
“A beer evolves in other ways too; the Zinnebir of 2022 is not the Zinnebir of 2002 because of innumerate conscious and unconscious decisions made in those 20 years. Brewers are constantly tweaking their beers, paddling furiously out of sight of the drinker to provide them the same – or better – experience every time. Over the course of 20 years a beer is pulled from its original template by incremental changes to brewing processes, new or different raw materials, or marketing decisions altering its colour, bitterness, or alcohol content.”
This week in AI news
– Atwater Brewing in Detroit has used ChatGPT to write a beer recipe, then brewed Artificial Intelligence IPA.
– If the commitment of beergeek to AI generated words and images wasn’t previously clear, it should be now that the site has been renamed beergeekAI. It is not a place to worry about the role AI will play in journalism (worth considering, but not in this context). It is a place to visit when you need a smile.
– Perhaps something similar is needed for wine drinkers, because otherwise this: “It wouldn’t surprise me if this has been going on for some time now. I’ve already written about straight-up plagarism in wine writing before, this just refines it. In most cases, given the paucity of sources used to plagiarize content for Instagram posts and the like (most copycat content is lazily purloined from a single website), a bot-written rehash will be both more balanced and more readable. But if we’re really honest, most wine writing is a recycling effort in the first place.”
You might also enjoy
But what does the “new” Fat Tire taste like? For those who can’t wait until they sample it themselves there is this: “If the color and packaging had remained unchanged, I honestly wonder what percentage of the Fat Tire drinkers would have noticed the shift in flavors. I can fully believe that some less discerning tasters would have happily gone on drinking the brand without realizing that things had changed.”
As an aside, because I wrote a couple of stories about hops and sustainability last summer I learned that New Belgium was already using HBC 522 in Fat Tire. Beers evolve.
23 people to watch. “These are folks whose voices are changing craft beer for the better every day just by doing what they do best: brewing beer. And yes, many of them by nature are also actively championing safer, more-inclusive spaces in craft beer.”
This is what success looks like. Cannonball Creek Brewing in Golden, Colorado, celebrated their 10th anniversary this past weekend. They brew about 750 barrels of beer a year. That’s not very much compared to a somewhat larger brewery in Golden, but enough to sustain a community business. They are better than pretty good at it what they do, winning a GABF medal every year since they opened. That’s not the only reason it was packed Friday night, although it’s a good place to start. Sunday they had a Piñata.
Elephant-friendly beer. If that headline won’t entice you to read this story I do not know what might.
OK, maybe they don’t really. I found this tasting note from John Frank at Axios Denver telling:
Fat Tire is like an old friend. You can immediately connect, even if it’s been too long since you last visited.
- The original pours a beautiful copper hue, easy-going with caramel and nut flavors that remind you it once counted as full-flavored craft beer.
- While well-made, the remake is uninspiring. It has a Honey Nut Cheerios aroma, and the flavors of sweet cereal that finish less satisfyingly.
The bottom line: You can probably drink more of them, but do you want to?
. . . even if it’s been too long since you last visited.
I spent more time Tuesday looking at Twitter than I have in the last two weeks, maybe a month, working my way through various threads, wondering when those commenting last drank Fat Tire, or why they spent so much time typing words about the can, or if the rebrand will help New Belgium recharge Fat Tire, or in another words if “high quality, low impact” (a reference to the beer’s zero-emissions production process) will create more connections than “Follow your Folly” once did, or why a brewery should be obligated to make a legacy beer exactly like it always has even if it quit using the exact same ingredients maybe two decades ago, or for that matter exactly what a legacy beer beer is, or . . . whew . . . exhausting.
This was taken in 2009 at a beer store in Charleston, S.C., a few days before New Belgium Brewing began selling beer in North Carolina. As the company had since 2006, when it started selling beer west of the Mississippi, it offered three brands in 22-ounce bottles — Fat Tire Amber Ale, 1554 Black Lager and Mothership Wit. Two weeks later they would launch the same three brands on draft, following with six-packs about a month later.
We arrived in North Carolina March 2, the day Fat Tire went on sale. We visited a package store the next day. Neat stacks of 1554 and Mothership Wit remained piled as high as an elephant’s eye. The Fat Tire was gone.
In 2009, Fat Tire accounted for 70 percent of New Belgium sales and it fueled expansion. Many customers thought Fat Tire was the name of the brewery, and the Fort Collins, Colorado, post office regularly delivered mail addressed to Fat Tire Brewery.
This did not happen by accident. After an early romance with drinkers when the company began selling its beers in the Northwest in 2002, New Belgium Brewing discovered the grass-roots relationship marketing, closely tied to cycling and love for the outdoors, that had worked close to its Colorado base could not be replicated in Oregon and Washington. When sales fell, New Belgium turned to marketing consultants Douglas Holt and Douglas Cameron. Those two outline and explain the strategy they developed in a chapter called “Fat Tire: Crossing the Cultural Chasm” within their book, “Cultural Strategy: Using Innovative Ideologies to Build Breakthrough Brands.”
Cliff Notes version, there was a tagline and a commercial. New Belgium used the tagline, “Follow Your Folly, Ours is Beer,” for at least 10 years after it was introduced in 2003. “We wanted to say ‘here’s the kind of ideology we aspire to, we celebrate all those who pursue the same kind of thing, and this is exactly the ideology that is at the heart of our brewery and the beer we are drinking,” the authors explain in “Cultural Strategy.”
The commercial featured a character they called The Tinkerer. He finds an old bicycle at a garage sale, carefully restores it and then happily rides it into the Colorado countryside. I think there was more than one iteration, and this is the one I found on YouTube . . .
Twenty years ago this commercial reflected a DIY ethos that had been central to brewery startups for 20 years by then. Of course, there was also the Fat Tire bicycle connection.
It was good marketing.
It is much easier to judge such things looking in the rear view mirror. I think I will leave it at that.
An update from Hop Products Australia, whose farms produce almost all the country’s crop:
“At the halfway point of the growing season, we have experienced another typical La Niña weather pattern characterized by cooler daytime temperatures and increased rainfall. With our soil saturated and our dams full, 4 percent of our acreage became subject to flooding. This was a common story across eastern parts of Australia at the tail-end of 2022. Despite some challenging conditions, we were able to modify our calendar of inputs, complete stringing and training on schedule, and help most of the flood-affected acreage recover. In general, our hops have now reached the wire, are filling out with laterals, and on the cusp of inflorescence which will give us more insight into the climatic impacts on yield this season.
“Even though the hop and brewing world seems to be going through significant realignment of supply and demand, the outlook for Aussie hops remains strong. Since crop 2023 is expected to be on average, we encourage brewers to proactively review their Aussie hop requirements and reach out regarding forward contracts.”
