The goal is to identify the outlier and explain why it doesn’t belong on the list. There may be more than one answer, although I happen to have a specific one in mind.
a) Mission Street Pale Ale
b) Perennial Artisan Ales Hommel
d) Revolution Ales Anti-Hero IPA
d) Three Floyds Alpha King
e) LaCumbre Brewing Elevated IPA
In case you’ve forgotten: Round one ~ Round two ~ Round three ~ Round four.
Following up on last week’s discussion of “dank” and the need for meaningful beer descriptors.
In wine country, pot-infused wines are the open secrets that present themselves in unmarked bottles at the end of winemaker dinners and very VIP tours (it bears mentioning that most winemakers are cagey enough to keep the manufacture of such wines far from winery grounds). The wines range in style and intensity as broadly as “normal” wines and winemakers do. Some practitioners of the fruit-forward, higher-alcohol, New World style take a similarly aggressive approach to infusing wine. “I know a winemaker that takes a couple of barrels a year and puts a ton of weed in it and lets it steep, and that wine is just superpotent,” says a James Beard Award–winning chef, who also asked not to be named. Henry, though, makes more classically styled wines, and with that reserve comes a more subtle hand with the cannabis. Adjusted for volume, “special” wines can range from under a pound of marijuana per 59-gallon barrel to over 4 pounds per barrel. The result is a spectrum ranging from a gentle, almost absinthe-like effect to something verging on oenological anesthetic.
Think you know where in the beer world this photo was taken?
Please leave your answer as a comment.
This is a photo from way back. I hope I haven’t previously posted it in this space. If so, I guess we’ll find out who has been paying attention.
“My belief is that many microbrewers lack institutional memory. They don’t know how big brewers have saved this industry.”
– Henry King (1921-2005)
Even though seven-plus years after I interviewed Henry King for a story in New Brewer magazine I think he’d notice how many “microbrewers” had acquired the political and business savvy he was talking about back then the fact is their fans have a little catching up to do.
This month the theme for The Session #56 is “Thanks to the Big Boys” (visit Reuben Gray’s The Tale of the Ale for a recap). Big, of course, is relative. Steve Lamond chose to write about Fuller’s. Here in the United States, Boston Beer and New Belgium are far larger, but generally considered small (OK, not by everybody, I get it).
Take a look at this list of the nation’s biggest breweries 50 years ago (courtesy of BeerHistory) and think about what they have in common.
| Anheuser-Busch, Inc. | 8,477,099 |
| Jos. Schlitz Brewing Co. | 5,694,000 |
| Falstaff Brewing Corp. | 4,915,000 |
| Carling Brewing Co. | 4,822,075 |
| Pabst Brewing Co. | 4,738,000 |
| P. Ballantine & Sons | 4,408,895 |
| Theo. Hamm Brewing Corp. | 3,907,040 |
| F & M Schaefer Brewing Co. | 3,202,500 |
| Liebmann Breweries | 2,950,268 |
| Miller Brewing Co. | 2,376,543 |
Right. Most are gone. A graphic reminder that brewing is a business. One that Henry King served well. Consider this story from 1966:
The deaths of 16 men where linked to cobalt salts that Quebec’s Dow brewery put in its beer to promote foam stability. That caused liver damage among frequent drinkers, the brewery’s best customers, and Dow ended up closing.
After King learned the deaths were related to cobalt, he spent 72 hours locked in his office, always on the phone, talking to every brewer in the United States.
“In retrospect, for what I did, I probably could have been sued,” he said. “We gave the brewing industry 72 hours to discontinue the use of cobalt in their products. We never asked a brewer whether he used it or not. We just made him give us an affidavit to give to the government that said on a given date 72 hours later, he was not using cobalt.
“We beat the federal government by seven weeks. We reported the cobalt problem, we were out of it and no longer had production seven weeks before the Food and Drug Administration even got their act together on it.”
He acted decisively not just because it was good for the beer industry, but because it was right. When the nitrosamine proved to be a carcinogen in the 1970s, King again moved swiftly. The USBA spent $1 million buying all 2,600 brands of the beer on the market and had each analyzed.
“Then I asked every brewmaster what they were using,” he said. “Three of them gave me false reports. I called the president of the brewery and told them that they had 36 hours to clean up their act. Boy, were they furious.”
By then, King had put a medical advisory committee into place. The same committee laid the foundation for the USBA’s Alcoholic Beverage Medical Research Foundation, of which King was particularly proud
King retired from the USBA in 1983, and by then he’d been instrumental in getting the small brewers tax differential approved (in 1976). He returned to the industry in 1992, serving six years as executive director of the Brewers Association of America. The BAA, which served smaller breweries, merged with the Association of Brewers in 2005 to form the current Brewers Association.
Small brewers have plenty to thank Henry King for, and in a way he was a gift from the Big Boys.
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Can you name the most influential (living1) beer writer in the world? I couldn’t even begin to try.
But right now you could make an argument for Brooklyn Brewery brewmaster Garrett Oliver — given the attention being lavished on The Oxford Companion to Beer, the four-pound beer book that is a top seller at Amazon.
This is a monster with more than 1,100 entries and it fell to Oliver to decide what got on the beer ark and what didn’t.
“Oud bruin, come aboard. Gose, sorry too obscure.”
“Serebrianka, we wouldn’t turn away one of Cascade’s hop ancestors. Centennial? That’s a lovely letter of recommendation from Ralph Olson, but we only have room for 70 hop varieties.”
That’s influence.
However, Oliver nominated a different candidate for most influential last week at the Great American Beer Festival: Eric Asmimov of the New York Times, who writes regularly about wine and very occasionally beer. Oliver offered that opinion toward the end of a half hour discussion in the Brewers Studio Pavilion about “The Evolution of Beer Scholarship.” He was making a point about how differently publications of all sorts treat beer and wine.
Few newspapers feature regular coverage of beer (although there are many wine columnists). So while Asimov may write seldom about beer, he does so to a very large audience. There’s no denying his reach when he does delve into beer but he doesn’t speak with the same influential voice he uses when discussing wine. And he doesn’t do it often enough to wield the influence he obviously could.
Just to be clear, he could because he is a terrific and sensible writer. In fact, give his story about the Companion a read and stick around for the brilliant conclusion.
As beer programs like Eleven Madison’s and volumes like the “Oxford Companion” are partly an effort to portray beer in all its multifaceted glories, some fear that a consequence will be a rise in the same sort of anxieties and pretentiousness that plague and intimidate wine consumers.
I think this fear is overstated. Beer consumers are a far more confident lot than wine consumers. They’re at ease with beer, mostly because they’ve had a solid grounding in their subject, unlike wine consumers who’ve been brainwashed into believing they must be educated or taught how to “appreciate” wine before they can enjoy it. The “Oxford Companion” is simply a wonderful resource for what, even when it’s complex, unusual, unfamiliar or strikingly different, is still just beer, regardless of how it is dressed up.
Still just beer.
That echoes nicely about the room.
1 In such conversations the word living is implied, because we expect commentary on current events, comparisons of things new. Realistically, four years after his death, Michael Jackson remains the most influential.