That was the beer week that was: Stories chosen by a human

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.”

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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.”

Cannonball Creek Brewing

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.

The best hop waters. Many of these are more expensive than beer.

Why do people suddenly care (again) about Fat Tire?

Why do people suddenly care about Fat Tire?

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.

No, We Don't Have Fat Tire.

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.

(I wrote about this in 2019, supplementing more words for #FlagshipFebruary, a project initiated by Stephen Beaumont and Jay Brooks.)

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.

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Australian hop crop appears ‘average’

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.”

Harvest will begin next month.

TWTBWTW: Being local versus being for locals

"Death of a Salesman" set

An interesting thought from Alister Reece.

“This also got me thinking about how so many of the beer styles we love and take for granted are a combination of location in a physical sense and locale in a population sense.”

I’m in the process of assembling a lengthy recap about what I’ve previously written “hop terroir” for the next issue of Hop Queries. Much of the research focuses on geographical differences, but there is more.

The first question asked here, back in 2005, was, “Does it matter where a particular beer, any beer, is brewed?” In thinking about this way too much in the years since, I’ve returned often to something Amy Trubek wrote in “The Taste of Place: A Cultural Journey into Terroir.”

“This broader definition of terroir considers place as much as earth. According to this definition, the people involved in making wine, the winemaking tradition of a region, and the local philosophy of flavor are all part of terroir. Unlike the narrow view of terroir, this humanist point of view is not really quantifiable. Terroir speaks of nature and nature’s influence on flavor and quality, but here the human attributes we bring to ‘nature’ are cultural and sensual rather than objective and scientific.”

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– Changing colors. We were New York City last weekend (the photo at the top is the set for “Death of a Salesman”; they were pretty specific about the rule against taking photos during the play) when I read this story about how New Belgium is making over Fat Tire. Had we been at home in Colorado, perhaps I could have tracked down a can of the beer and provided drinking notes. I will put that on my to do list.

– The Meaning of Dry January. I was wrong last week when I typed the link I posted then would be the only one to a story about Dry January. Beer drinkers may choose to quote this, “One takeaway from my research is that lower-alcohol-content beverages are better. It’s easier in a social situation to drink and continue drinking and not worry about your consumption.” They should read the rest of the story.

– What are the elements that make a beer memorable? Context. Context. Context.

– The shelf turd abides. A “a vessel of ironic detachment.”

– You Were Never Going to Go to Noma Anyway. I spent too much time in the week reading about changes at Noma, the hyperlocal Copenhagen restaurant, blah blah blah. Because I’ve been reading too much about the place since I wrote “Brewing Local” and wondering about how fine dining, beer and inclusivity (or exclusivity) fit together. So I’d also recommend you take a look at “Noma and the Fizzle of Too-Fine Dining,” “Noma’s closing exposes the contradictions of fine dining,” and “How much does our food tell us about who we are?”

TWTBWTW: Low visibility for beer business 2023

How are things looking for beer in 2023?

I’m OK if posts related to “Dry January”™ don’t continue to arrive at the same pace as they have in the first week of the year. They start to get repetitious. I expect this will be the only one I link to, unless I spot one even more striking.

– DRY INFIDELITY: On having a beer break in January

“You don’t know the story behind somebody desiring a break from beer in January. It may be that they have concerns for their own drinking patterns. It may be for financial reasons, especially after the pressures and expense of Christmas. It may be for fitness reasons as there are plenty of calories in this stuff, despite what people argue. It may be for mental well-being to have a break from a known depressant.

“Or it may be for any other reason unbeknown to others. It is a personal choice and everybody has the right to make it.

“But I’m tired. And I’m bored. And I’m sick to death of the irresponsibility of people within this industry. I’m tired of the shaming and guilt tripping online by people in this beer bubble and community being far too flippant about the mild poison that they peddle.”

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– The pub with no internet. So that would mean no Untappd, right?

– Firestone Walker Wookey Jack and the State of Black IPA. I didn’t know you could write about the history of Black IPA without mentioning Greg Noonan.

– They Meet Up in Motels Across America…to Trade Old Beer Cans. This is not new, but it showed up in a collection of stories about collections. It reminded me to look and see of a story I wrote about “Beer Dave” for All About Beer is in their growing archives. It is, although my byline is not.

– 6 Beer Industry Trends to Watch in 2023. No. 6: “Taprooms Will Become Attractive Interactive Hubs.” Yes. Disc golf at Live Oak Brewing in Austin, Texas.

– Speaking of trends. The Wall Street Journal had two stories about beer this week. As the headlines (The Huge Number of Small Breweries Creates a Beer Glut and Beer Sales Drop as Consumers Balk at Higher Prices) suggest they were less than optimistic. The posts are behind a paywall, but there is an option. I read the print editions at my local library.