Stuff recently noticed, perhaps because a press release headed my way or I was goofing off.
Drink that IPA now (please)
Six of the top eight new “craft beer” brands in the United States in 2010 were IPAs of some sort (sometimes “imperial” or “double,” sorry Mr. B), according to Symphony IRI, which tracks beer sales in various channels.
Curiously, although “American-Style India Pale” annually draws more entries than any other category at the Great American Beer Festival, before 2010 no single brand could be found at Walmarts across the country. Now there are three — Sierra Nevada Torpedo, New Belgium Ranger IPA and Samuel Adams Latitude 48. Sierra Nevada introduced Torpedo in 2009, the other two were new in 2010 (Latitude for just the last four months and still it was the second best selling new “craft beer,” behind Ranger.)
What does this mean? That IPA is going mainstream, going viral, about to trend on Twitter? Something like that. Plus thousands more people will get the story behind India Pale Ale wrong. (Save yourself the pain — just tell them to go buy Amber, Black & Gold and/or Hops and Glory.)
One bit of explanation. Symphony IRI tracks packaged goods through a variety of channels, such as supermarkets, convenience stores and big box stores. The places lots of people buy lots of stuff. IRI doesn’t get data from every single liquor store, including perhaps the one where you buy special beers. They don’t track sales in bars or brewpubs. Places where IPA was already on the radar.
However, when the Brewers Association finishes collecting information from its members and announces “craft beer” sales totals for 2010 they’ll likely reflect what Dan Wandel of IRI told BA members in a conference call on Thursday. He reported that dollars sales of what IRI calls craft beer (pretty much the same definition as the BA) increased 14 percent and case sales 12 percent.
Supermarket sales of Torpedo soared 154 percent in 2010. IRI now lists it as the 11th best selling craft brand (its definition, so no Blue Moon White, which would be No. 1). However that’s classifying seasonals and variety packages as brands. The top-selling six actual beers are Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, Samuel Adams Boston Lager, New Belgium Fat Tire, Shiner Bock, Widmer Hefeweizen and Torpedo.
Two more data points: IRI began tracking 53 additional IPA brands in 2010 and IPA’s share of what constitutes the IRI craft universe grew from 9 percent to 11 percent.
Many of these new drinkers may well tweet “I’m drinking such and such IPA at such and such pub” without even knowing that’s short of India Pale Ale (see above). That might be just as well, because they start hearing about beers brewed for a long journey as sea, built to last, full of hops that act as preservatives and they’re going to be tempted to stick a few in their cellar to see how they age.
An interesting idea, but not necessarily a good one for American IPAs. To quote from the Brewers Association style guidelines, “The style is further characterized by fruity, floral and citrus-like American-variety hop character.” And those American hop aromas — love ’em or hate ’em — are highly volatile. Much more so than the hops that would have flavored nineteenth century India Pale Ales.
After a couple of months many of those floral, citrusy, catty aromas that identify an American IPA will fade from even the most carefully bottled and handled beers. Subject them to a little bit of heat or agitation in transit — you know, like on a moving boat — and they’ll be plain old pale ales even sooner.
The best time to drink an American IPA and have it taste like the brewer intended was 600 words ago, when you read the headline.
Whither beer blogs (redux)?
There is something terribly circular about this. What follows is inside baseball, blogging about blogging instead of the beer itself.
I asked last year if anybody really reads beer blogs (other than other bloggers), pointing to a post at Palate Press digging into why wine blogs fail their readers (so don’t have many).
Today Jeff Siegel at the Wine Curmudgeon dives into a report from the United Kingdom’s Wine Intelligence that independent bloggers are one of the least trusted wine information sources in the United Kingdom, United States, and France.
Its study found that only one in five regular wine drinkers in the U.K. trust what independent bloggers say about a wine, compared with more than 50 percent who trust their wine merchant. In the U.S., the numbers were 20 percent and 80 percent, while only 10 percent of the French trusted bloggers.
Siegel went beyond the headline stuff — which caused a major stir in wine blogdom (like here) without most of the world noticing — to find another key number: 84 percent of the respondents in the U.K. said they didn’t read wine blogs.
This is the number (probably different in the U.S., and also different when it comes to beer blogs) Siegel chooses to focus on.
At this stage of the 21st century, most wine drinkers have access to the Internet and are well educated and Web savvy enough so that they can read any wine blog that’s out there. But that this affluent and sophisticated demographic doesn’t even know to look speaks to a serious problem with wine blogging. And it’s a problem that we perpetuate.
We’re too parochial, focusing on too much on the inside baseball kind of stuff that we like and that most consumers could care less about. I enjoy writing posts like this, and I think it’s important that I do it. But they are usually among the least well read posts on the blog. Wine drinkers want wine reviews.
I added the boldface — Siegel links to his most popular posts in 2010 to prove his point.
I suspect beer drinkers are much the same.
That’s enough inside baseball talk. Tomorrow back to inside beer talk.
How do you compare a pils to an imperial stout?
I have not so much made peace with “best” lists as run out of new ways to say why I don’t care for those that don’t provide sensible context. Thus when the latest lists from Rate Beer and Beer Advocate (in its print edition) arrived I sat silent.
Sure, I was amused reading the conversations that followed Martyn Cornell’s “Why extremophiles are a danger to us all” — both the comments on his blog and posts (such as this one) it inspired — but I didn’t have anything to add.
However, by taking a sledgehammer to college rankings in the current New Yorker magazine Malcolm Gladwell provoked a thought.
Gladwell begins his assault by examining the way Car & Driver ranks automobiles, writing the magazine’s “ambition to grade every car in the world according to the same methodology would be fine if it limited itself to a single dimension.” And, “A heterogeneous ranking systems works fine if it focuses just on, say, how much fun as car is to drive.”
Which leads to what the essay’s really about, rating colleges.
A ranking can be heterogeneous, in other words, as long as it doesn’t try to be too comprehensive. And it can be comprehensive as long as it doesn’t try to measure things that are heterogeneous. But it’s an act of real audacity when a ranking system tries to be comprehensive and heterogeneous — which is the first thing to keep in mind in any consideration of U.S. News & World Report’s annual “Best Colleges” guide.
This is not to say that Rate Beer uses the same methodology to compile its lists as U.S. News does for colleges. But it does endeavor to be comprehensive and heterogeneous (even though the top of the list is dominated by homogeneous, i.e. imperial, beers).
And therefore we are left with rankings that imply we might compare an imperial pumpkin beer to an elegant, well-balanced, low-alcohol cucumber beer. Could we would then use this as a guide when choosing a beer? Doesn’t work, does it?
(In all fairness to the beer rating sites they also group beers “by style,” making some homogeneous comparisons possible.)
Anyway, while I was reading Gladwell’s article — which delves into the subjectivity involved in setting “objective” standards — Pandora managed to feed me song after song that I didn’t feel the need to skip. It’s been a while since The New York Times explained how “The Music Genome Project” works, but it’s still a fascinating story. And one you may hear repeated in the coming months, because Pandora has filed for a $100 million IPO.
Some elements that these musicologists (who, really, are musicians with day jobs) codify are technical, like beats per minute, or the presence of parallel octaves or block chords. Someone taking apart Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” documents the prevalence of harmony, chordal patterning, swung 16ths and the like. But their analysis goes beyond such objectively observable metrics. To what extent, on a scale of 1 to 5, does melody dominate the composition of “Hey Jude”? How “joyful” are the lyrics? How much does the music reflect a gospel influence? And how “busy” is Stan Getz’s solo in his recording of “These Foolish Things”? How emotional? How “motion-inducing”? On the continuum of accessible to avant-garde, where does this particular Getz recording fall?
There are more questions for every voice, every instrument, every intrinsic element of the music. And there are always answers, specific numerical ones. It can take 20 minutes to amass the data for a single tune. This has been done for more than 700,000 songs, by 80,000 artists. “The Music Genome Project,” as this undertaking is called, is the back end of Pandora. [Note: The article is from 2009 and those numbers have grown.]
Would it be possible to do something similar for beer? I’m guessing homogeneous would work better than heterogeneous — there’s a reason that Frank Sinatra songs never show up on my Chris Knight station — and finding volunteers for research would be easy.
George Orwell’s favorite (favourite) pub
Back in November I linked to an essay from George Orwell about picking hops. Now Charles in Canada has added an article Orwell wrote about his favorite pub, Moon Under Water.
If you are asked why you favour a particular public-house, it would seem natural to put the beer first, but the thing that most appeals to me about the Moon Under Water is what people call its “atmosphere.”
And then there was the Dallas brewpub by the same name. If you blinked in 1996 you missed it. As I recall, it took more than a million dollars to open and caused quite a stir. It closed in, what?, about a month. In a state known for brewpub failures this was probably the most grand.
Reviewing Moon Under Water, the Dallas Observer offered commentary that seemingly haunts Texas brewpubs 15 years later: “Brewpubs are kind of like West Texas cows: It takes a lot of acreage to support even one.”