Monday beer reading: ‘Postmodern’ redux & ‘local’ redux

Art+Science=Beer hat, seen at 2024 World Brewing Congress

I am enamored with the potential of question and answer format that Alan McLeod debuted last Thursday. I may give something similar a whirl one of these months. But given that this week’s dispatch is being filed from the Indianapolis International Airport, brevity wins.

POSTMODERN

Last week at the World Brewing Congress (where the photo above was taken), I don’t remember how the conversation turned to the proliferation of beer styles. But Dan Vollmer, senior manager product strategy & research at Boston Beer, said there must be a better way signal to drinkers what to expect from a beer. Samuel Adams best two seasonals, he said, are Octoberfest and Summer Ale. “They both tell you when to drink them,” he said.

Joe Stange started using the term postmodern beer in 2011, if not earlier, at the blog he called Thirsty Pilgrim. He elaborated on it in a 2015 post for Draft magazine (archived by the Wayback Machine). Now Courtney Iseman acknowledges “postmodernism has been a bit of a moving target in beer.”

LOCAL

In case you missed it, I wrote a book titled, “Brewing Local.” I have opinions about “local beer.”

A dozen years ago, this was the topic for The Session.

Last week, Jeff Alworth wrote, “What’s curious is how contingent that concept of local is.” It is, he admitted, a pretty bloggy blog post. One that invites comments (which he would appreciate), kind of like The Session, back in the day.

YOU MIGHT ALSO ENJOY

– “Thank You For Paying Black People” I’ve been disappointed not to come across more dispatches from Barrel & Flow 2024. As well as this field report, there was news Em Sauter has a new book, “Pairing Beer With Everything.”

– Not all tastemakers are vintners. Bow & Arrow Brewing CEO Shyla Sheppard and Crafted for Action founder Jen Price snuck into Wine Enthusiast’s wine-heavy Future 40 Tastemakers 2024.

– Because Jack D’Or lives on (you know if you know). The Beer Nut makes a pilgrimage to St Mars of the Desert. He also found Fantastico! “Anyone looking for juicy haze here will be disappointed. I have to say I liked this more serious and adult take on the style, one that isn’t trying to convince you it’s secretly a soft drink.”

– Mash like its 1893. And there is this, “Allegedly, some breweries add fir pitch to the kettle at a rate of 3-4 lb per 100 barrels of wort to impart a pitch flavour to the beer, as the lagering vessels are not pitched but only lacquered.”

– Speaking of local. The sale of Magnolia Brewing in San Francisco (again) means it will be locally owned (again).

Monday beer reading: Stay safe out there, plus regional, local & fancy beer

Smoky hop peparedness workshop at the World Brewing Congress in Minneapolis.

Greetings from Minneapolis, where the World Brewing Congress will continue through Tuesday. The photo above was taken during a smoky hop preparedness workshop.

Today there will be three presentations related to making sure non-alcoholic beers are safe to drink. This is important and was already on my radar when I read “How Mash Gang is Breaking the Alcohol Free Mould.” That is not to imply that Mash Gang beers are not safe, or that the story should address what the company is doing to assure the beers are free of pathogens. It simply reflects my current fascination with what brewers might do to make non-alcoholic beer better without the many useful functions ethanol performs. One of those is making beer safer to drink.

I’ve written about how adding hop character may make NABs taste better and about putting flavors back into NABs that may be lost in the production process. Both stories are behind the same paywall, but the list of benefits alcohol provides appears before you hit the wall, so to speak, in the second.

Making flavorful beer without the help of alcohol, and often without got-to-love-them compounds that result from the fermentation process, is hard. Shouldn’t the challenge appeal to a crafter of crafts?

Granted it is better to start the Mash Gang story at the beginning, but it really kicked in here:

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Lotta Monday beer reading, starting with ‘authenticity’

There were many words spilled over beer last week, including some from Jeff Alworth related to one of my favorite topics: authenticity. He even headlines a phrase, “authenticity trap,” that I almost always have to explain during conversations with brewers.

In his post he leans to a passage in which “Holt demonstrates how iconic brands exude authenticity by encompassing political and cultural authority as resources for self-expression.” I’m pretty sure that is Douglas Holt, a marketing consultant who along with his partner Douglas Cameron, was responsible for the tagline “Follow your folly, ours is beer,” that New Belgium Brewing used for more than a decade.

In 2003, Holt and Cameron created a commercial that features a character they called The Tinkerer, who finds an old bicycle at a garage sale, carefully restores it, and then happily rides it into the Colorado countryside.

They outline their strategy for New Belgium in a chapter called “Fat Tire: Crossing the Cultural Chasm” within their book, “Cultural Strategy: Using Innovative Ideologies to Build Breakthrough Brands.” As well as Fat Tire, those brands include Nike, Jack Daniels, Patagonia and others. The word authentic comes up in most chapters, but usually as a given and without a definition of what it means to be authentic. What is clear is how important whatever they label authenticity is to those focused on marketing.

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Monday beer reading: Equity, ticking & mixed up Guinness

Getting right to it . . .

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ESSENTIAL READ OF THE WEEK

Of course, you should not follow only one of these links, but if you do then make it Jamie Bogner’s interview with Kevin Asato, executive director of the National Black Brewers Association (which I overlooked the week before while we were traveling).

“We can identify that racism and access to capital have been a standard miss—that’s consistent, not just with beer, but with several other industries—but as I’m digging down into it, this capital-intensive brewery model is [a barrier itself]. Most of my brewers—92 percent—are contract brewers. Contract brewing is yet another barrier to ownership because essentially, you’re cooking up a recipe in someone else’s kitchen. We need to get that kitchen for our own brewers. That’s my biggest hurdle right now.”

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QUOTE OF THE WEEK

“I average out at fewer than four pints a day, and cask beer generally has a lower alcohol percentage, about 3.5% to 5%. I did once try one that was 23%. It was so strong that I forgot to mark it down in my notebook.”

— Andy Morton, who has ticked more than 50,000 beers.

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YOU MIGHT ALSO ENJOY

– Mixing it up. “Guinness, in fact, is a beer that some experts say has an unfounded reputation as a novelty cocktail ingredient, and when added to the right drink — and in the right way — can garner a lot of likes without stoking controversy.”

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