TWTBWTW: Monks, kveik & complexity

Here 'ripens' Westvelteren Trappist beer

When Pete Brown asked participants on Twitter* why they read beer writing and what they want from a book or piece of prose he got plenty of answers. [Hit “read replies” to see them.]

I’m always on the lookout for stories to link to here and what I choose can be pretty arbitrary. I seldom think about what you expect, desire, whatever. Perhaps I should.

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A Paul Simon moment. A story about GABF from my wife and daughter. Of course I’m putting it first. Extra credit because it is at the (thank goodness it is back) All About Beer website. Daria and I first wrote about GABF for All About Beer in 1993.

From Norway with love.
– “Particularly since the dawn of what we might call “kveik consciousness”—the realization that what these brewers do is remarkably rare and interesting—the brewers now know each other, interact, trade yeast, and get together at least once a year to celebrate their old craft. The geography that once created a tradition no longer limits communication, but nevertheless, brewers stick to the ways of their parents.”

– Kørnolfestival is a bucket list adventure.

Impressions of Nuremberg. Also important life lessons, such as “never look up your first love.”

Rhythms, in brewing and in life. Those who have sat in on one of my presentations about monastic brewing have heard me talk about this before (thus the photos from Westvleteren at the top). Mark Dredge finds his own during a week at England’s only brewing monastery.

How long must this keep going on? French Women Are Sick of Waiting for Their Beer Revolution.

Beer travels. Because, pubs.

Word of the week: complexity. The story is about wine, but you will likely find beer connections within. “It took the 20th-century inventions of stainless steel, temperature control and anaerobic fermentation conditions to create purely fruity wines. So, in honesty, all wines once were complex—that is, they were laden with multiple flavors, aromas and textures that were not merely fruity.”

* h/t to Alan McLeod’s weekly beery news.

Beers for the future and thoughts from the past

Sir Isaac Newton Belgian Quadrupel

As the hours pass at a beer festival, sometimes a bit of beer is spilled, in this case Saturday during Blacktoberfest in Stone Mountain, Georgia. (If you find some irony in a black beer festival held only a few miles from Stone Mountain Park, where the road into the park is called Jefferson Davis Drive, good for you.) Ale Sharpton suggested the day before the event would be “epic.” Change is underway in Georgia, and it is accelerating. More later.

Meanwhile, a few links you may want to click . . .

But not a drop to drink
More on the discussion about if peasants in medieval times regularly drank beer instead of water because water was unsafe to drink. The latest from Lars Garshol, in which he concludes it is “abundantly clear by now that in the past lots of people did in fact drink beer against thirst every day.” And a recent post from Martyn Cornell the explains why this was not possible for much of the population.

Questions not asked
“Despite its rosy self-mythology, the craft beer landscape used to be full of pieces of shit. It had exploitative owners, power-mad managers, cruel and entitled customers.”

This, from Dave Infante, seems like an overstatement.

We can talk about that another time. Instead, consider this. “Fawning fluff gives pieces of shit room to fester; puff pieces underwrite the status quo.” Hard questions can be hard to ask. I’ve mentioned before that I once worked for a newspaper where the publisher told us, “If we (publish) something about a person, we should (write) something good the next.” Really. Easy questions made his life easier.

By chance, I was still thinking about Infante’s story when I came across this one about a woman who has worked at Deschutes original brewery (a brewpub) for 32 years. In we learn, “(Melissa) Talbott says she has looked at exit plans regarding retirement, but for now, she says she has at least another five years left in her.” And I wondered if she has earned some sort of pension from Deschutes or if the company provides health insurance. Should those questions have been asked and addressed? Asking for a friend.

From the cask
– Pete Brown offers six reasons cask ale-loving publicans should immediately whack the price up.
– Coming soon. Cask Beer: The real story of Britain’s unique beer culture.

Beer writing wanted
– Alan McLeod revisits the why question. “It’s only in the writing that the fixation becomes of value . . . This is the problem with the British Guild of Beer Writers and NAGBW shift from talking about ‘writing’ to the thinly smug language of ‘reporting’ and ‘journalism’ over the last few years. Not only does it smack of needy niche (and also pretendy-ism… yes, I said it) it misses the fundamental point that most of this is obsession, not reportage. Write!”

– Cutleaf in partnership with All About Beer is thrilled to offer a call for submissions for beer-related writing. Share with us your short stories, personal essays, poems, or hybrid work in which beer is featured.

Real, natural, authentic, and local

The Atlantic has a story about pawpaws, the “quintessentially American fruit,” and why they are so hard to buy.

This is not news to brewers.

“Brewing Local” includes a recipe from Fullsteam Brewery in North Carolina for making a beer with pawpaws and a story about why Piney River Brewing in Missouri has made a beer called Paw Paw French Saison. Here’s a bit of the Piney River story:

Brian Durham was listening to National Public Radio on his drive to work one morning when he heard a report about preserving Pawpaw French, a disappearing dialect in the Ozarks. “I thought, ‘That’s it. We’re getting some pawpaws, we’re buying some French (saison) yeast,’” he said. Piney River Brewing was going to brew Paw Paw French Saison.

Piney River is located on a farm five winding miles outside of Bucyrus, Missouri, because Brian and Joleen Durham live on the farm. They bought their house in 1997 and the rest of the 80 acres they live on five years later. They raise beef cattle on the property, but were too busy with the brewery in 2015 to get around to selling any. They feed spent grain to the cattle and a sign on the long gravel driveway leading to the brewery warns, “Caution, cows may be drunk on mash.”

Pawpaws (do not) not scale. “You find it all around here in the river bottoms. Good luck getting them before the critters,” he said. They buy their pawpaws from a farm in Ohio.

Pawpaw French is far rarer than the Cajun French that is essential to the culture Bayou Teche is intent on preserving. It is considered a linguistic bridge that melds a Canadian French accent with a Louisiana French vocabulary. The French originally settled Old Mines, Missouri, around 1723, back when the area was part of Upper Louisiana. “My father and mother spoke French very fluently, but they didn’t want us to speak it because it (caused) such trouble in school,” said Cyrilla Boyer, a lifetime resident who was interviewed for the NPR report. She said in the 1920s and 1930s teachers would smack students’ knuckles for speaking any French in the classroom. Pawpaw French persisted in Old Mines primarily because the town is so remote.

Historian and musician Dennis Stroughmatt is Pawpaw French’s ambassador to the outside world. He first visited Old Mines back in the 1990s, and there were still hundreds of pawpaw speakers. “It’s like eating candy when I speak Pawpaw French. That’s the best way I can say. It’s a sweet French to me,” he said. He knows better than to expect the language to make a comeback, but hopes parts of it will survive, and that kids will learn some phrases, and will understand the area’s slogan: “On est toujours icitte,” which translates to, “We are still here.”

The Atlantic reports on efforts to breed “a better pawpaw.”

It might be best to pause and consider this: “It may not be the worst thing in the world for pawpaws to play hard to get. Even if it was possible to scale production and ship the fruit nationwide, doing so would be at odds with the urge for local, sustainable food that fueled the pawpaw boom in the first place. Planting huge pawpaw orchards might just add to the ecological toll of mass farming. Breeders could use genetic modification to improve the fruit, Brannan said, but ‘that’s 180 degrees from what people think of the pawpaw. The pawpaw is real, natural, authentic, and local.’ For all the weird, frustrating aspects of pawpaws, they are a reminder of just how far food science has come in a century-plus.”

Balance has been restored, and a bit of bad news

I spent Saturday morning during the Great American Beer Festival awards ceremony seated next to Jonathan Moxey, head brewer at Rockwell Brewing in St. Louis. One of us would comment occasionally when a winner was announced.

“I taught him to homebrew,” Moxey said at one point.

I scribbled a few notes. After Boston Beer won gold for Just The Haze in the non-alcohol beer category, I reminded myself to see when the company last won a medal. It was 2014. (They won a second medal Saturday, in experimental IPA).

And so we came to category 83, Belgian-style witbier. You might remember that in May heads were turned when the judges at the World Beer Cup chose not to award gold or silver in this category, instead giving only a bronze, to Allagash White.

Saturday the judges gave three medals in the category, and gold to Allagash White (its eight GABF medal).

“Balance has been restored,” said Moxey.

That was the second most quotable line of the weekend. My top choice was simply overheard. “The good news is more women are getting into beer. The bad news is there is a line at the women’s room.”

[Note, a Monday morning edit] Festival recaps are just staring to get posted. The ROI of the Great American Beer Festival is a thoughtful one.

And a few more links . . .

Breaking news: Bell’s makes Hopslam a holiday beer.

For your viewing pleasure: Beer zines.

Science: Scientists Just Figured Out a Way to Make Beer Taste Even Better.

More science: LANL pair want to tap into science for better beer.

Stop and smell the . . . the third place

There is no mention of beer in this love letter to the sense of smell.

If the five senses were a boy band, smell would certainly be the least popular member. This is not news: Some of the most influential philosophers in Western history turned up their noses at olfaction. “Man can smell things only poorly,” Aristotle declared, deeming our noses inaccurate sense organs. Immanuel Kant called smell “the most dispensable” of our senses, citing its fleeting nature as the reason “it does not pay to cultivate it or refine it.” Centuries later, a study conducted by the marketing company McCann Worldgroup would reveal that more than half of the 16-to-22-year-olds they interviewed would rather give up their sense of smell than technology.

But without our sense of smell there would be no pleasure in drinking beer.

Great Good Places
Could this happen? I hope so. In his Fingers substack Dave Infante draws our attention to what he calls ThirdPlacesTok. It took a lot less than two years of zoom happy hours to establish face-to-screen interactions are not the same as settling in face-to-face, preferably in friendly establishment. The point is not that ThirdPlacesTok might replace our favorite “great good place” (to cite the title of Ray Oldeburg’s book), but that they introduce a new generation to the importance of third places. And this: “Remaking the American civic landscape to preserve the third places we have and build new ones (ideally where commerce is a secondary focus, or not a focus at all) will be impossible without a massive, small-d democratic groundswell of demand.”

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Another love story (Brasserie de la Senne Zinnir). “It looked cool, it tasted cooler: it was the first time I’d found a beer that was a bit of me. It tasted modern, in its hoppy aroma and bracing bitterness, while having a distinctly ‘Belgian’ edge in its spiciness. I fell in love, so much so that what Zinne did for me is something that I hope to do for everyone who drinks my brewery, Solvay Society, beers now – to change their perception of ‘Belgian beer.'”

Oktoberfest in Stuttgart

The other Oktoberfest. Germany’s second largest Oktoberfest, the Cannstatter Volksfest, attracts more than 4 million visitors to Stuttgart over the course of 17 days. Plenty of details and photos from Franz Hofer. We went in 2008 (photo here was taken then) and now I am wondering if festivalgoers still dance to “YMCA” on table tops and sing “Take Me Home Country Roads” at the top of their voices. I wrote a bit about the day for All About Beer magazine (god bless the return of the archives).

Festival, what festival? Yes, you could spend the week in Denver, drink hundreds of different beers from breweries all over the country and never step a foot inside the Great American Beer Festival.

The power of the story. Feel free to replace the word “wine” with “beer” each time you see it in a story. “Priming is a psychological phenomenon in which exposure to one stimulus influences how we respond to a subsequent, related stimulus—consider the high-decibel music that is often played during a sports game to energize the crowd and athletes. Studies show that if a wine is presented with a formidable reputation or is highly priced, people tend to rate that wine as higher quality. But quality alone does not guarantee greatness. A compelling story can imbue a wine with the crucial components of memorability and uniqueness, giving it an advantage over others even before the first taste.”

The people’s wine (or beer)? Eric Asimov at the New York Times makes his low opinion of Fred Franzia and Two-Buck Chuck clear in this story. Asimov is a member of a “smaller group of wine lovers spend a considerable amount of time, energy and money on wine because they find it delicious, as well as rewarding intellectually and aesthetically.” Nonetheless, deep in the story is another instance where the word “wine” could be replaced with “beer” in two instances. “The wine industry itself is much to blame with its history of pretentiousness, and its absurd rituals and vocabulary that convey the message that one must be a connoisseur before one can enjoy wine.”

The chase continues. Bottle flippers, mules . . . you’ve read about them before. But, wait, this isn’t another beer story. In this one “the good stuff” is bourbon.

Headline Gussie Busch would not understand
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