TWTBWTW: Unions, ghost pubs & brewery cats

Retweeting Boak and Bailey’s tweet pointing to their weekly roundup of interesting writing about beer and pubs, I commented “In which I am reminded a ‘thing’ maybe still be a ‘thing’ after it has been written about so much it seems there is nothing ‘new’ to write. Case in point, this morning I learned the Bermondsey Beer Mile ‘is still a thing.'”

To which Alan McLeod replied: “Isn’t ‘a thing’ different from ‘still a thing’ in that to be ‘still a thing’ there needs to be a reasonable length of time when it really wasn’t a thing even if there are those who thought the thing was thoroughly thingy throughout.” That was probably more than I was prepared to think about before breakfast on Saturday (this is where I should insert a photo of my food, but I will not).

My comment, however, is something I had been thinking about since it was announced Scratch Brewing is a semi-finalist for a James Beard Award. In the first few years after Scratch began selling beer in 2013 there many, many stories about the brewery. It was, and is, a great story. But if (almost) everybody writes one time about a place all at once then pretty soon there are no new stories.

Scratch’s post about the awards had 725 likes on Instagram this morning, and a similar one on Facebook had 594 likes. To many people Scratch is still a thing, even if the story faucet is no longer running wide open.

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Beer union members on parade.

So you understand I might be biased, I think unions are on balance a good thing. I know they aren’t perfect but most of the “cons” on pro and cons lists are bullshit. I once worked for a newspaper in which members of the editorial department were not represented by a union. And I worked for one, both inside and outside of management, where they were. Not only was the second a better place to work, for both union members and those in management, but I think having the union in place made the newspaper better.

That said, here is a straight up news story from The Red&Black, the University of Georgia student newspaper:

“On Tuesday, a majority of employees from Creature Comforts Brewing Company filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board for a secret ballot election for employees to vote to be represented by their newly formed union, the Brewing Union of Georgia, according to a press release from the union.

“BUG intends to become a fully independent union for breweries across the state. Various community leaders and union members delivered the letter requesting voluntary recognition on Jan. 13 to management requesting a response in three days, the release said. On Jan. 16, management said they would consider the request.

“Since the company did not immediately agree to recognition, BUG proceeded with filing for the election.”

Of course, it isn’t that simple. To understand what is going on you really need to be reading Fingers, Dave Infante’s Substack newsletter. Both his Wednesday report and a follow up (scroll down) on Saturday. Really, go do it now.

PorchDrinking has a “what does it all mean” story, and it includes a list of pros and cons (scroll about half way down). You could center an enthusiastic debate in a brewery taproom around any of the first five cons offered by Jon Hyman at the law firm Wickens Herzer Panza.

But No. 6 . . . wow.

“Nothing in the employer-employee relationship is supposed to be equal.”

Really?

Brewery cats. “Working cats” are not friendly or otherwise compatible with normal home life. A Kentucky Humane Society program finds homes for them, including at breweries. “At a lot of shelters that don’t have a working cats program, [these cats] wouldn’t be adoption candidates and they would probably be euthanized,” said the program manager.

Ghost pubs. In Brussels. If that doesn’t have your attention, the images are a product of a Praktica L and Kodak Portra 400 film.

An old story becomes a new story in Uruguay. This reads like an origin story that has been told thousands of times during the last 40 years in the United States. Things like this happen: “But only a few months before the scheduled shipment was supposed to arrive, the location they thought they had secured fell through. They were left with a fortune in state-of-the-art equipment about to be unloaded into the busy port with nowhere to go.”

And to be filed under wait-didn’t-these-breweries-just-open?, “they took inspiration from breweries like Grimm Artisanal Ales in Brooklyn, 2nd Shift Brewing in St. Louis, and Tripping Animals Brewing Co. in Miami.”

Requiem for Fat Tire. “As Fat Tire Moves On, I Miss the Old Belgium.”

The official beer of . . . World Axe Throwing League. The beer is Pabst and this is a real story.

Mic drop:

Is this is what an outstanding bar looks like?

Scratch Brewing bar

Scratch Brewing has been one of our favorite places to be since Daria and I first visited nearly 10 years ago Simply to be. Full stop.

So it seemed a bit jarring Wednesday when James Beard Award semi-finalists were announced to see Scratch as a contender for “Outstanding Bar.” They have a bar top, but eight tasters will fill up half of it. (There was a ninth glass to the left; when you can only visit once every 15 months or so, in this case last February, you order everything on tap and buy bottles to go.) And they have beer.

But people go to a bar to watch the Super Bowl. I’ve been at Scratch on Super Bowl Sunday, but there is no TV, and the people playing Cards Against Humanity did not seem to care. People scribble graffiti on the walls in bar bathrooms. Not at Scratch.

Scratch Brewing bathroom

There is an explanation. Scratch co-founders Marika Josephson and Aaron Kleidon were semi-finalists for “Outstanding Beer, Wine and Spirit Producer” in 2020, the year the Beard Awards were canceled. They canceled 2021 at the same time and since then there have been many changes. Last year there was Outstanding Bar Program category and this year there is simply Outstanding Bar. The criteria: “This award is presented to a wine bar, beer bar, cocktail bar, coffee bar or any other business whose primary offering is beverage and that demonstrates consistent excellence in curating a selection or in the preparation of drinks, along with outstanding atmosphere, hospitality, and operations while contributing positively to its broader community.”

Scratch Brewing, November 2020

Scratch definitely qualifies, but I still would not call the brewery on a farm a bar. And I don’t think the people who were there two days after Thanksgiving of 2020 would either.

#nottwitter16 – The bland leading the bland

I know I am doing this wrong. That I should be retweeting, maybe adding my own thought. But I have no urged to get sucked back into Twitter personally, and in this case I am passing on “the link + quick comment” philosophy behind #nottwitter. I just want you to read this excellent thought from Stephen Beaumont (@BeaumontDrinks) that happened to be posted on Twitter:

“Of course White Claw is coming out with a vodka. Per @ShankenNews, 50% of White Claw Seltzer drinkers drink vodka weekly, and 77% of them mix vodka with hard seltzer. It’s the bland leading the bland, folks.”

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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