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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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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This images was taken from a greeting card, and was captioned, “Where hipster gnomes gather; ‘Yes! More small batch beer and hancrafted sausages for all!” Perhaps this will cause you to think about hipster beer drinkers in a different way. See below.

More than 15 years ago, The New Yorker published “A Better Brew: The Rise of Extreme Beer.” Last fall, Dave Infante interviewed Burkhard Bilger, who wrote the story, for Taplines. Read the article, listen to the podcast, when you have a chance.

The New Yorker invested a good chunk of change to put this story on the page. Bilger went to Europe, to Delaware, to the Great American Beer Festival and elsewhere, across many days of work. How many stories in small beer-focused publications would have been funded with what was spent on a single story? It was and is an outlier, but toss it into the mix when you write a blog post in your mind based on:

– What Boak & Bailey wrote about “beer writing” in their most recent newsletter.
– Alan McLeod’s comments and further thoughts.*
– Evan Rail’s still fresh essay about the same subject.
– Matthew Curtis on publishing and sustainability.

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