A handful of beer links to begin the week

Dollar bills on the ceiling at Baumgartner's Cheese Store and Tavern

Walking into Wisconsin tavern with dollar bills on the ceiling never gets old.

This week’s featured beer ingredient is hops. I’d riff on some of those links now, but we’ve been traveling and I have some catching up to do (thus the overall brevity). More in the next Hop Queries (remember, the newsletter is free).

Our travels took us to several well worn Wisconsin taverns. Not exactly English pubs, but certainly different than brewery taprooms. That, for us, added extra context to Tandleman’s “Underneath the Arches” post, which included this:

“I think I have to face facts. E and I just aren’t the target audience. We will never really feel at home in such places, as the beer and the demographics just don’t suit us. I know they vary and some are, indeed, much better than others, but we generally feel out of place in them, which hardly makes for a good time.”

And for this comment from Cooking Lager:

“Brew taps may be uncomfortable but they have the air of exclusivity and special privilege granted to those in the know. That’s what craft beer is, exclusivity and privilege. Wrap it in an establishment as well as a product and you’ve got a winner.

“Pubs are for the hoi polloi, the prols, those that don’t fetishize beer and breweries. Anyone could be in there for crying out loud.”

Hops
– Happy Fugglesvesary.

– Brewing an English-hopped NEIPA.

– Juicy High Life.

Priceless?
– Pleasure and value from high wine prices.

– Spend money on experiences, not things.

Rhetorical tension
Does the word rustic tell you anything about flavor?

In search of America’s national beer tradition

Cold beer

Before the second edition of “The Beer Bible” reached store shelves, showed up on electronic tablets or arrived wherever people are reading books these days, Jeff Alworth wrote that national tradition is beer’s Rosetta Stone. Take the time to read his post before moving on.

His book offers a description of the American, German and other traditions that parallel the excerpt about British tradition. Buy the book to read them, but for now a few sentences from his blog post:

The American tradition, which like so many others was a riff on an older one, involves the use of unique ingredients (American hops) and techniques (all the weird ways Americans use them). The hoppy ales developed here are made unlike any beers before them, and certainly taste like nothing brewed in the last 12,000 years. And, like monumentally successful beers of earlier eras—London porter, pilsner, Bavarian lager—they are now traveling around the world and getting reinterpreted in other countries where local brewers will twist and distort them as their own cultures intervene.

It is true that many brewers in the United States and elsewhere are doing this. But it is true that even more are doing something else, and not just beers based on their own longtime national tradition. They are making beers like ones that originated in the United States almost 150 years ago and became globally dominant. Before getting to that . . .

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Time to pull out your favorite Larry Bell stories

Larry Bell, 1994

Monday I wondered about the difference between selling and selling out.

Today, there is a bit of news about Little Lion World Beverages buying Bell’s Brewery. Or as a Kalamazoo radio station put it, “Kalamazoo’s Bell’s Brewery to merge with Colorado-based New Belgium Brewing.”

I do not have great insight into “what does this mean?” Clearly, much will be made of it. Good Beer Hunting’s story points out that Bell’s Facebook page indicates all of its locations will be closed today (Nov. 10) and tomorrow to allow staff to “reflect on the past year and talk about what’s ahead.” Keeping it simple, it looks more like selling to me than selling out.

Expect to read many stories in the next few days about how the small brewery business was different when Larry Bell (pictured above at the brewery in 1994) and others were getting started. More than one will involve post-GABF parties and bathtubs.

Instead, on a personal note, when our family was traveling the country in an RV in 2008 and 2009 we slept in the parking lot of Bell’s production brewery outside of Kalamazoo. I might have stayed up late making phone calls that began, “Guess where we are.”

Beer links: malt revolution, rauchbier & selling out

Craft Maltsters Guild map

In honor of this week’s featured ingredient (last week it was yeast) here is the Craft Malsters Guild map that was on display during the Craft Brewers Conference in September.

Whimsy
“The Universally Recommended Timeless Institution Pub” is evidence that we need more blog posts written after a beer or three. Because, otherwise we might not get sentences like this, “That thing where it feels traditional and unchanged but has actually morphed slowly through the ages. So it’s just about on trend, but doesn’t feel trendy.” I wish somebody would say something like that about me.

Baby steps
Lawson’s Liquids is renaming two beers. Say goodbye to Knockout Blonde and Maple Nipple.

Selling (out)
I’ve always wondered about what the difference might be between selling and selling out. Entrepreneurs start businesses every day, and quite often the business plan includes an exit strategy.

Author Tom Acitelli used the word movement on more than a third of the pages in the first edition of “The Audacity of Hops.” I get it (this is not a “Succession” shout out) — drinkers sign on to a movement to stick it to the man and then a brewer who is supposed to be leading this movement sells (out) to the man.

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The Sierra Nevada Celebration shortage of 1995

It seems Twitter has a new algorithm designed to show me every photo posted of Sierra Nevada Celebration Ale. A week or so ago those were often followed by comments from others who seemed to be suffering FOMO because the beer was not yet in their market. This was still October. Were they really worried there would be a Celebration shortage?

This isn’t 1995. Sierra Nevada Brewing makes five times more beer annually than in 1995, with capacity to produce even more. Because priority No. 1 was always to fulfill demand for Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, in 1995 the brewery decided to produce only 35 percent of the Celebration they’d need to “satisfy everybody,” and did not ship it east of the Rockies.

Fans took extreme measures to get some. Ken Fichera, a Brooklyn accountant, used his frequent flyer miles to fly from JFK International Airport to San Francisco and back in the same day to pick up four cases of Celebration. (You remember when we all could just wander onto a plane with a case of beer and put it in the overhead bin, right?)

And when beer drinkers in California learned that only 140 barrels of Bigfoot Barleywine-Style Ale would be brewed in 1996, compared to 11,000 in 1995, they were on the road.

Ken Papai and Charlie Gow, two Bay Area residents, made two road trips to Chicago to buy Bigfoot. In the first, they formed a three-car caravan with Dan Brown. “Dan couldn’t wait,” Papai said, and as a result, Brown was pulled over by a state police officer, although he didn’t receive a ticket. Two weeks later, Papai and Gow realized they needed more beer — most of it was earmarked for friends across the country — and headed north again, this time in the same car.

After they filled the car with beer and had a few pints at the pub, they tried to take a shortcut during the 200-mile drive home, missed a turned and ended up stuck in the mud in a wildlife preserve. (Papai’s longer version of this story was quite entertaining, but the tl;dr version is that Gow passed a sobriety test, and the car was towed from the mud.)