The Year of Craft Lager, v24.6

Craft Brewers Conference, lager panel
Lager
Doug Veliky writes that it has been a running joke since 2014 that the upcoming year would be “The Year of the Craft Lager.” More like since 1994.

But were this to come true, it would be a welcome change. “It may never be the ‘The Year of the Lager’ because you simply don’t convert an impactful enough percentage of cheap light lager drinkers to $11.99 four-packs in a single yea . . . I am very open to the idea of the 2020s being ‘The Decade of the Lager’ though.”

Plenty of brewers would like to see it happen. The picture at the top is two ballrooms full of attendees Friday for a panel discussion at the Craft Brewers Conference: “Let’s Talk Craft Lagers: Brewing on Low to High Tech Systems.”

TikTok taste test
Can a bunch of journalists tell the difference between Karbach’s new Love Street Light and Bud Light? A smaller Houston brewery takes a shot at the latest release from one owned by Anheuser-Busch.

Vessels I
A primer for how different vessels impact aromas, flavors, and textures in a wine. It would be great to read something similar related to beer. (If it is already out there, please send a link.)

Vessels II
An ode to drinking wine from cheap glassware:

“For me there’s an order of importance when it comes to enjoying wine: the company, the quality of the wine itself, the food and, somewhere near the bottom, is the glass. Unpretentious glasses say spontaneity, fun and pleasure while delicate expensive ones say oneupmanship, pedantry and general twattery. They are for the sort of people who say stemware instead of glass, or timepiece for watch. Don’t be a glass bore. Life’s too short.”

But clean, please. Clean is still important.

State of the industry
You’ll have to connect a few dots, but here is Bart Watson’s “State of the Industry” presentation at the Craft Brewers Conference:

Previewing the conference, Jonathan Shikes took the opportunity to examine eight topics facing craft beer right now.

Because it’s Labor Day, essential and other beer-related reading

Labor Day
Today’s Finger’s newsletter from David Infante, “How the Twin Cities became a hotbed for craft beverage unionizing,” is timely and essential reading.

Crushable
Surge (hard seltzer) variety packI still do not understand, but perhaps this will help you figure it out.

Is White Claw Surge crushable?

“‘You can make the argument that ‘crushable’ and ‘sessionable’ parallels with American binge-drinking culture,’ says Elle Holcomb, a Portland, Oregon–based winemaker and alcohol sales representative. But she stops short of this conclusion, offering that the initial intention of ‘crushable’ is less about indulgence than it is an accessory for socializing.”

Change
I don’t usually point to podcasts, but Yakima Chief Hops has started a new one called “Bigger Than Beer,” which each year will explore a new subject. The first topic is “Women+ in the Industry,” and the initial conversation with Tessa Schilaty and Tiffany Pitra from the YCH sensory lab is exceptional.

I visited the “Aroma Dome” week before last and wished I could have spent much longer talking with them. (Technically, we weren’t in the “dome” itself. Pitra was teaching YCH staff members to recognize the aroma of onion-garlic – a lamentable character that may arise in hops that otherwise tropical aromas. She had chopped up onion and garlic, and it smelled great in there although it would not have in beer. We stepped outside.)

Schilaty and Pitra are not necessarily thinking about hop aroma, about evaluating that aroma and understanding that aroma like everybody else. Take notice.

Find it on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

Neomexicanus
This story wild hops in New Mexico would not be nearly as much fun if I reported it. I’d treat it more like a teaching moment, and insist on adding more facts and more history. It is more enjoyable to read it as it is, and listen to Joe Ely sing Silver City.

Styles
Boak & Bailey nicely summarized the outbreak of posts about beer styles (fourth entry) last week. To that I will add (and pardon the internal link) this post from 2010 about something Fred Eckhardt published almost the same time Michael Jackson’s “World Beer Guide” came out.

Always for pleasure
A fresh hop seminar.

The good (terroir), the bad (climate change) & the ugly (unacceptable beer festival behavior)

Bale Breaker Brewing, Loftus Ranch
Hops (at Loftus Ranches) viewed from inside a brewery (Bale Breaker). Moxee, Washington.

There is a decent chance I will be in a hop field, or on the way to one, when you read this. I’ve also seen a lot of grapes, fruit trees, corn and cattle since reaching the Northwest a week ago. Also a lot of smoke, from fires in California and Washington, hanging in the air and plants that suffered from the “heat dome” that settled over the region early in summer. So the first link today is to a press release. It reads like a press release, but, dang, pay attention, because climate change is real.

Carbon neutral
“New Belgium Brewing is releasing its Carbon Neutral Toolkit to support fellow beer companies on the journey toward net-zero carbon emissions. The detailed resource, which represents hundreds of hours of work and significant financial investment from New Belgium, is designed to help other small- and medium-sized breweries measure their carbon footprint and take steps to make their businesses carbon neutral by supporting the highest impact greenhouse gas emissions reduction initiatives available.”

Unacceptable
“I know I keep using the word ‘unacceptable’ . . . but how else can you describe the fact that part of going to festivals for womxn just naturally includes being prepared to guard yourself, to be subjected to discrimination and danger, to turn on yourself if something bad does indeed happen because that’s who society has taught you to blame?”

Courtney Iseman, who writes the Hugging the Bar newsletter, and Women of the Bevolution founder Ash Eliot are starting a series discussing the current state of safety and beer festivals . . . or lack thereof. Subscribe to Hugging the Bar to follow.

Texas terroir
You must be new here if you don’t know I am a sucker for terroir (hence “appellation” beer). Yeast found in the wilds of Texas may help Texas breweries create beer unique to their region. Many excellent points in “Yeast Hunters,” but I hope readers read this carefully: “around 70 percent of flavor in beer is due to the yeast.” That’s not “yeast flavor” flavor but the aroma and flavor that result from the interaction of yeast and other raw materials, perhaps also from Texas.

Wrong
I’ve never enjoyed judging the “Irish Red” category in beer competitions. Martyn Cornell’s takedown leaves me feeling OK with that. “(In 1988) Coors declared that ‘In 1864 in Enniscorthy, Ireland, George Henry Lett brewed the first batch of a full-bodied, red-colored lager that would eventually become known as George Killian’s Irish Red,’ which manages to cram five pieces of utter nonsense into less than 30 words.”

Crowd sourcing
“I’ve yet to visit any two identical farmhouses, so why should the beers made there (or modeled after the setting) be any different?” I’m not usually a fan of mashups of book blurb length comments, but I read this collection that Mandy Naglich assembled to the end. That said, I spent hours Friday talking about the mixed-culture beers at Fair Isle Brewing in Seattle and I’m not sure the word farmhouse was uttered once. Farm, yes, but not farmhouse.

Always for pleasure

Beers conditioning in the bottle at Fair Isle Brewing, Seattle, Washington
Beers conditioning at Fair Isle Brewing. Seattle, Washington.

The future of hops

Just a few things I have been seeing this week in Washington’s Yakima Valley.

Hop cones - sisters

Sisters. Cones taken from sister plants in one of Hopsteiner’s experimental yards. What can happen from just one generation to the next. In case you were wondering why breeders talk about phenotype and genotype.

Tissue culture room at Yakima chief propagation facility in Zilla, Washington.

The tissue culture room at the YCH Hops propagation center in Zillah. The high tech facility is strikingly different than the nostalgic Teapot Dome Service Station Zillah is better known for.

USDA-ARS breeding yard in Prosser, Washington

A breeding yard at the USDA ARS station in Prosser, Washington.