Monday beer links & wondering what stories well-traveled casks might tell

Happy holidays

We drove to central New Mexico this past weekend, so this will be brief. We hung out with family and friends, including some really into holiday decorations. The photo above is a single moment in the midst of a two-minute plus light show. Spectacular and worth the 450-mile drive (one way).

During the drive I thought a bit about how Alan McLeod’s Thursday Beer News Notes and how styles, style guidelines, competitions and ways consumers/writers choose to describe beer influence each other. Very complicated. None of this came up in conversations we had at the four breweries we visited, nor in the various conversations I was able to eavesdrop on. People were there because of beer, but not to talk about beer.

A few other links:

Casks, waiting to go back into action
CAMRA is looking for well-traveled casks. This is a press release, so nothing special about the reading. But think of the possible stories that could emerge if it were possible to interview casks that have been in and out of pub cellars for years.

HASHTAG SNOW PICS
Bring back the Christmas photo contest. New Belgium is ready.

MIGHTY FINE
What do they mean when they say fine wine? “It defines itself by having an active secondary market.” Beer-related lessons here?

AND MIGHTY EXPENSIVE
Investing in wine is for fools and the uber-rich. Another beer-relevant story.

UNANSWERED QUESTIONS
Are wineries and distilleries also being censored in Instagram?

Beer links: Repeat after me, ‘Gingerbread dive bar’

Miller High Life Gingerbread Dive Bar
The gingerbread walls of this dive bar are infused with Miller High Life and there’s Vermont maple syrup to pour on the branded bar floor to “recreate that distinct sticky floor feeling.”

Favorite comment I’ve seen posted: “Wow, the detail of the cornhole game will be lost on the target audience.”

What I don’t understand: The kits are “designed for fun, but not for consumption.”

NATIVE REPRESENTATION
Evan Rail writes about myths, misunderstandings and stereotypes related to Native Americans and the culture of beer. “There’s definitely a relationship between alcohol and Native American tribes, and a longstanding stereotype which was placed on Native Americans by colonialism,” LT Goodluck, a Native American brewer, tells him. “It’s just hard for Native Americans to shed that stereotype. I believe that once we get more Native Americans in the alcohol industry, maybe we can change the stereotypical view that seems like it dominates our culture.”

Related: The first version of Native Land, the collaboration beer mentioned in the story, I tasted, in this case from Outer Range Brewing, is really good. I’m looking forward to finding more. (Participating breweries and release dates.)

SAFE BARS
P.A.C.T in the Safe Bars P.A.C.T. stands for Promise of Awareness, Compassion, and Trust. Everything you need to know about the initiative. “Systematic and structural change takes a long time,” says Lady Justice Brewing co-founder Betsy Lay, “It requires a shift in culture and a lot of patience. We’re going to need large and small organizations to commit to this work: guilds, trade associations, individual breweries, vendors. There has to be buy-in industry wide.”

ECCENTRIC DAY
Friday was Larry Bell’s last Eccentric Day at Bell’s Brewery as the owner of Bell’s. He arrived wearing a Hawaiian shirt, Tommy Bahamas, sandals with socks and carrying a golf club. His name tag read “Tiger.” There is a YouTube interview.

My guess is that few who drink Two Hearted Ale have also had Eccentric Ale or know about Eccentric Day, although the beer and celebration have been around for more than 25 years. Back in the 1990s, Eccentric Ale was released on Eccentric Day one year after it was brewed. The day before, various friends of the brewery would brew the next batch. Randy Mosher once told a story seeing a shoe in the mash tun as it was emptied. It has since become a bigger, but different, party.

It grew organically into a community event. Will it remain the same under new ownership? The article about Eccentric Day 2021 is behind a paywall, but photos are not and tell a story themselves.

CELEBRATION WATCH
The beat goes on . . .

IPA: The *style* disruption that keeps on giving

There will not be a quiz.

– Jenny Pfäfflin kicked it off last Friday with this tweet that when I last looked had 508 likes.

– Joe Stange followed with this.

As happens, threads shot out in different directions. Feel free to explore.

– Yesterday, Alan McLeod pointed to to all of this in his Beer News Notes, choosing to highlight a comment from Garrett Oliver:

“I don’t ‘know’ a lot about jazz, but I still enjoy jazz. And I really don’t care what a jazz critic thinks I need to know – I’m having my own good time and I will not be fenced in by anyone. I’ve worked to demystify beer for more than 30 years. It’s supposed to be fun. And it is . . .”

– His post alerted Jeff Alworth to all this ruckus and he honed in on another Oliver comment (why in a moment):

“Because once your definitions and terminology mean nothing, your culture is ruined and cannot be recovered. Ask the French how they won. And then take a good hard look at the German brewing industry. Words have meaning (ask the Republicans). And nomenclature is culture.”

– And Stephen Beaumont joined the conversation, choosing still another Oliver comment:

“Yes, and that communication is super powerful. The French know this. Champagne is Champagne, period. Caviar is caviar. Diamonds are diamonds. If your words mean nothing and it’s the Wild West, you lose. Period. Might take a while . . . but you lose.”

[Last dash] Back to Alworth. Wednesday he asked: “What is ‘good’ in the context of a hazy IPA?”

I’m staying out of this. I’ll leave it to Tom Vanderbilt, author of “You May Also Like: Taste in an Age of Endless Choice.” (In Chapter 6 he writes about “beer, cats and dirt,” visits the Great American Beer Festival and talks with judges. They included Oliver, who also shows up elsewhere in the book. Vanderbilt also mentions beer in an opinion piece in The New York Times. But the beer references are not essential to his theses.)

So from the Times article (oops, I lied, more dashes):

– “The human brain is a pattern-matching machine. Categories help us manage the torrent of information we receive and sort the world into easier-to-read patterns.”

– “When we like something, we seem to want to break it down into further categories, away from the so-called basic level. Birders do not just see ‘birds,’ gardeners do not just see ‘flowers’; they see specific variations. The more we like something, the more we like to categorize it.”

– “When we struggle to categorize something, we like it less.”

Not sure this explains the popularity of IPA, hazy IPA or hard seltzer — but maybe I am missing something.

Beer links: 1990 & 2021 American pub crawls

After visiting breweries in 18 cities across the country since the beginning of October, Jeff Alworth has written about what he learned and what he has seen change since making a similar trip in 2015.

It made me think I would like to listen to a conversation between Chris O’Leary, who visits breweries at a rate that would have been impossible when Daria and I were writing a travel column for All About Beer magazine (RIP), and Alworth.

Meanwhile, the takeaway I totally agree with is that the supply of barrel-aged beers fermented with mixed cultures exceeds demand.

Until Alworth books O’Leary for the Beervana podcast, I’d suggest pairing his post with a two-part series Michael Jackson wrote in 1990, “The Great American Pub Crawl, Parts I and II.”

“In the summer of 1990, I sampled about 350 beers, in over 100 bars and breweries, in more than 25 states, through a five-week journey that described a letter “W” from Boston to Tampa to Minneapolis to Tucson to Seattle. Had I been able to progress in a series of straight lines, it would have been a 4,500-mile pub crawl.”

ETHICAL OFFSETS
Beer is alcohol and stealth Prohibitionists are not altogether wrong when they remind us that alcohol may harm individuals and as a result society. One of many thoughts I had after reading “How to drink beer ethically” [h/t News Nuggets and Longreads] is that by “doing good” breweries, large or smaller, may appear to offset any societal harm they cause.

That’s not the way it works. There’s more to “doing good,” just as there’s more to being environmentally responsible than buying carbon offsets. Earned in every case or not, breweries that would call themselves craft have the cachet to act as agents of change.

CONTENT
In “Lessons From Online Beer Classes,” Jordan St. John writes:

“Beyond a certain point, professionally speaking, beer is content. It’s informational. My fridge is more than half full of obligational beverages that people have sent for review and which might end up on instagram or in an article. I probably won’t finish more than about half of any of them, because the point isn’t drinking them; the point is knowing about them.” [h/t Beer News Notes]

ANGST
Jim Vorel seems genuinely bothered to see St. Bernardus Christmas Ale in cans. “And not even printed cans, either—these were wrapped cans of the sort you might expect to see from Local Hype Brewery’s new, weekly hazy IPA release.”

NOSTALGIA
I will trust you to read “Special grade mediocre everyday” from the start, but I’m skipping right to the finish.

“But (the pub) does have to be a bit damp, a bit warm, a bit weary. Our friends need to be there. And we need to be in our twenties again.”

Like anybody, I’d be happy to be in my twenties again. But with better beer this time around.

Monday beer & weed links: Gangier?

Landmark Tavern, Milwaukee

A quick bit of background. The genus Humulus (hops) belongs to the family Cannabaceae, which also includes cannabis (hemp and marijuana). Scientists long ago documented that hops and weed share some of the same terpenes — such a limonene, myrcene and pinene — that produce fruity, sometimes pungent, aromas and flavors.

But while it has been suspected that like hops, marijuana has sulfur-containing compounds it was not scientifically confirmed. Sulfur-containing compounds, that is thiols, are the “shiny new thing with regard to beer flavor.”

Earlier this year, a research team concluded that the compound 3-methyl-2-butene-1-thiol (MBT) is the primary source of “skunky” aroma in cannabis. MBT, of course, is responsible for skunkiness in light-struck beer.

Friday, Avery Gilbert reported in his always illuminating newsletter that a research team in Southern California has “identified a family of seven different sulfur-containing molecules that are the likely basis for the funkadelic ganja note of weed.” They included MBT.

The team also discovered that the concentration of sulfur-containing compounds ramped up dramatically in the final weeks before harvest and more during a week of curing. Probably not coincidentally, researchers have found that the amount of desirable thiols (and perhaps some less than desirable) also may increase exponentially as cones mature.

(I wrote about hop maturity for Brewing Industry Guide this month, and will have a bit more in this month’s Hop Queries, likely hitting email boxes tomorrow.)

SOMMELIER, CICERONE . . . GANGIER?
The initial stage of the Ganjier program, which costs $2,997, is just graduating its first round of experts from around the world. The training prepares them to assess ganja, or cannabis, products and make recommendations for customers, pairing products with activities and desired experiences. “We’re creating an entirely new class of cannabis professional. Something that doesn’t exist in the industry today, to be a voice for true quality.”

Read more