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 Sierra Nevada’s Chico home 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 turn 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.)

Citra? Mosaic? Saaz? (Or Cascade?)

Saaz hops

Jeff Alworth posted a question yesterday from Atlanta (hey! we used to live there); more than one, in fact. So here are two I am thinking about: a) Is Citra/Mosaic becoming a marker of style in the way Saaz is in Czech pilsners or EKG in bitters? and b) Do [brewers] feel like the pairing has become so successful it’s constraining the style?

As my wife may occasionally point out when we are out in public and somebody asks me about hops, starting a conversation with me about hops can be a mistake. I often have a lot to say. Thoughts in my head already started vying for a position at the front of the line after I read Alworth’s tweet. Showing unusual restraint, I’m going to take a little time to organize them and include the result in the next Hop Queries [subscription free, sign up here].

Meanwhile, for homework:
– Because of the way Twitter threads threads you might have to click around to find all the responses.
– Read about Stone Brewing’s history with Cascade.
– Also, take some time for Evan Rail’s historical perspective of Saaz.

Monday beer links: yeast genomics & the smell of old books

It was a good week for readers interested in yeast (you know who are are), so jumping right in:

Family tree
The more scientists study the genome of different yeast strains, the more obvious it is how diverse they are. That’s about as succinct a summary as I can offer, so go read Lars Garshol’s post. One nugget: Saccharomyces cerevisiae likely originated in China.

Custom strains
Jasper Akerboom once isolated a strain from what he found on a 40 million-year-old whale fossil, and Lost Rhino Brewing used to brew Bone Duster Amber Ale. He points out that the yeast likely was not close to as old, but instead is a strain from the environment, Nevertheless beer and the yeast received national and international attention from publications such as Popular Science and Scientific American. These days Jasper Yeast sells unique strains to hundreds of breweries. A Q&A.

Not sure this is progress
Two meetings organized by Mikkeller adjacent to its Copenhagen-based festival “offered few concrete answers for what’s actually going to happen next as Mikkeller says it will work to rectify past wrongs.”

Black Beer Dialogues
The background and the first episode.

Sensory
“The smell of old books stems from their slow chemical decomposition. Books are largely paper, and paper is largely plants. But the materials from which books are made have shifted over the centuries—and those shifts, in turn, have influenced how different generations of books smell.”
— Excerpt from “Revelations in Air: A Guidebook to Smell”

Strictly business
– Barley prices are up. Aluminum prices are up. Beer prices must follow, right?

– 2021 craft beer report. Including hard seltzer, of course.

– Thinking about starting a brewery? What are the chances of getting it financed?

– What do Napa and Berlin have in common?

Beer bars, part II

Max's Taphouse, Baltimore

Following up, as promised, on a discussion about The New York Times article headlined, “Last Call for the Beer Bar?” it seems fair to start with words from Josh Bernstein, who wrote the article that might otherwise been headlined, “The Evolution of the Beer Bar.”

“There is most definitely a place for beer bars that are integrated into a community and serve it well, with well-chosen beer and other beverages,” he wrote on Twitter.

Isn’t that the way it has always been? Flip through the “Bars of Reading” (1988), Pat Baker’s “Beer and Bar Atlas” (1988), either of the two books on the subject Daria Labinsky and I wrote, “Beer Travelers Guide” (1995) and “Beer Lover’s Guide” (2000), or others that have followed in the same vein since and that is pretty obvious.

What's on tap at Northeast Taproom, Reading, Pa.Does the draft selection need to be “better” than the Northeast Taproom in Reading? When Pete Cammarano bought the place in 1983 the draft choices were Budweiser and Schmidts. By the time “Bars of Reading” was published five years later Pete offered the best beer selection in Berks County. Authors Suds Kroge and Dregs Donnigan wrote, “Pete is the answer . . . but we forget the question.”

We first visited in 1994 and fell in love with the place. We went back in 1997 and fell in love again. The beer selection had evolved. Pete sold the place long ago, but this picture from the taproom’s Facebook page suggests beer is still taken seriously.

At the end of 1987 there were 73 U.S. breweries operating that opened after Fritz Maytag bought Anchor Brewing in 1965, plus Anchor itself. Forty-four of the 55 small breweries that began selling beer in 1988 were brewpubs, compared to only 29 brewpubs total when the year started. Several of those brewpubs grew into very large breweries, and they are well known today (Goose Island, Deschutes, North Coast, Great Lakes, etc.).

Read more

Is there a definition for beer bar?

Toronado, San Francisco
I don’t know if the Onion is incredibly on top of things or just lucky, but Monday a story in The New York Times asked, “Last Call for the Beer Bar?” It began by recounting the demise of Falling Rock Taphouse in Denver. And Tuesday, the Onion came back with “City Of Denver Shuts Down Bar For Operating Without A Brewery.”

The Falling Rock owners announced they would close the place little more than a month after we sat on the patio there to fill out the paperwork (on a phone, of course) to place a bid on the house we now live in. Fans came from far and near to say goodbye. I talked to some of the more local ones about where they would go most often now. Two names I heard more than others were Rino Beer Garden and Finn’s Manor. Finn’s has a shorter tap list — curated, as the kids say — and a cocktail menu. Rino has more than 60-plus taps.

Would both be classified as beer bars?

Pat Baker provided a definition in his “Beer & Bar Atlas” in 1988. His classifications included classic bar, neighborhood bar, beer bar, Irish bar, German bar, English Pub and fern bar. (Yes, neither wine bar nor sports bar.)

He described a beer bar as “a bar whose main claim to fame is a large range of beer. Frequently, the bar sports and attractive beer can collection, or other vestiges of breweriana. Because of the interest in beer, the beers can be well served, but the wide range brings with it the risk of old beer.”

And, because I bet fern bar grabbed your attention, he wrote, “The sobriquet for the trendy hang-outs of yuppies, almost always decorated with hanging plants. While usually a derogatory term, it is not unknown for a fern bar to offer good beer, or to be interesting!”

More from the “Beer & Bar Atlas” Friday and perhaps a bit of reminiscing about Suds Kroge and Dregs Donnigan.