‘And I say, brother, help me please’

Jeff Alworth, Betsy Lay, Lady Justice Brewing
Jeff Alworth and Betsy Lay in conversation at Lady Justice Brewing.

This past week in her Hugging the Bar newsletter, Courtney Iseman expressed frustration with beer consumers who continue to support toxic breweries. She also suggests that there are many beer influencers act who should act more responsibly. A code of conduct for influencers — now, that’s an interesting idea.

But to return to the question she asks, “How do we get [consumers] to give a shit?”

Spoiler alert, her suggestion: “All I can think of right now is just to keep the conversation going. Because I do know so many people, who have nothing to do with craft beer and so don’t know all “the news and updates, but who love drinking it, who have been immediately receptive upon learning about issues with certain breweries. So, whenever you’re not too utterly exhausted, keep spreading the word and steering friends and family away from the baddies and toward the breweries and brands contributing to a better industry for all.”

If a change it going to come, that must be part of it. To that end, links to three posts worth talking about:

– An article — published in Civic Eats, so outside the beer bubble — to print out and keep for reference purposes. It is time to help make sure Betsy Lay is right when she says, “The door has been opened. It’s going to be very hard to shut it now.” That’s Lay at the top beside “The Beer Bible” author Jeff Alworth. Alworth was at Lady Justice, where Lay makes the beer, as part of a book tour promoting the second edition of his book. Not surprisingly, the conversation turned to just this topic. The next day, Alworth posted this:

Read more

Wood, fires and brewing kettles

Scratch Brewing founders Marika Josephson and Aaron Kleidon talked about brewing beer in a wood-fired kettle on a recent Craft Beer & Brewing podcast. It is not as simple as flipping a switch, so I won’t try to summarize and instead suggest you give it a listen.

In the first photo below, from 2013, you can see where they split tree wood to fire their first (much smaller) kettle. Josephson is feeding the fire while Kleidon tames the boil. However, toward the end of the conversation Kleidon mentions now that they have a much larger kettle (under a roof, by the way) the wood for their fire comes from a local company that makes pallets. This is more environmentally friendly than chopping down the trees that surround the brewery.

Not quite as romantic, I know. I remember visiting Weissbrau Freilassing in 2008, said to be the last wood-fired brewery in Germany, and seeing the pile of wood that would be used for brewing (second photo below). Most of the wood is second-hand, although some is chopped. Although this makes perfect sense, I wasn’t expecting it. Curiously, there no wood flames under the kettles at the G. Schneider & Sohn in Kelheim to the north, but but the brewery has its own wood-chip-fired heating system. Kelheim is located in the midst of a forest, where chopping down trees does make sense.

The third photo is from Brasserie Caracole in Falmignoul, said to the last wood-fired brewery in Belgium. To be honest, that’s not wood in the photo, but paper crumbled up to provide a prettier picture when I visited in 2004.

The final photo is from three years ago, on Bjørne Røthe’s farm in Dyrvedalen Valley in western Norway. There it is nice to know that this is not the last wood-fired kettle still being used in Norway.

Scratch Brewing

Weissbrau Freilassing

Brasserie Caracole

Farmhouse brewing, Norway

Monday beer links, courtesy (in part) of the Town Crier

Thinking about Monday beer links

True? Not true? Has hard seltzer brought us to this?

In his substack newsletter Fingers, Dave Infante reaches this conclusion:

“[Flavored Malted Beverages] aren’t just changing drinking habits. They (will) also swing beer business’ collective center of gravity away from brewers (“all about the liquid”) and back towards marketers. Or, to put it another way: from craft back to commodity.”

OK, collective center of gravity leaves room for beers left of the dial, but how much?

Also last week, I pointed to a podcast/transcript about “How Hops Got Sommified.” In it, there is some discussion about brewers prominently listing hop varieties.

“That is done under the guise of giving the drinker more information. In fact, you’re kind of making people feel dumb because they don’t know what to do with that information,” says Zach Geballe. “To me, it is analogous to this thing in wine that I find incredibly frustrating, when you go to a winery or event and all the person talking to you about the wine can do is recite the technical data of the wine.”

Read more

Could an obsession with hops be bad for beer?

Hops in Hopsteiner experimental field

Talking about the “wine-ifcation” of beer isn’t new at all. But I don’t think I’d seen “sommify” before Monday, and certainly not in connection to beer or hops.

“How hops got sommified” doesn’t dwell much on the how and instead focuses on if and why.

This is a fair question: “A lot of brewers have taken to labeling their beers with the hop varieties. I tend to wonder if this is actually more polarizing and intimidating for beer drinkers, especially as there are more and more varieties of hops . . . I’ll see a big beer list that’ll say, ‘This is our IPA with Cascade and some other random hop you have never heard of.’ I don’t know what to choose. Is beer going to, unfortunately, make a mistake with this obsession with hops? Or is this a good thing for beer?”

As a person who sometimes gets handed a beer and asked “Can you name the hops?” I understand what it feels like to, well, feel stupid. And I know it may not be healthy to be able to recite the parentage of Citra (50% Hallertau Mittelfrüh, 25% Fuggle, 20% Brewer’s Gold, 5% East Kent Golding and 3% unknown).

However, I am a fan of being informed. Listing all the raw materials that go into a particular beer — including varieties of barley, other grains, herbs, whatever — gives an interested drinker a better idea what to expect when they order a beer. And that list of ingredients may set any particular beer apart from a generic one (i.e. a commodity).

In the second part of the podcast, Ryan Hopkins, CEO at Yakima Chief Hops, talks about the business of growing and selling hops.

There are hundreds of varieties now, but what was true 150 years ago is true today; some cultivars are valued more highly than others. In the last part of the 19th century, hops grown on the European continent could be classified into 10 categories. Those from the towns of Saaz (in what is now the Czech Republic) and Spalt (Germany) constituted Class I and commanded the highest prices. Class IV included those from the regions of Hallertau, Auscha, Styria and portions of Wurtemmberg and Baden. Class IX (northern France, Belgium and Holland) and Class X (Russia) hops sold for between 10 and 15 percent of the most coveted cultivars. What a hop was called and where it was from was most often the same.

Less than 20 years ago many hop varieties sold for less than they cost to grow. In contrast, the hop business, and the IPA business, is booming today because when drinkers know the names of hops those hops are not a commodity.

Who’s your drinking buddy now?

beer foam

Doing a bit of Feedly cleaning last week I counted 212 beer-blog feeds I follow. Of them, only 26 of them had published a new post in the last month. For many it was more like years since the last post. Sure, I should be embarrassed that I lousy job I do curating the list, but that is not the point.

In the 13 or so years I’ve intermittently posted links on Monday I’ve always looked beyond blogs, and beyond beer stories for that matter, for interesting items to pass along. If you are disappointed that I don’t point to more beer blogs, well, so am I. But let’s face it. Beer blogs are dead. That is why you are not reading this.

‘Drinking buddies’ – 8 years later
Hard truths.

“(The movie) captures so much of what’s been wrong with craft beer culture that we’re literally only starting to confront right now. These ideas of there being such in-demand breweries that people who brew there can act however they want; that you should want to work at those breweries so badly you’d be willing to put up with anything; that because it’s a brewery, basic workplace behavior expectations don’t apply and people can drink and make women feel objectified and even threatened . . . these elements were all there all along, hidden under the haze of us all viewing craft beer like this bohemian, artistic, no-rules beast, where we didn’t have to closely examine anyone’s behavior because everyone was supposedly united under this pious goal of sticking it to Big Beer.”
[From Hugging the Bar, a newsletter you should be reading.]

Whoa!

It’s only business
Anheuser-Busch InBev NV “Chief Executive Officer Michel Doukeris is considering a sale of some German beer brands it has owned for decades as the world’s largest brewer aims to prune less profitable businesses and trim debt.

“Doukeris has said that a ‘big revolution’’ is afoot in the alcohol industry, with more than 60% of growth being driven outside of beer. He’s seeking to insulate AB InBev against a stagnant performance in beer by doubling down on the company’s more nascent Cutwater Spirits canned cocktails, canned wine, e-commerce platforms and energy drink brands.”

Acidity
This is a story about wine, but there are beer lessons to be learned. Including this:

“Often, high levels of acetic acid are accompanied by an excess of another volatile molecule, ethyl acetate. It has the pungent aroma of nail polish remover . . .

“At high concentrations, these volatile compounds conspire to make a wine that’s aromatically distracting at best and downright unpleasant at worst. Elevated levels can even deliver a burning sensation in the throat.”

Change is constant
Dijon mustard producer Grey Poupon has released a white wine that is infused with Grey Poupon mustard seeds, along with honeysuckle. Can a beer be far behind?

Always for pleasure
Fresh Hop Beers
Go here, click through. It really is a terrific great guide, and an example of how fresh hop beers are part of a time and place.