Second annual Beer Culture Summit: Nov. 11-14

Hop pickers

The second Beer Culture Summit begins Nov. 11 with “Yes…I’ve heard of you: A conversation with Dr. J Jackson-Beckham and Garrett Oliver” and concludes Nov. 14 with “Beatles, Bowie, and beer.”

Between those presentations are 30 Zoom sessions, as different from each other as the opening and closing ones. Of course, the event hosted by Chicago Brewseum is virtual. Three quick examples of what to expect:

– Nate Chapman and David Brunsma, who answered questions here last week, will discuss their book, “Beer and Racism,” and then lead a panel discussion with Alex Kidd, Ale Sharpton, Shyla Shephard and Garrett Oliver.

– Michael Roper of Hopleaf and Hagen Dost from Dovetail Brewery will demonstrate “beer poking.”

– “A motley crew of current and former beer professionals sit in front of their laptops in their respective homes and discuss the virtual beer community informally known as Beer Twitter – the good, the bad, and the borderline absurd.”

One more thing. I’ll be there on a panel talking about hops. Thus the photo at the top.

Some best and otherwise Very Important Beers

American Brewer magazine 1999

Back in the day I yielded to temptation and posted lists. I also railed against them. So you might figure there is no reason to trust me.

But two lists (the second is really multiple lists) that showed up last week sent me to the files to dig out a couple from the days of print that I will share them here.

The headline on the first—The 25 Most Important American Beers of All Time—screams bring back a Jay Brooks takedown (another back-in-the-day thing in which Jay would dig deep, point after point, about something written). I commented in one Twitter thread, and otherwise have three questions.

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‘Beer and Racism’: Uncomfortable, but necessary, reading

"Beer and Racism"In “Craft: An Argument,” Pete Brown writes, “(Craft) isn’t just about the things we make; it’s about the kind of people we are. And for this, we get to an unspoken assumption we may be reluctant to admit even to ourselves; we believe that makers and buyers of craft products are morally superior to other people.”

Craft brewers are the good guys. So are craft beer drinkers. Stories like this pop up almost every day: A funk band and a brewery pooled resources to help make money for the United Way and parks in Wisconsin; or a Florida brewery is serving a pink beer all month and donating a portion of the sales to a local nonprofit raising awareness of early detection of breast cancer.

Craft breweries raise money for charities, they boost local employment, they collaborate with each other, they support environmental causes, and they check all the other appropriate boxes. Of course, they are woke. Craft brewers and craft drinkers agree that racism—a word no easier to define than craft beer—is bad.

In “Beer and Racism,” authors Nathanial Chapman and David Brunsma write, “Craft brewers and craft beer often symbolize progressive ideals, creativity, independence and forward-thinking.” Seems familiar, until they add, “If this is true, why is the craft industry and culture exclusively white?”

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Putting the ‘dry’ in dry hopping

You’d already know this if you subscribed to Hop Queries, my free monthly newsletter. From the October issue:

I have a new favorite answer to the question about why dry hopping is called dry hopping. The idea came up during a panel discussion at the Craft Brewers Conference earlier this year, but John Paul Maye of Hopsteiner crystalized it during a presentation at the recently concluded World Brewing Congress.

He pointed out that brewers in England had noticed that dry hopping beers ignited refermentation even before Brown and Morris published “On certain functions of hops used in the dry-hopping of beers” in 1893. Because refermentation lowered the final gravity the beers finished dryer, it lead some of them to begin calling the process “dry hopping.”

Public service announcement for DDH fiends: Less may still be more

This is your brain on hops

This is your brain on hops. I have no idea what a mouse’s brain would look like.

Welcome to my biannual reminder that less may be more, in this case referring to compounds that create beer aroma.

Some basics
Olfactory receptors are buried in the two patches of yellowish mucous membrane called the olfactory epithelium. Humans have about 20 million receptors, covering the epithelium of both our right and left nostrils. The first stop a collection of molecules otherwise known as an odor makes on the way to the brain, and to being identified as a particular aroma, is in the receptors. Once activated, neurons transmit signals to the olfactory bulb of the brain, which relays those signals to the olfactory cortex. Olfactory information is sent from there to a number of other brain areas, including higher cortical areas thought to be involved in odor discrimination and deep limbic areas. Odor sensation becomes olfactory perception.

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