‘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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Covid neither neighborhood nor innovation friendly

Boak & Bailey’s news and nuggets Saturday served as a reminder that UK beer drinkers are stuck in a grim cycle. My Twitter and Instagram feeds, full of snaps of people gathered with friends (but not too many friends) at bars and brewery tasting rooms, suggest things are better here. Has the worst really past? There are reasons to believe it hasn’t.

Story No. 1 from the Wall Street Journal this past weekend: “McDonald’s, Chipotle and Domino’s Are Booming During Coronavirus While Your Neighborhood Restaurant Struggles.” The subhead: “A health crisis is creating a divide in the restaurant world. Big, well-capitalized chains are thriving while small independents struggle to keep their kitchens open.”

Story No. 2: “Covid Is Crushing Small Businesses. That’s Bad News for American Innovation.”

(These stories are behind the Journal’s paywall. I tracked them down in print, which is one more thing that’s not as easy as it was at the beginning of the year.)

Restaurants come and go. About 60,000 open in an average year, according to the National Restaurant Association, and 50,000 close. But this year it will be much worse. The association predicts 100,000 restaurants will close during 2020. Employment at restaurants and bars has dropped by 2.3 million jobs from a total of more than 12 million before the pandemic, according to the Labor Department.

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Looking ahead, and through the rear view mirror

Cold Beer

One read, two listens. My recommendations for this weekend.

Evan Rail writes, “If a big part of craft brewing is innovation, its flip side is tradition, at least part of which has meant the revival of extinct, historical styles. And to be honest, we’re starting to run out of those.”

He adds, in an essay titled “The Last Beer Style,” that, “If we keep resuscitating these previously extinct historic beer styles, we will run out of them—unless, of course, some contemporary beer styles also disappear along the way. It’s not hard to foresee the extinction of Amber Ale, Brown Ale or even Black IPA.”

That provides context for something Mike Karnowski told Jamie Bogner on the Craft Beer & Brewing Podcast. “How many of the BJCP styles are actually brewed commercially by brewers? It’s almost nostalgic to think of an Amber Ale.”

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