Make wort, CIP, repeat. #brewerylife

Last week, Evan Rail tweeted a link to a New York Times story about “The Twilight of the Imperial Chef.”

Rail wrote:

Great piece arguing against elevating celebrity chefs, recognizing that many people make restaurants great.

We’ve been saying the same thing about craft beer for years.

Breweries are *lots* of people. Delivery folks. Taproom workers. Keg cleaners.

In our culture we have a tendency to elevate & make heroes of individuals.

But our favorite breweries include more folks than just Sam, Garrett, Tomme, Evin or Yvan. (And look: you know which breweries I mean.)

These are teams. Groups. Real people. Let’s do right by them.”

Consider how Tejal Rao sets the table in the Times story:

For decades, the chef has been cast as the star at the center of the kitchen. In the same way the auteur theory in film frames the director as the author of a movie’s creative vision, the chef has been considered entirely responsible for the restaurant’s success. Everyone else — line cooks, servers, dishwashers, even diners — is background, there to support that vision.”

This is one of several stories recently about “monsters in the kitchen.” I don’t think anybody is suggesting that is going on within breweries. (On the restaurant side of brewery operations, that might be another matter.)

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‘A lot of young people said it was for old people’

Last week, Shine Registry* hosted a “virtual business shower” for Kweza Craft Brewery, which is female led and the first craft brewery in Rwanda. It was a Zoom call, set up for a maximum of 100 participants, and hundreds of others got shut out.

One hundred is not a big number, but this was the first time a Shine shower attracted as large a crowd. It is a reminder of a halo that still hangs around (craft) beer, that there is much interest in the topic of women and beer, and a realization that there’s more to beer than the European tradition that American brewing was built on.

(* Shine Registry hosts profiles of businesses and their founders with wedding registry-style lists of the stuff that they need. Founders ask for support while they are starting their businesses and give their communities an opportunity to show that support in meaningful and substantive ways.)

The presentation has been archived and runs about an hour. Worth your time. The words craft and innovation jump to life when Chiedza Mufunde speaks. She’s so, well, passionate that when she uses the word passion I’m OK with it.

And, given that this is Wednesday, the day I aim to post words related to place I particularly recommend you listen to Apiwe Nxusani-Mawela, starting at the 7 minutes mark, then continuing throughout the discussion.

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All in the service of #beerhistory

Fred Eckhardt collection at OHBAA box of Fred Eckhardt’s papers at the Oregon Hops and Brewing Archives.

I would not know Tumblr still exists if it weren’t home to the Oregon Hops and Brewing Archives blog. It seems that’s just one more way it is a link to the past.

As Tiah Edmunson-Morton wrote in her tweet this past weekend, the #beerhistory field has grown impressively since she started OHBA seven years ago.

I wrote about her and the archives for DRAFT magazine two years into the run. (You can find the story here, but be aware the site is no longer secure.)

Edmunson-Morton has been running ahead of the crowd from the start, already practicing what Paul Eisloeffel of the Nebraska State Historical Society called holistic collecting, “thinking outside of the archives box” and gathering artifacts as well as historical documents. This doesn’t necessarily come naturally.

“Dealing with artifacts has always been a problem for standalone archives,” he said. He’s a proponent of the sort of proactive collecting Edmunson-Morton undertook. “It is important for archivists to be able to look at what’s happening in a culture and start collecting now. I really applaud her.”

In “But What If We’re Wrong” author Chuck Klosterman writes, “It’s impossible to understand the world of today until today has become tomorrow.” It’s also impossible if somebody is not saving the important stuff to begin with.

That’s place with a capital P

Lilly Pad Hopyard BreweryThe hummingbirds were an unexpected bonus.

There was a time, 25 years ago when we were researching our “Beer Travelers Guide,” we would driven many miles out of our way if we heard about a brewery with a campground and a hopyard. (Sometime, when we can sit down together in a beer garden somewhere, I’ll tell you the story about Gillette, Wyoming, in 1995.)

There are too many breweries to keep track of these days, and we’re out of the guide writing business. We were just citizens on the way to a weekend in and around Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area in northern Tennessee who learned about Lilly Pad Hopyard Brewery because one of the previous guests at the Airbnb where we were staying mentioned it in a review.

It was on the way, and we could grab dinner and beers for later (we were staying about an hour to the north).

Lilly Pad Hopyard Brewery entrance

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