Monday beer reading: culture, culture, culture

Deschutes Fresh Haze in a half liter Paulaner glass

Good morning, class. Your assignment this week is to write an essay that should include beer and culture in the title as well as one or more of these words:

Class
Luxury
Affordable
Craft
Postmodern
Postindustrial

The reading material:

– First up, last week, Boak & Bailey asked “What is a healthy beer culture?”

– During the week, Jeff Alworth posted about time in Prague, including a bit of “generalizing.” Along the way he writes, “Beer, as I’ve mentioned probably too many times, is a product of culture.” Don’t click away without reading Alistair Reece’s comment.

– This may seem like an aside, but it is a reminder that alcohol is one of the attractions of drinking beer. Alan McLeod pointed to a story about experiences at a festival where the only manufacturers featured were Ontario based craft breweries that have begun to offer non-alc or low-alc products as part of their lineup. Some differences from the traditional version, and not just the demographic (some of the patrons have hearing aids).

– Mcleod also had thoughts about list of the most overrated beer styles.

To which, Mike Kallenberger commented at Bluesky, “The take on overrated beer styles has me wondering yet again if ‘chasing trends’ hasn’t caused subtle but lasting harm to ‘craft beer brand equity’ (whatever that is) even as it spurs short-to-medium term sales.”

– Think about that while reading “After a Boom, Craft Beer Considers a New Creed: Less Is More.”

At the end, Bob Kunz at Highland Park Brewing in Los Angeles says he sees growing demand for beer served by the pitcher. “Nobody has to think about what they’re buying,” he said. “You end up having more collective experiences if you’re drinking the same beer.”

– In ”The Sum of Small Things: The Theory of the Aspirational Class” author Elizabeth Currid-Halkett introduces the concept of “conspicuous production,” which stands in contrast to “conspicuous consumption.” She writes that, “Inconspicuous consumption in other words, has become a shorthand through which the new elite signal their cultural capital to one another.”

Let’s be realistic. Had some members of what Currid-Halkett labels the new elite not embraced craft beer, stories about it would not be appearing in The New York Times. And what could be a better example inconspicuous consumption than drinking beer by the pitcher?

Alcohol. People. Beer drinkers. Connections. Beer makers.

Have I left anything out?

The photo at the top was taken at Pepi’s, a restaurant in Vail, Colorado, that serves excellent German-inspired food. That is Deschutes Fresh Haze in a half-liter glass. A crossing of cultures, it seems. FYI, a member of our traveling party ordered it. I went with a Hacker-Pschoor.

Link of the week: Collaborations and the way forward

Beer foam

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Stephanie Grant gets right to the point:

“True collaboration, especially when the grounds are unequal between the two collaborators, should ensure both parties benefit from the interaction. And that shouldn’t always come in the form of money, but also knowledge in and outside the brewhouse.

“It’s time for Black people in the craft beer community to go beyond the excitement of collaborating with a brewery they admire and ask themselves: How can we both get the most out of this collaboration? We must not mistake our unequal footing as in not having value. If that were the case, the offer to collaborate with established breweries wouldn’t exist. It’s time to balance the scales.

“So, what’s the way forward?”

Knowledge and capital, she answers, particularly capital. Exhibit A: The 8 Trill Fund started by Crown & Hops.

“Unlike past charity-based collaboration initiatives that often fall out of relevance once the beer is brewed and the check is written, the Eight Trillion Allies Collaboration Series encourages breweries to stay engaged,” she writes. “And it’s not restricted to a moment in time, but an ongoing effort to bring equity to the craft beer industry and increase Black brewery ownership to 13%.”

You might also enjoy

– In the spirit of #PubJanuary: Anthony Gladman makes the case for “sitting on your own with a pint.” And when Boak & Bailey visited a pair of rebooted Bristol pubs they found “a classic example of a pub that has not got much for us personally but we’re glad it exists, serving a distinct crowd, and appears to be thriving.” Finally, a press release about Proper Pubs installing defibrillators across its estate. This is not to imply the customers who make up their distinct crowd are of a certain age, but that this is a measure to serve the communities where the pubs operate.

– Historic hop fraud. Styrian hops sold as Saazer hops in the 19th century. I’ve got observations about some of the details in this post that I will share in the next Hop Queries.

– It seems that the status of craft beer — the good, the bad, the in-between — can be found on a single street in San Diego.

– $20 pints are coming. Those are New Zealand dollars. That equates to $12.25 in the United States, where, in some cases, consumers may already be paying similar prices.

– “I brewed the $150 Tesla Cyberbeer so you don’t have to.” It’s a video and it’s a bit silly. But, dang, it reminds you why it is fun to be a homebrewer.

Monday links: Beer kits, curation & 12-ounce pours

Chris Cuzme and friends at Fifth Hammer Brewing

A reminder: You will find more interesting reading and commentary from Alan McLeod and Boak & Bailey. Particularly this week, when “other links” are condensed because were are traveling. And still finding time to support #pubjanuary, listening to jazz in Long Island City, being dazzled by the selection at The Grand Delancey in Manhattan, noticing how few women there were in the very crowded Other Half taproom by Rockefeller Center, and reconnecting with the fabulous frites at Bold Monk in Philadelphia.

I was working my way through The Legend of the Selmer Mark VI last week when How to Ship a Brewery Around the World hit my radar. It is a story about Pete Brown, a Boston native brewing in London, buying the Russian River brewing kit and shipping it to London for use at Forest Road Brewing.

Shipping breweries long distances, particularly new ones, is hardly unusual. Nor is the way Brown and his father disassembled and reassembled the kit. Nonetheless, I am a sucker for these stories. For instance, few mash tuns are as well traveled as the five hectoliter one sitting on display at New Belgium Brewing in Colorado. Jeff Lebesch and Kim Jordan won their first Great American Beer Festival medal with the mash tun (and adjoining equipment, of course). Before it returned to the brewery in the early aughts to become a museum piece, Gordon Knight won medals with it at three different breweries.

To ask if magic is in the equipment or in the brewer requires that you accept there is more to brewing than engineering. So you might want to stop right here if you think it is silly that Brown found himself thinking, “It would be our own fault if we couldn’t kick magical beer out of this thing. It’s like having Jimi Hendrix’s guitar; if we play it right, it’ll do the right thing.”

As is typical for a The New Yorker story, The Legend of the Selmer Mark VI (which is, if you didn’t know, a saxophone) is part personal journey, part history, part how-this-is-made, and part philosophical. Early on, the author writes, “I know that how you feel affects how you play, and that if I want to get closer to what I hear in my head I just need to practice. But, in my weaker moments, I’ve wondered about the magic horn. What sound might it grant me, if I got my hands on one?”

Should you wonder what it looks like, that’s a Mark VI in Chris Cuzme’s hands in the photo at the top. The Fifth Hammer co-founder started playing saxophone when he was eight years old, and he was a professional musician long before he became an amateur brewer who would turn pro. He still plays a few gigs, and every Wednesday he gets together with a rotating cast of long-time friends in the “Brewside Lounge,” where the front portion of the Fifth Hammer brewhouse becomes an intimate jazz room.

Cuzme was excited to talk about the Mark VI story, and not just because it is another chapter in a catalog of instruments he owns. During conversations across six years, he’s thoughtfully answered my questions related to where creating music and beer intersect, including how learning, collaborations and improvisation impact the process.

“I’ve always thought the parallel is you can’t just pick up an instrument and play what your are hearing,” he said last year. “You have to learn the process of making a sound . . . and then, ideally, you are adjusting it so that it is a language where, in your head, you have a note and essentially you go back to that note and you play it. It’s happening instinctually.

“The same is happening with brewing, I think. I want this flavor. I know how to get there through process and experience.”

After the Wednesday session ended, Cuzme talked with a friend, Sean Nowell, who also plays a Mark VI, and who occasionally joined the foursome (which at times during the evening became a sixsome). Deep in a discussion about reeds, Nowell turned to an outsider and said, “Sorry if this is getting geeky.” It was no more, or less, geeky than listening to Fifth Hammer head brewer Mark McGurrin talk about the balance between isoamyl acetate and 4-vinyl guaiacol in the hefeweizen Cuzme would drink before the session began.

Nowell told Cuzme that he could hear him playing inside the brewery doors as he approached the building. “It sounded like you,” he said. That’s not as simple as it, well, sounds. Rereading the traveling brew kit story, I decided the thought Chris Almeida closes his saxophone essay with fits nicely. “The sound is how you feel about yourself,” he wrote.

A brewing kit, an instrument, they matter . . . but if there is magic, they are only part of it.

FYI, at the top, that’s TW Sample, Nathan Peck and Mark Bordenet playing with Cuzme last Wednesday in the “No ballad zone.”

You might also enjoy

– Stop curating beer, start thinking beer. Roger Baylor at this best.
– Doug Veliky’s predictions for 2024. Yes to 12-ounce pours.
– Reflections on Erika Goedrich and the Craft Beer Cellar. In particular, read what Bill Butcher at Port City has to say about the power of an individual to drive change.
– Six things I’d like to see in South African craft beer in 2024. No to beers you end up watering your plants with.
– How Iowa’s Big Grove Brewery Defies the Odds. But well aware of the “New Glarus Effect.”
– What To Do About Beer Festivals. Set aside some time. This occupied a good chunk of a train ride from Manhattan to Philadelphia.
– E-Nose Sniffs Out Coffee Varieties Nearly Perfectly. There must be a related beer (or hops) application.

And so 2024 beerlinking here begins . . . now

Request in one of the restrooms at Scratch BrewingYou know if you know (at which brewery this request is posted)

Happy New Year. It seems, since last compiling links Dec. 18, that I missed many year-end wrap ups and predictions for 2024. Alan McLeod generously catalogued many of them. I thank him for making it easy to move forward with only a quick look at two posts related to looking backward and looking forward before going forward:

– If you didn’t share a recap video, did 2023 even happen?
– A New Year’s resolution for 2024: never tweet
I look at X once most days, which means I only see a sliver of what I might. Plenty of interesting people are still there, and I wish they’d move to Bluesky. I occasionally will retweet something to be polite, but I’m doing my best not to post. It is always tempting. A little experiment Dec. 20, when the National Hop Report came out, served as a reminder: I posted to Twitter, to Bluesky and to Facebook. Twitter easily drove the most traffic.

Two essential reads this week
– The Philosophy of the Farmer Brewers
Because these brewers only use ingredients sourced from their farm. “It is a volatile practice that leads to conflict, improvisation, and frustration in equal measure.”

– Anon, A Giant Monster Roams — Torrside Brewery in New Mills, Derbyshire
Yes, Alan McLeod and Boak & Bailey already pointed to this story, but I didn’t want you to miss this thought: “They still feel unique within the industry—a more playful side of brewing that is becoming increasingly rare.”

The, wow, ‘How did this happen?’ story of the week
– The Sad Spiral of Rockmill Brewery: How the Craft Beer Darling Ended up in Foreclosure

These ideas would seem to be related
– Reasons to Skip Dry January
– In 2024, How About “Pub January?”
As appealing as these “Pubs in AI” look, Pub January requires visiting physical pubs.

By the numbers
– Boak & Bailey share their Bristol spreadsheet.
– One Year and 389 Breweries Later.

I only read the headline
(I didn’t inhale)
– 9 Things You Should Know About Old Style Beer

Monday a.m. beer links: How’s 2024 looking?

Strong Rope Brewery, Brooklyn
Strong Rope Brewery in Brooklyn sends a message

A programming note: Looking at the calendar, I see that Christmas and New Year’s Day fall on Mondays, so no Monday links here until Jan. 8.

The year about to end will be the first one, with the exception of Covid-depressed 2020, that the sum of beers produced by the breweries categorized as “craft” did not increase. That goes back to when the Institute of Brewing Studies was collecting the statistics for microbreweries and brewpubs and had not yet defined “craft brewery.”

(The IBS was a subsidiary of the Association of Brewers, which merged with the Brewers Association of American in 2005 to form the Brewers Association.)

A “Year in Beer” summary produced by the Brewers Association and chief economist Bart Watson’s presentation last week for association members and the press both focused on the business of beer. They made it clear that the numbers reflect an ongoing trend, and that 2024 will be just as challenging for breweries.

Why should beer drinkers care? For one thing, if your favorite brewery goes out of business you’ve lost something. So consider Watson’s last two slides. He suggested that “most of the challenges craft faces have opportunities in craft strengths.” Flavor and variety matter, a wide range (including next to zero) ABVs serve different occasions well, and where diversity grows niche and local opportunities do as well.

And on the final slide, he asked, “How will you grow occasions in 2024?”

I was reminded of standing outside one of the tents at the first St. Louis Brewers Festival in 2007. Anheuser-Busch invested considerable resources to pour a few of its beers along with six other St. Louis area breweries at the time — a different time, indeed. The festival was a tiny part of A-B’s “Here’s to Beer” national campaign (the url herestobeer.com now redirects to A-B and the Wayback Machine gets stuck at the age check gate, which is too bad; fun to see that mid-aughts thinking).

Bob Lachky, executive vice president of Global Industry and Creative Development, was an enthusiastic proponent of the promotion. He was a man pretty good at his job, and credited with the “I Love You, Man” and “Whassup?!” campaigns as well as the Budweiser frogs. Bud Light did quite well when he was the brand manager.

(He was less than impressed with everything related to Dylan Mulvaney earlier this year. “It took us 20 years to take Bud Light beer to the No. 1 beer in the country, and it took them one week to dismantle it,” he told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.)

Lachky was drinking a Budweiser, watching attendees head out after the taps closed.

Among other things, he talked about young drinkers turning to spirits to celebrate rather than beer. “We can’t keep losing the occasions,” he said.

Deja vu.

Postcript: Primitive Beer’s Hotbierfest is a pretty good example of how to do a occasion right.

You might also enjoy

– Colorado Grain Chain. Speaking of Primitive Beer, the brewery uses all Colorado-grown grain. And Primitive co-owner Lisa Boldt is the Colorado Grain Chain project manager. The nonprofit Grain Chain is member-supported and, among other things, helps small-scale farmers to network and market their products. “If we as brewers and distillers want the local community to support us, to buy our products and come to our tasting rooms, I think it’s important that we support the local ingredients that go into our products,” Boldt says.

– New York City’s Strong Rope Brewery and the East Coast Cask Revival. It is delightful to see Strong Rope founder/brewer Jason Sahler get this attention. “When I am giving tours I am the face of the beer,” he told me when I visited him in Brooklyn’s Gowanus neighborhood in 2019. “But I tell them all of this is not possible without farmers. The farmers do all the work before (ingredients) touch our deck. It’s easier for me to explain that on a small scale. There’s something more tangible to me when it’s local.”

– Cola Craze: Germans Love America’s Iconic Soda So Much They Put It in Their Beer. Spezi, a blend of Coke and orange soda, was created by Brauerei Riegele in Augsburg in the 1960s. Riegele was founded in 1386. A tour includes the well they draw water from. “This water has never seen humanity. The first thing it sees is beer,” Sebastian Priller-Riegele, a 28th generation brewer, told me when I visited the brewery in 2019. Riegele wins scores of medals for its well-made, Reinheitsgebot-conforming beers, but it seems that award-winning beer isn’t the only reason they have stayed in business for more than 600 years.

– The Best Hidden Gem Places to Drink in 2023. Some of the places sound cool; others not so much. But what I really want to know is if any of the three (three!) spots in Austin, Texas, have a sticker that declares: “THIS IS ONE OF DOUG’S TOP 50 BARS IN AUSTIN.”

You can’t make this stuff up

– HOPnotic spell. A hop water brand has hired a hypnotist “who will hypnotize select consumers to help make sure they stay extra dry this January.” It is a contest, of sorts.

– Blue cheese beer. “We’re always looking for something to ferment, whether it’s sauerkraut or pickles or beer or wine, whiskey, cheese, you name it, it’s all fermented.”

And for the last link of 2023 . . .

I’d rather not point to a post from X, but this seems essential. Yes, do read the comments (replies).