Reading the beer links: Heritage, authenticity & nostalgia

Hops and hop people in the Yakima Valley and the Willamette Valley commanded my full attention last week, so pardon the brevity today. (Speaking of brevity, a programming note: no links next week, and perhaps the week after. Holiday, then GABF weekend.)

It was Sunday before I had time to read Alan McLeod’s Beer News Notes and Boak & Bailey’s nuggets. If you haven’t visited those two, now would be a good time to head there and click on.

One quick bit of musing about heritage, the result of a Pete Brown post at X that McLeod points to. The photos at the top and bottom were taken in USDA research fields near Prosser, Washington. The babies in the seedling field (top) are cute, don’t you think? The odds are very much against them ending up with a name and being used to brew beer. But if that happens, farmers will know they are agronomically prepared to survive in a climate wild hop plants in Mongolia did not know five million years ago.

A constant topic of discussion last week was the Great Centennial Disaster. In recent years, farmers in the Yakima Valley have harvested about seven to eight bales of Centennial per acre planted. This year, some fields produced only two-plus bales per acre. Not every field was such a disaster, but when the USDA releases harvest data in December the results will not be pretty.

This raises a question about if it is environmentally responsible for brewers to make beer with hops that require farmers to use additional resources as the climate changes. Centennial is a pretty special cultivar. Try to imagine Bell’s Two Hearted without it. Can’t do it, can you? I’m not prepared myself to answer the question about environmental responsibility when it comes to Centennial, Saaz, Hallertau Mittelfrüh or several other wonderful hops. But I’ll keep asking it.

An aside: As well as the discussion about heritage and authenticity that followed Brown’s question on X there was Josh Noel’s post showing vintage beer hats for sale. That’s nostalgia. Heritage and nostalgia are not the same. The distinction is important.

Finally, the hops pictured below are a reminder of why they are categorized as experimental. This plant won’t be returning in 2024.

Hops in the USDA experimental field outside of Prosser, Washington

Labor Day beer links: Don’t be ‘that guy’

Experimental barely at Wheatland Spring Farm + Brewery

Credit to occasional commenter Dave Lavery for this first bit of fun reading: An Interaction with Scotland’s Most Inane Bar and Restaurant Manager, and its Aftereffects.

I have no words, other than the thought in the headline.

Labor Day
Dave Infante has done the heavy lifting with a wall-to-wall worker special in honor of Labor Day 2023. It’s a free edition Substack newsletter, and he would appreciate it if you consider buying subscription.

If it can happen in Denver it can happen anywhere . . .
– Brewery Closings Are on the Rise — Is the Local Craft Beer Scene in Trouble?
– Last call: Two Pittsburgh-area breweries are closing their doors.
– As national craft beer market contracts, Grand Forks brewers feel the squeeze.
More breweries will open in 2023 than will close, but this is also a fact: “In Grand Forks, the microbrewery scene — known for being tight-knit and community-oriented — is often making ends meet by the skin of its teeth.”

You might also enjoy
– Soil To The Sun — Long Man Brewery’s Regenerative Agriculture. Interested in trying a beer made with grain grown using regenerative farming techniques on this side of the Atlantic? That’s how Wheatland Spring Farm + Brewery in Virginia grows the grains on its property. The brewery also cooperates with Virginia Tech to breed barley better suited for the region (that’s a test plot in the photo at the top). The farm brewery is located not far north of Dulles International Airport, but their beer also shows up at places elsewhere on the East Coast, such at Tørst in Brooklyn.

– Brewing Craft Beer for an Underserved Audience. This is one of several posts from SevenFiftyDaily focusing on “innovators,” many of confronting equity issues.

– Breweries, College Athletics Try to Cash In With Co-Branded Beers. “The same university that sued a Georgia beer company is now seeking out sponsorship deals with alcohol companies. It shows you how far this has come.”

– Nostradouglas’ Fall Predictions. Passed along to give me an opportunity to write I don’t care about Black IPAs.

– Where Are All the Celebrity Beer Brands? Once again, I don’t care.

On closings, unions, Anchor beer & Kirby Pucker Lemon Blueberry

Back in 2011, Joe Stange asked this question in The New York Times: So is there a limit to the number of craft brewers that locals are willing to support?

“Seriously? It’s beer,” answered Dylan Mosley, the head brewer for the Civil Life Brewing Company in south St. Louis. “You know how many people drink beer? If I opened a hamburger joint, nobody’s going to be, like, ’Hey, you know how many hamburger joints there are?’ They’d be like, ’Sweet! Another hamburger joint!’”

The hamburger joint-brewery analogy has lived in my head since. Hamburger joints close for a lot of reasons, often with barely a mention why. Now that there are more of the 9,000-plus breweries in the country and many have been around for decades, sometimes they close just because it is time.

That seems to be the case for LowDown Brewery & Kitchen in Denver. Owner Scott O’Hearn said the brewery, which will close this week, was not struggling and was profitable. “When you look five years [out], it becomes a little riskier. Not necessarily to lose money, but to not make enough to be worth staying open,” he said.

On the other hand . . . here’s an interesting take on Epic Beer entering liquidation in New Zealand. “There is a sad reversion to historical reality happening, whereby as the consumer becomes more price-conscious, they tend to shift back to beers put out by the very major breweries that brands like Epic existed to challenge. And in so doing they wear away at the spirit of innovation which helped fuel the craft brewing movement.”

But . . . Epic lives on.

“Well it sure has been an intense roller coaster ride over the last month,” founder Luke Nicholas said. “But we now can see some light at the end to this liquidation process with a successful purchase of Epic Beer. It means Epic will continue and I will be involved going forward. Exactly how and what this means still needs to be determined.”

Public service

Eight San Francisco Bars Where You Can Still Buy Anchor Steam Beer. Including the current status of what is in inventory. Generally, not much.

You might also enjoy

– Workers at Elysian Brewery Vote to Join Teamsters Local 117. “This is an opportunity for us to shape the future of the industry and to pave the way for other breweries by showing them that union representation is possible. It’s time for us all to stand up for what is right and make history in the process.”

– The New State Fair Beers of 2023, Ranked by Their Minnesota-ness. Where to start? Kirby Pucker Lemon Blueberry. Vacation Mullet. The Funnel Never End.

– Wayward Lane Brewing and the History of New York’s Hop Houses. Brewing in a former hop house is much cooler than in a railway arch.

– If it’s Tuesday, this must be Kölsch. Martyn Cornell joins a tour that takes him to Cologne, Dusseldorf and several other places, including almost a complete set of Low Countries brewing abbeys AND St Bernardus, one of his favorite breweries. Part One is followed by Part Two and Part Three. He’s not done.

– Book review: Cask by Des de Moor. “It’s not a beer or pub guide but an attempt to think about cask from every angle: its history, the culture that surrounds it, the science, and the appreciation of the beer itself.”

– An Israeli beer brewed with 3,000-year-old Philistine yeast strain. “You might have seen headlines that declared: ‘Want to get drunk like a Philistine?’ or ‘Drink the beer that Goliath (or Cleopatra or the pharaohs) had!’ or even ‘A taste of history in every gulp!’You might have seen headlines that declared: “Want to get drunk like a Philistine?” or “Drink the beer that Goliath (or Cleopatra or the pharaohs) had!” or even “A taste of history in every gulp!'”

Of drunken elephants & the importance of being local

Should this beer be called Taylor Ham or pork roll?
The theme this Monday is from last week and from some time earlier.

Last week: What happens when your local craft brewery is no longer local?
March 2012: What makes local beer better?
The first post is mostly a business story, the second is a reminder that discussions about the meaning of local are not new. It comes from a different time, when 25 beer bloggers would post on the same topic. The Session went on longer than it should have, but five years in once a month it provided some terrific reading. (One cautionary note, you’ll find several links no longer lead anywhere. RIP beer blogging.)

Last week: Billy Busch Wants To ‘Make Bud Light Great Again’
July 2022 (and earlier): Yes, that Billy Busch.
The first headline I saw about this simply referred to an heir who offered to take Bud Light off of A-B’s hands, but I knew immediately it had to be Billy Busch. The headline on the Riverfront Times story (second link) refers to him as a “dubious St. Louis character.” Indeed.

He was always good at grabbing attention. For instance, in 2016 he suggested he would buy Grant’s Farm, where the Clydesdales live. In 2020, there was the reality show The Busch Family Brewed. When we lived in St. Louis he promised to build a large brewery, and his contract-brewed Kräftig brand had a decent local presence. But he abandoned that project in 2019. The status of Busch Family Brewing & Distilling Company is not exactly clear. Neither the website for Facebook page has been updated in 2023.

Last week: Beer-stealing raccoons
Back in the day: 1999 ~ 2002 ~ 2003 ~ Also 2003 ~ 2006

In Thursday’s beery news notes, Alan Mcleod pointed to the raccoons and beer story, and I commented on X that I miss the stories about boozing elephants that were almost common 20-plus years ago. For one thing, they led to a story about genetics and drinking that included this bit of math: In 2006, researchers calculated that based on the amount of alcohol it takes to get a human drunk, a 6,600-pound elephant on a bender would have to quickly consume up to 27 liters of seven percent ethanol.

You might also enjoy

– Why Is This Colorado Brewery Making a Taylor Ham-Themed Beer? In the mountain town of Nederland, this is not strange. The town no longer hosts Frozen Dead Guys Days (the event moved to Estes Park), but the legend lives on. I must go with Daria’s New Jersey expertise on when it comes to this beer. First of all, she says, it should be called pork roll. No, it does not remind her of pork roll, but of a Knotted Root hazy IPA, which is a good thing. What excites her most is learning that pork roll is available in Nederland, a 45-minute picturesque drive from our house.

– Hop Water Makes a Big Splash Into Non-Alcoholic Beer. The list of best hop waters here does not include Austin Beer Works Hop Water. That is a mistake.

– What would a perfect beer awards process look like? This is an excuse to remind you about Garrett Oliver’s “Four-Pint Principle.”. It was several years ago that he explained he means “that I want the customer to WANT to have four pints of this beer.” Circumstances may dictate otherwise, but he or she should want to continue drinking that beer. Oliver was speaking to brewers, telling them they needed to get out and drink their beer where other people drink. “Just before the end of every pint, every customer makes a decision – ‘Will I have another one of these?’” Not that I would volunteer to judge a competition that required drinking four pints of each beer . . .

– A perfect beer festival. 10 reasons, and I an partial to #7: the beers. Hazy, smoked, bright, cloudy. Pale, red ,amber, brown, black. Alcohol free, light, barrel aged, hoppy, malty, Belgian-inspired. Kellerbier, Neipa, Quad, Biere de Garde, Weizenbock, mead, braggot, ice cider.

– Pelikaan Cafe, Antwerp. “Magenta walls brighten the atmosphere of this dimly lit cafe, with ample sunshine flooding in through the feature windows and back door that opens out onto a small outdoor seating area.”

– There’s a halo ‘around the beer. In the Hop-ocalypse Now section, Dave Infante writes at Athletic Brewing Co. “receives a helluva lot of good press for being a 6-year-old brand in a small-share niche that’s enjoyed good press for basically all six of those years.” With some notable exceptions, you would write the same about what many call craft beer for most of the past 40-plus years. For instance, there is this story, and this story.

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm . . .

Honey bees

If you visit semi-regularly you’ve learned there is no established Monday format here. At times I’ve called the collection of links to stories from the previous seven days That Was The Beer Week That Was and might again. This week, it is more like one great read and things that might be filed together.

Read this: Thomas Walker, Victorian London’s “female barman”

“At the time, Thomas Walker tended to be talked about as a rogue and adventurer, living an outlaw life. With hindsight, we can sense that it was a pretty desperate existence.”

Must these things be true?

– “Creatively speaking, craft beer now finds itself at the lowest point it’s occupied in several decades.” The headline on the story rings a tone that is just as hopeless, and the post itself will remind you of what seems to be an ongoing discussion.

I am left considering what it means for a brewer to be creative, or what it takes for a beer to be considered new, even novel. New Image Brewing, located in an adjoining town, currently has a terrific helles called Do Less on tap and in cans. It is brewed with malts from Troubador Malting here in Colorado, and thus probably tastes more familiar to me than to you. The malt flavor in Do Less is different than the malt flavor in Bierstadt Lagerhaus Helles, brewed less than 10 miles from New Image.

Bierstadt Helles, to me, is pretty much a perfect beer. I’m not going to quit drinking it because I’ve found something new (and practically speaking, Do Less is probably a one-off). But new, interesting and good, to me, that is creative. It would be greedy to ask for more.

– “At this level, the beer business is mostly a game of scale and operational efficiency.” The context here is the sale of a bunch of breweries that now will be called craft again. I would not argue that operational efficiency does not matter, but I do wonder how much and what other variables there are. Being big has advantages; so does being small.

Last week, Brewers Association chief economist Bart Watson estimated that sales of breweries the association classifies as craft declined two percent in the first half of the year (compared to 2022). However, breweries that sell fewer than 1,000 barrels per year reported positive results. That’s most of the breweries in the country. There are something like 3,500 microbreweries and taprooms that produced fewer than 1,000 barrels in 2022, as well as 2,300 brewpubs. (Additionally, more than 800 breweries choose not to have their annual production published, and many of them are pretty small.)

Granted, many of those breweries have business plans that suggest they will eventually need to regularly sell more than 1,000 barrels to be profitable. But there are other plans.

West Coast IPA

– Your homework. One way to make sense of the chatter about West Coast IPA is to taste a few examples. The results of the Best of The West Coast IPA National Throwdown point to examples to look for, some of which are available well beyond where they are brewed.

– Primer #1. American? West Coast? Hazy? What’s the Difference? There are official guidelines.

– Primer #2. Jeff Alworth asks “When you see [West Coast IPA] on a menu, what do you expect?” Then he examines how pFriem Brewing went about building one.

Not beer

– A $400 million Contraction in Wine Sales is Coming. This amounts to a reduction of $54,800,000 in payments to growers for grapes. Another example of scale.

– How an obscure piece of lab equipment ended up in cocktail bars from London to Shawnee, Kansas. This gadget is being used “to capture the essence of various ingredients and enhance the flavor profile of cocktails in a cleaner format.” Moving from not beer to beer, that’s what some advanced hop products are also designed to do.

– Is Whiskey Twitter Dead? We once went to a WhiskyX festival in Denver because it included an hour performance by Drive-by-Truckers. There were spit buckets, but nobody was using them. I like malted alcoholic products, but I don’t think I am tough enough to do that on a regular basis.

– Mead has a long history and a future as a sustainable beer alternative. a) Stories about mead as an emerging drinks category have been around for at least 30 years. b) Lars Garshol pointed out on X that we are going to need a lot more honey bees for that that happen.