![\"Schalfly](\"http:\/\/www.appellationbeer.com\/images\/20121213-schlafly.jpg\")
Let’s just call it a “good thing.”<\/p>\nLet’s just call it a “good thing.”<\/p>\n
The picture to the right made me smile first thing this morning when I saw Jared Williamson’s tweet<\/a> from a few hours before.<\/p>\n Williamson is a shift brewer at The Saint Louis Brewery’s production brewery, otherwise known as Bottleworks, where they conjure up Schlafly beers. (He also makes a brief appearance in a book about hops you are sick of hearing about.) Somebody should be collecting the Twitter exchanges between he and Jeremy Danner,<\/a> although like the message with this photo — “This is Irish Extra Stout w\/fermcap. 202BBL in a 210BBL tank” — they might be too “inside baseball.”<\/p>\n The events of this morning got me thinking about the tweet itself. Not the words or the photo, but that it even happened.<\/p>\n First, there was an op-ed piece in today’s Post-Dispatch<\/em> by Charlie Papazian and Bob Pease of the Brewers Association and Schalfly CEO Dan Kopman, headlined: “Craft or crafty? Consumers deserve to know the truth.”<\/a> This was followed by a press release from the BA: “Craft vs. Crafty: A Statement from the Brewers Association.”<\/a> And that included a link to a list of domestic non-craft breweries.<\/a><\/p>\n “Craft” has been talked to death in the U.S. beer blogosphere for years and now has infected England as well. I can hardly wait to read the same old debate in German and Polish. And, repeating what I typed here last week, this blog exists because I think the “where” (including where it is brewed, obviously) in beer matters. So I have nothing new to say on the craft\/crafty front.<\/p>\n Instead, back to that tweet. <\/p>\n It connects us (whoever “us” is, but I think it is more than one guy who lives three miles from the brewery) to Schlafly beer in a way a commercial that costs more than a million dollars to show during the Super Bowl cannot.<\/p>\n That’s a “good thing.”<\/p>\n That some guy who works in the brewery took the time to snap the photo and type the words is also a “good thing.”<\/p>\n That nobody in “corporate” stopped him, that’s astonishing (other than the fact that Schlafly doesn’t exactly have a “corporate,” but stick with me, please). You think a shift brewer at one of the world’s brewing giants is sending foam-soaked tweets from a fermentation cellar? “Don’t let a focus group get a look at that foam.”<\/em> <\/p>\n In the course of the morning crafty tweet overload, Danner made a fine point<\/a> about the dangers of defining anything based on “what it’s not” as opposed to “what it is,” but this is an example of something that makes Schlafly-Boulevard-CivilLife-Perennial-4Hands-UrbanChestnut-and-so-in-St.Louis-and-then-beyond different. And it’s a “good thing.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Let’s just call it a “good thing.” The picture to the right made me smile first thing this morning when I saw Jared Williamson’s tweet from a few hours before. Williamson is a shift brewer at The Saint Louis Brewery’s production brewery, otherwise known as Bottleworks, where they conjure up Schlafly beers. (He also makes … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[292],"tags":[593,592,591,220],"class_list":["post-10734","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-musing","tag-craft","tag-jared-williamson","tag-jeremey-danner","tag-schlafly"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4wTn-2N8","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10734","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10734"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10734\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10754,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10734\/revisions\/10754"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10734"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10734"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10734"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}