![\"MacHops](\"https:\/\/kfi.jpm.mybluehost.me\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/20230410-machops.jpg\")
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This tiny room next to the kiln where hop farmer Brent McGlashen sleeps during harvest season. See explanation below.<\/em> <\/p>\n The sale of Lazy Magnolia, the first packaging brewery in Mississippi, was announced last week<\/a>. These things happen. Look at the list of \u201c21 iconic breweries\u201d below and count how many are run by their founders.<\/p>\n At some point breweries become \u201ctoo big to fail.\u201d They aren\u2019t going to simply disappear. But there are thousands of smaller ones and eventually there must be a change. The kids inherit the place or a new owner takes charge or, in fact, they simply disappear.<\/p>\n I\u2019m making no predictions about what happens next at Lazy Magnolia, if the new owners really will take \u201cthe brewery to new heights while maintaining its community roots.\u201d<\/p>\n Lazy Magnolia opened in 2005, the same year at Ballast Point, Captain Lawrence, Dry Dock and 23 other microbreweries. Eighty breweries, 18 microbreweries and 62 brewpubs, closed that year. Put another way, 72 breweries came, 80 went and 1,310 remained the same.<\/p>\n In 2005, Boston Beer sold almost 20 percent of what the Brewers Association classified as craft beer and the 50 largest breweries almost 80 percent. In 2021, Boston Beer sold 7.3 percent of \u201ccraft beer\u201d and the 50 largest breweries 50 percent.<\/p>\n Of course Lazy Magnolia had a story to tell<\/a>. Leslie Henderson gave her husband, Mark, a homebrew kit for Christmas about 2000 or so. She ended up being the brewmaster. Hurricane Katrina shut down the brewery in 2006, but they survived. Their Southern Pecan Nut Brown Ale is made with whole roasted pecans and gets regular Untappd checkins from all over the American South.<\/p>\n Lazy Magnolia brewed 14,508 barrels of beer in 2012, but business had already begun to falter before the pandemic. They produced 11,450 in 2017 and 7,392 in 2021.<\/p>\n The brewery is one data point among thousands, but those thousands are the ones to watch when talking about the future of locally brewed beer.<\/p>\n In Kansas, small town means small<\/strong> “Roughly 70% of Ashley\u2019s patients come from out of town, and many of them are undergoing sedation during their visits. ‘If you\u2019re getting a root canal or a crown, your driver is going to have a couple hours to kill while waiting for you,’ Keir said. ‘And there wasn\u2019t a lot to do, or eat or drink in Minneapolis. So in 2019 we thought, why not buy this old building and figure out something to do with it for the community?'”<\/p>\n Lists<\/strong> – 8 of the best beer cities around the world.<\/a> Not everybody will agree with the two US choices, Portland (Maine, that is) and Denver. And a note about the Denver entry \u2013 Black Project closed last September.<\/p>\n Festivals<\/strong> – The Freshtival 2023.<\/a> All of the beer poured will be less than 7 days old.<\/p>\n Good listening<\/strong> And he sleeps even less during harvest, which just wrapped up. Most nights his young children come tuck him in before going to bed (their house is nearby). He might sleep two hours in the tiny room (pictured at the top) next to the kiln that runs 24 hours a day during harvest. <\/p>\n Mac Hops is by no means a tiny operation, but, as you can see, is still hands on. I’ll be writing a bit about New Zealand hops in the next Hop Queries newsletter<\/a> as well as elsewhere . . . likely for the next several months.<\/p>\n Really good stuff I read this week<\/strong> – The curious love affair between Jason Isbell and America\u2019s sportswriters<\/a><\/p>\n – Is Ashely Nicole Moss the future of sports journalism?<\/a><\/p>\n Because this.<\/p>\n \u201cBut maybe, just maybe, I\u2019m old as fuck. Maybe I\u2019m a dinosaur who needs to accept that times (and approaches) have changed. Maybe my way isn\u2019t the only way. Maybe my way isn\u2019t even the right way.\u201d<\/p>\n Cue (or queue) up Jason Isbell’s “Maybe It’s Time.”<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This tiny room next to the kiln where hop farmer Brent McGlashen sleeps during harvest season. See explanation below. +++++ The sale of Lazy Magnolia, the first packaging brewery in Mississippi, was announced last week. These things happen. Look at the list of \u201c21 iconic breweries\u201d below and count how many are run by their … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","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":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[703],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17449","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-monday-links"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4wTn-4xr","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17449","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=17449"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17449\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17462,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17449\/revisions\/17462"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17449"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17449"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17449"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nThe “transformational potential of a small-town brewery”<\/a> is particularly evident at The Farm & the Odd Fellows in Minneapolis (a town in Iowa). “The Swishers are rural Kansas natives who met at Bethany College in Lindsborg, moved away and boomeranged back to central Kansas in 2009. They have two kids and are both medical professionals by trade. Keir is an ER doctor in Salina, about 20 miles south of Minneapolis. Ashley is a dentist who bought a dental practice in downtown Minneapolis in 2010.<\/p>\n
\n– 21 most iconic American breweries.<\/a> Boston Beer is the only one on the list you\u2019d call lager-centric. Just an observation. By chance, you can read more list-member Allagash here.\/a> <\/p>\n
\n– Clear Beer Fest. <\/a>Just what it says. How\u2019s that for transparency?<\/p>\n
\nHosting an All About Beer podcast<\/a> focused on hops grown in New Zealand, Em Sauter and Don Tse began by thanking Brent McGlashen of Mac Hops for being up at 7 a.m. New Zealand time to talk with him. I had to laugh, because by his own account McGlashen doesn’t sleep much.<\/p>\n![\"Brent](\"https:\/\/kfi.jpm.mybluehost.me\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/20230410-machops2.jpg\")
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\nThey have nothing to do with beer, but they have something to do with how we think about new things (which might include beer). And how we think about writing about beer.<\/p>\n