![\"Smoky](\"https:\/\/kfi.jpm.mybluehost.me\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/20240819.jpg\")
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Greetings from Minneapolis, where the World Brewing Congress will continue through Tuesday. The photo above was taken during a smoky hop preparedness workshop. <\/p>\n
Today there will be three presentations related to making sure non-alcoholic beers are safe to drink. This is important and was already on my radar when I read \u201cHow Mash Gang is Breaking the Alcohol Free Mould.\u201d<\/a> That is not to imply that Mash Gang beers are not safe, or that the story should address what the company is doing to assure the beers are free of pathogens. It simply reflects my current fascination with what brewers might do to make non-alcoholic beer better without the many useful functions ethanol performs. One of those is making beer safer to drink.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve written about how adding hop character<\/a> may make NABs taste better and about putting flavors back into NABs<\/a> that may be lost in the production process. Both stories are behind the same paywall, but the list of benefits alcohol provides appears before you hit the wall, so to speak, in the second<\/a>.<\/p>\n Making flavorful beer without the help of alcohol, and often without got-to-love-them compounds that result from the fermentation process, is hard<\/em>. Shouldn\u2019t the challenge appeal to a crafter of crafts?<\/p>\n Granted it is better to start the Mash Gang story at the beginning, but it really kicked in here:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cDespite having never brewed beer before, he believed that it must be possible to make an alcohol-free beer which tastes as good as an alcoholic one.<\/p>\n \u201c\u2018How hard can it be?\u2019 he told the others.\u201d<\/p>\n IF I HAD MORE TIME I<\/strong><\/p>\n After I read the news about Miller Coors abandoning its interests in fancy beer and Tilray adding to its portfolio, and absorbed the takes from Doug Veliky<\/a> and Jeff Alworth<\/a> there was this from Alan McLeod<\/a>: <\/p>\n \u201cJeff asks some good questions and triggers good thoughts \u2013 but there seems to be an assumption that \u2018local\u2019 and \u2018regional\u2019 are similar constructs. I don\u2019t think they are. By the way\u2026 does one now cheer in 2024 as much as one booed in 2016? Such a long time ago, isn\u2019t it? Wasn\u2019t it? My thought is that it is all such a case of corporate deck chair shifting that it really no longer matters. Macro abandoning craft at the same time craft is seeking to mimic macro. Whoda thunk it? What an odd scene this is for so late in the play.\u201d<\/p>\n Keeping it brief . . .<\/p>\n – Local and regional are<\/em> different, but not all the time. Creature Comforts Brewing in Athens is local in Athens and regional in Atlanta. (Terrapin Brewing, now owned by Tilray, is located in Athens, but let\u2019s not sidetracked.) Much of the brewery\u2019s crazy early growth came because Tropicalia sales took off in Atlanta. Trop, as it is known by its buddies, remains amazingly strong, but would be stronger still had not so many local breweries opened in recent years. There are similar stories in every state.<\/p>\n \u2013 “Craft” seeking to mimic macro? So late in the play? I don\u2019t see that. Obviously, there is the matter of what breweries we are talking about, and the matter of how craft is defined. I\u2019m talking about Kings Country Brewing Collective, Montclair Brewing, Dovetail Brewing, Cloudburst Brewing and plenty of others. They see themselves early in the game, and why not?<\/p>\n – More thoughts from Jeff Alworth about regionals at Bluesky led to this super important observation from Mike Kallenberger.<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cAny time a brand is sold we should ask, \u2018What does one party know that the other doesn’t?\u2019 Often it’s about a different answer to the question \u2018What business are we in?\u2019\u201d<\/em> <\/p>\n Scratch Brewing is not in the same business as LaCumbre Brewing, which is not in the same business at Molson Coors.<\/p>\n – One more observation from Mike Kallenberger.<\/a><\/p>\n I just noticed the buried line in the Brewbound piece that MC will also shut down AC Golden, which was essentially their effort to do a Leinie’s\/Blue Moon-type thing under the Coors umbrella. This is a major strategic turn of the aircraft carrier.<\/em><\/p>\n AC Golden lived within the Coors brewery in Golden, and released some excellent beers. That included 11 GABF winners as well as Troy Casey\u2019s first mixed fermentation beers before he left to start Casey Brewing. There\u2019s more to being successful brewery than making quality beer. See Kallenberg Observation No. 1.<\/p>\n IF I HAD MORE TIME II<\/strong><\/p>\n Cambridge Brewing is closing.<\/strong><\/a> What happens to breweries after they hit 35 years will be something to watch as more of the “new breed” of breweries enter their fourth decade.<\/p>\n MOST EXHAUSTING LEAD OF THE WEEK<\/strong><\/p>\n The argument\u2013frequently my own argument\u2013that the terms \u201ccraft beer\u201d or \u201ccraft brewer\u201d have outlived any form of legitimate usefulness or coherence is not exactly a new one at this point. For close to a decade, former craft beer evangelists have watched from the sidelines as the once seemingly concrete, advocacy-tinged terminology of the industry has eroded under the sheer, unrelenting force of outside entropy, seemingly infecting any label one could use to designate this brewery or that company as part of the fraternity of virtuous small business champions opposing international megacorps. A decade ago, we were already observing that the AB InBevs of the world intended to use the inconceivable vastness of their corporate structure to make informed choices a near impossibility for all but the most rabidly informed craft zealots, and they ultimately succeeded beyond even our expectations\u2013obfuscation of ownership and process was the name of the game, and Big Beer played the game expertly, watering down the seeming importance of ownership in the process. What we couldn\u2019t foresee at the time was the now seemingly obvious receding of the greater \u201cbetter beer\u201d wave itself, which would lead those same megacorps to increasingly abandon \u201ccraft\u201d beer as a profitable venture. And with the likes of AB InBev and Molson Coors ditching their craft beer investments in the last couple years, what does that really mean for the status of those brewing companies now gobbled up by the next generation of would-be profiteers? Have these terms become even more antiquated in 2024, or is there any value left in calling someone a \u201ccraft brewer\u201d?<\/p>\n From Is There Any Value Left in the Terms \u201cCraft Beer\u201d or \u201cCraft Brewer\u201d?<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n YOU MIGHT ALSO ENJOY<\/strong><\/p>\n – How does one get into the craft beer hall of fame?<\/a><\/strong> I’m also using this link to point out the ACBHOF has an rss feed.<\/p>\n – Bootleg Biology\u2019s Hunt for a Tennessee Yeast.<\/a><\/strong> I wish the story had included that Jeff Mello once set out to capture wild yeast from every ZIP code-defined region in the United States. He didn’t realize there are 41,618 of them.<\/p>\n – Drinking on the go.<\/a><\/strong> Not just for bacholorette party bikes<\/a> in Nashville. <\/p>\n – America’s oldest homebrew shop saved.<\/strong><\/a> “Customers of the store read like a who\u2019s who of Oregon brewing history.<\/p>\n – What is Greetings from Minneapolis, where the World Brewing Congress will continue through Tuesday. The photo above was taken during a smoky hop preparedness workshop. Today there will be three presentations related to making sure non-alcoholic beers are safe to drink. This is important and was already on my radar when I read \u201cHow Mash Gang is … 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":[703,292],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18497","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-monday-links","category-musing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4wTn-4Ol","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18497","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=18497"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18497\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18511,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18497\/revisions\/18511"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18497"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18497"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18497"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}wine\u2019s<\/del> beer’s value proposition?<\/a><\/strong> Asking for a friend. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"