Of Tart IPAs and Podcasts

For this Friday, before I follow the course of the mighty Columbia to the sea, I leave you with some tasty morsels for the weekend. First up: a brand new pod! On this week's episode, Patrick and I walk through a beer tasting to illustrate just how much you can learn about the ingredients and process from your senses alone. It is of course also available via iTunes.


 As a side comment, I'll add that I think the most valuable lesson people can learn about beer is distinguishing among the flavors contributed by malt, hops, and yeast. Old-timers sometimes forget how mystifying these flavors are to the uninitiated.

Next we go All About Beer, where I discuss a beer that really needs a new name. It's a further evolution on fruity IPAs, but uses a dash of kettle-soured acidity to add structure:

Let’s go back to the juiciness of ripe fruit. What makes it taste like it does is not just the sweetness and distinctive flavor, but acids. Even in fruit we don’t think of as tart, the fresh, “alive” qualities come from a foundation of acidity that firms up the flavors and sweetness. A few breweries have discovered that adding just a touch of acid to a standard IPA has the effect breweries were going for when they started adding fruit—it makes them seem somehow more fruity.

But don't call them "sour" or "tart" IPAs, which is totally misleading. And, based on the scores of comments on AAB's facebook page reacting to the link, viscerally offensive. (But would it kill people to actually click through and read an article rather that just responding mindless to the links that flash before their eyes? Apparently.)  Go have a look.

And finally, I leave you with this photo, which I just liked.

It's Hard Out There For a Publisher

This is a slightly random aside, but I wanted to draw your attention to a great post about the state of the internet over at Talking Points Memo. For those of you who don't read political blogs for fun, TPM may have escaped your notice. It's a left-of-center site that grew out of a personal blog by Josh Marshall. (As an aside to the aside, the site was my introduction to blogging. I'd never heard the word "blog" until Paul Krugman called attention to some of the work Marshall had been doing on the coded racist words of then Majority Leader Trent Lott. Within a month, I had started my first blog.) Like all news/opinion sites, it has struggled in the age of social media.

What's changed in the last 4 to 5 years is the inroads social media sites have made into the paid advertising space. Much as Craigslist virtually destroyed the classified ads business that local newspapers owned, a site like Facebook can deliver ads more efficiently and cheaply than most traditional advertisers. 

The great liberation brought about by the internet made it possible for someone like me to put my voice in front of (potentially) the whole world--a phenomenon new in the world. But if you envision the structure of media as a funnel, where the voices of the public are the wide end, and the media gatekeepers act as the narrow end, what happened with the internet--and especially, with social media--was the elimination of that narrowing. Now all people can connect with all people, which means the writer in this equation isn't very important anymore. Josh' perspective is that of he publisher, but since we can all now be publishers as well as writers, it may be a distinction without a difference. Writers and publishers are still casting around now to figure out how to make a living. Many of us develop nervous tics because it seems like our societal value is approaching zero. Though from a purely academic perspective, the changes are fascinating.

Which I suppose is about as good a place to segue to links as any. Today at All About Beer I discuss a significant epiphany I had in Miami, Florida on the subject of beer. True story.

So join me back in the Abbey Brewing pub. Most beer culture in the world right now has its roots in European brewing. Abbey reflected that—with a healthy dose of American sprinkled in. As I mentioned, Miami is loaded with culturally-specific businesses, so there’s nothing out of the ordinary about a European-American pub making up part of the tapestry. And yet, in that moment, I realized how much American beer culture—especially craft beer culture—carries with it this European valence.

We also have the latest Beervana Podcast up and ready to caress your ears in our dulcet tones. In this latest episode, we discuss wintry beers, touching on topics like wassail, Lamb's wool, glühkriek, bière de Noël, and of course, price elasticities. We have also slightly tweaked the format to include news and beer recommendations (an extension of the "Beer Sherpa" feature birthed here on this blog) as well as a a "mailbag" feature, in which we are attempting to draw you into the discussion. We welcome questions, comments, criticisms, witticisms--anything that inspires you. Email us at the_beerax @ yahoo.com.

The End is Nigh

In order to locate a two-month period in which blog posts were as bereft here as they were in Sept and Oct this year, you have to go back to 2006. During these past two months, I've been on a national book tour while trying to complete a book manuscript. And so blogging has suffered mightily. Fortunately for all concerned, things are finally coming to a conclusion. My mid-November, it should be back to the normal level of randomness you have all come to expect.

However, tomorrow I depart for Miami to begin the final leg of the book tour. I'm arriving early so I can enjoy a bit of sunshine and Cuban food. Thereafter follow these stops, for anyone who happens to be nearby:

• November 4 at 8pm, Miami, FL
  Books and Books, Coral Gables 
• November 5 at 7pm, Tampa, FL
  Hidden Springs Ale Works  
• November 6 at 5pm, Atlanta
  Ale Yeah Craft Beer Market (you can also pre-order signed copies)  
• November 8 at 2pm, Nashville
  Yazoo Brewing special event
• November 9 at 6:30pm, Richmond, VA
  Ardent Taproom - ticketed event ($30 gets you the book and three Ardent beers) 
• November 10 at 6:30, Washington DC
  Busboys and Poets Brookland 

What else? Well, I did manage to do a bit of serious blogging while I was on the road, and you can read about that over at All About Beer in a post I promised last week after passing through Milwaukee:

The Pabst complex is so compelling because it’s so tangible. Capitalism is a violent and sometimes jarring force, and as quickly as it graces a business with the generative power to rise from the pavement, it can strike it right back down. For 15 decades, that brewery continued to grow in lunges, expanding capacity to remain lean and efficient, to gobble up more and more of the growing market. The excitement and energy we are witnessing in brewing now is no different than the one that visited the U.S. 150 years ago when German immigrants brought their brewing expertise and inspired drinkers with lager beer. But in 1996, the same calculus that fueled that empire also led to the decision to quit the place: beer could be made more cheaply elsewhere. In a pen stroke the buildings went dark.

Read the rest here.  Finally, Patrick and I have a new Beervana Podcast on the subject of cider. It coincided with the Cider Made Simple book launch last night (with very serious thanks to Nat West, Kevin Zielinski, Abram Goldman-Armstrong, and Silas Bleakley and Kristina Nance). In this week's episode, we do a survey course on cider. (At one point in the podcast, there's an inadvertent Happy Halloween from the producer. You have to listen to hear it.)



You can also listen to it on iTunes.

Your Omnibus Friday Post

I'm getting on a plane for Philadelphia today, so let's trot through these points briskly.

Southern Oregon Shooting
As everyone in ear- or eye-shot of electronic media knows, there was another mass-shooting in Roseburg yesterday. Discussion of things like beer are highlighted by this event for their triviality, and everyone in Oregon is a bit shaken this morning. Not surprised--good Lord, no--but disturbed. Our thoughts are with everyone at Umpqua Community College.

Legalized It
In one of the more bizarre coincidences, yesterday also marked formal cannabis legalization in Oregon. Anyone 21 years or older can now walk into one of the scores of dispensaries across the state and buy up to a quarter ounce of Purple Haze. It's clear we've passed into a new era, because not only did the day pass without attracting much media attention, but dispensaries reported fairly normal (if busy) days--no lines around the block. No worries, though, beer fans, this development isn't likely to blunt* the growth of your fave beverage.

How wild is your beer?
In a rare Oregon-focused post on All About Beer, I travel to Parkdale and talk to Solera's Jason Kahler about the wildest of wild ales--those that are made through natural fermentation.

If you wanted to boil the whole of modern brewing to a single goal, it’s trying to gain as much control over the biochemistry of the brewing process—starting with keeping wild yeast out of the brewery. This approach seems fundamentally contrary to brewing wild, which requires the embrace of randomness. When I visited Cantillon back in 2011, Jean Van Roy—who is equal parts poet, philosopher, and brewer—put it this way. “It’s never the same. Never. You never know what you will discover. That’s why lambic is so fun. In French we have a sentence. We say, tout est dans tout. If I translate it: everything is in everything. In this brewery, everything is playing a role in the final product. Everything.”

This is not the approach of the modern brewer; it’s something closer to an alchemist—which Kahler acknowledged. “It’s kind of magical in my head. There’s obviously hard science behind it, but I don’t understand all that science, and I don’t think you have to understand that science.”

Beervana Podcast: An Econ-focused Look at Buyouts and Mergers
When Patrick and I conceived of the podcast, we thought it would be cool to incorporate his expertise--economics--into our analysis. Beer isn't a platonic ideal--it's a product, bought and sold on the open market. So too are breweries, which lately have been selling a lot more than some people would like. We tap Patrick's wealth of knowledge to discover whether this is anything fans of good beer should be worrying about. (Plus a fun blind-tasting of some of the, err, finer products of these large breweries that are doing all the buying.) I'll like the Soundcloud feed below, but you can also get the podcast on iTunes. 






__________________
*Sorry.

Odds and Ends, Plus a Great Press Release

Three things for today's shorty post before I head to San Francisco for Beer Bible events. Should you have miraculously not gotten your fill of Beer Bible stuff, let me direct you to my post at All About Beer on why I wrote the book.

I can’t answer the most important question people have about this book (“okay, it’s long, but is it any good?”)—though I hope you’ll find a copy and see for yourself. What I can do is tell you why I wrote it, and why I think we need yet another book about beer.

Patrick Emerson and I have finished the most recent Beervana Podcast, and the subject, likewise, is a ranging discussion about writing the book. Patrick joined me on the first leg of my travels (in Great Britain), so he joins the conversation as well.


Finally, I want to leave you with one of the more interesting and amusing emails I've gotten lately. It comes 10 Barrel Brewing, which as everyone knows was recently acquired by AB InBev. This is the email introducing the press release:

Since people seem pretty stoked on 10 Barrel’s new Portland pub, we’ve decided to get a little more aggressive and announce seven brand new pub openings in Oregon. Some may say that we’re growing too fast, or that 10 Barrel is losing sight of who we are, but we took the restrictor plate off to give the people what they want! Check the video (https://youtu.be/_V0xnzeNHJY) and feel free to share it before we announce on our social channels on 8/24.

If that doesn't seem skittish enough, how about the final paragraph from the press release itself:

“Honestly, these pubs have been in the works for a long time,” added 10 Barrel co-founder Jeremy Cox. “We started talking about these way back in May or June, and we’re glad they finally came together.”

You think anybody's feeling a bit scorched by the blowback from said buyout?

Book, Book, Podcast, Blog

The Friday roundup begins with a pretty cool offer. My hometown bookstore, Powell's, is offering signed editions of the Beer Bible for pre-order. I found this slightly amusing, since they haven't consulted me about that. But anyone who knows Powell's knows how important it is to the city and I will be happy to sign as many books as they want to sell. So if you're looking to pre-order and you don't live in town, sign up now.

While we're talking Beer Bible, let me point you to the new Facebook page for the book. I'm not sure why we do this, but we do, and I have done it. I will use it as a clearinghouse for dates on the for upcoming book tour. So go like that and follow along if you feel inspired.

Next, we have the latest Beervana Podcast available. This is the first of a two-parter that will revolve around the Oregon Brewers Festival. Even if you don't live nearby and have no plans to go, you may still find it interesting. We're using the current event as a way to chart the change in beer over time, looking at this year's list and comparing it to the one from a decade ago. Big changes, and I think they represent trends in brewing writ large.



Finally--and directly related to that concept of changes in beer--is my latest All About Beer post.

For the average consumer, “IPA” is completely disconnected from the historical style—it just means juicily hoppy. So when you attach it to any other adjective (session, white, Belgian, etc.), all it does is designate the presence of the juicily hoppy character. So yes, if Ben made a 4.8% lager made with pilsner and Vienna malt, infused it with that juicy hoppiness, he could probably call it a helles IPA. (The helles part would be a lot more confusing than the IPA.) But the implicit point in his question is evident—by the time you’re making a helles IPA, you’ve stretched that poor adjective so far it hardly has any meaning left.

Have a good weekend--

Wonderful Things

It feels a little petty, on this 26th day of June, to be mentioning anything as base as beer. This date will be remembered along with some biggies (May 17, 1954, August 6, 1965, June 28, 1968) as watershed moments in the history of freedom in the United States. Congratulations to the Supreme Court and all those who committed "countless small acts of courage" to bring it to fruition.

Session IPAs
On the other hand, this is a beer blog, and I have a few items to mention. First off, the latest podcast is live. Today Patrick and I address session IPAs. Are they an actual, distinct style, or merely pales ales dressed up in marketing gloss to sell to the rubes? We speak to three brewers who've made these beers to discover the real story. (There's a weird gap in the middle, but don't despair, it's just poor production on our part--the pod continues eventually.)

By the way, the podcast is now available on iTunes. I encourage everyone to subscribe--you won't regret it! 


The Trickiness of Beer Styles
Next, I'd like to direct you to a couple of my posts at All About Beer.  First we have the troublesome question declaring whether a particular American beer has been "brewed to style." It ain't as easy as it looks.

And more importantly, styles change—just like language. You may insist until the end of time that “hopefully,” an adverb, should never begin a sentence—but that battle is long lost. Language moves on, and so must grammar pedants (full disclosure: I am one). Until the 1950s, when they went extinct for a time the witbiers made in Hoegaarden were wild ales, something like young lambic. That changed when Pierre Celis revived them a decade later. So should we insist that breweries are doing it all wrong now?

Hard Root Beer?
Finally, allow me to direct you to a treatment a phenomenon that is sweeping the nation--hard root beers. Yup, they're a thing.

The question that leaps to my mind is this: do people love Not Your Father’s Root Beer because they love it, or because they’re impressed with the sleight-of-hand at play? It’s made by a brewery and called a beer but tastes exactly like a root beer. Also: it tastes exactly like a root beer but, giggle, it’s boozy! Those are elements of novelty that have buoyed every malternative since the 1980s.

You may not be surprised to hear where I land on that one.

Have a nice weekend, everyone. And to my poor brethren in the Pacific Northwest--find yourself a shady patch and try to stay cool. It's going to be India hot out there.

All You Ever Wanted to Know About Italy, and More

Photo by Giulio Marini

Last week, Birrificio Italiano's Agostino Arioli arrived with three friends and co-workers on a fact-finding mission to the West Coast. I hosted them for a couple of days, showing them pubs, breweries, and leading a trip down to Gayle Goschie's hop farm in Silverton. (Big fun, natch.) It reminded me how much I love Italian beer (the new stuff, not Peroni or Moretti, though Peroni in particular is a fine mass market lager). So this week became a spontaneous Italy week. First came an overview for All About Beer.

The best Italian beer is not only world-class, but some of the best beer I’ve ever tasted. But more than that, Italians have, in just 19 short years, developed their own brewing traditions so that it’s possible to talk about “Italian-style” beer. It’s one thing when a country’s breweries develop the skill and knowledge to reproduce quality examples of existing styles. It’s another, far rarer thing when they develop their own styles. So how did they get here, and what are the markers of “Italian-ness?” Here’s a primer.

Then Patrick and I did a podcast about Italian beer, hinged to a tasting of five of Italiano's products, hand delivered by the generous Arioli. It departs slightly from our regular format, but I think it's our best ever.

Please give it a listen. And I mean that seriously. I love doing this podcast and I think folks will find it interesting. I won't be able to justify the time (nor will Patrick) as a vanity project, though, so we're really looking for an audience. You will vote with your ears, and I hope you encourage us with your interest. Your comments about what works/doesn't work and what we could do to improve it are always invited--nay, solicited. Tell us what you think.

Podcast Live, Bonus Ferulic Acid Rest Commentary

The latest podcast is now live. Today Patrick and I discuss the very welcome emergence of lagers in the craft beer sphere.

Also, in case you missed it, I have a new post up over at All About Beer. It's part of my "quirks of brewing" series. We started things out with parti-gyle brewing, and this week we go to the importance of the ferulic acid rest. What? You've never heard of a ferulic acid rest? Man, do I envy you: your life is about to change.

Once the ferulic acid is in the wort, it can be converted by yeast into a tasty-sounding compound known as 4-vinyl guaiacol, the actual source of the flavor. The yeast must be a special variety known was POF+, meaning “phenolic off-flavor.” It was originally a slur, issued from the perspective of lager breweries who didn’t want any 4-vinyl guaiacol in their beer.

Enjoy. And, as always, share the links, and send me your feedback--it's always welcome.

Friday Odds and Ends

I've been trying to think of a hook for this story, but I got nothin'.

But one [distillery] has found a work-around. It's come up with a chemical process that ages bourbon not in years — but in hours. The innovation is unsettling an industry that is long-soaked in history and tradition....

Terressentia's website says its process uses ultrasonic energy and oxygenation, which "finishes chemical reactions that failed to complete in the distillation stage," and results in a "smoother mouth feel."

Interesting, though.

Next, I'd like to direct you to the latest All About Beer blog post, in which thinking about the validity of regional IPA subtypes (West Coast, East Coast, etc.) leads me to consider regionalism:

So, if we think there’s a style effect going on, it’s more likely a brewery effect. They don’t drink a lot of Dortmund export in Cleveland because of some exotic local preference (I’d find it mighty surprising to see the Dortmunder style pop up anywhere else)—but because the favorite local brewery, Great Lakes Brewing Co., makes a great version of that beer. Here in Portland, one of the U.S. cities most famous for hops, our best-selling craft beer is a wheat ale. But that’s not because Portland is a wheat ale town (they’re pretty rare), but because Widmer’s flagship is Hefeweizen, and Widmer’s our hometown brewery.

And finally, a personal note: the Beer Bible apparently went to the printer today. They're doing two versions, hard- and soft-cover, though the former is mainly just for the library market. (Just 1,500 copies, but you can pre-order one--no doubt for a Limited! Time! Only! from Amazon.) On the inner flaps of the dust cover, the publisher has written really nice copy. To celebrate the imminent tangible manifestation of the book, I'd like to share it with you. (An indulgence, and I appreciate it.)

Never in the long history of drinking have beer lovers had it so good, with a brewing renaissance happening around the globe. And never before have beer lovers who also have a thirst for knowledge had it so good—The Beer Bible is a lively, comprehensive, authoritative, and purely fun-toread guide to beer in all its glory.

The Beer Bible celebrates the pleasure of discovery, for readers new to beer, and the pleasure of connoisseurship, for old hands ever eager for more information. It’s a book built on the premise that the best way to learn about beer isn’t by trying every one out there, but instead pouring your favorite and studying it. That’s what opens the doorway to history, culture, and craft, the influences that make each style of beer unique.

Like bitter, for example. Its origins in the twin discoveries of hops as a spicing agent and modern kilning, which allowed for straw-colored malts. How it took several more centuries to displace the great porter epoch. The influence of mineral-rich Burton water. The Zen simplicity of how bitter is brewed. The quality called “moreish”—a distinctly British adjective extolling the virtue of being pleasant over the course of a full evening at the pub. And the fact that it really needs to be drunk straight from the tap or cask.

To top it off, Jeff Alworth’s ever-engaging style: “British bitters are characterized by a definite hop presence, but they have no violence in them. The hops ride atop a gentle biscuit sweetness and add marmalade and spice.” And so it goes for bocks and lambics, schwarzbiers and Vienna lagers, saisons and Pilsners, weisses, weizens, and witbiers.

Welcome to beer heaven.

(That last sentence even seems to be a subtle tip of the hat to this blog.)

Good Reads

All About Beer lives up to its name today, with three articles you'll want to check out. The first comes from Oxford-based writer Tim Hampson and concerns the latest developments in English hops.

“The British climate is maritime with even fairly even rainfall throughout the year. The majority of other hop-growing regions in the world are much hotter in the summer and much colder in the winter, and all require irrigation. It is the terroir created by our unique climate that produces hops with lower levels of myrcene than in the same hops grown elsewhere in the world. Lower levels of myrcene deliver a more delicate aroma and leave room for more of the other hop oils, which provides the complexity of flavor."

Next we have a Cinco de Mayo post from Jeff Cioletti on mezcal. It's tequila's more rustic cousin, and it is by far more interesting and tasty (in this drinker's humble opinion). It's the smoky Islay malt to tequila's Highland.

Before the agave is fermented and ultimately distilled, artisans bake the heart of the plant in underground charcoal-heated ovens, imparting the not-so-subtle smokiness. Tequila distillers, on the other hand, steam their agave, which has no such effect on its taste.

Finally, the last bit is a piece I wrote about the wild, wonderful cocktails of centuries past, now documented and reproduced by local Portland mixologist Jacob Grier. You ain't drunk cocktails 'til you drunk a mulled, curdled-milk cocktail made with eggs.

I think it’s human nature to believe that the olden times were boring and monochromatic. The people were more innocent, their interests less racy, their choices few and limited by what would grow on the back forty. That may be true of most things, but not beer. Beam back 300 years, and you’d find an orgy of exotica inhabiting the average pint glass. One of my favorite descriptions, from a 17^th-century source, suggests starting with wheat and oats and “one bushel of beans.” It continues: “once fermentation begins thirteen flavorings are added, including three pounds of the inner rind of a fir tree…” Another source, from the 1500s, mentioned laurel, ivy, henbane (a poison) and chimney soot. Tasty! 

Perhaps some reading you can do over your lunch hour.

The World's Most Secretive Brewery

Today's post on All About Beer is a special holiday feature.  You can attempt to guess the brewery in question:

“We do have a legendary process and there is element of mystery behind it—and you’re not going to get that out of me.”

I do have one addendum.  This is a brewery that rejected my entreaties to see the inside (the real inside, where they actually make the beer) and I wrote, "If you do much research, you discover that this has been true for a while—no one has seemed to so much as glimpsed a mash tun for years."  It turns out that's not entirely true--Brian Yaeger has been inside.  I'll have to get him drunk and find out what he knows.

Follow-up. I had forgotten this report from Martyn Cornell of a visit to the brewery organized by the European Beer Bloggers Conference (including illicitly-snapped pics of Brewhouse #4).  Nothing there makes me regret calling Guinness the world's most secretive brewery.

A Grab Bag of Interesting

Let's skip the usual preamble and launch straight into the many interesting tidbits I have collected for you.

1.  I have both a new post at All About Beer and one I think I forgot to tease.  The new one concerns how London's beer scene looks a lot like ... Portland's (or any American city).  They love them some American-style IPAs--but it leaves me wondering who will champion cask.  It has already provoked one rebuttal--or call it an addendum--from Boak and Bailey.

The earlier post I forgot to mention emerged from Gigantic's Massive! barley wine, a beer that endures a nine-hour boil.  It gave me an opportunity to haul out my old Lacambre and throw around words like "maillard reaction."  Read it here.

2.  While we're on All About Beer, you might consider checking out this post about the proposed new Mikkeller brewery slated to go into San Diego later this year.  Interesting experiment.

3.  A beer fest in Reykjavik features two Oregon breweries (of 13 total)--Hopworks and Breakside.  From the press release:

“Our focus has been on breweries from Oregon simply because we like the way people from Oregon think and how the craft beer movement has been developing in that particular state,” said Ólafur Ágústsson, restaurant manager at KEX. “We feel that we can connect to people from Portland and all of Oregon. Reykjavik has a lot in common.”

The next question is: how do I swing a junket to Iceland?

4.  The rare brewers dinner that features multiple breweries.  It's at Higgins and it ain't cheap, but you get the Commons, Crux, Boneyard, Barley Brown, and pFriem in one meal.  And Higgins is never cheap, anyway.  I do wish more restaurants would do this kind of thing.  Italian beer dinners, German beer dinners, sour beer dinners--there are many organizing principles one can deploy that don't involve one brewery.

5.  We drink less beer.  Ron Pattinson has a fascinating group of charts showing how much less we drink now than we used to.  In the past fifty years, per-capita beer consumption has fallen markedly:

• Belgium, -38%
• (West) Germany, -6%
• UK, -25%

The US is slightly weird because of prohibition, but another chart, in which he looks at the last six years, is equally interesting:

• Belgium, -12%
• Czech Republic, -9%
• Germany, -4%
• Ireland, -20%
• Netherlands, -11%
• UK, -21%

So the period corresponding to the biggest worldwide brewery boom in--well, forever--is also the period in which per capita consumption is tanking.  (True in the US, too, though numbers are lagging.  Consumption fell 7% from '08 to '11.)

6.  According to my Facebook alerts, February 18th is the birthday of Crux's Larry Sidor, Pink Boots' Teri Fahrendorf, and Double Mountain's Matt Swihart.  That seems like a damned impressive coincidence.

Why Brands Matter

Falling down on the job here.  Two posts at All About Beer to note.  The first one concerns the importance of brands.

Let’s try a thought experiment. I’ll offer the name of a brewery and you notice the first few things that spring to mind. Ready? Sierra Nevada. Unless you’re really not into beer—and then, why are you reading this?—something should have popped into your head. OK, here’s another: Dogfish Head. Or here, try this juicy one: Lagunitas.

We have strangely complex relationships with breweries. The mention of a name produces a tangle of impressions, memories, opinions, prejudices and emotions. Unlike many product companies—soap makers, snack food companies, pharmaceutical firms—breweries inspire feelings. You’ve had a lot more meaningful experiences with a beer in your hand than, say, doing laundry.

The second tied into the first, springing up when owners sold Elsyian to AB InBev.  What kind of challenges to a brand do new owners pose?  Especially when part of your brand is "corporate beer sucks?"

It’s hard enough for small breweries to make the leap from beloved little-guy to corporate property without suffering some brand damage. For Elysian, a brewery where the brand relied heavily on that small, outsider status, the leap will be a good deal higher.

Read 'em if you missed 'em.

Experts Versus Hive Mind

As my weekly blogging over at All About Beer becomes a routinized thing, I'll alert you to posts more rarely.  However, you might be interested in today's post, which addresses the issue of expert opinion versus the wisdom of hive mind.  In terms of beer evaluation and review, I argue that we don't want to throw the former out entirely.

It is characteristic of this moment in American history that we hold experts in contempt and valorize the global hive mind. Critics are vanishing faster than tropical reefs, and we now rely on sites like Yelp and Good Reads and Amazon to tell us what to buy or read or patronize. There are many reasons why these sites have made us better consumers and, in some cases, better-educated. But the hive mind has a tendency to elevate mass opinion and codify conventional wisdom (even when that “wisdom” is grossly errant). The phenomenon is so pernicious it can even infect non-crowd-sourced information. If you trusted BeerAdvocate with the authority to decide on Burton Bridge’s Olde Expensive, you’d have been sent down a blind alley.

In making the argument, I pivot off the words of local beer luminary Bill Schneller, so go have a look and see what you think. 

Are You Ready for Lifestyle Beer?

My latest post at All About Beer concerns a growing phenomenon in beer--and a brewery that serves as the perfect case-in-point:

The splash page for Saint Archer Brewing Co., a San Diego company founded last year, is curious. On a recent visit to the page, there was nothing but a six-and-a-half minute video that began in grainy black and white and looked something like the early French new wave. It turned out to be a short promo doc about a guy who makes surfboards in San Francisco. Wait, what?

Welcome to the most ambitious lifestyle brewery in America.

What's "lifestyle beer" and why is St. Archer it's patron saint?  Go have a look.

Your Controversy of the Day

Submitted for your discussion: Maine, not Oregon or California or Colorado, is brewing the country's best beer.  That's the thesis of my latest post at All About Beer, and I'm only being very slightly hyperbolic.

Maine obviously can’t compete on numbers. The population is the lowest of any least-densely populated state east of the Mississippi, and most of the towns are crowded down in the south and along the coast. It’s only got 47 breweries. People acknowledge that it has good beer, but it’s never placed among the most glamorous and it won just a single GABF medal this year. Nevertheless, in the ways that matter, Maine is at the beery vanguard. Good beer has saturated the culture and pubs—as Bray’s demonstrates—regularly have interesting, unexpected beer. None of this was unfamiliar to me—it’s been this way for years. What was striking was the degree to which breweries are now pushing the envelope on innovation and quality. As an Oregonian, I’m used to measuring cities by the number of years their beers trail ours. Maine’s scene isn’t trailing anyone, though, and their Portland may now be the equal of Oregon’s Portland. Seriously.

Go read the whole thing.

Stale Beer and Fresh Cider

For your Friday surfing pleasures.  Over at All About Beer, I have a two-parter about beer freshness: part 1 discusses why beer gets stale and what breweries do to ensure fresh beer and part two discusses why you still find stale beer on shelves and what you can do to avoid it.

I've also launched a website to accompany my forthcoming cider book.  Both are called Cider Made Simple, and while the book won't be out til next fall, the website--still a work in progress-- is here now.  (Fans of Cider Saturday may recognize some of the content.)

Ross-on-Wye Cider and Perry, Herefordshire, England

Fresh Hops, Neomexicanus Hops, and No Hops

Hot on the heels of a bottled Lagunitas fresh hop beer, two from Deschutes arrived at Casa Beervana, Chasin' Freshies (still the worst name in beer!) and Hop Trip--and two more chances to disprove my skepticism that fresh hop flavor can be bottled. 

(As a side note, Chasin' Freshies plays a prominent role in my skepticism.  One recent year, I was down at Deschutes sampling fresh hop beers, and Chasin' Freshies was on tap.  It was the first year they made it, and I assumed it was just one of the many one-offs they do during fresh hop season.  It was one of the best examples I'd ever had, though, and so imprinted itself on my brain.  A couple hours later, I arrived home and found a bottle of the same beer waiting for me.  That Chasin' Freshies was nothing like the beer served on tap and yet was, presumably, as fresh as the brewery could make it.)  (As a side note to the side note, I'll add that I've only previously had one fresh hop beer worth a damn--BridgePort Hop Harvest.) 

So back to Deschutes' 2014 bottled fresh hop offerings.  Did they manage to bottle the flavor?  Must I revise the theory?  Our findings are inconclusive: Chasin' Freshies (22 oz bottle) was superlative.  Fully alive and green and fresh-hoppy.  Hop trip (12 oz bottle) was a dud--very little hop character at all, and therefore a sweetly malty soup with no zip.  My advice: if you want the experience of fresh hop, get on down to your favorite grocer, buy a 22 of Chasin' Freshies and drink it tonight.  You might even risk waiting until tomorrow, as you hand out chocolate to small fiends.  I wouldn't wait longer than that.  Skip the Hop Trip.


The Neomexicanus Hops Are In
Stan Hieronymus has an update on some monk-grown native hops that will soon be available to the home beermaker.  Step lively if you want to get in on the action.


In Lieu of Hops
Finally, let me direct your attention to my latest post over at All About Beer.  Today's offering involves Eric Steen's project Beers Made By Walking, wherein Eric and brewers go on a hike and forage ingredients to use in a beer, along with my consideration of which of those ingredients seem like candidates for regular use. It starts:

Artemisia douglasiana, also known as California mugwort, grows along stream banks up and down the West Coast. Dried and—particularly—burned, it has a distinctive aroma similar to another plant famous in the region, Cannabis sativa. Perhaps for this reason, it creates a pungent, hop-like quality when added to the conditioning tank of a light ale. The flavor is anything but subtle; it is sticky and musky and surprisingly bitter, reminiscent of some of the more exotic modern hops in vogue. I discovered it in a gluten-free beer by Portland’s Ground Breaker Brewing, the result of a project called Beers Made By Walking in which brewers go out and forage for local ingredients they later use in a beer.

Go read the whole thing.  (Please!)  

Lastest AAB Post: What a Portlander Found in Victoria, BC

More content to come today, but I wanted to direct your attention to my latest All About Beer post, of which this is a tease:

It’s possible to think your hometown is in step with larger trends—IPAs are popular everywhere, saisons and barrel-aged beers are reliable beer geek bait. But all it takes is a little travel to upset this sense of sameness. A couple weeks back, I spent the weekend in Victoria, BC, which is roughly as far from my home in Portland as Boston is from New York. In the West, that counts as neighbors. I ended up visiting six breweries while I was there, and by stop number four, I felt like I’d gone through the looking-glass: I was definitely not in Oregon anymore.

As always, please like and share it if you do actually like it and think it's worth sharing.  I'm still trying to make sure they don't regret giving me the platform.  In any case, do at least go have a look.