Four Interesting Items

Any one of these could be a full, hearty entree, but I think they'll do even better as small plates. See what you think.

My Sponsor Comes to America

For the past year, I've been delighted to welcome Guinness as a sponsor on this blog--this week we learned we could welcome them back to the US as well:

Diageo today announced its intention to build a US version of Dublin’s popular Guinness Open Gate Brewery in Baltimore County, Maryland. As currently planned, the company would build a mid-sized Guinness brewery and a Guinness visitor experience with an innovation microbrewery at the company’s existing Relay, Maryland site. This new brewing capability and consumer experience, combined with a packaging and warehousing operation, would bring the company’s investment in Relay to approximately $50 million. The new brewery would be a home for new Guinness beers created for the US market, while the iconic Guinness Stouts will continue to be brewed at St. James’s Gate in Dublin, Ireland. 

This is not the first time Guinness has come to America, but the previous experiment ended after just six years. The current effort looks like a more ambitious and risky project. Diageo has been trying to figure out for years how to use the Guinness brand as an entry point into the craft market, with notably mixed success. The challenge for any giant brewery with such a strong brand presence is figuring out 1) how to expand without weakening the core product's position, while 2) convincingly appealing to customers in an entirely new segment. Most of the big breweries have concluded it can't be done, so they've followed AB InBev's strategy of just buying breweries in the craft segment. Can Diageo convince people that Guinness means both Irish stout and fullsome, tasty craft beer? Big gamble.

October Debuts
Speaking of arrivals, we have a new entry into the pretty-darn-crowded world of beer chatter.

Today, Pitchfork is proud to announce the launch of October, a digital publication focused on beer with an editorial perspective that speaks to a new generation of beer drinkers. A destination for devotees and novices alike to read about, learn about, and share their appreciation for beer and celebrate the culture around it. The site is being launched in partnership with ZX Ventures, AB InBev’s incubator and venture capital fund that focuses on increasing awareness and excitement around beer and brewing culture.

The tie to ABI caused some sniping on social media, but the project is incredibly transparent. Read a little further and you learn that October is "overseen by Pitchfork’s creative studio and in collaboration with Michael Kiser of Good Beer Hunting, Eno Sarris of BeerGraphs." So far I don't see much that distinguishes the content from any other beer magazine. Kiser even has a think-piece up about where the Budweiser brand sits in the modern beer landscape, a perfect example of the way he brings insight and value to the conversation--while at the same time leaving that question of relationships with funders wide open. Still, the one knock I have on October so far is that it doesn't really seem to have a clear raison d’être that distinguishes it from, say Draft or All About Beer. Indeed, Good Beer Hunting seems to have carved out a clearer viewpoint.

New Branding
Two Oregon breweries sent me emails announcing new branding today, and they are both market improvements. I pass them along as an example of the way breweries are responding to a tightening market. In a world of jillions of brands, you can't have stale or bad packaging around. Rogue, which updates its flagship, had the former and Cascade the latter. Here's Dead Guy:

And the new Cascade.

Yeast and the New England IPA
Finally, because I'm a completist, I want to direct you to the latest Beervana Podcast, and not just out of pure self-interest. Over the past year, we have discussed on these pages and elsewhere the nature of the New England IPA. Yesterday, Patrick and I paid a visit to the Imperial Yeast labs and did a pod with the three principals there. During the course of our interview, Owen Lingley discussed this beer style (they're getting a lot of questions about it from customers) and issued a rather bold, declarative position on the style as involves yeast. You will want to listen to hear his views--and learn all about yeast, which is a subject many of us wish we knew more about.




Happy weekend, you all--

A Good, Old-Fashioned News Roundup

Been awhile since so much stuff came along that I felt it merited a round up, but there you have it. (Nothing here about Cleveland, either--I promise.)

1. Puckerfest!
One of the best events of the year arrives in Portland tomorrow--Belmont Station's annual celebration of sour, Puckerfest. The lineup:

• Tuesday, July 19 - Breakside (with appearances by Ale Apothecary, Alesong, Boneyard, the Commons, Culmination, Rogue, Upright).
  
  
• Weds, July 20 - Gorge Night, featuring Double Mountain's annual Kriek releases (including a keg you can't even get in Hood River), Logsdon, pFriem, and Solera.
• Thurs, July 21 - Belgian Giants. Rodenbach Alexander (!) and Grand Cru, Cantillon Iris and Gueuze, Hannsens Oude Lambik, Bockor Cuvee des Jacobins Rouge, and Liefmans Goudenband.
• Friday, July 22 - Cascade. 
• Saturday, July 23 - Block 15 & De Garde. 
• Sunday, July 24 -  Califorina breweries. Almanac, Bear Republic, Firestone Walker, Green Flash, Lost Abbey, Russian River.

2. Hop Acreage Expands 18.5%
American IPAs are great for beer drinkers--and even better for hop growers. Brewers are now using absolutely crazy amounts of hops when they make IPAs, and that means hop acreage has had to expand to keep up with demand. This is from the Hop Growers of America:

After a 15.4% increase in acres harvested in the US in 2015, a 10.2% increase in 2014, a 10.3% increase in 2013, and a 7.2% increase in 2012, acreage has jumped up once again. For the second year in a row, U.S. hop acreage has surpassed previous records to reach all time highs. With 53,213 total acres strung for harvest in the U.S., that’s a whopping 8,303 new acres from 2015 – a 18.5% increase.

It is whopping, too. In 2004, which looks like a serious low tide for hop-growing, the US grew only 27,742 acres--almost exactly half the acres it grew in 2015. A few interesting notes:

• Zeus (21%), Willamette (21%), CTZ (18%) and Galena (17%) were the big cultivars back in 2005. There were just 6% of Cascades.
• Variety was much more pronounced in 2015. The biggest cultivars were: Cascade (14%), Centennial (9%), and CTZ (9%). 
• Hop acreage outside the Northwest increased 64% and is now 4% of all acreage. Michigan, with 650 acres, is leading the pack.

3. The Price of a Beer
This last one is not much more than a link, but it's a good one. Care to guess how the price of a pint of beer stacks up now to any time in the past fifty years? (Hint: this is one way you don't want to make America great again.) Interesting graph for those who find graphs interesting.

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.

Anheuser-Busch's Purchases Elysian

Another one down:

St. LOUIS and SEATTLE (January 23, 2015) – Anheuser-Busch today announced it has agreed to purchase Elysian Brewing Company, based in Seattle, Washington....

Joe Bisacca, Elysian ‎CEO and co-founder [...] will continue with Elysian along with his partners, Dick Cantwell and David Buhler. “After a lot of hard work, we’ve grown from one Seattle brewpub to four pub locations and a production brewery. With the support of Anheuser-Busch, we will build on past successes and share our beers with more beer lovers moving forward.”

Wow.  Weeks ago, when AB snatched 10 Barrel, I observed that their strategy appeared to revolve around finding independent breweries with impeccable cred, and they could hardly have done better than Elysian.  It's long been my favorite Washington brewery, and it's always my first stop when I hit Seattle.  It has always seemed the most Seattle of the Seattle breweries--an extemporaneous brewery that could be equal parts gritty and urbane and credibly support local sports teams or indie bands.  Elysian always seemed to be right where Seattle was a the time.

Will this change?  I'm normally agnostic about ownership structures, but as a fan, this is at least a little alarming.  But as I've been saying for years now: welcome to the big new world of craft brewing.

 Update. Why does this rattle me--admittedly not a local, but local-adjacent?  A big part of Elysian's allure was how well they represented Seattle and the heartbeat of the city. Just because a brewery is local doesn't mean it can channel the local mores, culture, and zeitgeist. Elysian could and did--which is a big part of why they were so good. Can they still do that as a division of AB? In the short term, almost certainly. But I fear we've lost a little bit of what made Seattle Seattle.  Or put another way:

does it really? pic.twitter.com/jFlFqWf1oD
— Evil Twin Brewing (@EvilTwinBrewing) January 23, 2015

Several Small, Interesting Things

Over the past week, I had a half-dozen moments where something interesting and beer-related floated by on the digital stream.  None warranted a post by themselves, but I can't help rattling them off, along with an opinion or two.  (You'll find some/all of them interesting, too.)


1.  Will Ohio's Fat Head's Brewery Thrive in Portland?

Does that Fat Head logo suggest a cultural
misalignment to anyone but me?

Fat Head's is a popular brewery from suburban Cleveland, successful enough that it expanded to Pittsburgh and then to ... Portland.  [Correction: Fat Head's started as a beer bar in Pittsburgh, then opened their brewery in Cleveland.] It will open two weeks from today in the Pearl District (13th and Davis), ground zero for the city's priciest real estate.  Fat Head's is famous for an IPA they proudly call "West Coast." 

Comment:  This is endlessly fascinating.  Portland has 978 breweries (estimated), and they're all "West Coast."  Portland is legendarily provincial, a place where locals gleefully eschew anything non-Oregonian.  (Forty years ago, a certain local brewery made some hay with that very concept.)  Many Oregonians are erstwhile Midwesterners who left places like Ohio because they wanted to live in a weird un-Ohio town like Portlandia where, presumably, they weren't seeking Ohio beer.  It seems like a steep and rugged climb.  That said, the brewery says it intends to make Portland-only beer on site, and I'm sure the brewers will quickly integrate into the Portland brewing community.  The Pearl is so expensive that there aren't many mid-range restaurants around, which will help get people in the door.

Will Fat Head's fly?  I have no earthly idea.


2.  Is Cheap Beer Good?
Writing in GQ, David Chang (a chef, Google informs this non-foodie) declares his love for mass market lager.  "And there's no drink I love more. I love it more than any great white wine, more than any white Burgundy, which I love very, very much. In my fridge, the only beer—practically the only foodstuff I've ever purchased for home—is Bud Light bottles."

Comment: God bless him.  I know this is total exhibitionist click-bait, but I'd like to use it as an opportunity to come out against beer-shaming.  People like what they like.  It's long past time we stopped trying to get them to drink what we like.  Over the last ten years, I've found myself in countless versions of the same discussion with someone who'd become interested in exploring beer, but was worried s/he didn't like the "right" ones.  There should be no shame in beer.  You love Bud Light or Shock Top: good for you. If so, I might suggest Breakside Pilsner or Allagash White, but I'm not going to look at you with surprised derision and shake my head in sadness.  And I think anyone who does has missed the whole point of "enjoying" beer.

Comment 2:  For some reason chefs often like light lagers.  I have formed theories that relate to their interest in not having strong liquid flavors compete with their subtle chewable ones, but haven't done a full double-blind study yet.

(Stan Hieronymus directs us today to a rebuttal by Garrett Oliver, which is not persuasive.)


3.  Seawater Beer
Vice points us to Er Boqueron, a Spanish beer made with Mediterranean sea water.  The writer is interested in a related study that shows that deep ocean water, partially desalinated, helps speed recovery time after exercise.  Naturally--it is Vice--this leads the writer to believe that it might prevent hangovers. 

Comment: Sea water?  Based on reviews, it must be pretty heavily desalinated.  But at the very least, the phenomenon shows you how far we've gotten into the exotic beer trend.


4.  Beer in the Non-Beer Press
James Fallows is an old-school foreign-policy journalist writing for The Atlantic.  He has developed a passion for craft beer and occasionally blogs about it.  In the current edition of the magazine, he wrote an article about Jim Koch.  I direct you to it because it's interesting to see non-beer people write about beer.  Fallows did a follow-up piece on his blog, wherein he noted how, despite how superficially unimportant beer is, it has a serious impact.  Fallows has been doing a project for the past year looking at the circumstances and problems confronting small American towns.  Connecting his avocation and vocation, he writes: "I know this seems like a running gag, but quite seriously we've come to think that the locally based, strongly locally branded food-and-beverage outfits we've seen from Maine to Mississippi to South Dakota, are significant business operations and signs of civic health."

Comment:  In the Koch piece, Fallows describes him as a billionaire.  This goes back to a point I have been making for some time: beer is a lucrative business.  The happy warrior Fallows describes is the public version, but Koch, like all billionaires, has managed to succeed through a combination of hard-nosed (and often controversial) business decisions, political acumen, aggressive competition, and periodic collaboration with some competitors.  I don't fault Fallows for anything he wrote except the sepia-toned filter that colors the piece with a promotional gloss.  It's a bit Pravda-esque.


5.  47,000 Articles About Pumpkin Beer

Comment:  I hate pumpkin beer.  

Four Interesting Things

Stephen Colbert, Powell's, and Amazon
I have occasionally launched sorties of barbed adverbs at the large online bookseller to the north (see here and here), much to everyone's disinterest.  And yet, my warnings were prescient!  Amazon is so big (41% of the dead tree copies, two-thirds of digital)  that it exercises enormous control over what gets published and what price it sells for.  And because of this might, they can punish unfavored publishers, as they have done with Hachette, one of the big five.  (Backstory here in a quick recap.)  Hachette's crime is negotiating with Apple's e-book service.  Amazon is essentially saying: "be a damn shame if someone came in here and took away your Kindle titles" while smacking a thin, nerdy fist into an open palm.

The authors, of course, are getting screwed and hate this, but most authors are voiceless bit players in a grand epic.  But not all of them:

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,The Colbert Report on Facebook,Video Archive

In case you didn't press "play," the upshot is this: Colbert, a Hachette author, is sending his readers to Powell's.  A heartwarming story that might benefit a local retailer--happy Thursday one and all.


How Expensive is Too Expensive?
I, like the next man, enjoy a night on the town with rich food and beer, served to me by the people who made same.  Brewers dinners are fun, indulgent, and occasionally revealing.  So I was intrigued when this landed in the inbox:

As many of you know we will be launching Beer Camp Across America this Summer.  This unprecedented celebration of our collective spirit: 12 different collaboration beers brewed alongside 12 exceptional brewery partners, showcasing the sense of pride and passion shared by craft brewers nationwide. Portland will be lucky enough to get a sneak peak of all these collaborations at a special Beer Dinner at the Woodsman Tavern featuring  Ken Grossman owner/founder of Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. and Jamie Floyd owner/founder of Ninkasi Brewing. The dinner will include six different courses and all 12 Beer Camp America collaboration beers on DRAFT!

Interesting! (And, good god, 12 beers--indulgent.)  But then came the hammer:

The dinner will run $120 per person. 

That's a lot of Hallertauer.  Possibly it's worth it--entrees at the Woodsman run around thirty bucks, and an evening with Ken and Jamie is bound to be entertaining.  But $120?  I'm feeling we're edging toward 1% territory here.


Fruit Beer Fest - This Fri-Sun
I have no information except that it's happening and has, the past two years, had exceptional beers.  Based on the beer list (cool layout on the website, too), it looks to continue the winning streak.

701 E Burnside
Full details here.


Beers Made By Walking
Eric Steen has been doing a cool thing that I've been negligent in discussing.  The notion is this: "Beers Made By Walking is a program that invites brewers to make beer inspired by nature hikes and urban walks. Each walk is different, each beer is a portrait of that landscape. The program happens in multiple cities each year.  "  This summer and fall, the program explores Portland's Forest Park with six breweries (Sasquatch, Hopwork, Breakside, Coalition, Harvester, and Laurelwood).  To quote Eric, "Led by Forest Park Conservancy's Matt Wagoner and local brewers, these hikes will focus on edible and medicinal plants and inspire a series of beers that will serve as drinkable, landscape portraits of Forest Park and the surrounding area."

You can join the walks for free, but you have to register here first.  Go to the website for times and dates.

Fraud and Growth in the News

Two news items of note this week, in case you missed them.  The first would have been a signature case-in-point for my old campaign, the Honest Pint Project (RIP), and although that effort is over, the message remains relevant.  Behold:

For years, thousands of hockey fans and other arena-goers in Idaho have paid $4 for a "small" beer, served in a squatty plastic cup, and $7 for a "large" beer, served in a taller cup. According to a lawsuit filed this week against CenturyLink Arena in Boise, the cups hold the same amount of beer, despite their apparent differences.

The fraudulent glasses.  Source: Yahoo.

The part of this story I love the most is the exquisite response by the stadium's management. It should be studied by students of public relations as a classic in the "how to mess up a response to scandal" genre.

It was recently brought to our attention that the amount of beer that fits in our large (20-oz) cups also fits in our regular (16-oz) cups. The differentiation in the size of the two cups is too small.

When evidence of you blatant fraud goes public, you probably shouldn't compound the trouble with blatant lies.  The problem, as everyone who was defrauded knows, was not that the "differentiation" between the two cups.  It's that management used differently-shaped, same-sized cups to defraud their customers.  Good thing someone "brought it to their attention."  We are way too litigious generally, and this isn't a war crime, but CenturyLink Arena deserves to lose its shirt over this one.

In our second story, from the Denver Post, we have the following story:

When the guiding lights of American craft brewing met last weekend at the St. Julien Hotel in Boulder to sharpen their vision and undoubtedly drink a lot of good beer, the suggestion was raised that craft brewers should try to claim 20 percent of the U.S. beer market by 2020.  By the end of the meeting, the Brewers Association board had revised the organization’s mission to reflect that goal.

The article goes on to discuss how realistic the goal is, quoting various luminaries including our own Beeronomist.  Count me among the believers.  From 2005 through 2012 (the last years for which we have numbers), craft brewing has never grown less than 5.8% a year, and that was during the depths of the recession--and five of the last eight years have been in double digits.  The Brewers Association member breweries are currently picking up about a percentage point a year, a figure that will grow as the base grows.  Add into that the loathed "crafty" beers and the craft beers BA doesn't track (CBA, Goose Island), and I think it's easy enough to see how you make the goal. 

News You Can Use

Today, for reasons described in the first bullet point below, you get a newsy/newsish roundup.  They are nevertheless items of real, if perhaps small, interest, so read on.


To Europe

On Friday I decamp to Europe.  I will be there exactly two weeks, traveling through Herefordshire and Somerset, Normandy, and the Basque country to learn about cider.  I will blog on the road, in that loose and scattered way one does when confined to spotty wi-fi and an iPhone.  What you'll miss in elegant turn of phrase and deep insight--hallmarks of this blog*--you'll get in immediacy and foreigness.  Anyway, that's the plan.  I've done my best to locate cider talk on the weekends to avoid losing my beer-centered (and titanic*) readership, but this is going to be two straight weeks of cider. Give it a look anyway and see if it's interesting.  Expect the first post from Bristol over the weekend.


About that Craft Beer Bubble
Okay, this is a red flag.  From a press release by the Brewers Association today:

At the end of December, the Brewers Association counted 2,722 brewing facilities in the US, an increase of almost 400 from the end of 2012....   It is interesting to note that 2013 marks the first year since 1987 that microbreweries outnumbered brewpubs in the country.

The number of breweries is interesting but essentially meaningless.   The United States could easily accommodate thousands of brewpubs scattered across the nation's cities.  It cannot accommodate too many thousands of microbreweries, though, because there are a finite number of grocery shelves and tap handles in the world.  Microbreweries, according to the Brewers Association definition, make less than 15,000 barrels but sell at least three-quarters of their beer off-site.  Those 1,376 microbreweries might only be able to produce 2 million barrels of beer--1% of the market--but they run into a bottleneck when they send them off-site.  A stat to watch.


Peter Austin is Dead
A small item from across the Atlantic caught my attention:

THE founder of Ringwood brewery Peter Austin – widely credited with saving the microbrewery movement in the UK as well as introducing it to America and popularising it worldwide – has died aged 92. 

In the US, we tend to think of ourselves as sole inventors of craft brewing, but Austin's name should be put next to Fritz Maytag's and Jack McAullife in the official history of the brewing renaissance. 

Mr Austin set up the famed brewery in 1978, aged 57. He came from a brewing family; his great-uncle was a brewer in Christchurch and his father worked for Pontifex, which was the leading brewing engineering firm in the country....

In 1982 Mr Austin hired Alan Pugsley to train to brew and work with him on brewery start-ups.  They installed more than 120 breweries in 17 countries, including Siberia, China, Nigeria and South Africa. The equipment for the Siberian brewery was lost in the Russian railway system for two years before finally turning up in Dudinka. 

Roger Protz also has a lovely remembrance.  


A New Era of Beer Writing Dawns
Okay, it actually dawned when Evan Rail published Why Beer Matters as a Kindle Single.  It matures a bit more with the release of a new Kindle book by good friends-of-the-blog Alan McLeod and Max Bahnson (aka Pivni Filosof).  I haven't read it (see item one of this blog post), but I've scanned it and what you will find in between its digital covers is not typical.  Beer book writing is being driven ever further in the Sunset Magazine direction favored by publishers (soothing words about an indescribably delicious world depicted in deep-focus color photography), so weird oddball books have zero chance of being published.  The Unbearable Nonsense of Craft Beer is a weird oddball of a book--a rant placed inside a fiction.  It may not be getting universal acclaim, but credit Alan and Max with following their bliss.  If you want more writers to do that, consider spending the four bucks on their book.  It will encourage others. 

______________________
*False.

Brewing News of the Bizarre

In the political world, the longueurs of summer are the time when, lacking the anchor of legislative activity, paranoia and conspiracy become unmoored and float up among respectable conversation.  It's called silly season.  I wouldn't have thought the same thing happened in the beer world--until I scanned through my news lists and  Beer Pulse this week.  Now I wonder...


1. Weird Canning Story #1
We go to the unlikely source at Wonkblog for our first oddity: the investment banking firm Goldman Sachs is hording aluminum in order to drive up prices, driving up the cost of producing a can of beer. 

Here’s the trick: Three years ago, Goldman bought a bunch of warehouses around Detroit and started paying traders extra to bring their metal there rather than anywhere else. The longer it stays, the more rent Goldman can charge, which is then passed on to the buyer in the form of a premium.

This is, as all things Goldman touches, perfectly legal--and just as immoral.  Imagine if the commodity at hand was, say, broccoli or flu vaccine.  Neato!


2.  Weird Canning Story #2
You recall Churchkey, the retro-hipster beer company Entourage star Adrian Grenier launched last year?  It has fallen on hard times:

[S]ix months into production, the company hits a snag and is forced to pull all of its freshly made beer from the marketplace.  The idea was to revive the flat top steel can, a package that hadn’t been used in the beer industry in more than 50 years. But quality control issues and what Hawkins described as “bulging cans” forced Churchkey’s founders to halt production last October.

“The integrity of the beer was being compromised,” Hawkins said. “The canning line wasn’t as efficient as we needed it to be, the pressure inside the can was too high and we ultimately had to pull the beer off shelves.”

This makes no sense to me. What about the canning line could cause the packages to bulge?  Must this not be a problem with the beer?  And if it's a problem with the beer, shouldn't that be easy enough to fix? 


3.  So Cynical My Head Hurts

Newcastle, that punky independent brewery from Northern England, got a good one off on ole Budweiser.

Newcastle posted a photo across its social media accounts on Monday mocking Budweiser’s new “Bowtie” can. The photo is part of a series called #NoBollocks, mostly geared to tear down traditional big beer marketing.

Introducing the new, #Newcastle bow-tie can. It’s our regular can with the sides pushed in. Innovation! #NoBollocks

Ha!, that's so funny!  Except that Newcastle is an international Heineken brand no one in England actually drinks.  You can call it "meta," I call it cynical.


4. Call it "Reinheitsgebot Plus"
I doubt this will shock many of you, but the big breweries use additives in their beer.  Newcastle, for example, uses caramel color.  A ton of breweries use corn syrup.  It's so not shocking that I was shocked to see a non-beer person recoil in horror.  She has the shocking expose:

But, Guinness beer also contains isinglass, a gelatin-like substance produced from the swim bladder of a fish. This ingredient helps remove any “haziness,” solids, or yeast byproducts from the beer. Mmmmm… fish bladder sounds delicious, doesn’t? The sneaky thing this beer company does like many of the companies mentioned here today is create an illusion of using the best ingredients when in actuality what they tell you publicly on their websites is a complete farce. 

Actually, not so sneaky: fish bladders have been used for generations to clear the haze in cask ale.  The writer is especially interested in GMOs and got MillerCoors to "admit" the use of corn.  It is actually newsworthy, I suppose, to wonder if the corn in the corn syrup in the Lite beer came from GMO crops, but I doubt very few beer drinkers were rocked by the news that Miller and Coors use corn.  But it does reveal how we can forget to communicate basic facts about beer to those who don't swim in these waters each day.


5. You Can't Drink 13,958 Beers
Sometimes I stress that I'm not keeping up with all the new beer releases.  Whoo-boy, am I sure not keeping up with the new beer releases:

A single TTB agent currently approves all beer labels, Hogue said. The TTB has approved 13,958 individual beer label applications since October of last year.

The story is actually more about the process of getting beer labels approved, and it's really fascinating. If you've ever talked to a brewer about getting labels approved, they describe it as an experience half-way between Kafka- and Dante-esque.  The sixth circle of bureaucratic hell.  Now we know why.

That ought to hold you for awhile.

Synthetic Yeast on the Horizon: Mary Shelley Would Be Proud

The scientist builds the creature from a boneyard of parts, removing from it the frailties of natural life, finally breathing into it the flicker of life.  Nope, not Frankenstein's monster, but Saccharomyces cerevisiae--beer yeast.

The international project adds to work to create the first ever synthetic life form, by building a bacterium genome from scratch.

It will be the first time a genome has been built from scratch for a eukaryotic organism, the branch of the evolutionary tree that includes plants and animals. 

The notion is to make it more resistant to its own waste (ie, alcohol), presumably to aid industrial breweries in things like ever better high gravity brewing. 

"Clearly there are strains of yeast that are highly resistant to alcohol, but they all die off as the alcohol gets higher, so making more alcohol resistant strains will be very useful for that industry in terms of cost value," [said Professor Paul Freemont, from the centre for synthetic biology and innovation at Imperial College London]

It will inevitably be hugely controversial.  Who's going to want to drink Frankenstein beer?  But my sense is that the only real commercial purpose in trying this is efficient beer-making, which means it will be a part of an industrial process to create inoffensive mass-market lagers.  I suppose there could be super-high-alcohol beers in the offing, too, but they're a novelty product at best. 

Good, wholesome beer is a product of particular fermentation conditions, including a diverse array of yeast strains.  If you like IPAs or saisons, I think there's no reason to fear.

A Grab Bag of Tasty Treats

Catching up on the news.  With alacrity, now...

1. Cider Riot launches.
During my first extended conversation with Abram Goldman-Armstrong years back, I learned that he was a child of Yamhill County and its abundant fruit.  In the years since he was a kid, Abram has traveled the world and been associated with the Timbers and beer (his Twitter handle is @BeerAbe), but he recently launched a project that feels like a homecoming--a small Portland-based cidery.  He's actually been making cider since high school, working with both wild seedling apples from home as well as cider apples from the White Oak orchard (a cidery that closed in 2005).  Last night, he shared small-batch versions of the ciders he plans to make this fall, including a crisp, slightly tannic draft cider called Burncider (his cidery is located just off Burnside), a hopped cider called Everybody Pogo, and a rich, tannic cider called 1763--the year of the famous cider riots in England.  (Auspiciously, that happens to be exactly 250 years ago.)

The Northwest is one of the leaders in the national cider revival, but a lot of the products are made with sweet desert apples, the kind made for eating.  Cider apples, though--bittersweet, bittersharp, and sharp--are "the heart and soul of a proper cider."  Abe uses "proper cider" a lot, and he plans to make his dry, in the English fashion.  As a taste of what he hopes to one day make, Abe broke out the last of a blended cider with '07 and '09 vintages made largely with Kingston Black apples.  It was one of the best I've ever tasted--complex with deep tannins, a bit of French-cheesy funk and rustic English skin character.

Abram has a modest Kickstarter going, and if you're at all interested in cider, this is a good project to back.

2. Beer cocktails by Jacob Grier
While we're talking Kickstarters, let me direct your attention to a prospective book by Jacob Grier called Cocktails on Tap.  This project has grown out of the "Brewing up Cocktails" events Jacob hosted with Ezra Johnson-Greenough and Yetta Vorobik.  (You'll recall my amazement over one of their early offerings, the sublime hot scotchy.)  It's going to be an impressive book when completed; Jacob's working with photographer David Reamer, designer Melissa Delzio, and publisher Ellee Thalheimer (whom you'll remember from Hop in the Saddle).

Twenty bucks is like a pre-order on the book, so go check out the Kickstarter.

3. Portland Monthly's beer issue.
I don't totally get the business model for Portland Monthly, but I gather it involves these monthly best-of cover stories (best doctors, best neighborhoods, etc).  This month beer gets the spotlight, and I have to say, hiring Christian DeBenedetti to select the fifty best Oregon beers was a very good move.  No two people on the planet would choose the same fifty, but DeBenedetti's fifty are really tight.  I had to work very hard to come up with even minor quibbles.  If you have friends transitioning into beer-fandom, tell them to pick up a copy and use the list as a guide.  They could do infinitely worse.

Bud Watering Down Its Beer?

Post updated; see below.

In the bizarre news of the day, try this on for size:

Credit: Willy Volk

AB InBev’s St. Louis-based Anheuser-Busch Cos. routinely adds extra water to its finished products to produce malt beverages with significantly less alcohol content than displayed on its labels, violating state statutes on consumer protection, according to a complaint filed yesterday in federal court in Philadelphia. Similar lawsuits were filed in federal courts in New Jersey and San Francisco. 

Of course, the plaintiffs have the goods on St. Louis, right?  Ummm...

It’s unclear in the complaints how the plaintiffs determined the alcohol content was less than stated. [Attorney for the plaintiffs Josh] Boxer said the complaints are based on information from former workers at some of the company’s 13 U.S. breweries.

“On information and belief this is a corporate policy of AB to intentionally short the alcohol content,” Boxer said in a phone interview. “We believe this is a corporate policy that comes from AB InBev and trickles down.” 

This seems totally preposterous.  The upside to such a venture is a very minimal cost saving, the downside could be brand-jeopardizing.  Furthermore, a lab can determine who's right in a snap.  That the plaintiffs haven't done this seriously undermines their credibility.  But here's what it really sounds like to me: high-gravity brewing.  That's when a brewery makes a high-gravity wort and later adds water to bring the alcohol content to a particular level.  It's common at big breweries (though I haven't toured the A-B plant in St Louis yet--I hope to!--and don't know whether they use the technique).  I have been wrong so many times I shouldn't make statements like this, but: I'd put a lot of money on Anheuser-Busch to win this in a laugher.

________________
Update.  With a hat tip to Stan, let me direct your attention to Alcohol Beverage Testing News, an independent lab run by Gary Spedding--a former director of laboratories at Siebel--who's been doing those labs I wondered about.  Because of A-B's famously rigorous standards, Spedding has used Bud as his control beer.  He writes:

Also for calibrating our alcohol instruments Bud goes in after calibration to see hopefully 5.00% abv. pretty much on the nose. Not so recently. Now as low as 4.94% after slipping from 4.98% earlier in the year.

and

The Bloomberg article talks of other acquired brand changes for ABInBev and we have also noticed this with other classic beers in the giants stable. The article may have hit the nail or the King fair and square on the head. They relied on sensory perceptions of patrons but analytical parameters can confirm their suspicions. I think, from our early findings that it already has. 

I love how I my hubris was almost instantly exposed, but I love even more how it shows the value of blogging, even in the benighted era of Twitter dominion.  Thanks, Gary!

Big Beer, Monastic Beer, Irreverent Beer

Beer news of the world:

1.  How big is too big?
If the Department of Justice has its say, this is:

For more than a decade, the world’s biggest brewers have been swallowing competitor after competitor as they grapple with slowing growth in many markets. Now, the Obama administration wants to cut them off.

The Justice Department on Thursday sued to block Anheuser-Busch InBev’s $20.1 billion deal to buy Grupo Modelo, the Mexican maker of Corona beer, saying that the merger would cement Anheuser-Busch InBev’s control of the market and enable it to continue to raise beer prices. Grupo Modelo is the third-biggest beer company in the United States.

 I'm with the DOJ.  It's not just the size of the beer companies themselves--you have to consider the influence they would wield over hop and malt suppliers, distributors, and retailers.  Half the US market is enough InBud.  Let Modelo go.


2.  Engelszell Stift gets its button.
We were alerted a year ago to the news that an Austrian Trappist monastery had applied for official designation as a Trappist brewery.   I checked back a few times to see if the International Trappist Association had approved, but it's apparently a slooooow process.  (Monks have never been known as speedy deciders.)  I'm not sure when the approval happened--I must have missed the ITA's tweet--but they're in.  Update your records--there are now eight certified Trappist breweries.


3.  Revelations does not mention beer.
This cracked me up: yesterday Double Mountain released a new beer called White Rider of Conquest.  The description:

Revelations, Chap. 6:1: And I saw when Coughlin opened one of the beers, and I heard, as it were the noise of thunder, one of the four beasts saying, Come and see. 6:2: And I saw, and behold a white horse: and he that sat on him had a beer; and a crown was given unto him: and he went forth conquering, with his Ale. 8.7% ABV, 29BU

The actual text is sadly less interesting.  Coughlin, incidentally, is Matt, a DM brewer.  I believe the text, however, was amended by devilish Matt Swihart.

Beer News and Where to Get It

At the risk of speeding the obsolescence of my blog, I thought I'd mention a site you should be visiting daily: BeerPulse.  It was founded by Adam Nason as Beer News in 2008 and spent its first years as a feed for press releases.  In the past few months or so, Adam has really stepped up the content.  It still has press releases (useful, actually), but Adam scours Facebook, Twitter, and the news for anything beer related.  He regularly has the latest business news, interesting pieces about collaborations or projects, and even deep-background pieces like this (catnip for me):

German winter barley and rapeseed yields should be about 10 percent higher than last year, based on harvest results, farm lobby Deutscher Bauernverband said.  

In the past couple days, BeerPulse alerted me to these stories:

• Mexican Craft Beer Scene Booming.
• A story on the first nonprofit pub--here in Oregon (natch)
• Craft beer may be booming, but consolidation is, too: so far this year, there have been 45 acquisitions.
• Anchor's growing, a second brewery is "inevitable."  (Most interesting fact: it only produced 104,000 barrels last year.  I thought it was much bigger.

If it's not on your short list, put it there.

____________

In other news, the Brewers Association released half-yearly numbers, and I am no longer sanguine about the rate of new brewery openings. 

The U.S. now boasts 2,126 breweries—an increase of 350 additional breweries since June 2011. The BA also tracks breweries in planning as an indicator of potential new entrants into the craft category, and lists 1,252 breweries in planning today compared to 725 a year ago. Additionally, the count of craft brewers was at 2,075 as of June 30, 2012 showing that 97 percent of U.S. brewers are craft brewers.

They include this graph, and the near-vertical line on the right-hand side looks a whole lot like the beginnings of a bubble.  (For an unsettling comparison, have a look here.)

It may warrant a bit more blogging once I digest the numbers a bit.

The Beer Goddess Reports

I will confess that part of the reason I took the week off was because I was doing some work with a nonprofit over the weekend. While I was gone, Lisa Morrison ("the Beer Goddess ^(TM)") reported both the name of former Deschutes brewmaster Larry Sidor's new brewery (Crux Fermentation Project) as well as this bigger scoop:

Change is in the wind for Full Sail’s Portland-based brewmaster John Harris. Harris says on Monday, he told his Full Sail bosses, Irene Firmat and Jamie Emmerson — along with the other employee-owners of Full Sail — that he was leaving the brewing company to pursue his dream of opening his own brewpub in Portland. Harris says he will work at Full Sail through April.

Harris says he has raised “about half” of the money he feels he needs to set sail with his dream, already has found brewing equipment and is now looking for a space.

Harris is, of course, the brewer who started at McMenamins in their earliest years, was the founding brewmaster at Deschutes (Mirror Pond, Black Butte, Jubel), and then spent fifteen plus years at Full Sail.

Wow.

News and Events

First, the big news, which Ezra finally broke: Ben Love and Van Havig are going to partner up to form Gigantic Brewing--a rather restrained, understated name for a Havig endeavor. In the music world, when members of a band get together to form a new band, it's known as a "supergroup." Ben and Van are two of the most admired and liked brewers in the city, so this must be a superbrewery. (Fun game: which rock stars are Ben and Van like? I'll go with Jerry Garcia and David Lowery.)

Next, there's a whole lotta events going on about which you should be apprised:

Block 15 La Ferme de la Ville Provision Release
Tonight! -- 5pm
The Beermongers, SE 12th and Division

When I visited the brewery with Patrick last fall, Nick Arzner pulled out a few bottles from his specialty stash. His saison, an evocation of the classic aged farmhouse ales of decades past, absolutely blew me away. I've been waiting anxiously for this year's version. Nick's also brought up kegs of the sublime 2010 Demon's Farm (Cheers to Belgian Beers winner), 2010 Hopnosis barleywine, Alpha IPA, and Wandelpad Belgian blond.

_____

Oakshire Night
Tonight! -- 5pm
Bottles, 5015 NE Fremont

What is this, an invasion from the lower Willamette Valley? Arzner's at Beermongers, and at the same time across town, brewer Matt Van Wyk will be at Bottles with eight of his beers, including some rarities-- Rose Mountain Gruit, Bruine Von Brugge, and Hibernator Doppelbock. It's more good beer than a person knows what to do with.

_____

Deschutes Street Fare
Thursday, August 18, 5-9pm
Portland Pub, 210 NW 11th

This is a fundraiser for Morrison Child and Family Services that may well turn out to be one of the city's best events. Deschutes closes down Davis Street next to the pub and invites in bands and food carts--where, of course, the beer is matched to the cuisine. It's a lot of fun and totally Portland.

_____

Lompoc 15th Anniversary Party
Saturday, August 20th, 11am
New Old Lompoc, 1616 NW 23rd Ave

Inconceivably, the Lompoc is 15. They will be throwing a big bash at the original location--which, apparently, is destined for the backhoe. (The faithful, obviously, can decamp to its other locations.) In celebration, the brewery is digging into the archives and pulling out fifteen very special beers.

_____

Coalition One Year Anniversary Party
Saturday, August 20th, noon
Coalition Brewing, 2724 SE Ankeny

Must have been a good day to start a brewery. Coalition trails Lompoc by a few years, but the small brewery a stone's throw from my house has already become a Portland fixture. Live music, barbecue, and one of my favorite beers in the world--maple porter. Perfecto.

_____

Beer Blogger's Conference
August 19-20

This is of no real interest to anyone who's not a blogger, but I thought I'd mention it anyway. You may see a pack of awkward beer geeks roaming in packs--that would be us. Wave and smile.

Breaking News: Blogger Moves ... Plus Some Other Stuff

I knew Stan Hieronymus was moving from New Mexico to St. Louis. I didn't realize it was MSM newsworthy, though. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch disagrees and welcomes Stan and his wife Daria with this nice article.

Speaking of writer/bloggers, Jack Curtin noted at the beginning of the month that he was listed a woeful 33rd on the flawed Wikio beer blog rankings. Worse, he fell twelve points in the past month. This is inexcusable, for Jack's a great writer and a really good blogger--he posts at least daily (except when he's fishing in Idaho). The logarithms are against him, though, and I hope other beer bloggers do their part to link to link back to Liquid Diet and get him up the rankings, where he belongs.

Also:

• When I was passing through Hood River, I happened upon Double Mountain's Matt Swihart and his brand-spanking new purchase: a 1953 Chevrolet Panel Truck (like this one) which will be the new DM truck, outfitted with taps and looking groovy.
• Pabst is moving to LA--though it hardly matters, since Pabst brews no beer.
• Craft Brewers Alliance saw sales--but not profits--jump 15% in the first quarter of the year.
• European beer bloggers will be conferencing this weekend in London. American beer bloggers will be meeting in August, here in Portland.
• Since this newsy post is blogger-heavy, I should acknowledge the obvious: Doc Wort has vanished. More surprisingly, he's done so without a peep.
  

That's all I got.

Can We Just Quit Calling MillerCoors a Beer Company?

When you have effectively exited the beer business, these kinds of ideas seem brilliant:

CHICAGO—MillerCoors LLC plans to launch a lemonade-flavored version of low-calorie beer MGD 64, the latest effort by a big U.S. brewer to rejuvenate slumping sales....

The company expects the brew to attract new consumers to the beer category, and to capitalize "on the growing consumer interest in flavored beers," Andy England, chief marketing officer for Chicago-based MillerCoors, said in a memo to employees Friday.... MillerCoors also will unveil a new marketing campaign for the main version of MGD 64 later this year as part of an effort to strengthen the brand, Mr. England said in Friday's memo. [bold added.]

A couple of thoughts:

1. A warning sign that you may no longer be a brewery is when you begin to conceptualize your market as the "beer category."
2. Once you remove the beer from your beer and replace it with lemonade, do you actually believe the customers you're attracting are being drawn to beer?
3. If your business has become peddling beers flavored with lime and lemonade, does your brand have anything to do with beer anymore?

The article, which comes from the Wall Street Journal, ends on a luxuriously ironic point--one clearly lost to doomed MillerCoors:

MillerCoors's beer shipments to distributors, a measure of sales volume, fell 3.4% last year.... The announcement of MGD 64 Lemonade comes at a time of declining sales volumes for mass-market brews in the U.S. The industry has been hurt by stubbornly high unemployment and rising competition from wine, distilled spirits and small-batch "craft" beers.

At the moment people are turning to full-flavor beer and away from gimmicky swill, MillerCoors has a lightbulb moment: more gimmicky swill!

Sad News: Van Havig Leaves Rock Bottom

John Foyston has the news:

One of Oregon's most innovative brewers, Van Havig, is suddenly at liberty today after leaving Rock Bottom Restaurant and Brewery, a national chain of brewpubs, after nearly 16 years with the company. "I just don't fit with the company," he said today, "I've been asked to leave."

John's story is worth a read, so consider this effectively a referral to his nice reportage. But I'd just like to add my regrets. Oregon is blessed with an embarrassing richness of good brewers. Van is that, but beyond brewing, he's one of the real characters in this region, a guy who injects joy and wit (dry, Beckett-like wit) into everything he does. I have no doubt he'll land on his feet, but it's a sad statement about a company going through corporate re-shuffling that they would decide a guy like Van doesn't "fit." Guess who just ended up on Beervana's shit list?

Hang in there, Van--

Score One for Jim Koch

This just in:

Boulder, CO • January 3, 2011-The board of directors of the Brewers Association (BA), the trade association representing the majority of U.S. brewing companies, has voted to change the BA's designation of "small" in its definition of a "craft brewer." The Association's board of directors also has revised its bylaws to reflect the change.

The NBA has the "Larry Bird exception," and I hope they'll call this change the Jim Koch exception. Boston Beer, Koch's company, recently passed the two-million barrel mark, causing the inevitable discomfort among the small-brewery advocacy group. It's the right decision, for a lot of reasons, not the least of them this one:

The industry's largest craft brewer, The Boston Beer Company, is poised to become the first craft brewer to surpass 2 million barrels of traditional beer within the next few years. Loss of The Boston Beer Company's production in craft brewing industry statistics would inaccurately reflect on the craft brewing industry's market share. [Itals mine.]

Still, it only forestalls a major re-thinking of the definition of "craft beer." The Brewers Association booted Craft Brewers Alliance (aka Widhook), which only brews the beer BA would otherwise consider "craft." As the years roll by, breweries will get big and complex and if BA wants to remain relevant as the collator of craft brewing statistics, it will have to deal with this complexity.

Still, props to Brewers Association for revising its arbitrary criteria.