Your Thursday Beery News Notes For Mid-July

The heat had broken for a bit, we here just having a bit of summer for now but more storms and heat start to roll in today. There. Your weather update. The garden is doing great. Thanks for asking. Peas just about done. Third planting of spinach underway. Elsewhere, things are unhappy in good beer land. Gütbierelandia. People are cranky about this that, and the other. One pub in Cornwall, England even put up an electric fence to protect the bar, as excellently illustrated above. We all know why it’s like this and it almost pains me to mention it. Gütbierelandia ist traurig unt launisch. But that is all I do in this here weekly round-up, noting the week’s zeitgeist once again through sifting clues scattered on these information highways. That’s what I do. And what did I find this week?  Unhappy people.

First, Stan gave me a bit of a zing in his post about the future of beer writing:

Blogging allows writers to distribute words that would not otherwise be published. It is a hard way to earn money. On Thursday, Alan McLeod repeated his pitch for more beer blogging, more new voices. (Suggesting how complicated this might be, his weekly news wrapup included only one link to a personal beer blog, and that one has a corporate sponsor).

Of course, I went to go after him immediately on social media but then, as the blood red rage abated four seconds later… I realized he was right. Look at this list of beer blogs and notice how few are beer blogs.* And he was perhaps more right than even he realized, as I went on a’ commenting that too much quality beer writing started chasing a few trade writing bucks leaving only impecunity, edited-in samey banality, semi-heroic but years late taking of obvious stances, culminating with a drought of good personal writing related to the experience of beer. So different from investigative reporting.** I don’t know if there is any hope of a revival.  I don’t share his (or Boak’s/Bailey’s) hopes for e-publishing given that’s been around for yoinks.  Folk just need to write more and forget about the money. There isn’t a future in it. Never has been. Be like Kurt say. Click on the thumbnail.

Tales of Covid abound. How to have a gentlemanly BBQ is explored in what might actually be a parody. And the New York Post reports that teens are dressing up as mask-wearing grandmas to try to score alcohol. This from UK sugar makers Ragas may serve as a good benchmark from here on out:

Lockdown also resulted in the closure of on-licensed premise businesses such as pubs, bars, event venues and restaurants, with these accounting for 62% of alcohol consumption in the UK in 2019. As a result, demand for casks and kegs beer fell sharply. Larger breweries that have canning and bottling lines were able to ride this out. Regional, micro and craft producers that rely purely on keg and cask sales, however, did not have this option, and instead were forced to shutdown indefinitely.

Covid tweet of the week: “The waiter served tapas in a hazmat suit…”

And Jeff in Beervana considered how the pandemic is going four months in and makes this interesting observation about the Times Before Now:

The arrival of seltzer and FMB was actually a warning sign, signaling exhaustion with the rather baroque shape beer had taken. People wanted an uncomplicated buzz. All that excitement and energy buoyed a product that was, in volume terms, not actually growing. If a year-long pandemic saps consumers’ interest in going out for ten-dollar pints, if they seek refuge instead in simpler, cheaper beer, what becomes of those halcyon 2010s? Will beer still be fun?

Now, consider this and tell me Jeff is wrong:

Kombrewcha CEO Garrett Bredenkamp is looking to the hard seltzer segment for inspiration as the hard kombucha brand backed by Anheuser-Busch’s ZX Ventures looks to compete in the fast-growing segment.

That’s about seven layers of dumb right there, folks. And it’s all not to mention the less than passive aggressive attitude stuff from breweries. And as Norm noted, what all started with one brewery, Trillium, putting out bad beer in bloated cans what go boom in the night… or the hand… ended up with much comment ensuing when they declared it more of a feature than a bug:

We don’t want anyone to have to clean up a mess and advise that you store these cans in a refrigerator immediately. Refrigerated (38ºF) batch samples that our QA team retains have not burst and upon further testing, we’ve seen no yeast growth from the time of packaging.

Speaking of which almost, elsewhere people (again) are unhappy with BrewDog. This time about the use of the new ideas of others:

Scottish multinational brewery BrewDog has been slammed for allegedly “stealing” marketing ideas… A Reddit user wrote: “Brewdog commissions work or sets fake interviews to solicit marketing ideas, steals them without paying or crediting the contributors. Owner doesn’t understand when people take issue…”

The story does not exactly have solid sources but, you know, who does these days?** I will leave you to your own conclusions.

And this sounds like a reason for a full on boycott, I’d say. #HTKT

In the story of the week and perhaps echoing Stan above in asking the musical question “where have all the good times gone…” Lew Bryson went all universal theory of what is bad, evil and ungood about craft beer today and in doing so slammed (excellently, I might add) the thirty years legacy of the core pre-craft and then craft ethos of having a hate on for the “other”:

That’s what happens when there’s no hate in your heart. You can work on the things that are based in love: improvement, care, transparency and truth, good flavor, authenticity. Craft beer has that, in plenty, but damn, we keep fighting about it. If we hadn’t made such a big deal about what craft brewing wasn’t…we wouldn’t have had these big fights when craft brewers decided that they were going to blend, and brew with corn (and donuts!), and put beer in cans, and make light lagers.

Oddly, this reminded me of the efforts of eight or more years ago to have craft take on 20% of the market by 2020… which is where we are now.  If we are honest, any movement towards that goal was only going to achieve it by adding bulk non-craft quantity like Yeungling and also allowing Sam Adams to stick around well after the stale date. What it might have in common is that head scratch as to why US craft finds the has needed to be so… so… so macro. Ah, the path not taken…

Which leads us right into the next tale,  on the question of the governance of the Brewers Association itself and in particular people calling for the resignation of head honcho, Bob Pease. As I mentioned last week, I found the mind boggling level of remuneration a bit… mind boggly. Now, care of a podcast interview with Andy Crouch, things have shifted to the lack of diversity and complacency with members’ bigotries in the BA itself. What exactly does the actual small hardscrabble brewer get for his or her membership dues anyway? Suits. But your own suits!!! Then even Andy got heat for asking the questions. Or is it “caught heat”? Yowza. Yet… the idea that a Euro-sort interviewing a Euro-sort will not lead to greater understanding of the lot faced by non-Euro-sorts is compelling.

Best non-covid tweet.

Finally, there was one break in all the pent up unhappiness. Some good news in Boak and Bailey’s review*** of Lars’ new book on “being Lars and finding kviek was there just waiting to be found”:

Lars’ subject matter was, until recently, the kind of stuff of which footnotes are made. Here, commercial brewing of the type that dominates globally is the footnote, or at least the over-familiar postscript to a much longer story that is rarely told.

I’d buy it based just on that one review but… bought it already.

Remember – keep writing and tell us what you see. Be brave. Do it! Make Kurt proud. And check in with Boak and Bailey most Saturdays, plus more at the OCBG Podcast on Tuesdays and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well.  And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletter, too. Plus the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. There’s the AfroBeerChick  podcast as well! And have a look at Brewsround‘s take on the beer writing of the week. Not to mention Cabin Fever. And Ben has finally gone all 2009 and joined in with his own podcast, Beer and Badword.

*What’s a blog? Start with Scripting News.
**…not so much…
***Sweet reference to They Might Be Giants, too.