Your Thursday Beery Beer Notes For When He Hardly Makes Any Real Effort

It’s been a week. Four out of seven days on the road, driving in a car for about 21 hours. No time for blogging much. The upside? Rhubarb ginger ice cream at the fabulous Slickers of Bloomfield in Prince Edward County, our nearby wine growing region of Ontario. Downside? Highway 401 from Halton to Kitchener upon which I had to drive coming home, telling my son to be quiet as we had 50 km of 130 km/hr traffic packed tight with what felt like a foot or two between cars. Evil. Fortunately, the ice cream came second. On the way there Saturday, as noted on Le Twit, we also ate at the highly recommended Northern Dumpling Kitchen which blew our minds. That image there? That’s the Chinese broccoli with garlic. Very simple. Nutty nutty good. And lamb and leek dumplings. Imagine! The restaurant looks like this. It’s located here along with 25 other small food spots. Go. But don’t go when I go. KDK only has about 30 seats. Wednesday’s dash to Syracuse, NY for a work meeting with some of my favourite business clients was a treat. And I hit the Watertown Hannaford grocery for, you know, Dinosaur BBQ sauces and oyster crackers. Things denied to Canadians.

Enought about me! In the world of beer, Jessica Mason guided us to consideration of a new thing in the UK’s pub trade – the label “fresh ale” as seen in the wild or at least in pubs asking if the new beer category will help lager drinkers migrate to cask or if it actually cannibalises real cask ale for good:

A new beer category, named ‘fresh ale’ has been created by Otter Brewery to bridge the gap between craft beer, cask ale and lager. ‘Fresh ales’ are beers that are initially brewed as cask ales, but instead of being filled into casks they are gently carbonated before being put into kegs. The Devonshire-based brewery’s first beer being launched as a ‘fresh ale’ is named Amber Fresh and paves the way for “a new form of ale for pubs, designed to be fresh in name and fresh by nature”.

We are told that the beer will stay in great condition for longer, remaining fresh to drink for weeks, rather than days. Which is interesting.

Pellicle posted an interesting tale, the story of state of American Porter which paired last evening with a Godspeed Kemuri Porter at this very minute as my fingers do their dance. And what’s that state look like?

In 2023, only a few legacy porter brands remain. Fitz is still ubiquitous here in Ohio and the Midwest in general. Deschutes Black Butte from Oregon is still around, though it’s getting harder to find here on the opposite side of the country. Bell’s Porter can occasionally be spotted, though who knows for how much longer. Anchor’s and Sierra Nevada’s porters have not been seen in the wild in years and are presumed extinct in these parts. Sales figures from Bart Watson, Chief Economist at the Brewers Association (the trade body representing small, independent breweries in the United States) show porter’s share of total craft has dropped by 60% by sales volume since 2007, the earliest year for which numbers are available.

Fitz is good code. And, not really relatedly, Katie Mather is back with another edition of her newsletter, The Glup, this time sharing thoughts on the role of music in one’s thoughts:

Where the void (a term used in BPD circles and treatment to reference the absence of or inability to define emotion—the void can last moments or days depending on the episode) can be a black hole taking in and vaporising thoughts of comfort, in these playlists I can find ways to play with its distortion of reality. Daydreaming has always been my preferred state of being, and learning to find and clarify these powerful places in my mind has been empowering. Liminal spaces have always fascinated and terrified me…

I am a big time daydreamer, me. Katie also advises that she has upcoming articles in Pellicle as well as Hwaet! and Glug and Ferment, too – and that her book(!) will by published by Wine52 later this year.

Gary continues to speed though the archives and provides us a take of mid-century drink, Tenpenny ale:

In comments to my recent post “Walker’s S.B. Sherry Bright Ale”, Ron Pattinson pointed out that the name Tenpenny, shown proximate to the Sherry Bright name in adverts I considered, denoted a separate beer. He indicated it was 5.4% and quite dark in 1951. Edd Mather added that this Tenpenny was a brand originally made by George Shaw & Co. Ltd. of Leigh, Lancashire, a brewery bought up by Peter Walker’s parent company, Walker-Cain.

I shared that this brought back memories of a dear departed but distinct Ten Penny ale. Your uncle’s beer… well, maybe your great-uncle’s.

As noted in B+B’s Saturday round up, Mark Johnson has shared some thoughts about his relationship with alcohol under the grim but honest title of “Chasing Oblivion“:

It would have potentially been helpful for me to find something else as a lifestyle or as a hobby. As it was, my genuine love for tasting beer and visiting different types of pubs pulled me away from oblivion. As much as social media aspects of beer and self-proclaimed bloggers are routinely mocked, that energy made me approach beer differently . It made me focus on the positives without the need for pushing it that extra few drinks. I’ve made no secret that writing about my struggles with depression, my suicidal thoughts and some of my issues from the past have probably kept me alive. Before I had no such outlet. It has never truly occurred to me that my previous release was alcohol. It wasn’t every day. It wasn’t inhibiting my day-to-day life. But I was using it as both therapy and medication. Seeing alcohol purely through the beer lens helped me recalibrate.

An interesting story in the continuing saga of craft buy outs and closings this week sees a CNY veteran brewery buying out one of the top micros of days gone by. As my co-author Don Cazentre* reports from the scene:

Utica’s F.X. Matt (Saranac) Brewing, makers of the Saranac line of craft beers and the traditional lager Utica Club, has agreed to purchase Flying Dog Brewing, a large craft brewer based in Maryland. News of the deal was broken by Brewbound, a site that covers the national brewing industry. The deal announced today will likely make combined Matt / Flying Dog one of the ten largest craft brewers in the country, according to statistics compiled by the national Brewers Association, based in Colorado.

Mike Stein added that this may be a relief to those transitioning to the new leadership given the seemingly poor record of the former.

There is nothing good to report on the Bud Light market these days. Transphobic customers walk, good union jobs perhaps at risk and a welcome inclusive marketing plan gutlessly abandoned as fast as possible:

Bud Light is offering generous rebates for Memorial Day that in some cases amount to free beer as Anheuser-Busch continues its scramble to recover from the Dylan Mulvaney controversy… The rebate offer comes as Bud Light sales have worsened for the sixth consecutive week since April 1, when trans influencer Mulvaney shared an Instagram post of a custom Bud Light can the Anheuser-Busch brand sent her to celebrate “365 Days of Girlhood.” Rebates have already been offered on Bud Light by individual vendors looking to rid themselves of the embattled company.

Question: if your kid was in a local sports organization which, by Jeff’s reckoning, had only 80% committment to being the sort of place that “welcomes all, that straight up supports human dignity with action“… would you stick around? Not me. I am not picking on Jeff at all by saying this as I think he has the numbers shockingly right when it comes to craft beer. He also added another bit of math this week, a verbal description of the graphical representation of data this time which, again, is quite correct:

Nevertheless, the situation arises, at least partly, from a fault line that has always bedeviled the organization. From the very start, the Brewers Association saw itself as not just a trade association, but the central champion of a new culture of beer and brewing. This put them in the position of speaking for an industry far larger than their member breweries, and necessarily created compromises when the interests of their members deviated from the industry’s in general.

So, that entity with 80% top drawer actors is also just one side of a fault line – “fault” being an excellent double entendre – with people who are not produces on the other side of the line. Fans, hangers on, most beer writers, consumers, the public I suppose. People, as Jeff correctly says, who are not makers but are, according to the BA, still seemingly supposed to line up in lock step with them under the banner of the unified champion. Which we already consider to be 20% dodgy to one degree or another. Gotta tell you: if this is that rec league situation me and my kids would out of there in a spray of gravel as fast as I can get the car our of the ball field’s parking lot. In particular, I share the opinions expressed by a reader identifying as “gingersnap” in the comments at Jeff’s post on the underlying situation and how the mechanism actually works:

The problem with the language is that privilege is not a superpower to be used as an instrument of leverage. Privilege, in this case for white brewery owners, is a result of systemic oppression of non-white folks, it is not something that was earned. To talk about leveraging this power of privilege is part of the “white savior trope” and suggests that those without privilege should be grateful for whatever efforts are made on their behalf. That kind of thinking is hurtful, elitist and white-centric.

That cause is pretty all purpose for the effect of bigotries, if history is any sort of teacher. And I have also long thought and even said that this sort of thing (along with all the BA’s upward pricing encouragement and flaky faddish brewing technique promotions) is exactly why North America needs its own verion of CAMRA which sits apart from and even faces the BA. A consumers’ group for and led by beer drinkers, that’s whats needed. Why? Because it would appear that currently, the people in charge of the construct, the culture, the dialogue are not the consumers who actually control the cash with their spending decisions.

Such a plan would be reasonable, given the BA was formed twenty years ago in part to address some late micro era rogue weirdness while protecting the trade and perhaps cushioning the still prominent actor dabbling in some outrageous sexist marketing… as John Noel has confirmed. The yikky pattern continued, for example, two years before #MeToo in the sexist choices of certain prominent trade members at the CBC in 2015 as well as the 2018 Zwanze Day mess again involving a prominent man in beer. Still, all is presented as A-OK in the big craft picture. And still all associated with what gingersnap above called the “white savior trope” or what I have called “Great White Male Hero Theory Problem” in craft beer.

And while the Brewers Association is this keystone in the craft culture it is yet not, as Jeff says, able to respond in any effective manner to these issues. It “wants to be politically neutral in terms of state politics” and, when facing toxisity, found it “impossible to relocate this event.” That all being the case… is your kid still playing in this sports league? Why are you showing up to sit in the stands knowing or even experiencing the bigotries within ear shot form the stands or the benches? Why support the BA? Because it’s all we have?* And why do you think it’s all we have? Probably because we have forgotten what we should have.

Oh… and one last thing. Jeff also wrote that:

…the BA itself bringing smart people who think like these folks (and there are a lot of them!) into BA’s upper management would be a good first step in transforming the way the organization thinks.

Sadly, and as I noted two weeks ago, the BA does have at least one such excellent leader already in their organization and has for a number of years: Dr. J Jackson-Beckham, the Brewers Association’s Equity & Inclusion Partner. Seems there’s been plenty of stumbling at that first step. More on this from Stan, Robin and Stephanie Grant.

That’s it! That’s enough from me. I’m having a glass of wine this evening and relaxing. Let the others now scan the beer news for you! As per, you can check out the many ways to connect including these voices on Mastodon:

Anyone else? And, yes, we also check the blogs, podcasts and newsletters to stay on top of things – including more weekly recommendations from Boak and Bailey every Saturday and Stan at his spot on those Mondays! Get your emailed issue of Episodes of my Pub Life by David Jesudason on many Fridays. Once a month, Will Hawkes issues his London Beer City newsletter and do sign up for Katie’s now more occassional but always wonderful newsletter, The Gulp, too. Ben’s Beer and Badword is back! And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. There is new reading at The Glass. Any more? Yes! Check to see the highly recommended Beer Ladies Podcast. And the long standing Beervana podcast . There is the Boys Are From Märzen podcast too and check out the travel vids at Ontario’s own A Quick Beer. There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too. All About Beer has introduced a podcast. There’s also The Perfect Pour. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And the Craft Beer Channel on Youtube soon celebrating a decade of vids. And remember BeerEdge, too, and The Moon Under Water… if you have $10 a month for this sort of thing… I don’t. Pete Brown’s costs a fifth of that. There was also the Beer O’clock Show but that was gone after a ten year run but returned renewed and here is the link!***

*I just note that he and I are on the team writing the hitory of New York State brewing for SUNY Publishing. He knows everything one needs to know about the CNY brewing business and more.
**Update: well after my press time, Courtney Iseman went so far in her newsletter to carefully suggest and also plainly express a few things about the power dynamic that the BA imposes on craft beer culture when she wrote: “There are good things about CBC, and there are good people at the Brewers Association. I’m not comfortable telling people they should never go to CBC again. I’m not optimistic the BA will really take the note and meaningfully improve CBC, but I’m hopeful, so while I have no plans to attend again for the foreseeable future, I think it’s too soon to make any certain, sweeping statements… I think it’s important for us to remember that there are many people in the industry who don’t have as much of a choice. Their jobs might essentially require them to regularly attend CBC.” Which is absolutely nuts when you think about it for three seconds: get in line or get another job. Thanks BA.
***And finally the list of the departed newsletters and podcasts or those in purgatory. Looks like both Brewsround and Cabin Fever died in 2020, . We appreciate that the OCBG Podcast is on a very quiet schedule these days – but it’s been there now and again. The Fizz died in 2019. Plus Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch seems done and the AfroBeerChick podcast is gone as well! The Fingers Podcast packed it in citing, umm, lack of success… as might have been anticipated, honestly. Did they suffer a common fate? Who knows?

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