It’s not beer’s fault, it’s me

Beyond the beer glass -- traffic on a New Orleans street

The headline — Costco Is Coming for Craft Beer — about store brand beers reads like click bait. The story itself, on the other hand, serves interested readers well. But . . . I can’t remember how many version of this I have read. It is a function of knowing that Mission Street Pale brewed by Firestone Walker and sold by Trader Joe’s won two gold medals and a silver at the Great American Beer Festival before purposefully hazy IPA existed.

Every few years there is a story about which Trader Joe’s beers are brewed at what breweries. (I’m pretty certain that shortly 2011, Firestone Walker quit brewing the Mission Street Pale and Trader Joe’s found another brewery to make the beer.)

And almost 10 years ago there was the “Is Walmart Looking to Dethrone Budweiser as King of Beers?” story.

That too many posts sound so familiar to me is one reason you won’t find a list of links here today, or on the Mondays that follow. Another is that a regular Monday posting does not sync the rhythm of life around here (or wherever we are). Random might work better.

But it’s not 2003

Brewers United for Freedom poster for event June 26 in NYC

I did not receive the press release about how Sam Calagione (Dogfish Head), Bill Covaleski (Victory Brewing), and Greg Koch (Stone Brewing, now retired) are “bringing their legendary friendship, their boundary-busting brews, and a rock-and-roll spirit that can’t be tamed” to Manhattan later this month. But you may read the basics and the astonishing verbiage here.

I’m sorry, but although these are founders of breweries that make really good beer who have spent decades in the trenches (and, full disclosure, Sam Calagione wrote the foreword for “Brewing Local”) I won’t be booking a flight to be there June 26.

For one thing, that poster is, well, I have no words — particularly because I know the lay of the nearby land and Beer Authority is a short walk from Madame Tussaunds wax museum. From the get go, breweries such as Victory and Dogfish Head, have emphasized “authenticity.” Granted, I’ve been in a Madame Tussaunds once in my life, decades ago, but nothing about it felt real to me.

What does these days? This, for instance.

Beer’s past, future, Grodziskie, farmhouse yeast, the Gaia concept . . .

Marcin Ostajewski of Browar Grodziskie in line for breakfast at the 2024 Craft Brewers Conference in Las Vegas.

That’s Marcin Ostajewski of Browar Grodziskie in line for breakfast at the 2024 Craft Brewers Conference in Las Vegas. In a little more than two weeks he and brewery president Krzysztof Panek will be talking about all things Grodziskie in Utrech, the Netherlands, during Carnivale Brettanomyces. The “yearly wild beer festival dedicated to deviant fermentation of all kind” is, in fact, about more than oddball fermentation.

The headline here hints of how diverse the talks will be, so I will leave you to explore the entire list on your own. These sorts of gatherings and exchanges of ideas are how beer culture avoids turning into the monoculture American beer seemed to be headed for in the 1970s.

One example, Aiden Jönsson’s examination of beer and the Gaia hypothesis: “Take a sip of beer and you will notice aromas and flavors that remind you of the world around you. Some of these play crucial roles in our physical environment by interacting with the atmosphere, oceans, and geology. We will explore some of the ways common compounds in beer reflect natural processes in our environment and climate, and how life could have evolved to use those compounds to regulate the environment to its benefit in Gaian ways.”

Bet you wish you could be there.

6.02.25 beer links: True Beer vs Big Craft & very bad news

The news Sunday that Martyn Cornell has died was a gut punch. Friends filled Bluesky with small stories, including links to many of his blog posts. Rereading one of my favorites — “In which I give more badly written beer history a good kicking” — I couldn’t help but smile for a moment. It was a sentence after sentence takedown, and should have made any writer happy to have Martyn not review their work.

JUST WONDERING

ABI’s Years of Craft Strategy Whiplash Are Catching Up With It details Anheuser-Busch InBev’s failures over the years to sell enough beer that customers would rather drink than the ones their closer-to-home breweries back. In the story, Dave Infante mentions “big craft” (which he puts in quotation marks). If I read it correctly, I think he means “craft-like” (my quotation marks) beer from breweries that do not meet the Brewers Association’s definition of craft brewery.

Which I think is different than the big craft Alan McLeod has been referring to for at least a dozen years (scroll to page 7). McLeod might correct me, but he has been referring to breweries such at Sierra Nevada (1.1 million barrels produced in 2024), and perhaps even ones such as Fiddlehead Brewing (108,143 barrels).

This raises several questions. ABI big craft, after all, is made up of breweries that used to qualify to be members of the Brewers Association. How is Goose Island pre-2011 different than Goose Island today? Do they have more in common with ABI or Fiddlehead? More important to me, personally, as a brewery visitor, does Sierra Nevada have more in common with the ABI group as a group or with Liquid Mechanics Brewing (1,369 barrels) in Lafayette, Colorado, where I had a terrific Helles Friday afternoon?

Forty years ago, Vince Cottone, a beer columnist for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer who contributed to numerous publications, first used the phrases craft-brewing scene, craft brewery and craft brewing in the manner they are thought of today.

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5.26.25 beer links: Calibrating, ticking on TikTok & murk

It is Memorial Day in America, so get outdoors, drink a beer if you want. If you missed these posts last week, read them Tuesday.

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QUOTE OF THE WEEK

“Me, if I have a SNPA (Sierra Nevada Pale Ale) in front of me, I am really only concerned with the taste of the thing in front of me, not whether it has hit the bullseye on the shifting dart board of style.”

                    — Alan McLeod

From Your Beery News Notes For The Start Of The Last Month Of Spring. Context follows.

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We’re as Confused as You Are.

and

Is Sierra Nevada Pale Ale an ESB?

Alan McLeod’s quote comes from his reaction to these stories about Sierra Nevada Pale Ale winning gold medal in the ESB category at the World Beer Cup. I cited it at Bluesky, adding, “Let these be the last of many words.” So even though I have thoughts, I will honor what I wrote. Instead, consider this photo from a conference in Ecuador in 2022. Here, Gordon Strong, president emeritus of the Beer Judge Certification Program, answers the question, “Why beer styles?” Be sure to notice what guidelines are not.

Why Have Beer Styles -- a presentation by Gordon Strong

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