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I have given shout outs to San Diego Beer News and Brandon Hernandez a few times on this blog and have used his brewery travel guides to help when visiting a beer inundated part of the country and now he has a new guide up appropriate for hop season, Walla Walla.
One of my beer bucket list items, climate change permitting, is to visit that major hop growing area during harvest, and I will book mark the Walla Walla via San Diego page for sure.
Hop producer, Segal Ranch has announced some expanded acreage for the poorly named Anchovy Hop (read Anchovy for more info) The main flavors are watermelon and cedar.
This falls in the middle of their new hops which includes Zumo which is out in at least one beer from Russian River and maybe more since it too is getting more land as well as a third varietal with the exotic name of Tangier due to a lead aroma of tangerine peel.
If you are not acquainted yet with the art and beer education of Em Sauter well there is another outlet where you can see her beer work, Forbes.com. You can check it out HERE.
Maybe I am just not a ‘Zine type of guy. Keep that in mind for this review, mileage may vary.
The first ever Final Gravity is a nice amount of pieces, ten all told. And the variety of writers and angles on craft beer is commendable too. But aside from Lauren Mack’s writing on re-creating Seipp Brewing, nothing really dazzled. And worse, there were two pieces, one about an artist and one about a touring musician that were barely tangential to beer.
The piece written by brewery owner Betty Bollas read more like a to-do calendar than a diary. There was just no spark to it.
I am hoping that issue 2 will have more interesting writing or I should amend to writing that maybe goes a little deeper and finds more of a rhythm to it.
Now this a grand combo. The strange and fascinating lite beer and historian Maureen Ogle. First, click HERE for the podcast.
This podcast episode is a great primer for the timeline of “lite” beer and how it came to be such a juggernaut from humble “diet” beginnings.
Check out their other podcasts as well.
I was excited to hear from professor and author Jennifer Jordan on the Beer Me podcast (part of the All About Beer family of podcasts). She is in the process of researching her new book Before Craft Beer: Lost Landscape of Forgotten Hops.
The book will chronicle the Wisconsin hop growing industry way back in the 1800’s. A great topic and I am a sucker for stories about lost times in history. The podcast is a little slow and doesn’t dig into too much but does give a starting point for when the book comes out.
We have all seen the sub-par beer names. The lazy ones, the sexist ones, the puns for days ones. Maybe we need to have AI on the case. It is passing certification tests left and right, so why not…
Here is one you can try…
If you are here, you are into beer culture. Sorry to break it to you. And if you want more beer stories then there is a new, not read on a screen outlet coming – Final Gravity.
Order up Issue # 1 which will arrive in time for summer beer drinking season.
I am going to request that you read this POST first from the Beervana blog.
Now that you have sailed back and are pondering the state of craft beer in 2023, I would like to add my three cents about this, which is that there will always be three levels of customer, be it for phones or beer or anything else being sold.
You have the people that are firmly not into it, the vast tentative middle and then the diehards. Reductive, yes, but you see it in politics (it too is something sold) most glaringly and scarily. A battle for the undecideds.
That middle block though will NEVER be completely won over. They float with the tides of trends. Be it generational trends away from their parents drink of choice or to what is the next IT beverage. And you can invariably tell when that trend has jumped the shark when your SABInBev or MillerCoors starts heavily marketing a new product and ALSO when they discontinue a product.
Using the invest / divest model, you see a heavy influx into RTDs with Boston Beer making canned malt (not whiskey) cocktails for Jim Beam while Platform Beer and other breweries bought by SABInBev are being dismantled.
The bigger companies chase after trends that the tentative consumers are following. They will almost always be late to get on board the boat.
So what should craft beer do? They can chase as well by making hard seltzers or hard slushies or pastry stouts. They can try to look younger than their years to be cool to the undecideds. Because of the ability to quickly pivot to their customers needs they can be faster than the big conglomerates that have to focus group the heck out of a new idea.
But that is still chasing a customer that will not, in all likelihood, become a convert to the cause. I think a brewery needs to find its identity and then provide that reliably and with high quality while tossing in surprises here and there. If you make great IPA, then be the hop zone for people.
That middle group will eventually come back after they go around the horn of other drinks.
Time for a little history, in video form…