Category: Beer in the news

Great articles that you should read.

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A Kirin Grows in Brooklyn

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Kirin buys into Brooklyn Brewery reads the headline. File this under, not super shocking acquisition news. Brooklyn Brewery has been expanding East for a while now. Plus they are looking forward to construction bills for their proposed Navy Yard complex hitting their mailboxes. A new stream of money was probably needed.

And give them credit for being smart about it. Get people amped about a new project and about brewing more in-house and then bring the news of the investment later. Then counter any aggrieved by keeping the investment below the Brewers Association threshold. Plus they went with a corporation but not the evil empire seeing that Lagunitas caught less hell by partnering with Heineken. Craft beer buyers seem to save their precious vitriol for SABInBevMinusMiller and no less about the big players in the foreign scene.

It is pretty clear that the Ottaway’s in charge are paying attention to how the beer fan community perceives announcements as opposed to other breweries who are tone-deaf in both their “breaking news” and responses.

Of course timing helped too. Brooklyn news was soon eclipsed by the layoffs at Stone and now most people, especially on the West Coast will probably never really get the information and thus still think of them as fully independent.

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DIY is Back

When our craft beer was still in the growing phase, you could find places where you could brew beer, using the equipment and expertise of someone else. They soon faded away though as home brewing shops and clubs blossomed around L.A. But now a new company is testing out the waters.
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Zymurgy Brew Works will provide the professional brewing equipment as well as the ingredients and recipes. Then you leave the clean up to them. Once done, you slap your personal labels on the bottles and voila, your own beer. They are promising that brewmasters will lead some sessions so that you can make a copy of beers that you normally buy.

They opened up last weekend and apparently also have a tap room / bar on site too.

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The Longshot’s are In

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One of the annual rites of GABF is the announcement of the Sam Adams Longshot winners. This year the chosen (2) homebrewers and (1) Sam Adams employee who will see their beers brewed on a super larger scale are:

David Cousino of Avon, OH, Saison – “Cousino began homebrewing 25 years ago in college and after a long break started brewing in earnest four years ago. He is a pharmacist and now the attention to detail in his profession shows in his homebrews. Koch says Cousino’s Saison has a soft malt character, delicate floral notes and a hint of pepper.”

Duane Wilson of Horseheads, NY, American Wild Ale – “Wilson and his co-brewer Mike Edwards have been brewing together for eight years and strive to improve on the styles they create. Wilson’s mixed-fermentation American wild ale is fruit forward with apricots and kumquats and finishes with a dry tartness.”

Graham Johnson of Marblehead, MA, Imperial Stout – “Johnson is the Samuel Adams employee home brew winner. The company opened up the competition to its employees because they are so passionate about beer and many of them brew at home. Johnson’s Imperial Stout uses whole coffee beans and chocolate and has decadent flavors of cocoa, espresso and hints of brandy and raisin. The taste finishes with touch of sweetness.”

It will be quite the task for a Wild Ale to be added to a mixed pack.

Now the waiting begins, the six-pack won’t arrive until spring of next year.

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Up, Up and Away

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Now this is a cool idea. Mikkeller teamed up with SAS Airlines in taking a beer tasting to the sky. Probably not going to happen when I fly Southwest to NYC but in a traveling world where getting one decent craft beer on a flight is becoming less hard to accomplish, it is high time to keep pushing.

What would really be cool would be to try and test the beer before taking off. Take your notes and grade the beer. Then find your seat onboard and try again at higher altitude and speed and see if the beers taste the same.

I have read many articles on how taste is affected when you are airborne and it would be a fascinating to see if it applied to beer, and if so, how much. Would an IPA be less hoppy and more malty? Would a saison’s subtle notes be lost? Would one beer “win” a taste testing at the terminal but “lose” when you are scrunched into a coach seat?

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Put a Sticker on It!

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Even if craft beer fans fanned out and patrolled grocery stores and beer shops to steer people away from industrial corporate beer (in a nice way, of course), we wouldn’t be able to prevent all beer purchases.

But Mike Van Hall and his Committee on Opprobriations has devised a solution. Stickers. According to the Washington Post, Van Hall who is an artist as well as graphic designer has created stickers that range from “This label is offensive” to “This Beer is Not Craft” or the snarkiest one “Do Not Trust this Product” and then places them on beers that deserve them.

You can follow his adhesive exploits @opprobriations, to see who is getting fact checked.

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GABF Awards – Re-Cap

Another edition of the Great American Beer Festival is in the books. Here is a curated awards round-up with a focus on LA area based breweries.
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Imagine you had 7,227 beers in front of you. Picture that in your mind.  That is the beast that Charlie Papazian has wrought.  He pioneered this festival through 35 years and it was heartening to see Colorado Governor Hickenlooper honor him for his service and all of the many fist bumps that must make his right hand a mess on the Sunday after the awards ceremony.
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96 categories were contested this year with (7) new categories added for 2016.  Pumpkin /Squash Beer, Finnish Sahti, Swedish Gotlandsricke, Pale and Dark Breslau Schoeps, German Leichtbier and Specialty Saison.
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Let’s get into the Los Angeles winners shall we?  ABove is Bob Kunz and the Highland Park team which won GOLD with Good Green for American-Style Strong Pale Ale.  El Segundo, known for hops, won for their lager instead, Casa Azul.  The Beachwood Blendery was not in chaos but their friendly Lambic won silver.  Also winning silver was Devon Randall and Arts District Brewing in the Smoke Beer category for Cowboy Curtis.  Also, very impressively Huntington Beach’s Riip Beer Co. took silver in the highly competitive and largest group, IPA with their Super Cali IPA.  An amazing 312 beers were in that category!  Moving down to bronze we find Kinetic Brewing winning that shade in the Chocolate Beer category for 4th Gear,  newbie Iron Triangle started snared the Imperial Stout bronze for Jawbone, reliable winners Smog City got bronze for Sabre-Toothed Squirrel as well.

For reasons unknown to me, the Pabst plant of industrial beer won a pair of medals as well as another Large Brewing Company plaque.  So there is that LA connection too.
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Big Winners of the morning presentation were (4) medal winners Figueroa Mountain and  Überbrew from Billings, Montana.

Going all statistical, the best results were posted by Wyoming, Hawaii and Virginia.  California picked up 56 medals all told.  IPA’d dominated the amount of submission but coffee beer was a newcomer to the big categories so kudos to California that took silver and bronze in that caffeinated category.

(All photos screenshotted from the Brewers Network livestream of the event.)  Sorry that I again entered in late.  Damn time difference.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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HPB in Chinatown

If you have seen the brewery tucked into the Hermosillo that outputs the fantastic beer from Bob Kunz at Highland Park Brewery, both beer lovers and claustrophobics will be heartened to hear that the time drawing closer for when the brewery will break ground on their 2nd location in Chinatown.
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A location that will be very close to the Gold Line on Spring Street in the iconic LA neighborhood will house the new brewing facility, bar + and outdoor patio.

Once the ground is broken, it will probably be around 9 months before the new location opens making it a prime candidate for most anticipated of 2017.

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What She Said

“I’ll have that too.” apparently isn’t as cool a phrase to utter in craft beer.

That is the conclusion in the book Invisible Influence by Jonah Berger.
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According to an experiment by consumer psychologists Dan Ariely and Jonathan Levav, in which they offered brewery visitors the choice to try a sample of one of four beers: an IPA, a lager, an amber ale, or a wheat beer.

Some groups wrote down their order in private while other groups ordered aloud. The findings? Those who spoke their order were less satisfied with their own choice than those who did not speak their aloud. What was even more interesting was that the “vocal” group was dissatisfied because they had NOT wanted to order the same thing as everyone else.

Now some profess not to care what people think. But we don’t live in a bubble. If I see or hear a few people ordering a beer, I look to see what is going on and possibly order it myself. At times though, I do choose the contrary path (usually to swerve around IPA’s).

Speaking of the most popular style, I have to think that the runaway popularity had to create problems for any scientific study. Amber is not exactly a popular style, and neither is wheat unless it is hopped up. That leaves pilsner as the only “real” competition and that has to skew the results in my mind.

The next time you are in a brewery, sit near where the beers are ordered and see if an informal, unscientific polling proves or disproves this point.

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Tinyfield

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I read about Tinyfield Roofhop Farm in the latest Beer Advocate magazine (which also talked about the nascent efforts of Angel City to grow hops in the heat of DTLA)

This NYC rooftop farm grows “microgreens, salad greens, edible flowers, and hops in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn.”

The farm began growing in 2015. More may come because the Farm Brewery Bill of the State of New York requires craft brewers to brew beer made primarily from NY grown farm products. By 2018, they need to use at least 60% state hops and other ingredients with the number growing to 90% by 2024. So supply will need to meet demand.

Now if California had a similar bill, maybe we can have places like Tinyfield which have 100 Cascade Hop plants up on the roof.

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On the Rise

Draft Magazine did another one of their numerical issues. The twist this time around is that it was the 25 Breweries on the Rise.
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Two L.A. breweries made the list: Monkish Brewing and Phantom Carriage. Below are the blurbs on each one.

Monkish Brewing Co. – Torrance, California
“This summer, the popular four-year-old brewery ditched its distributor and moved to primarily brewery-only releases. To offset the risk, co-owner Henry Nguyen started brewing what he initially swore he wouldn’t: IPAs. Those have crept up in RateBeer scores alongside upper-90s-rated Monkish saisons Haiku de Saison and Rara Avis. “We didn’t want to do what everyone else was doing,” Nguyen says. “But we’d been thinking: ‘What would a Monkish IPA look like?’” The answer: cloudy, creamy, low in bitterness. “When we first made these, brewers here were telling me to my face these beers were ugly and not really IPAs,” he says. “Now after a few releases, they’ve seen the lines [of customers], and they’re asking me which yeasts we’re using.”

Phantom Carriage Brewery & Blendery – Carson, California
“Phantom Carriage’s taproom is worth a visit, even if just to experience the decor: Based just outside of LA in Carson, California, the brewery has a horror-show vibe (“Spooky but not kitschy,” says brewery co-founder Martin Svab) with scythes and other rusty farm implements stabbed into the walls; candles glowing inside fake human and animal skulls; and the “Phantom Theater,” playing a rotating lineup of scary movies. “I’ve always been into these old scary movies that unfortunately, this day and age, are being forgotten,” Svab says. “They’re just so beautiful. So the entire brewery’s just an homage to the old horror cinema.” That goes right down to its name: “The Phantom Carriage” was a Swedish film produced in 1921, notable for its early use of special effects and for certain scenes so iconic that Stanley Kubrick remade them in his own horror film, “The Shining.” (The famous axe-through-the-door scene? “The Phantom Carriage” did it first.) Come for the fear, stay for the beer: Inside the dark confines of the brewery’s taproom, nearly 400 oak barrels are filled with the creations of head blender Simon Ford, who was well-known in the LA homebrew scene for his downright fantastic sour beers long before joining the Phantom Carriage team. His skills are just as potent in the big leagues: Muis, a Belgian blonde ale melding honeydew melon, guava, spearmint and onion skin aromas with musty lemon and white pepper flavors, is one of the better 100% Brettanomyces fermented beers we’ve ever tasted, and beers like the Simcoe-hopped Annalee grisette and Broadacres Berliner weisse exhibit complex, slightly wild flavors that, like the environs in which they’re served, are scary-good.”