Category: Beer Industry

my occasional rants and raves about what is going on in the industry.

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Diversify

In what could be filed under belated, the Brewers Association has hired Dr. J. Nikol Jackson-Beckham to be the first diversity ambassador.

Per the press release, “Jackson-Beckham, an assistant professor of communication studies at Randolph College in Lynchburg, Virginia, will work closely with the BA’s Diversity Committee, which was established during last year’s Craft Brewers Conference in Washington, D.C.”

Jackson-Beckham has written a book about this very topic: Untapped: Exploring the Cultural Dimensions of Craft Beer which should help her as she travels the country talking to member breweries and brewers guilds. Another plus is that she is an avid homebrewer as well.

I will certainly be on the look-out for her work and I hope to be in attendance when she next speaks in Los Angeles. Hopefully this will herald a change that will be beneficial long term.

You can read more HERE.

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Brewchive

Being a regular library user, I would welcome the chance to check out both the physical and on-line collections regarding craft beer.

The California State University, San Marcos (CSUSM) has been collecting “beer paraphernalia tracing the history of craft breweries in San Diego.”

Dubbed the Brewchive, it “is a new project from the university’s library. According to CSUSM Special Collections and History Librarian Judith Downie, the collection dates back to the late 1980s, about the time that the craft brewing scene first started to gain steam in the San Diego area. Around 30 years ago there were maybe five or six craft breweries in the county; today there are 156.”

Now that L.A. has a nice amount of breweries and a little bit of history behind it, the CalState system might want to look into expanding north and to Central Coast and Bay Area too. It will be much easier to find documents, coasters, recipes and the like

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End of the Celebrator


Another casualty of the phasing out of print has hit the beer world. The Celebrator Beer News is now moving online only. The paper nudged over the 30-year line but that was the end of the run.

A combination of advertising deficits and the shift to reading from tablets and phones did the brewspaper in. This development has probably pushed publisher Tom Dalldorf to do what perhaps should have been done years ago, positioning the website as the main portal and adding more timely stories while keeping brewery information more up to date. A mobile app has been floated as a possibility as well, which I am all for as well.

Back in the “olden” days. The Celebrator was my window to the beer scene of the nation. Each of the correspondents had a distinct writing style and it was fun to read the stories of beer dinners and festivals in other states and around the world. It was also a bit maddening that it was always behind a couple of months. Now that the focus is on the site, I will be certainly reading it more frequently for beer updates. And I think it will free up the correspondents to write more pro-active pieces.

As I said in a Facebook comment, I hope this is just the closing of a chapter and not the book.

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Bell X


Craft beer is coming to the City of Bell in the form of Border X Brewing.
Partners David Favela, Alberto J. Lemus, and Diego Torres-Palma started in 2014 down in San Diego and are venturing north much like fellow SD brewery Modern Times did.
Border X has a focus on traditional brewing craft brewing methods highligted with Mexican ingredients.

Beers with jamaica (hibiscus flower), lime and cucumber with sour beer or dried prune and chile powder.

The space in Bell (on Gage Avenue) was formerly used by the Golden Bakery and will now house a 7,000 square foot brewery.

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Can They Make it Hazier?

Back to science! Yeast, that fermenting wonder that can give a beer the aroma of banana without a banana in the vicinity of the brew kettle might just be able to replicate hop flavors. (Keep in mind, not all, just some)

You can read about the breakthrough work HERE but the upshot is that a genetically modified yeast could produce flavors that mimic Beers with hops. The question is how long would it take to, say, have a Citra Yeast or a Three-C’s yeast. Probably quite some time.

This research even has the imprimatur of brewing professor, Charlie Bamforth from the University of California, Davis as co-author on the paper.

Whether brewers will replace the dry hopping late in the brewing process with a GMO yeast with DNA from mint and basil plant is a whole different experiment.

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Hazy, Contemporary, Australian and Gose


The Brewers Association (BA) released their updated Beer Style Guidelines for 2018. After review “Hundreds of revisions, edits, format changes and additions were made to this year’s guidelines, including updates to existing beer styles and the creation of new categories…” That last bit is the big news because three of those categories are a nod to the power of haze.

~Juicy or Hazy Ale Styles: The addition of this trio of styles include representation of what may be referred to as New England IPAs or West Coast Hazy IPAs. The styles will be identified in the guidelines and Brewers Association competitions as “Juicy or Hazy Pale Ale,” “Juicy or Hazy IPA” and “Juicy or Hazy Double IPA.”

~Contemporary American-Style Pilsener: The addition of this new category addresses marketplace expansion and provides space for sessionable craft brew lager beers with higher hop aroma than found in pre-prohibition style beers.

~Classic Australian-Style Pale Ale and Australian-Style Pale Ale: This split from one to two Australian-Style Pale Ale categories reflects tremendous diversity in the Australian craft beer market and authoritative input from the technical committee of the Independent Brewers Association. Classic Australian-Style Pale Ale can run slightly darker and typically exhibits relatively lower hop aroma. The Australian-Style Pale Ale category provides ample room for a range of somewhat paler, more hop aroma- and flavor-forward beers being produced today by hundreds of breweries in Australia.

Gose and Contemporary Gose: Predominantly technical tweaks were made to create more differentiation between these two categories.

I don’t have a great reason to not include new categories but it seems to be getting a bit nitpicky now. I would prefer that the categories were split differently. IPA, for example, could have sub-categories like regular, hazy, British, Australian, Session that had winners and the top of those could make up the best three. Split DIPA out with Imperial and do the same. This way you give shout outs to more beers while keeping the category count manageable. All I know now is that the yearly awards show just got even longer.

The 2018 Beer Style Guidelines are available for download HERE.

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Home Brew Con


There won’t be any droids or cosplayers or Whovians at the Portland Convention Center in June. But it will be plenty nerdy because the Rose City will be hosting Homebrew Con, also known as the National Homebrewers Conference.

The three-day event will celebrate its 40th anniversary this year this year. There will be “interactive sessions, workshops and demonstrations that cater to beer enthusiasts and amateur brewers of every level.” Plus there will be a keynote address from Charlie Papazian.

The event finishes with the National Homebrew Competition, the world’s largest beer competition.

The “Con” runs fromThursday, June 28 to Saturday, June 30. Check out the conference schedule HERE.

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Kind of a Big 2017 Deal

Yesterday, The Brewers Association released the figures of the Top 50 U.S. Craft Brewing Companies. (They also released the Top 50 overall, but I ain’t interested in that).

Let’s tease some of the numbers out from a California perspective:
~ Biggest in CA is Sierra Nevada at # 3
~ There are four “collectives” at 5, 6, 9 and 14
~ There are 9 California breweries on the list + Firestone Walker as part of the Duvel Moortgat Group. Most are in the 35-50 range.

Overall, there are no “Wow!” surprises on the list. Those breweries that contract for others are high as expected. If you are looking for anomalies, New Glarus at # 16 might be considered bigger than thought before. What does “pop” is when you look at the list on a map…

Those blanks spots really stand out. The population of those “blanks” is part of the reason that say neither Dakota has a pin in it. State laws play a bigger part though in populous states such as Texas and Florida.

Kudos to the association for releasing so much information.

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3Grand

I know it was announced last week but it seems only fitting to use 3/3 to talk about the Independent Seal breaking the 3K point in usage.

That number represents half of today’s 6,000 craft breweries in just 8 months of use. So the next phase of action is #SeektheSeal.

There was a mini-kerfuffle with some slamming the design or the reason behind the seal but that has thankfully receded from view as the seal becomes more commonplace in shop windows and on packaging.

It’s still an efficient and easy way to differentiate #independent from the ever encroaching industrial brewers.

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Best Facilities Award – Winter 2018

I have waxed rhapsodic about the well curated taproom of Dry River Brewing before. It has a steampunk meets old-timely barn vibe that makes the small space seem lived in and welcoming. But what is even better is that the bathroom continues that decorating theme.

Most beer facilities are utilitarian. Keeping them clean is the basic goal which means spartan decor that is easy to clean and stock with supplies. But DRB has a bathroom that is stocked with little tchotchkes and art as well as a bowl of “something” that I assume is what makes it smell so good. There are local L.A. growlers on a high shelf. All of it takes your mind off the business at hand.

Why post about it? Well, I believe that breweries and bars can do a lot better with their bathrooms. Make them fun and architecturally inventive. Add artwork of bears with beer. Beer people are forced by nature to spend plenty of time in the loo, so make it fun!