Tag: firkin opinion

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California Craft Beer Summit – Final Thoughts

The theme for this year’s Summit was “unsteady”. My flight from BUR to SMF didn’t even toss peanuts to us due to the bumps. With crazy bank shenanigans and big competition from Bourbon and RTD’s, it seemed that everyone was a bit on edge. The future just seems wobbly.

While on the floor I saw little activity around a lot of the equipment booths and others seemed a bit heavy on banking and finance institutions.

Their was also some placement stategery going on. In the past, regions of California would pour their beers from one spot and you would see the hop folks clustered and the equipment booths together. This time around there was no clustering at all. You could have a malt seller next to a sanitation booth and one or both may have poured beers. And there was no signs as to what was pouring. So, as an LA person, I could not easily scope out the beers of the Bay Area or San Diego.

My guess being that in an effort to get all attendees to all booths, they mixed it all up to draw people in to give booths more exposure and chances to interact with people. It seemed, to me, the changes were exhibitor impact based and away from ease for attendees. Because if you were in the market for fruit puree, you were gonna walk.

The festival also was the same length as I remember but Monday was a political day of action with a Welcome event so you didn’t really go to the Convention Center until Tuesday and Wednesday was a half-day. That gave the Summit both breathing room and condensed the activity.

The education was still top notch. Lots of great information to be had. The events were excellent outside of the Summit and, as usual, the ship was run well and on-time. Imagine trying to pour Pliny to a huge crowd. Hard to do.

So, what did I take from the event? Loads of info that I will read about, a small understanding of the breweries in Sacramento that I could visit and a feeling that though there may be turbulence ahead, there may also be smooth pockets of air as well.

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The Firkin for February 2023

Am I the only one who feels that the big thing seems slow to arrive. Is the big craft beer trend caught in an airport somewhere?

No new IPA variant is on the horizon. A slight uptick, to my mind, in Triple IPAs but we seem stuck in Cold (IPL or IPA) weather when it comes to the dominant style.

Pastry stouts seem to be reaching an expiration date as you can reliably find then on shelves. We get the yearly pilsner spiel but them and lagers have a low ceiling.

Maybe some adjunct will become the de rigeur ingredient for brewers, I had an excellent blue corn pilsner recently and I could see any number of heirloom agricultural products touching a beer fans nerve.

But as we saunter into the last month of Q1, it seems no change in direction for the good ship craft.

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The 1st Firkin of 2023

Speak for 11 seconds otherwise Skynet will know that you are inebriated. Confused? Read THIS, then come back.

Now, my first inclination is to think that the creators of this speech recognition software are tooting their horn a little bit too much. I am thinking of early lie detector tests where foolproof claims were made that just could not be backed up. Primarily because body reactions may not be about what you are being asked but what someone is afraid will be learned.

A person could have just gotten a yes to a date proposal, for example, and be really giddy. Maybe as giddy as I get when tipsy. Or they could have been told no and start mumbling. Would that trigger as an alcohol caused speech pattern.

And going back to my happier mood, how does the AI know my baseline? And what if I am particularly happy because my birthday month starts tomorrow? How does that factor in?

As with the lie detector, this inebriation sensor might be good as part of an overall set of proofs, not as a sole one.

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The Final Firkin of 2022

Before I dive into my quick thoughts for the end of the month, I would like to give a quick R.I.P. to Mumford Brewing in DTLA as they close after 7+ years. I visited when they first opened and thought the beers were only OK, but then a subsequent visit showed a fast growth. It taught me that some places need time to gel. From there on out Mumford was a solid winner especially with their hazy IPAs. Buy those few cans out in the wild still if you can.

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Bourbon Pursuit and Breaking Bourbon have noticed that bourbon and spirits tend to run the opposite of craft beer. Big brands dominate. Making it hard for craft distilleries to get air where in beer bigger seems to default to worse or boooring.

As we head to a new year, both good beer and good bourbon will need to learn from the other. Heritage breweries will need to figure out how ubiquitous brands like Jim Beam or Maker’s Mark can remain popular even though they are much larger than little distilleries.

Craft distilleries need to ponder how chasing new trends works for small breweries and how they harness that energy to stay on the tips of tongues and front of minds.

And what I think might be more important is how do bourbon and beer combine past the simple fill a bourbon barrel with an imperial stout.

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The Firkin for November 2022

Both Stone Brewing and Oskar Blues have gone back to their back catalog of beers and re-released beers that had not been on tap or cans for a while.  And while the nostalgic part of me thinks that is a fun idea, I do wonder if the constant stream of new releases from breweries over the last few years will make this idea a non-starter when the hip breweries get to the same age as Stone and Oskar.

Because, you have to build a following for a beer.  You can’t really do that if there were two new beers the previous week and another on the next week.  It is the same long-term issue I have with pre-season seasonals that are off shelves before the season is over.  You disconnect the beer from the time of the year that you are celebrating.

This is not an Old Man Yelling at Clouds post, if a brewery chooses a new, new, even more new path, that is absolutely fine. But that path means that you are bound to lose some nostalgia as well as a chance to have a flagship beer. You will create a new mindset in the customer who will open the door expecting a new beer on tap or in 4-packs.

Maybe the pendulum will swing back to core beers.

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The Firkin for October 2022

Lego nights at breweries. Yes, it is a thing. And if you allow me to hop up onto my well-worn soapbox, why?

Let me start by acknowledging that I understand that you need to drive business to you. And if it is a logo emblazoned cornhole game or stein holding contests than go for it.

I also get that trivia nights and musical guests create a sense of community that is much better than people dully staring at phones. We probably need a hit of people after the stay at home times.

But maybe we can add a night in or thirty minutes for the old school beer fan who wants to talk about the actual beer with friends old and new instead of yelling over a pinball machine and crashing jenga blocks.

It can all be just too loud and too busy. Maybe it is the introvert in me that needs the thinking space but when I have a beer reverie interrupted by a barking dog going from table to table, I drink my beer a little faster and head home.

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The Firkin for September 2022

I have been known to take a sarcastic potshot at seltzers on this blog while simultaneously extolling creativity at every opportunity.

Another dichotomy in this universe is that I cringe whenever I see a slushie machine at a brewery while also partaking of bourbon / ginger beer slushies at a distillery.

How can I do both?

It is pretty simple to me. Seltzers are not beer. They are fruited alcohol. And as much as I enjoy bourbon or gin, you are probably not going to see me having a peach or cinnamon bourbon. But I will try a historical beer based on a colonial recipe or a chili pepper IPA because those are attempts at a new flavor profile, not just an quick and easy add blue raspberry to an existing product.

Same with a slushie. Bourbon and ice is a cocktail. Beer in a slurpee cup yanks beer out of its home like putting a Blazer fan in purple and gold.

Go ahead and sell them if you can but I will treat them as the profit used to make the good stuff.

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The Firkin for August 2022

This is a tough question because I have changed methodology depending not just on the quality of the beers but on many other factors.

In general, I sip a little of each beer to see first but if beer A is light and really good and the rest of the tasters are darker, I may polish off the light one to not wreck my palate. I also sometimes try to find what exactly a flawed beer has wrong with it and thus finish it, before I go back to the best beer of the bunch.

If all the beers are of equal quality, and one is not a stylistic outsider, then all will be drunk at the same pace. But if all beers selected are not good, and it has happened. I may drink the best one and drink enough of the others to obscure my dislike when I bring the glasses back.

It is not an easy question to answer because of the Choose Your Own Adventure decision tree involved.

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The Firkin for May 2022

Though I always carry my trusty iPad around with me, there are more times where I prefer not to go online.

The whisky makers at Glengoyne had a similar thought, I guess, because they have hatched The Offline Edition of their whiskey that comes in a box with a mini Faraday cage inside that can block the signals of up to four phones.

That got me to thinking that brewery taprooms could have offline nights or a section of the space dedicated to those who want to enjoy their beer and not enjoy their beer whilst also glancing at their phones every minute.

You could then focus that nervous phone energy into talking to the beertender about the beers on tap, or simply savoring your beer.

I know that this culture likes to extol being connected but maybe we can discard this bit of multi-tasking and put the phones away.

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The Firkin for April 2022

Every year April heralds Easter and then 4/20. And boy, am I not on the CBD or THC or TLC bandwagon. All the Snoop Dog memes, the warmed over munchies craving jokes make April 20th a day to avoid social media.

To me cannabis and beer is like stuffing cheese into the crust of the pizza, overkill. What actual flavor does cannabis add? I do not know. I have read about chocolate with marijuana, candy with marijuana, water with marijuana and yes, even pizza with marijuana and I have not seen what it adds to the experience.

This is no anti-weed screed, just a reminder that if you are adding an ingredient to a beer, that ingredient better add something to the overall drinking experience. I had a saison that included lemon and vanilla recently. The creaminess imparted by the vanilla played extremely well with the citric acidity, bringing out the best aspects of both while also taking the edges off of both.

And that is what any CBD/THC addition should do in a perfect world.