Beer Thoughts

The gift of beer itself may seem obvious, but it is fraught with pitfalls. Especially if the gift giver is not as knowledgeable, experienced, or perhaps as jaded as the intended recipient. Craft beer lovers tend to have promiscuous taste buds. They crave new and exciting, and occasionally hard to find beers. How can anyone hope to keep track of another person's sense of new. You may have an advantage if you live a few states away and distribution agreements give you unique access to a hot new Nano, or even a New Belgium scale microbrewery. That's a great in if you have a little guidance. A beer lover that's a bit of a hoarder may enjoy an annual gift of Brooklyn Black Chocolate Stout, or Sierra Nevada Bigfoot for their cellar. However, the safest bet for a beer gift is t he somewhat corny Beer of the Month Club. Has the beer lover on your list has neglected to drop any good hints for gift ideas? Are you looking to surprise? Here are some ideas to consider....

Let's face it .  Beer is a commodity.  Throughout the history of brewing , the content and character of beer has been influenced by the costs of ingredients, brewing processes, and direct or indirect costs associated with batch inconsistencies.  Even though 21st century propserity allows the resurection of higher cost/higher flavor brewing.  It's silly to think that the embrace of brewing tradition will always ignore the tradition of embracing sciencentific advance to improve brewing economics or beer character.   In fact, scientific advance is clearly needed to improve the economics of organic hop growing .  There's a growing market for organic beers as craft drinkers like their occasionally unique character, and this type of farming's sustainability.  However, Hops are a challenging crop.  Just ask any north eastern hop grower.  If you can find one.  Growers have long suffered from blight, and weather which has encouraged farm...

It's impossible for traditional crafts to exist in a vacuum, isolated from the innovations and discoveries of the modern world.  Brewing is no different.  It's a craft rejuvenated by home brewers returning to the traditions of the past, and entrepreneurs who followed their passions into a battle against Goliaths of commerce and misconception often romanticizing the individual artisan while celebrating the greatness created when the brewer's art embraced industry in Bohemia, Britain, and Germany.  The pace of scientific discovery and technological change has only hastened.  Today scientific discovery and technological improvements are influencing beer through its ingredients, brewing processes, and marketing. Technological changes to beer ingredients are both the most frightening, and the most exciting sources of science driven innovation available to the modern brewer. While a good beer may be transcend the qualities of its components, it's difficult to artfully ...

This week, Nature published a paper entitled " A physical, genetic and functional sequence assembly of the barley genome ".    Promotional Press releases were quick to link this achievement to potential crop improvements .  The London Press wasted no time in connecting the dots to beer .  "Improvements" are changes, and the craft beer community greets all changes with levels of skepticism that are, at a minimum, healthy.  Alan McLeod's Good Beer Blog saw the discovery as the beginning of sceince's impact on brewing, and was quick to expand the question of the relative benefit of genetically engineered barley crops into a broad challenge to science as a whole: Can Science Really Improve Beer As Known Now?   Science has contributed significantly to brewing throughout the history of the art, and provided the tools that allow us to best appreciate our ancestors beer styles and brewing techniques. Firstly, Science must be defined as an actor if it...

Beneath a fairy tale skyline of spires, domes, and towers, a modern city of industry and commerce sits upon cobblestone streets and ancient bridges.   Prague is a maddening riddle.   Brilliant minds like Franz Kafka and Bohumil Hrabal relied upon surrealistic visions to make sense of it.   Despite the city’s complex and frankly tumultuous history, there’s a millennia of brilliantly preserved architecture, miraculously spared the devastation of fire, war, and tasteless modernizations that have continuously reshaped many European cities. Located between the noble hop fields of Žatec (Saaz in German) and Moravia’s cascading barley fields, Prague is within easy reach of the ingredients to needed to sustain a vital brewing scene.    However, the city was not spared the 20 th century’s assault on local beer culture.   In the early 1990s, international breweries monopolized the city’s tap handles.   Brewpubs were mostly forgotten, a novelty for tourists, a...

I clicked into a link to catch up activities at local brewery Jack's Abby , and was surprised by one of the ads on the site.  A Westfalia centrifuge?  Did clever ad AI figure out that I was a little interested in quoting a pilot unit for work?  Nope.  This ad was sold directly to the site. It just seemed wildly out of place on a Craft Beer and Brewery website There's a lot of respect for tradition among craft brewers, and frankly not many large scale breweries where this type of equipment makes financial sense.  The captains of industry the defined so many styles in the Victorian era never would have imagined the insanity that is a continuous flow disc stack centrifuge.  I can barely comprehend it despite having worked with them for six years.  GEA Westfalia's video on Separation technology is fairly instructive, even if the music makes me giggle. That's not to say centrifuges have no place in brewing.  They are nice pieces of equipment, and ...