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Union Tribune Profiles Jeff Bagby

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San Diego’s Union Tribune yesterday featured an engaging profile of award-winning Pizza Port brewer Jeff Bagby. Since I’m usually railing against coverage in the mainstream media, I want to point out that the Tribune’s columnist Peter Rowe (who frequently writes about beer) did an excellent job on the article. In addition to the profile, he also had tasting notes for some of Bagby’s beers, and — unlike the San Francisco Chronicle — listed all the GABF medals won by local breweries then finished up with a list of upcoming beer events in San Diego. Well done, and congratulations Jeff.
 

Dave Keene, from the Toronado, with Jeff Bagby, at the recent Port Brewing Beer Dinner that was held at the Cathedral Hill Hotel by beer chef Bruce Paton.

Sam’s “Extreme Brewing” Published

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Sam Calagione’s newest book, Extreme Brewing: An Enthusiast’s Guide to Brewing Craft Beer at Home, was published today. This one is more about homebrewing than his last book, Brewing Up a Business, which was all about his iconoclastic marketing style. If you know Sam, you’ve got to love this quote from Forbes. “The Italian word for chutzpah is audacia, but it might as well be ‘Sam A. Calagione.’”

And here’s a description of the book from the publisher:

Extreme Brewing is a recipe-driven resource for aspiring home brewers who are interested in recreating these specialty beers at home, but don’t have the time to learn the in-depth science and lore behind home-brewing. As such, all recipes are malt-syrup based (the simplest brewing method) with variations for partial-grain brewing. While recipes are included for classic beer styles — ales and lagers — Extreme Brewing has a unique emphasis on hybrid styles that use fruit, vegetables, herbs and spices to create unique flavor combinations. Once their brew is complete, readers can turn to section three, The Rewards of Your Labor, to receive guidance on presentation, including corking, bottle selection and labeling as well as detailed information on food pairings, including recipes for beer infused dishes and fun ideas for themed dinners that allow the reader to share their creations with family and friends.

Reeling in the Dogfish Head Beer Dinner

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Beer Chef Bruce Paton’s next beer dinner will feature Sam Calagione and the beers of Dogfish Head Brewing from Delaware. Brewmaster Sam Calagione will be there in person to discuss his beers, along with his new book, Extreme Beers. It’s another four-course dinner and well worth the $80 price of admission, and maybe we can persuade Sam to do some rapping. It will be held at the Cathedral Hill Hotel on Friday, November 10, beginning with a reception at 6:30 p.m. Call 415.674.3406 for reservations. Make your reservations soon, because the dinner is filling up fast and you don’t want to miss this one.
 

The Menu:

 

Reception: 6:30 PM

Beer Chef’s Hors D’Oeuvre
60 Minute IPA

Dinner: 7:30 PM

First Course

Poached Foie Gras with Toasted Five Spice Syrup and California Osetra Caviar

Beer: Midas Touch Golden Elixir

Second Course:

Duck Pho with Charred Ginger Broth and Parsnip Noodles

Beer: 90 Minute IPA

Third Course:

Red Cooked Angus Short Ribs with Lobster Medallions

Beer: World Wide Stout

Fourth Course:

Ginger Scented Banana Custard with Citrus Caramel Sauce

Beer: Chateau Jiahu

One of the beers that will be served at the Dogfish Head Brewing Beer Dinner.

 

11.10

Dinner with the Brewmaster: Sam Calagione of Dogfish Head Brewing Beer Dinner

Cathedral Hill Hotel, 1101 Van Ness Avenue, San Francisco, California
415.674.3406 [ website ]

Goose Island Video Profile

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BusinessPOV, a Chicago media enterprise doing online video micro-journalism, contacted me about their latest effort, a video profile of Goose Island Brewing. It includes a short interview with Brewmaster Greg Hall interspersed with footage of the brewery and Goose Island’s beers. It’s a little over five minutes and manages quite nicely to give a good flavor of what their business is all about. It’s definitely worth checking out.

Click above to watch the video profile.

Anchor Profiled As Successful Small Company

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Last week, USA Today profiled Anchor Brewery in their Inside Money section as a stellar example of a successful small company with no desire to grow larger and larger like the trap so many other successful companies fall into. The story is in conjunction with the publication of a business book on small companies, Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big by Bo Burlingham, an editor at Inc. magazine. On the same day as the Anchor profile, USA Today also has an article about Burlingham’s new book entitled To grow or not to grow? Some companies decide to stay put. Both are written, naturally, from a business perspective but are a good, positive pieces for craft beer. It’s certainly nice to see that for a change.

AP’s Beer by the Numbers

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Last week, quite a number of papers ran a short little filler item from the Associated Press that just listed the following statistics regarding the beer industry and U.S. consumption.
 

  • 1,409: The number of breweries — ranging from brewpubs to national brewers — operating in the United States.
  • 306: The number of breweries in California last year, putting the state first in the country. Mississippi was last with one.
  • $82 billion: The U.S. sales volume for beer last year. Craft beer — beer typically made in small batches by regional or local brewers — accounted for $4.3 billion.
  • 21.3 gallons: The amount of beer consumed per capita last year in the United States. New Hampshire led all states with 31.1 gallons. Nevada, North Dakota, Montana and Wisconsin rounded out the top five. Utah was last at 12.2 gallons.
  • 48: The percent of all beer sold in metal cans last year in the United States. Glass bottles followed at 42 percent and draft beer was at 10 percent.
  • 84.1: The market share held by major U.S. breweries and noncraft regional brewers. Imports have 12.4 percent and craft brewers hold 3.4 percent.

Beer Goes Wireless

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Heineken and IBM, along with a few other companies, have partnered together to test wireless tracking of beer shipments. Dubbed “The Living Beer Lab,” the scheme will allow Heineken to know the exact location of any shipment of its beer, even in the middle of the ocean, using “triangulation techniques of both satellites and cellular base stations to locate exactly where the cargo is.”

The first test is currently underway, with ten containers of Heineken in the water and in transit from both the Netherlands and Great Britain en route to the United States.

According to ZDNet UK, “Integration has been completed with IBM WebSphere service oriented architecture (SOA) to maintain a paperless trail of the beer’s journey from customs in Europe through US customers and into the distribution centre on the other side of the Atlantic. The process will eliminate the need to fill in up to 30 documents on each journey, and could vastly decrease the amount of time the beer spends in transit.”

Here’s a more thorough explanation of how it all works, complete with impenetrable business jargon from The Retail Bulletin:

IBM’s Secure Trade Lane solution will provide real-time visibility and interoperability through an advanced wireless sensor platform and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA), based on IBM’s WebSphere platform. The project’s SOA, called the Shipment Information Services, leverages the EPCglobal network and EPCIS (Electronic Product Code Information Services) standards, so rather than build and maintain a large central database with huge amounts of information, distributed data sources are linked, allowing data to be shared in real time between Heineken, Safmarine and customs authorities in the Netherlands, England and The United States.

In this project, Safmarine will ship ten containers of Heineken beer from locations in both Netherlands and England, through their Customs Authorities, to the Heineken distribution center in United States. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam will coordinate the project and provide best practices documentation to share across the European Union.

“The Beer Living Lab is setting a roadmap for the next generation e-Customs solutions. We test innovative solutions, based on IBM’s Tamper Resistant Embedded Controller (TREC) and SOA developed by IBM that could revolutionize customs,” said Dr. Yao-Hua Tan, professor of Electronic Business, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. “Companies using these solutions could benefit greatly due to less physical inspections by customs; thus these e-customs solutions greatly facilitate international trade.”

According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, more than 30 different documents are associated with one single container crossing a border, which equals roughly five billion documents annually. The findings of the project will provide a viable alternative to manufacturers, shippers, retailers and customs administrations as they look to move to a paperless trade environment. Once accepted and implemented widely, paperless trade will support initiatives such as Green Lane, which will eliminate most inspections on arrival, thus significantly speeding up ocean fright shipments and improving the profit margins for shippers.

“Because efficient collaboration is a paramount requirement to making this work, IBM built the Shipment Information Services to address interoperability. If governments around the world are serious about electronic customs and paperless trade, they need to encourage each country to adopt open standards environments to enable collaboration and data sharing throughout the trade lane,” said Stefan Reidy, Manager, Secure Trade Lane, IBM. “The Beer Living Lab project is the first step in building the Intranet of Trade, which will help to substantially improve efficiency and security in the global supply chain.”

Now if only they’d stop using those green bottles that result in Heineken being such a skunked beer most of the time.

U.K. Shows Perspective in Rejecting Increasing Beer Tax

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Patricia Hewitt, the Health Secretary for the U.K.’s Department of Health, during an interview Friday in youth newspaper First News told them that she would ask the British government to increase the tax on alcohol, and especially alcopops, as a way of combating underage binge drinking. And not just increase them, but “really increase taxes on alcohol.”

The Treasury Department quickly rejected her call for the increase, suggesting that it was her job to combat binge drinking and raising taxes on all alcohol would “punish responsible drinkers in an attempt to change the behaviour of a small minority.” Amen.

And according to the Daily Express, another “Treasury source said the idea was misguided because the main consumers of alcopops were no longer youngsters, while the move also risked driving whisky producers out of business.”

Now if only our government could find its spine to stand up to the neo-prohibitionist agenda in similar fashion. Ah, dare to dream …

N.Y. Times Reviews Ambitious Brew

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Friday’s Book Section of the New York Times reviewed two new beer books, including Marueen Ogle’s Ambitious Brew. The gave it a decent review, but perhaps more importantly it’s great to see the Times actually review books about beer. That’s certainly a sign that “the times they are a-changin’.”

New York Magazine Letter to the Editor

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A couple of weeks ago, New York Magazine did a tasting of several unrelated beers and published their findings. Stephen Beaumont wrote an essay decrying the article and I likewise threw in my two cents, adding some random complaints.

The magazine, to their credit, invited Stephen to write a letter to the editor and he graciously invited some other beer writers to also sign the letter, in the hopes of having it carry more weight. The issue for the week of October 30 has printed his letter in their Letters to the Editor section, and I’ve also reprinted it below.

Ales in Comparison

As writers and editors who specialize in beer, we’re always delighted to see our preferred beverage receive coverage in the mainstream press, even when the story doesn’t involve any of us. Really, we are. But we’re dismayed when said story fails to treat such a noble drink with the respect it deserves, as was the case in Ben Mathis-Lilley’s “Ales in Comparison” [“Strategist: Taste Testing,” October 16]. Would New York Magazine assemble a random group of “enthusiastic” art lovers to critique the latest show at the MoMA? Would it publish a review of a haphazardly selected group of wines, sherries, ports, and champagnes, dismissing one as “girlie,” another as “sissy,” and a third simply because it has “a funny name”? Again, likely not. Yet this is exactly what Mathis-Lilley does, presumably because beer’s egalitarian reputation makes it somehow okay. Please, continue publishing stories about beer. There is a wealth of choice out there, and consumers no doubt appreciate all the guidance they can find. But before you commission your next article, please take a look at the methodology involved and ask yourselves, “Would this be acceptable were the topic fine wine, theater, or the city’s latest culinary hot spot?”

—Stephen Beaumont, writer, worldofbeer.com; Julie Bradford, editor, All About Beer; Jay Brooks, writer, brookstonbeerbulletin.com; Lew Bryson, writer, lewbryson.com; Tom Dalldorf, publisher, Celebrator Beer News; John Hansell, publisher, Malt Advocate

Will it do any good? Who knows, but you do what you can, fight the good fight and hope for the best.