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Celebrate Your Hometown Glories For The Next Session

February 20, 2018 By Jay Brooks

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For our 133rd Session, our host will be Gareth, who writes about beer in Leeds, England at Barrel Aged Leeds. For his topic, he’s asking us to look just outside our door in out local community for Hometown Glories, by which Gareth “had in mind an imminent visit to the place I spent my formative years and blogging about it’s highlights and wider beer scene.”

circle-city

But he also has some possible starting points for you to consider:

  • Describing the types of bars/pubs you have in your home town, how popular are they? Has craft beer culture made much of a splash?
  • Are there any well-known breweries? Is there a particular beer or style that is synonymous with your home town
  • History of the town and how that can be reflected in its drinking culture
  • Tales of your youth, early drinking stories
  • Ruminations on what once was and what is now? Have you moved away and been pleasantly surprised or disappointed on return visits?

My visit [to my hometown] over the next week is going to hopefully inspire me, and it’s a great excuse to visit a few old haunts and new venues. If you’re less enamoured with your hometown, or even if you left and never returned, feel free to respond anyway – maybe you’re an adopted native of somewhere better. My home town is no longer my home, so if you’d like to write about the place you feel most at home in relation to beer, that would be welcomed too.

So by Friday, March 2, or thereabouts, start your trip down memory lane to your hometown, or just open the door if you still live there. Either way, to participate in the March Session, simply leave a comment at the original announcement and leave the URL to your post there, or tag him on Twitter with your post.

birdseyeviewofreadingfrompagoda
My own hometown of Reading, Pennsylvania.

Filed Under: Beers, Breweries, Related Pleasures, The Session Tagged With: Announcements, local

Next Session On The Hunt For Missing Local Beer Styles

October 20, 2017 By Jay Brooks

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For our 129th Session, our host will be Eoghan Walsh, who writes Brussels Beer City. For his topic, he’s asking “what beer style would you like to see being brewed in your local market that is not yet being brewed?” and has titled his topic Missing Local Beer Styles.

local-1

Here’s a fuller explanation:

In 2017 it might seem odd to think that there are beer styles missing from our local markets. We seem to be living in an era of almost ubiquitous choice – where almost every style of beer is available to us either in bars or online, and where new styles quickly break out from their local markets to be brewed by craft or independent breweries around the world. Often though, this choice feels like one between an IPA, a session IPA, a double IPA, a NEIPA, a black IPA (although, really?), West Coast IPA, fruited IPA, etc.

You get the picture.

Local means local

And outside of large metropolitan areas, areas with a large craft beer culture, or regions without recourse to online shopping the spread of different or new styles can remain limited. That’s not even to mention the local or regional styles that disappeared in the last 50 years. And that’s why the theme of this month is styles missing from your local brewing scene’s canon. And you can take local as a relative concept, depending on your context – your town or municipality, county, region, even country if you really are isolated. And local also means brewed locally, not just available locally. Essentially: what beer style would you like to see being brewed in your local market that is not yet being brewed? Simple enough question.

local-2

Eoghan then suggests some themes you could consider:

  • The “Dodo” – a local or regional style that has died out and not yet experienced the same revival of the likes of London Porter or Göse.
  • The “One-hit Wonder” – that one one-off or limited-run style from a local brewery that was never made again, to your eternal dissatisfaction
  • The “I used to be cool once” – a style that burst through in the first flushes of the “craft beer” revolution, but which has since died a death, albeit one now much-lamented
  • The “Phoenix” – narrowing your focus from the style to a specific exemplar of said style, that is no longer in production, from a particular brewery – think of the birth-death-rebirth cycle of a Thomas Hardy’s Ale for example.
  • The “Contrarian” – you could always take the contrarian approach, and call out a style being produced locally that you’d really rather not see again. Ever.

local-5

So what local beer styles do you think are missing from where you live? There’s a lot out there, so I imagine it’s hard to know what’s not there. But have a drink, and start thinking about what’s not in your glass, but should be. Simply leave a comment at the original announcement and leave the URL to your post there.

support-local-beer

Filed Under: Beers, Just For Fun, News, The Session Tagged With: Announcements, Beer Styles, local

Next Session Focuses On Local History

April 18, 2014 By Jay Brooks

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For our 87th Session, our host is Reuben Gray, from The Tale of the Ale. For his topic, he’s chosen a local theme, all about Local Brewery History. He’s asking you to “give your readers a history lesson about a local brewery,” and here’s the details:

In Session 87, I want you to give your readers a history lesson about a local brewery. That’s a physical brewery and not brewing company by the way. The brewery doesn’t need to still exist today, perhaps you had a local brewery that closed down before you were even born. Or you could pick one that has been producing beer on the same site for centuries.

Stipulations?
The only thing I ask is that the brewery existed for at least 20 years so don’t pick the local craft brewery that opened two or three years ago. This will exclude most small craft breweries but not all. The reason? There’s not much history in a brewery that has only existed for a few years.

Also, when I say local, I mean within about 8 hours’ drive from where you live. That should cover most bases for the average blogger and in many, allow you to pick one further away if you don’t want to talk about a closer one. For instance, I live in west Dublin and the closest brewery to me is The Porterhouse, but they only opened in the late 90’s. The most obvious brewery of course is Guinness, but enough people get told the history of Guinness by a very clever marketing team so I can’t bring myself the re-hash the same old tales about the 9000 year old lease and all that. So I will be picking something else on the day.

Some of you may already know a lot about the history of a local brewery and others might have to do a little research. If you do pick a dead brewery, see if there are any connections today! Perhaps the brewery is dead but the brand was bought by another brewery and lives on today.

The most important goal is to have fun with your research.

Wappen

So put on your historian’s hat and let’s tell some histories to make Maureen Ogle proud. On Friday, May 2, blow the cobwebs off of your local, possibly now defunct, brewery’s story and give us your best chronicle.

Also, as Reuben generously pointed out, we have a number of open slots for upcoming Sessions. If you’re a contributor, but haven’t yet been a host, please consider signing up for one. We need a host for June, along with August and beyond.

beer-is-as-old-as-history

Filed Under: Just For Fun, The Session Tagged With: Announcements, Blogging, local

Session #61: What Makes Local Beer Better?

March 2, 2012 By Jay Brooks

locavore-text
Our 61st Session is hosted by Matt Robinson — a.k.a. The Hoosier Beer Geek — and he’s asking us to consider the question What Makes Local Beer Better? Here’s how he puts it:

The topic I’ve been thinking about is local beer. The term is being used by just about every craft brewer in the country. What does it really mean though? Is it more of a marketing term or is there substance behind the moniker? This month I want to think about what makes local beer better? I’m not just talking about the beer itself, although it’s the focal point, but what makes local beer better? My connection to local beer is far from thinking that my beer is actually “local.” Maybe you don’t agree with me, and you can write about that. Bonus points for writing about your favorite local beer and the settings around it being local to you.

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I’ve been thinking about this one a bit lately, too, mostly in terms of what most people aren’t talking bout, which is that for many, possibly most, climates the two most common agricultural ingredients of beer cannot be grown and what that means for their ultimate status as local products.

I’ll ignore the question about whether local beer is better, because as far as I’m concerned, that’s not as interesting to me personally. Bad beer can be made halfway around the world as easily as next door, and vice versa. To my way of thinking, good beer is the result of a skilled brewer, using good ingredients, regardless of where they happen to be brewing.

local-beers-logo

There used to a phrase you’d hear as the craft beer movement was gathering steam in its early days: “Think Globally, Drink Locally.” A play on words of “Think Globally, Act Locally,” a phrase that was coined in the late 1960s or 70s (no one’s quite sure); it originally related to town planning and the environment.

But it’s no surprise that early craft brewing placed an emphasis on drinking local, since for most of beer’s history it was only a local product. Beer didn’t used to travel very well, or very far. That’s why at its peak in the 1870s, there were over 4,000 breweries in the United States alone. Every town had at least one brewery to slake the thirst of its residents. When you went to the next town, you drank their beer. When you went to the nearest big city, you could drink perhaps dozens of different beers from their local breweries.

locavore-badge

The First Locavores

In fact, I think craft breweries presaged the newer locavore movements taking place in most communities over the last few years. When the word “locavore” was chosen as Oxford’s 2007 “word of the year,” it was only two years old, having been coined right here in the Bay Area by a group of four women in San Francisco. The original idea was to restrict your diet to food grown or produced within a 100-mile radius. But it also emphasizes that local ingredients are fresher, more nutritious, taste better and are ultimately better for the environment, too. And that message certainly seems to spreading. Are there many towns today that don’t have a farmer’s market?

That’s also the same idea that early craft breweries were trying to get across. Fresh beer tastes better. So the closer to the source one is, the fresher the beer is likely to be, not to mention the economic advantages. By buying local, there’s the added benefit of keeping the money circulating in your local economy and not sending it to a corporate headquarters hundreds of miles away.

Many early microbreweries recognized that advantage from the beginning, and worked tirelessly to be good local citizens, and most I know of are still very active in their local communities, raising money for good causes, donating kegs for worthy events, giving their spent grain to local farmers to feed their livestock and partnering with other local businesses for the benefit of the places where they both live and work.

What Makes a Beer Local?

In 2012, it’s immensely satisfying that no one in America has to travel very far to find local beer. Several years ago, the Brewers Association crunched the numbers and determined that more than half of all Americans lived within 10 miles of a brewery. Since then, hundreds of breweries have opened (with literally hundreds more in various stages of planning) so that factoid is only getting closer. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn it’s more like 75% live within 10 miles of a brewery now.

But as terrific as that is, there is an elephant sitting at the bar, wondering what it means to be a local beer. What exactly makes a beer local? The obvious answer, of course, is that it’s brewed right here. Brewpubs, which brew where they serve, are the most local you can get, from that point of view. And breweries that only deliver their beer in a local area likewise would have to be considered local.

But as many people are beginning to point out, some of the ingredients that go into beer come from all over the world. Beer is an agricultural product, and its two most well known ingredients — barley and hops — do not grow well everywhere. They need the right climate to flourish. Hops grow best in Washington and Oregon, and also in parts of England, Germany, the Czech Republic and even New Zealand. One of pilsner’s signature ingredients is Saaz (or Zatec) hops, which grow best in the area around the Czech Republic. You can grow them other places, but they take on different characteristics when you do that. Beer brewed with the same hop variety grown in different places will often taste slightly different.

And barley does grow in a lot of places, but most it for brewing comes from Europe, the Ukraine, Russia, Canada and Australia. If you want specialty malts, they’re mostly likely available only from where they’re created. Even if you grow your own barley, you have to go through the malting process, which is typically done by a maltster. And there’s not a malthouse in many places, either.

The point is, there are a lot of places where it’s simply not possible to get all the ingredients to brew beer locally, and that raises the specter about whether a beer brewed locally, but with ingredients flown in from around the world, still can be considered a local beer.

Because beer is mostly water, the majority of your bottle will always be almost entirely local, both by weight and by volume. The malt and hops and yeast constitute a very small portion of the finished beer. But as more and more people are taking seriously eating and drinking locally, it’s hard to ignore that arguably beer’s most important ingredients may not come from down the street.

Not that some breweries aren’t trying to address this. Thirsty Bear, in San Francisco, a little while back created a beer using all locally sourced ingredients, which they called Locavore Pale Ale. Likewise, the relatively new Almanac Beer Co. is creating all of their beers with mostly local ingredients, and working toward making that all. And Sierra Nevada releases annually their Estate Brewer’s Harvest Ale, which they make using both malt and hops grown on their own property in and around Chico.

In California, we are fortunate enough to have the right climate where both hops and barley can grow, even though the majority of it is grown elsewhere. But in many other states that traditionally haven’t grown these crops, brewers and farmers are trying to do just that, with an eye toward making their beers even more local.

But in some locations, there isn’t anything that can be done. Alaska isn’t going to start growing hops and barley anytime soon, but I’d have a hard time considering a beer brewed there not being a local beer. Regardless of whether or not 100% of the ingredients are local, it does still have local character. The water, the air, the industry, the people brewing it and selling it, the economy: those are all very local.

For me that’s enough. In the end, I personally don’t think it diminishes beer’s ability to be seen as local. While I believe this is a debate worth having, undoubtedly there will always be some purists who won’t be able to budge from a position that if all the ingredients aren’t local, then it can’t be considered local. If they choose not to drink those beers for that reason alone, that’s a shame. Because with beer, the most important thing is how good it tastes. If it’s all local, that’s just a bonus. Or as friend of mine once quipped, “If I can drink it, it’s local.”

buylocal

Filed Under: Beers, Breweries, Editorial, Just For Fun, The Session Tagged With: California, local

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