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Brewsters at work

By on December 22, 2016 in local/indigenous

Scratch Brewing and Jester King brewsters at work

Jester King Brewery promoted Averie Swanson to head brewer this week. She replaces Garrett Crowell, who is leaving Jester King with plans to start his own Texas brewery.

That’s Swanson in the background of this photo, with Marika Josephson of Scratch Brewing in the foreground. Swanson joined Jester King co-founder Jeffrey Stuffings and Crowell at Scratch last August, where six brewers assembled collaborated to make a beer that was mashed in wood, boiled in wood, and fermented in wood. Josephson is doing her best to keep wort from boiling over, while Swason stirs the mash for the next batch.

“I’ve never had this much fun,” Swanson said at the time.

Craft Beer Austin has an interview with her.

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Session #119 topic announced: Discomfort Beer

By on December 20, 2016 in the session

The SessionHost Alec Latham has announced the topic for The 119th gathering of The Session on Jan. 6 is “Discomfort Beer.”

For Session 119 I’d like you to write about which/what kind of beers took you out of your comfort zones. Beers you weren’t sure whether you didn’t like, or whether you just needed to adjust to. Also, this can’t include beers that were compromised, defective, flat, off etc because this is about deliberate styles. It would be interesting to see if these experiences are similar in different countries.

Don’t worry, he’s got some suggestions to make it easier, but it will be up to you to decide if this thought works for you.

“Ultimately, familiarity devours discomfort.”

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Monday beer links: Stone beer, DNA silliness & that word that’s not going away

By on December 19, 2016 in hops, local/indigenous, musing
MONDAY BEER & WINE LINKS, 12.19.2016

Editorial note: Weekly links will be on unpaid leave the next two Mondays. Regular service will resume Jan. 9 (01.09.2017 or 09.01.2017 depending on where you live).

Craft: The Lost Word.
So let’s head into 2017 with the optimistic thought we’ll quit talking about the word we put before beer and talk about beer itself, brewing, culture, ingredients, geography, or anything that does not involve bickering about a definition of something that which refuses to be defined. [Via Boak & Bailey’s Beer Blog]

Beer tailored to your DNA: London brewery creates the perfect pint based your genetic code.
No. Just no. I sense this story has legs, so wherever you read your headlines you’ll keep seeing it, often enough that you might believe that somebody has done a little investigating and established there’s a reason to pay going on $32,000 for 317 gallons of beer. (That’s the equivalent of 3,381 12-ounce servings, so almost $10 for each one.)

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Significant beer digit

By on December 16, 2016 in musing

Crazy Mountain beer on tap in Asheville, NC

Reading Bryan Roth’s story about American beer sales abroad in the latest (37.6) issue of All About Beer magazine this fact about Crazy Mountain Brewing in Colorado jumped out at me.

Another fast-growing market is South Korea, where (Kevin) Selvy sells about 360 barrels a month and is hoping to increase that to 480 in early 2017.

Four hundred and eighty barrels a month would be 5,760 a year. To provide some context, sales in South Korea alone (not even its best foreign market) would have made Crazy Mountain the 184th largest microbrewery in the United States in 2015. There are, of course, 176 larger regional breweries, including Crazy Mountain, and then some rather big breweries not classified as craft. But Crazy Mountain Korea would easily be larger than more than 90% of the 5,000-plus breweries in the U.S.

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Whither the brewmaster?

By on December 14, 2016 in musing

The other day Zymurgy editor Dave Carpenter wrote about “Five Beer Clichés We Need to Stop Using,” and this was the first.

Brewmaster: I’m not against the word ‘brewmaster’ per se, just its liberal use. All brewmasters are brewers, but not all brewers are brewmasters, just as not all cooks are Michelin-starred chefs. The mere act of upgrading from 5-gallon homebrew batches in a garage to 5-barrel commercial batches in a larger garage does not automatically a brewmaster make. Head brewer? Sure. But let’s use the title ‘brewmaster’ more sparingly.

I was thinking the “how do you define a brewmaster?” topic had come up here before, but if so I’m not very good at figuring out the archives because I couldn’t find it. There was something Garrett Oliver said in 2013 at the European Beer Bloggers Conference.

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