We now accept the fairly rigid classification of beer styles offered by groups like the GABF and Cicerone program. Where did they come from, and who decided how they should be organized? The short answer is Michael Jackson, but the longer answer is more intriguing.
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Beer styles are an agreement, shorthand to describe something we think we all understand. But scratch the surface even a little bit, and you fall into an epistemological void. Three examples this week illustrate their paradoxes and predicaments.
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A quintuple IPA arrived in my mailbox and promised to answer a question I’ve long wondered about: is there a point of diminishing return on IPAs, where hop intensity can no longer increase with the strength of a beer? The answer lay within.
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As the pandemic launches into its fifth and potentially most-virulent wave, politicians are stepping back. Private retail businesses are left to make decisions about how to police their customers, and the fallout might last years. It’s a bad situation.
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Pliny was a bright light in the fog. Despite its hurricane of flavors, it was more focused, refined, and elegant than other IPAs of the day. With the benefit of time, we can see that it reset expectations about what was possible, pointing to the future we now inhabit.
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Workman Publishing is being sold. The Publisher of The Beer Bible also owns Storey, an imprint with a number of excellent beer titles. It’s probably not good news.
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For people like me devoted to the culture, craft, and history of good beer, mass market products are like clouds passing through a blue sky. Once the new products were dry beer and wine coolers and now they’re alcoholic sodas and seltzers. They will be passing overhead forever because people like them.
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Of all the interesting stuff that has appeared at this site over the past 15 years, nothing was more important than the forty-odd posts from brewers and one cidermaker that constitute the Coronavirus Diaries series that ran on the site from March 2020 to this May. They’re now available as a book.
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Molson Coors announced it was ceasing production of a bunch of minor brands it owned, including one that hurts Oregonians’ hearts: Henry Weinhard’s Private Reserve. It was a beer that helped make the city Beervana, but also a remnant of a dying era.
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Three months ago, we were all excited to be entering a time when life could go back to something approaching normal following 15 months of a pandemic. But now cases are spiking again, and it’s time to take drastic action to prevent a return to shutdowns and death.
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