I guess we have to talk about Dilly Dilly. It's the catch phrase in the latest ad campaign launched by Bud Light, one that has achieved rare virality on social media. No matter how you slice it, it's become a national meme. But has it been good for Bud Light?
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A month ago, I posted an article that got a fair amount wrong about the Oregon Brewers Festival. I sat down with Art Larrance and Chris Crabb so I could correct the record--and in the process discovered many fascinating details of which I've been heretofore ignorant.
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Three news items for your Monday morning. We begin with an update on the Old Town Brewing trademark dispute, move to some new research about barley flavor, and finish up with a note about my (possibly) sole book signing this holiday season.
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For a writer--well, for me, anyway--the worst outcome is not that people will hate a book (though that's certainly not a good result), but that they won't read it at all. The death of a writer comes not at the hands of an angry public, but an indifferent one.
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In two days time, most Americans will settle down before a giant feast. Turkey, football, Grandpa Joe--a tradition as old as the country. You can enhance the day immeasuruably with thoughtful libation selection. My vote: Traquair House Ale.
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Another busy week in podcasting. Patrick and I offer you the latest Beervana Podcast, wherein we discuss canning with Hopworks' Trever Bass, and I appear on Experimental Brewing with Drew Beechum and OPB's The Four Top.
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People don't trust their own judgment. Given an object stripped of all information and context, they rarely know what its value is. They instinctively look for clues, hoping to suss out some extrinsic guide to its intrinsic value.
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I visited Belhaven in Dunbar, Scotland in 2011, at the tail end of George Howell's career there. Like all of the old-school British brewers, he was well-dressed and courtly. He had been head brewer--what the Brits call their brewmasters--for a decade and a half at that point.
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Five years ago, Adam Milne established Old Town Brewing's leaping stag as a legal trademark. But for the past two years, he's been locked in a legal battle with the City of Portland, which wants to use that logo so it can license products by AB InBev. Here's the whole maddening story.
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It's a surreal experience to visit one of the country's best breweries, see a gathering of their biggest fans, order glass of truly superb beer, and amid all the jollity know that it was all ending. (The Anderlecht wild ale was a revelation; Galaxy Myrtle was vibrantly fresh; and of course Urban Farmhouse and Flemish Kiss, my final two beers at the old place, were Urban Farmhouse and Flemish Kiss.) How could this be?
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Breweries all have personalities. Like people, they have a particular appearance, a vein running through their interests, a way of doing things or behaving in the world. But here's the thing: very few actually know what it is.
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"Gluten-free" brewing is a niche in the brewing world that our modern minds place into a special, denigrated category: beer with some essential part of the beer removed. But this really is a modern view. By sixteenth-century standards, these ingredients would have been entirely normal.
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Why do politicians invoke beer in their periodic set-pieces? They think it bespeaks blue collar authenticity, the drink of the everyman. In the politician's grab bag of easy symbols, beer is like a pair of jeans, a hunting rifle, steel-toed boots, a pick-up truck.
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I do podcasts. One (ir)regularly, one occasionally and one, which dropped this weekend, a single time. Make sure to give them a listen.
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Level Beer combines the talents of Geoff Phillips (Bailey’s Taproom) along with brewers Jason Barbee (Ex Novo), and Shane Watterson (Laurelwood). Any Portland brewery may turn into an IPA house, but for now, the focus is on sessionable, balanced, European-inspired ales and lagers.
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Yesterday marked the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther's 95 Theses, the Catholic theologian's assault on the church's several abuses of the day. In homage to that event, I turn my own attention to beer and the elements about it requiring their own reform and/or settlement.
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