Collections of interesting finds in the wider beer-related media — worth reading for their excellence or their egregiousness
Excise tax might be the hot-button issue in Australian beer at the moment. It’s quickly mentioned whenever troubles with the industry (such as brewery closures) are discussed, and has become an election issue with parties in and out of government making various promises of reform or relief. Sadly, the ‘debate’ is undermined by half-truths and misinformation. I want to push back against that, focusing on a particular widely-shared clip by Queensland’s Blackflag Brewing.
I’ve worked in the beer industry for nearly two decades. I met a huge proportion of my friends through it. I write this. It is a significant part of my identity. And it’s not an easy time for beer, right now. But it makes me extremely uncomfortable when people — in the business, or the wider subculture — call for direct, targeted support from government. I want to try and explain why, with help from a simple piece of moral philosophy nicely illustrated by, of all things, an episode of Bluey.
Ever since reading an excellent travelogue through, and review of, all the bars in The Witcher 3,1 I’ve been taking better notes about the beer I find when I play games. It’s the same impulse that leads me to document the relevant clues in the crossword; where and how beer shows up can tell us something about its place in the wider culture. And since moving to Washington D.C., I’ve had occasional flashbacks to the Fallout games2 — the first one I played is set here, so let’s start with that and then compare and contrast a few others.
Continue reading Here, 252 years from now — and other unreal places I’ve had a beer‘Independent’ remains the adjective of choice in promoting and organising the many Australian breweries that might otherwise be grouped under ‘craft’ or (in earlier times) ‘micro’. But companies who persist in waving it around as they take part in the recent string of mergers, consolidations, and various other entanglements are straining the word to breaking point. It’s too much like someone insisting “being single is really important to me, that’s why I married another bachelor!”
Continue reading Independence — “…I do not think it means what you think it means”
Since noticing a reference to modern hazy IPA in the New York Times crossword,3 and wondering what that “meant” in terms of beer’s currency in the popular culture, I’ve been keeping a tally of what else comes up. I recently realised I had a full calendar year worth of such records, and the urge to make a spreadsheet and go looking for patterns came on predictably strongly (for me) after that. The result: ninety-nine appearances, clumped around a few themes, with ale and ipa done to death, a few favoured brand names, some real clangers, and the occasional delight.
Continue reading 99 clues about beer in the Times — a 2024 crossword survey
Last week, as I was helping out on a canning run at the brewery, I was listening to the ‘Why Brut IPA Never Hit It Big’ episode of the Taplines podcast,4 and it’s had me thinking and reminiscing and pondering ever since. That conversation (between journalist Dave Infante and brewer Kim Sturdavant, who developed the style and coined the name) is well worth a listen, and I don’t really disagree anywhere, but as someone who was bartending through the peak of the phenomenon and who really loved those beers, remembers them fondly and looks for their echoes to this day, I have a few thoughts to add.5
Continue reading A nearly missing link — ‘Brut IPA’ as an important transitional fossil
Like a New Zealander excited when the country is mentioned out loud in overseas media or just actually included on a map, I’m always interested when beer pops up in unexpected places. Last Friday’s NYT crossword had ipa among its solutions, which itself isn’t uncommon — the crowded design of American crosswords mean they reuse some three-letter words a lot — but the clue specifically referencing hazy struck me, and I wondered if that was new, and what (if anything) it might mean.
Continue reading The New York Times crossword as a measure of mainstreaming
I want to know how many breweries there are in New Zealand. And I honestly think it’s strange that it’s a hard thing to find out. Even the smallest of them is visible from hundreds of metres away, and they are usually literally bolted to the ground. This shouldn’t be difficult; we’re counting Kererū the brewery, not Kererū the bird. And yet every total I’ve seen hit the news for years has seemed way off ― so I decided to do my own survey, and my best estimate is that there are currently 141 161.6
“Sponsored content” isn’t easy to do well — the ethical considerations are very tricky indeed, and it’s often just all too plain to readers that an ad is an ad — but this piece on The Spinoff recently is a particularly clear example of how to do it badly. Continue reading Sponsored nonsense — the Brewers Association’s clumsy stealth tactics
Sometimes, being nearly right is actually worse than being completely wrong. A story headlined Higher Alcohol Levels In Craft Beer Catching Drivers Out was published yesterday, and proved to be an instructively terrible example of this. It’s broadly in the ‘single out beer to be the bad guy in a story about booze in general’ genre, but goes an extra step and zeroes in on “craft beer” for some speculative shaming. Frustratingly, they built their pile of wrongness incredibly close to an important point, which they just wound up burying in crap.
