Category Archives: Mediawatch

Collections of interesting finds in the wider beer-related media — worth reading for their excellence or their egregiousness

The New York Times crossword as a measure of mainstreaming

Closeup of the New York Times Crossword for 14 July 2023 with the clue 'One might be hazy, for short'

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.

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A New Zealand brewery headcount

Look! There’s one, right there, lurking in the background. Move quietly. Don’t startle it.

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 141 161.1

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Sponsored nonsense — the Brewers Association’s clumsy stealth tactics

Screenshot from The Spinoff (taken 27 September 2018)
Two ads, poorly disguised as one story and one related ad

“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

A bad story hides a good point

Stuff.co.nz headline (4 December 2017)
Not news — for several different reasons

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.

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‘Too Much…’ is never enough

Author (probably) not pictured. (Taken from here.)

So. A wild satirist appeared, and is proving super effective. We haven’t really had one around here before, and I don’t know what good deeds we did to deserve Too Much To Beer as our first. It’s entertaining and incisive stuff, doing what all the best satire strives to do when it gets up in the morning: highlighting absurd truths and using humour to make a point worth making. As of right now, its creator is still anonymous and ― despite being a naturally inquisitive sort ― I’d like them to stay that way.

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Fresh hypocrisy

Hops at the Baxendale family estate, Golden Bay (March 2016)
So fresh*

Last week saw a nicely-timed bit of beer journalism: just as us New Zealanders were settling down to enjoy this year’s batch of green-hopped1 beers — served within days of their release — a flurry kicked off online about the dodgy practice of some U.S. breweries putting longer “best before” lifespans on beers they send to Australia than what they are labeled with back home. So a can of, say, Stone’s Go To IPA will have a much-hyped 120-day ‘expiry’ in California, but get given a whole year on the shelf in Canberra. It’s a saga worth reading through, if you haven’t already, and perfectly illustrates a nice little point of moral philosophy2 — that hypocrisy is a special kind of dickishness.

Continue reading Fresh hypocrisy

The Brewers Association’s new disinformation campaign

The truth is a brittle thing (from a threadless.com design by macdoodle)
The truth is a brittle thing (adapted from a threadless.com design by macdoodle)

More information always seems like a worthy idea. But the truth is a complicated thing and some people are very skilled bullshitters — able to spin a rare species of lie from saying something entirely accurate, which carefully exploits ambiguities in someone’s question or levers off errors in their background understanding. ‘Beer the Beautiful Truth’a new campaign launched by the Brewers Assocation,1 is sadly just this kind of bullshit. It’s the opposite of what beer needs right now.

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2016: That was the year that was

'Overlooked Middle Child', from the Beer Diary Brewing Department, shortly before its abandonment. (Wellington, 8 January 2017)
How very metaphorical: a nice vantage point, a weird climate, and a neglected personal project

So, that was 2016. It was… interesting. As you perhaps noticed. Plenty happening in the beer business, but no shortage of distractions in the wider and weirder world. Despite working on various of beer’s front lines, I felt a little disconnected from it all last year. And so rather than trawling through my notes looking for particular favourites (such as I’d do when preparing for a Year In Review episode of the podcast) I took some time for a more-general contemplation of the year gone by, and its heroes and villains — or at least those who are not helping,1 and those who are. Here, I present three loud boos and three cheerful hurrahs.

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“Sour”

8 Wired 'Hippy Berliner', Garage Project 'White Mischief', and Mussel Inn 'Lean Lamb' — and Sour Squirms (Golding's Free Dive, 17 September 2016)
Well, these’ll never sell.

I’m a big fan of sour beers. I like what they do to my brain, in terms of their inherent deliciousness. But also — and I say this as a bartender, host-of-tastings, and general observer of the business — part of the fun is what they do to the brains of other people. Nothing more efficiently upends a newbie’s naïve understanding of “what beer is”,1 and nothing seems so capable of making professionals spout nonsense. After a few recent articles and tasting sessions,2 I just want to take a moment to defend sour as a character and as a category.

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Subcultural cringe

Wellington City Council 'Declare Your Love' ad (19 September 2016)
Photo by Todd Atticus. Original artwork by the Wellington City Council — and me.

So, that was me. I’m the wagin the old-timey parlance of the newspaper. There’s little point pretending otherwise, since the sign was twenty steps from the front door of the pub where I work — and a large part of my m.o. here involves uploading literally hundreds of handwriting samples you could compare against. I’m all for the normalising of beer into the wider popular culture, but this crap isn’t helping. And I say that as a bearded someone (admittedly, it’s neither “bushy” nor “bristly”) who works in the (for want of a better word) craft beer business.

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