This weekend, the earthly remains of Rogue Ales (1988-2025) will be auctioned off, having been divvied up into nearly a thousand occasionally baffling lots. Like a few other breweries,1 my experience of them took a winding path: initial excitement as a much-hyped treat from afar, before fading into the background, then causing cringe as their shtick staled before a decline that, in hindsight, felt inevitable. Others have discussed the cause of death; it’s the treatment of the corpse that interests me today.
It’s a race to the top by way of a race to the bottom
Voting is now open for the 18th GABS Hottest 100,2 and Mountain Culture — having placed #1 for the past three years running — recently launched their latest campaign, this time with a Ted Lasso theme. With the tactics and intensity that secured their blockbuster win in the 2022 competition, they’ve helped cement a “new normal” for the poll, one of relentless targeted promotion from a few loud voices. It undermines the countdown’s value and appeal — and, frankly, doesn’t reflect well on them.
The Washington Monument in 2277 — at least according to Fallout 3
Ever since reading an excellent travelogue through, and review of, all the bars in The Witcher 3,3 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 games4 — the first one I played is set here, so let’s start with that and then compare and contrast a few others.
(…of beer venues, I mean.) For the six years I lived in Melbourne I worked within a surprisingly-tight area; a two-kilometre circle centered somewhere in Collingwood, in the inner-North-East.5 That part of town saw a few high-profile closures in 2024, further datapoints for the general sense of doom that haunts the industry — but also some interesting (re-)openings, and given my proximity to it all I wanted to take a moment to sit with what’s happened and try to pin it down.
Illustration by my incredibly talented comrade ramikin.jpg
Given that I built this place and can visit any time, it’s a little strange to say “I miss being here” — but I do. I know why I haven’t been around more often; a mix of factors internal and external that’d be familiar-enough to anyone else who does this kind of thing: timing, distractions, self-doubt, and difficulty gathering the energy to do the work on a deep-dive, or to brace for the blowback on something critical, or push past feelings of futility. It’s oddly comforting the reasons are so mundane — they’re all addressable (if not actually solvable) problems. So I’m going to try.6
Mr. Boh goes to Washington (and regularly visits Chinatown)
For the second installment of The Session’s 2025 reboot (despite best intentions, I missed the first one for reasons that may soon be obvious), Boak & Bailey asked: “What’s the best beer you can drink at home right now?” In normal circumstances, I might’ve gone on a riff about the troublesome idea of “best” (or even “good”) but right now it’s the notion of “home” that’s more complicated for me. Anyway, the answer is still clear enough: it’s National Bohemian — Natty Boh, to its friends.
Ingredients: Anchovies. (May contain traces of anger.)
A few years ago, U.S. brewing company Fast Fashion sponsored a new hop varietal and named it “anchovy”, in a move that’s probably half in-joke turned outwards and half marketing stunt.7 It’s still fairly niche, but it pops up occasionally in this part of the world, and always restarts a train of thought of mine when it does.8 Personally, I love anchovies; that’s a word with positive associations for me,9 and I can see the fun in the incongruity of naming a hop that. But the beer industry has an awkward relationship with comedy that’s worth poking at a little.
So. Beer awards, again. (And belatedly, again.) The announcement that entries were open for the 2024 Brewers Guild of NZ Awards, together with the fact I was at the presentation dinner for the Australian competition last week,10 plus the chance to drink a bunch more New Zealand beer than usual at The Catfish recently have all combined to spur me into finally publishing the number-crunching I did for last year’s BGONZAs. As always, there’s some interesting details in here that are easily overlooked if you don’t do a little elementary statistics, and plenty of trends and quirks to keep in mind while anticipating doing it all over again in August.
Late last week, the story suddenly broke that Epic11 had gone into liquidation. As one of the best-known names of the early craft beer scene in New Zealand, and likely the “gateway beer” for a sizeable chunk of the subculture, the news was received with shock and sadness, labelled a tragedy, and many wondered what it foretold for the wider industry as they praised the legacy of founder Luke Nicholas. But a lot of the reaction has mistaken historical influence for current relevance or viability,12 and overlooked some real problems that should have been more obvious to all concerned.
A boastful billboard wrapped around a big bollard — a bollboard? a billard? maybe a billboll?
Melbourne’s Own Consistently Excellent Beer, the billboard read, provided you walked back and forward a bit or at least leaned side to side, since it’d been stuck up on a surface that was too tightly curved. I’d seen variations on that poster campaign before, but now it made me mad; they’ve gone from the usual advertising puffery into raw uncut nonsense and lies. Fixation hasn’t been either for years.
