Friday Notes

A few things to tide you over for the weekend.  First up, my latest post at All About Beer, wherein I take a look at one of the most influential breweries most people haven't heard of, Brasserie Thiriez.

As Americans have taken up saisons, [Dupont is] not the direction they’ve headed. Instead, they make beers with less assertive, more familiar esters in the citrus family that are light in hopping and only medium-dry—something like a kellerbier crossed with a Belgian pale ale. If you start tracing these beers back to their source, you find yourself not in Belgium, but just across the border, in Esquelbecq, France. This is where Daniel Thiriez started his farmhouse brewery (also named Thiriez) 19 years ago and where he started brewing beers that look a lot more like American saisons than does Dupont’s.

Next, you might have a gander at Martyn Cornell's most recent, if for no other reason than to remind yourself of the mutable nature of beer style. 

Meanwhile, here’s a small rant ... about how Greene King IPA is “not an India Pale Ale”.... You don’t have a clue what you are talking about....  Do you complain because today’s milds are nothing at all like the mild ales of 200 years ago, 7% abv and made solely from pale malt? Beers change, and beer styles are not carved on stone tablets. A 19th century IPA would have been kept for up to a year in cask, would have lost all its hop aroma and would have developed a distinctly Brettanomyces flavour. Nobody at all is brewing an IPA like that. 

Oh, and somebody's mad on the internet.  And no, not about dress color.  But lest you get too hot and bothered, I'd say this is a standard the-world-is-changing, get-off-my-lawn-you-damn-kids wheeze.  It really doesn't have anything to do with beer.

Craft beer culture must die, or at least stop taking over all the pubs where I like to go. If it were contained to its own small bars where I never drink, it’d just be another niche subculture, where it belongs. 

Finally, go have a look at Pete Dunlop's fine description of the knotty situation A-B, Maletis, and 10 Barrel Brewing find themselves in.

You may recall that 10 Barrel was purchased by AB last year. The intended outcome of that purchase was that 10 Barrel brands would be distributed by AB-owned Western Distributing in this area. The problem is, Maletis owns the franchise rights to 10 Barrel here.

Have a good weekend--