A Fistful of Hot Takes
This atmospheric picture brought to you by AI (see below)
As months to step away from the beer world go, January isn’t a bad choice. News scrolls run pretty slow. Nevertheless, life moves forward. Stuff happens. Major national breweries, for example, decide to reformulate their decades-old flagship beer formulas. So for this first Friday in February, while rain clouds gather overhead, I have a few hot (and possibly lukewarm) takes. Get ‘em while they’re fresh!
Fat Tire Gets a Makeover
For the first time in 32 years, Fat Tire decided to publicly break with its famous amber ale, going for something, oh, I don’t know, more 805-esque. New Belgium CEO Steve Fechheimer described the gambit this way to CBS: “(We created) something that is slightly crisper, slightly brighter and slightly easier drinking. It is more in line with the palate and preferences of current 21-to-29-year-olds.”
🔥 Hot take: No style of beer is more dated than the amber ale, an icon of the 1980s and 90s. It was the beer that powered New Belgium’s rise, but it has been in decline for a long time (down half its volume since 2016, according to Kate Bernot). And it’s not just that ambers are nearly extinct—New Belgium had an opportunity to move the brand into the current boom category of light golden ales, like the aforementioned 805—or Kona Big Wave. But my hottest take here is that New Belgium basically had nothing to lose. Sure, some folks won’t like it, but they weren’t drinking enough of the amber to keep it around as a viable product. It’s a Voodoo Ranger company now, so taking a flyer with an old brand in a new category comes at almost no risk.
Boston Lager Reformulated … Sort of?
This story came out after the Fat Tire news, and seemed to be evidence of a trend. Or was it? Two years ago, Boston Beer quietly started tinkering with Boston Lager. The story they told then was similar to the one they told last week, with the national rollout of a “new” Boston Lager. Yet one was hard-pressed to find anything of interest in the press release: “The brewing process, however, has been updated to incorporate a traditional German practice of biological acidification, which results in a brighter, more approachable beer. ‘With Remastered, we're one step closer to perfection’ [said founder Jim Koch]. ‘We cleaned up the brewing process to create an easier-drinking profile, giving it an extra sparkle that drinkers will savor.”
🔥 Hot take: This is the most Boston Beer move ever. A lot of fanfare, some misdirection, a bunch of words that don’t mean anything, and apparently, all in service of a new ad campaign in time for the Super Bowl. Koch has always touted the bona fides of his beer as a faithful recreation of his great-grandfather’s recipe, which he has never produced nor allowed anyone to see. All this business about biological acidification may be true (though don’t bet your life on it), but it’s completely meaningless. Brewers often acidify their mash, and they have a few ways of doing it. Because Germany’s brewing laws don’t allow for pure acid additions (only hops, water, and malt, don’tcha know), they use this technique to get natural acids. But they’re the same acids you can buy in tubs. So either Boston Beer hasn’t been acidifying its wort—and keep in mind the beer has been contract brewed all over the place, so this sacred “brewing process” of which he speaks is the process used by whatever brewery he happened to be contracting with at the time—or they have, but are doing this as a stunt.
The irony of Jim Koch’s life is that he launched Boston Beer as a jihad against large American breweries, and has spent his entire career using precisely the same tricks they do to catch up to them. This is more of the same.
Hormel Collaborates on a Chili Cheese Beer
When I discovered a tweet from Hormel on Monday announcing its collaboration with Modist (MN) on a chili cheese beer, the tweet had had surprisingly little traction in the week it had been sitting there. Well, word has since gotten out. A few people have even tried it, including friend-of-the-blog John Holl, who described it this way: “You can really taste the meaty beans.”
🔥 Hot take: This sounds delicious!*
Trappist Down
Two years ago, we learned that the Trappist monastery making Achel had lost its final two monks. That put their standing in jeopardy, though production of the brand moved to Westmalle. Well, a couple weeks ago, we learned that a private citizen has purchased Saint Benedict Abbey of Hamont-Achel, which itself is kind of amazing, so now the beer is well and truly kaput.
🔥 Hot take: Rochefort, Orval, and Chimay all have around a dozen monks (precise numbers aren’t easy to get, and it may be fewer), and they’re old. All three could plausibly follow Achel in the near future. Given their age and size as breweries, the beers will probably survive as commercial products, but this is a sad consequence of the demise of European monasticism.
AI Takes Over the World
This isn’t a beer-specific development, but it sure got rolling in January. Two types of content generators, ones that churn out text and others that make pictures like the one at the top of the post, received a lot of press for their remarkable recent improvements. They’ve been around for years, but have made startling strides in quality in the past year.
🔥 Hot take: I’m actually going to have an AI week soon, because I think it has huge implications for the beer industry. Meantime, you should be very paranoid about everything you read. The hottest of takes is that you can’t even be sure a human wrote these words.
Oregon Brewers Fest Kaput
On Jan 13, the venerable Oregon Brewers Festival sent out a press release announcing they were canceling the 2023 event a year after it started post-Covid. Although organizers, principally Art Larrance, said “OBF will return when the time is right,” the rest of the release sounded like an obituary, with many thank yous and acknowledgements of the history of the fest. It seemed like they just didn’t have the heart to call it once and for all.
🔥 Hot take: OBF is dead, but it doesn’t have to be. Beer festivals are tough these days. Their original purpose, to introduce people to new beers and breweries, no longer exists. Covid has made people crowd-wary. And organizers are right that climate change has scrambled their timing; last year, the OBF faced triple-digit temps, a heat inconceivable in the 80s when it was launched. That said, the OBF is a public trust, even if it’s in private hands, and creativity, reworking, and rescheduling could revive the grand old event. Unfortunately, when a public trust is held in private hands, we are left watching from the sidelines. So many of the fixtures of Portland beer from the 80s haven’t survived, and this is another one to fall. RIP.
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*That’s a lie. I have never been more disgusted by the mere description of a beer than I was this abomination.