The Year in Words
Tomorrow the North American Guild of Beer Writers will announce the winners of their annual writing awards. The year in consideration runs from July to June, and we submit our best work in the summer. Given how evanescent writing on the internet has become—even I forget a lot of what I write—I like to take the opportunity to mention what I considered my best work. In past years I have posted links on a Twitter thread, but I have been moving away from that platform lately, so let’s do it here. After all, what’s more bloggy than blogging about blogs?
Over the course of the year in question, I wrote 126 posts on this site, contributed the “Style School” column to Craft Beer & Brewing, and wrote at assorted other pubs (Portland Monthly, VinePair, Oregon Public Broadcasting, Good Beer Hunting [RIP], and possibly others). I haven’t been working on a book in a while, incidentally—instead I spent much of my time over that year working on Celebrate Oregon Beer—so everything I wrote appeared on the web. Books may be in the future, but more the middle distance rather than immediately ahead.
I hope to do well in this year’s NAGBW competition, but whatever happens there, these dozen pieces were my faves, and in case you missed them, here’s a reminder—
West Coast Pilsner (August 21, 2023)
“With dank tropicality, it smells like a modern IPA. Upon first contact with the tongue, it tastes like an IPA, too; the first time I tried it, I really thought it was just going to be an IPA posing as a lager. But almost immediately something interesting happens. The hops seem to evaporate, revealing the pilsner underneath. Like any pilsner, it is lightly malty, crisp, and dry. Trace amounts of hop flavor linger, but by the time you swallow they’ve transformed almost entirely into aromatics. The hops are “fine” in the European sense—very soft, nothing sharp or grating.”
Barley Brown’s: 25 Years of Invention in Oregon's High Desert (August 29, 2023)
“At one point they bought some clear PET water bottles for their experiments. ‘We didn’t know anything, so we wondered, What happens if we just pour the pellets in?’ he said. They started by putting mostly-fermented wort in the bottles and leaving the caps on loosely, but the result wasn’t especially promising. ‘It’s hazy green and that doesn’t look very appetizing,’ he remembered. But then Shawn took one of the bottles and put it in the cold room and the next morning it was all clear. ‘We realized all we gotta do is dump the hops in warm and crash it.’ For good measure, in some beers they’d do a second dry-hop well after fermentation. Voila—long before hazy IPAs popularized ‘DDH’ ales, Tyler and Shawn figured it out themselves.”
Schwarzbier: The Enigmatic Dark Lager (9/18/2023)
“Köstritzer’s current managing director, Uwe Helmsdorf, has identified an intriguing reference to the brewery from the 1820s, in a letter by linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt. Writing to his wife about his friend, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm complains that the writer wasn’t eating anything. ‘He lives on beer and bread rolls and consults with the servants as to whether he should drink dark or light-brown Köstritzer.’ Two centuries ago, did schwarzbier come in braun as well? Was it a family more than a style?”
Dave Selden’s Workshop of Lost Wonders (November 2, 2023)
“Dave’s workshop is deliciously tangible. Precarious stacks of ink pots rise from one table. Blocks and plates sit on a machine the function of which I’ve forgotten. The original journals, which Dave doesn’t print himself, are stacked in wire boxes on one wall, while architectural drawers, wide and shallow, contain other prints. (The laser printer, prosaic and modern and entirely without romance, Dave has positioned in a different room, out of sight of the cool stuff.)”
Incubating More Than a Brewery (November 29, 2023)
“Among their community, craft beer wasn’t a thing. ‘You walk into a craft brewery and you’re going to see zombies and skeletons. People I know don’t see themselves in there,’ he said. Chicago has one of the largest Black populations in the US—almost a third of the city. Depending on how broadly you define Chicago, the city contains more than a hundred breweries. Yet, including Funktown, just three in the city are Black-owned. That’s a huge disparity, but also an opportunity to put good beer in the hands of people who have never explored it. ‘People were always curious, asking why we liked it,’ he said. ‘They just didn’t drink it.’”
Sacred Profane's Amazing, Radical Approach to Beer (January 4, 2024)
“And maybe that’s why they don’t want you to call it a Czech brewery. The ingredients may come from Bohemia, and the techniques, and the serving equipment, but the really important stuff—the making the beer and the drinking it and the dialogue they produce—will happen there on Washington Street. There’s even a delightful parallel with the Czech lagers Brienne and Michael don’t make. The original pilsner, of course, was made on a brewery designed by a Bavarian and brewed by a Bavarian in the Bavarian manner. And look how that turned out.”
The Corona Mega Mystery in Full (January 17, 2024)
“En Route to Oceanside, an unincorporated town of 361, we stopped in Tillamook for dinner, selecting a Mexican restaurant I will not name in case it is on the fringes of an international beer-smuggling ring. Our server, who also seemed to be the owner, offered us a choice of one beer: Corona. He gestured at a cooler, but instead of seeing the familiar blue and white, it was filled with 1.2 liter bombers with labels the color of a paper bag. I write about beer for a living, and I spend a fair amount of time in Mexican restaurants, and I have never seen a bottle like that. Mystified, I asked about it, and he told us (paraphrasing, because at the time I didn’t know this was a story), ‘That’s the kind we get in Mexico.’ He said it encouragingly, as if inviting me to sample a local delicacy.”
Prague (January 25, 2024)
“Prague is more homey and earthy. Its century of hard times still lives as a vapor of hardship in the interstices between the ancient buildings. I have a hard time identifying exactly what causes this impression. Perhaps the handwritten signs advertising beer or mulled wine or the way shops seem to spill out onto the street, even in January. Perhaps it was once a vain and arrogant place with a sense of its own world-historical gravity, but it feels modest and welcoming today. Vienna’s buildings felt like vaults containing the city’s treasures; in Prague they’re out in the open, a new discovery around ever curve of the tangled streets.”
Craft Beer Has Been Flat For Eight Years (February 14, 2024)
“Unlike regular domestic beer, craft took a big hit during Covid. Particularly when combined with the domestic lager numbers, that illustrates the large shift from draft to package that happened during the pandemic. Beyond Covid, however, what the following chart really illustrates is that the Great Flattening didn’t start at or just before 2020—it dates back to 2015. In that year, the US sold 24,523,015 barrels of craft beer—nearly identical to 2022 (the last year for which we have numbers): 24,273,285”
I HAVE A MINOR COMPLAINT: N/A Beer Still Not a Deal (March 21, 2024)
“For the better part of a decade this was supposed to be the Next Big Thing, however, and it still hasn’t cracked the one-percent mark. In the meantime, multiple N/A beer companies have come on line, as well as countless N/A brands. The press has breathlessly covered the N/A “space” (a broom closet, apparently), and I can’t remember how many articles I’ve read navel-gazing about America’s turn to healthfulness or the way Zoomers are embracing N/A beer. It is all pure hype and it needs to stop. N/A beer is a slow-moving, minuscule segment in the beer industry and I will continue to ignore it until its volume reaches whole digits.”
A Drinking Life: My Two Fathers (April 17, 2024)
“In my child’s memory, beer had a ritual quality. I grew up fishing with Dad, and fetching him a beer became part of the mystique of the endeavor. Fish only seemed to bite when he had a freshly-lighted Winston or just-opened can of beer beading in the heat. Cracking a beer was a way of aligning the circumstances within the universe. The fish would strike, and he’d spill his beer or awkwardly try to convey it to the ground. Opening the beer was an incantation and an invitation.”
What if CAMRA Had Valued Quality Over Romance? (June 10, 2024)
“Although CAMRA knew the only thing breathers did was extend the life of their beloved beer, it would take them two more decades (until 2018) to sanction their use—or at least no longer object. (“We have a neutral position on the use of cask breathers,” they still maintain.) So for more than fifty years, members of CAMRA prevented a technology that might have saved cask ale from a problem that was very, very real because their sense of romance in old-timey methods was so extreme they feared a problem they knew was not real.”