The Role of Status

I see you reaching for that four pack of IPAs with the geometric pop-art labels. Are you choosing it because the beer is good, or because you are aware it’s what all the cool people are drinking? Status in beer is a small thing, but it's still a thing.

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Jeff Alworth Comments
The Terpene Frontier—and its Dangers

There’s a real danger that the constant chemical invention that makes beers taste more vivid is also changing the way we think about them. We know that a chemist can synthesize flavors with a magician’s skill, but the reason we once liked beer was because we admired how a brewer could make beer taste.

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Jeff Alworth Comments
In Case You Missed Them

It’s the competition time of the year, when beer writers send their best work off to peers at the North American Guild of Beer Writers. I had to dig through the archives for the pieces I was most proud. Here they are. 

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Jeff Alworth
The Power of Worlds

Writers are, more than anything else, the deities of small worlds—they feel compelled to create these universes of imagination. The stabbing of Salman Rushdie illustrates just how real those imaginary worlds can become. 

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Jeff Alworth Comments
Terroir and Hop Selection

Hop terroir is real, as a new paper from Oregon State University documents. But you don’t have to tell brewers that—they already know that hop selection is at least as important as variety, given the different expression state-to-state and even farm-to-farm.

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Jeff Alworth
Number of the Day: 46%

An old document on my hard drive from the Oregon Brewers Guild contains a list of all the breweries active in Oregon around the turn of the 21st century. Slightly less than half are still around—but compared to regular US businesses, that’s really good.

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Summer in Oregon

A stroll through a forested gorge festooned with ten waterfalls followed by a cold one poured literally in the middle of the trellised fields from which its hops were harvested? That’s called Saturday here in Oregon.

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Jeff Alworth Comment