On my Beerbox #3: Brief Thoughts on Women in Beer

    It's time again when I pluck something from the news and rant a bit about it... On my Beerbox #3!

    Featured in the beery news this week, Boston Beer Company (Samuel Adams) founder Jim Koch has been catching a bit of heat for his seeming neglect of women when it comes to membership on the company's board of directors.  Now, as I've only read a couple of articles on this, I don't feel justified commenting on the issue directly.  Those of us who have seen the documentary Beer Wars might remember that one of the main focuses was on Rhonda Kallman, former founding partner and Executive Vice President of sales and brand development for Boston Beer Company (Samuel Adams).  So, evidently, Koch can't eaxctly be accused of not having women in a position of power in the company, even if there's been a decided lack of gender diversity on the board.  Again, I'm sure there are any number of people that could "well, actually" me either way with the facts about what's going down at Sam Adams, but this ain't about that.

    I kind of got thinking about "perception" in craft beer when I was out at some random sports bar the other night.  This has been a pretty big thing in the "craft vs crafty" argument that's been going on since the day before forever.  Anyway, as I sat looking over the tap list, I found nothing that interested me at all and thought "why can't they just have one or two craft selections".  Taking a step back, I actually counted the taps and, thanks to several selections from both Sam Adams and Harpoon Brewery, found that in fact MOST of the taps were craft.  There was also a couple of Goose Island Beer Co taps (and it could be argued either way if this company deserves the "craft" moniker or not), one tap of Curious Traveler Shandy from the Sam Adams-backed Traveler Beer Company, one tap of Guinness Draught and then you Buds, Bud Lights, Shock Tops, etc.  But, to a spoiled Bostonian Beer geek like moi, this initially registered as no craft at all.

   At this point, you might ask yourself what the hell this has to do with women.  I think it had something to do with the number of backwards baseball caps and pitchers consumed with 25 cent wings at this place.  See, these are the craft beers that toe the line.  The beers that are technically craft, but are cheap enough and palatable (lack of flavor, IMO) enough to appeal to the bro bar crowd.

    It seems a dubious honor that the most successful craft beers are rewarded in this way, being pounded by bros whose exposure to the cross section of women and beer looks something like a bartender in tight pants or the girl in the bikini on the commercial.  This is the crowd that creates the stereotype that men like beer and women like wine or... I don't know.  Fruity drinks or maybe a low carb beer or some other awful concoction.  Patriarchy aside, stereotypes are only true insofar as the size of the lens you use.  While this bar I was at might have been representative of one corner of the beer world (or, sigh, more like three corners of it), there are more women in beer than you can non-threateningly shake a stick at.

    My bottle shop of choice, Craft Beer Cellar is owned and operated by two very capable women, Kate Baker and Suzanne Schalow, who know more about beer than a thousand of me, and they have the Cicerone accreditation to prove it.  Hampton, NH now has their own little craft beer store, Top Shelf Brews, run by Susan Hutchinson  Nearby in North Hampton, NH, Throwback Brewery is also wo-manned by two intrepid ladies, Annette Lee and Nicole Carrier.  Several area nano and gypsy brewers are made up of teams consisting of one male and one female, so let's not forget Idle Hands Craft Ales' Grace Tkach, Pretty Things Beer and Ale Projects' Martha Holley-Paquette, Somerville Brewing Company (Slumbrew)'s Caitlin Jewell and Backlash Beer Company's  Maggie Foley.  Now, this is just the women I could think of off the top of my head with no extra research, based on one very small geographical area.  I'm not saying women are represented enough in beer (not by a long shot), but suffice to say no one shouldn't dare say there aren't women in the beer business.  There are excellent women in the beer business.

    So maybe there will be an over-reaction to the Jim Koch thing.  Maybe there will be exactly the right reaction, and the continuous push against the brown glass ceiling will be reinvigorated yet again.  All I'm saying is while we rage for how it should be, let's take stock of what we already have.  You can look at these big craft beer companies that have made it to the bro bars and you'd be forgiven if you got the wrong impression, but from where I'm standing, the women are indeed working it, even if it's from the ground up.  And that's how you win a war.

Happy Time of Year When We Complain About Seasonal Creep!

    Merry Crankmas, one and all!  It's the most predictable tiiiiiime... of the year!

    Now, far be it for me to be one to head off some restaurant quality (whatever happened to that idiom?) grumping at the pass, but we've finally hit that time of year when, inevitably, some brewery puts out an early fall beer.  Then, inevitably, the blogosphere (can we get rid of that idiom?) sets itself on fire with indigence over how it's too early fall beers.

    Seasonal beer creep happens, sure.  But it happens all year.  The reason it gets noticed so damn hard when fall beers hit in July is because fall beers, especially Pumpkin beers are so dang distinctive.  Spring and Summer beers are a matter of gradient.  It's hard to find a line of demarcation between beers that are generally lighter, crisper, cloudier, lawnmowerier... what have you.  Winter beers are perhaps heavier or darker or spicier than Springs or Summers, but the fall is cool enough that a Winter beer is often acceptable, and again they aren't that far from some Fall styles, either.  The demarcation between Summer and Fall beers, however, is pure bold print, Pumpkin or no Pumpkin.

   

    Don't get me wrong.  I think July is too damn early for Pumpkin beers, too.  So is August, so is the first couple of weeks of September.  But you know what?  People still wear white after Labor Day, too.  The fault lies not with the brewers, dear drinkers... but with ourselves.  Let me draw a parallel to one of my other favorite subjects: comic books.  

 

    Comic book fans love nothing more than to complain about "event comics".  For those not in the nerdy know, that's when, usually in the Summer, a publisher will announce some "the status quo will change... FOREVER!" type of event where they not only put out a six or eight or ten issue "main storyline" book, but supplement it with "tie ins" while also pulling in regular titles.  For example, let's say Marvel announces The Derp Wars, a six-issue major event coming this summer that will forever change your favorite heroes (until the next event).  They also put out several three or four-issue tie ins, like "Derp Wars: Requiem" and "Derp Wars: Secret Files".  They also take the next issue of Spider-Man (as well as several other currently running series) and hijack it for "Spider-Man #435: Derp Wars (1 of 2)".  The reason they do all of this should be obvious.  It's a cash grab.  And it works.  People buy event comics.  If they didn't, despite all the complaining, no comic publisher would ever throw their weight behind a line-wide sales loss leader.

    Back to beer.  This should be patently obvious, but breweries put out Pumpkin beer in July because people buy it, and breweries want to (and darn well SHOULD) make money and be profitable.  We beer geeks and bloggers may complain until our throats are hoarse and our moms need to make us a grilled cheese sandwich, but the average consumer doesn't care.  They don't really care if a beer "tastes better" when the weather is a certain way.  They probably don't think about where the "Pumpkins" are coming from if this year's crop isn't even close to ready yet (spoiler: it's made of people!).  All they know is that they like the taste of Pumpkin (or any other seasonally anticipated) beer, and it's been a year since they had it.  And look!  It just hit the shelves!  Better stock up!

    There are plenty of breweries that do it quote-unquote "right" (matter or perspective) and put out their Pumpkin beers in late September or early October.  Cambridge Brewing Company holds a "Pumpkinfest" event every year around Halloween and, at least last year, put out the call on social media sometime in the Fall for people to come down and help them prepare actual, fresh, just-grown pumpkins for their The Great Pumpkin Ale.  There are plenty in the beer media who pay the creep no mind and celebrate a style in their own way.  My friends @RATEMYPUMPKINS have a Twitter account dedicated to rating a Pumpkin beer a day in the Fall, but don't sweat the creeper.  In fact, they adapted for the warmer months by telling us what they think of certain beers in the shower.

    In conclusion, if Pumpkin beer being available in July (or Summer beer being available in February) bugs you, vote with your dollar and don't buy it.  From there, if it really hurts you so much that other people aren't doing the same, re-evaluate.  Or go outside and play.  I don't know.  If you're that butthurt still, write your favorite brewer and ask them why they're doing something to make money and survive (and then hang your head in shame).  Live and let live, beer geeks.

Summer Blockbuster of Beers

    And now something from my series of blogs where I play the part of an old curmudgeon.  Oh, wait.  That's all of them.

 

     My palette and I have found ourselves in an odd place as of late, and I don't really know what started it.  I mean, some of my favorite beers are still pretty aggressive in terms of flavor.  Heady Topper isn't exactly a sipper, you know?  But maybe a beer like that is an exception to the rule.  But I'm getting ahead of myself.  This isn't so much a complaint about hype, but more of a complaint about the correlation of hype and aggression.

     Despite my recent feelings, I can't help but think that I'm just as guilty as anyone else in supporting the craft beer trend of giant, blow-your-head-off hop flavors.  Did I get excited to buy Stone Brewing Company's RuinTen?  Absolutely.  And I enjoyed it.  Still, I'm noticing a remarkable number of beers hitting the shelves of this oeuvre.  I started noticing it when all of the beers on my internal watch-for list were very aggressive IPAs and Double IPAs, but I think it all came to a head for me when attending American Craft Beer Fest and noticing the infographic in their booklet.  Without consciously thinking to do so, my pen hit the page and I wrote "THAT'S THE PROBLEM" over the circle that showed what an inflated sample of the festival offerings were of this type.

     Biggest circle?  American IPA.  Second biggest?  American Double IPA.  Third?  Pale Ale, and I can personally assure you that those were largely represented by "extra hoppy" Pale Ales... and at this point you have to wonder where the demarcation of style actually is.  Kolsh and Gose are great summer styles, too... but they only show up on the "less common" bar graph.  The pie chart shows a rather small portion for another great summer beer, the Saison.

     And you know, it's funny how traitorous I feel having these sentiments... but I'm just getting hopped out.  My tongue needs to taste other flavors.  Hell, my tongue needs to TASTE FLAVORS, and the trend seems to be to put my tongue in the camel clutch so that it may never work right again.   What it comes down to, for me, is this:  It's easy to blow my head off with hops.  It's harder to make a beer that's just downright pleasant.

      So I've gone on a journey back to my roots and am re-discovering some beers I haven't had in years but are totally scratching my itch right now.  Berkshire Brewing Company was not only the makers of my first consumed craft beers, but they are downright excellent at making pleasant beers.  Their Czech Style Pilsner is the first beer that comes to mind for this.  Their Lost Sailor IPA is also wonderfully understated, proving that those three letters, IPA, don't have to be synonymous with destroying my palette.  Of course BBC has many beers like this, but I'm really digging on these two lately.

  
    Another savior for me this summer has been Pretty Things Beer and Ale Project, specifically their ¡Magnifico! (a low-ABV Belgian Pale Ale) and their American Darling "Good Time Lager" (which I'll admit, when I had it last year, I didn't think I liked it all that much).  One of the things I always respected about Pretty Things is not only their well-crafted beers, but their restraint.  It was only last year that they put out their first and only American IPA, Meadowlark, and left it as a seasonal offering rather than a year round beer.  And even if they did, I would hardly describe it as a hop bomb.

     A third brewery that's making things both subtle and wonderful is Jack's Abby.  More remarkable is that their recent beers that come to mind for me, The ABCS and their 2nd Anniversary Lager are both Double IPLs, and again prove that you don't have to go aggressive to get hop flavor across.  In fact, the very name "The ABCS" seems to suggest to me a notion akin to "the basics".  As in you have to master the basics of beer making before you can think about pulling out these go-big-or-go-home flavors that may entice many, but may chase away a comparable amount. 

     Of course I'm not going to name any names on the breweries (dare I add... young breweries) that are leaning a little too heavily on hop bombs.  I wouldn't even feel comfortable saying they're trying to cover up imperfections in their beer (or, if not actively trying, are still probably succeeding in that), because I assume the fault lies in me.  There are, after all, many people that adore these offerings.  I know because I see the breweries re-tweet every positive review, he said, snarkily.  All I am saying is that this summer, I'm seeking out pleasant.  And so can you!

     In addition to the breweries previously mentioned, check out beers from Blue Lobster Brewing Company, as they seem to specialize in beers without a lot of frills and, other than their delicious Hamptonweisse and its kiwi/apricot one-two punch, doesn't use anything to achieve complex flavors other than the hops, the malt and the yeast.  Though they do have some quite hoppy offerings, I've always found their beers to be very even.  Going one step beyond the hop, quite literally, I've also grown quite fond of Earth Eagle Brewings.  They specialize in gruits, or beers without hops.  We forget, but hops are really just the herb du jour for giving beer its flavor.  In the past, any number of other botanicals were used in its place.

     Craft is always talking about attracting consumers over from the macrobrew side of the beer world, but continue to pump out these varsity-level brews like hops are going out of style.  Not everything needs to be double or triple imperial giant whatevers, nor should they be.  From where I'm standing, it seems like market saturation.  There is, however, relief out there. And plenty of it, if you look past the hype.  Drink something pleasant!

    Tune in next time when I probably contradict myself completely.

Our Beard and Savior

 

     Just wanted to say that I've been stupidly busy lately, and don't have a new blog ready for this week... but wanted to wish a happy birthday to Jay Vallee, Big Red Beard Brewing Director of Operations and all-around beardy guy (that means cool).  Won't you join me in raising a glass today in his hairy honor?