Quotulatiousness

January 18, 2016

The craft beer movement infiltrates the land of vodka

Filed under: Business, Europe, Russia — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Guardian, Alec Luhn reports on the rise of craft brewing in the heart of vodka-swilling Russia:

It is a drizzly Monday night, but Craft rePUBlic is boisterous with the chatter of brewers and beer aficionados. Those just walking in are greeted with a half pint of Red Nelson, a saison beer made with hibiscus tea and orange peel by local brewer Alexei Sazonov, who is celebrating his birthday at the craft beer bar.

Sazonov works at Bottle Share, one of a growing number of microbreweries driving what has been dubbed the “craft revolution” here, but he created Red Nelson at home under his nickname, Big Hedgehog. Sazonov says of the major Russian beer brands, whose bland lagers dominate store shelves and taps: “They boil it quickly, ferment it quickly and sell it quickly. A microbrewer brews beer he wants to drink himself.”

Russia, of course, is known for vodka rather than beer, and a popular saying holds that “beer without vodka is throwing money to the wind”. According to the latest World Health Organisation data from 2010, 51% of alcohol consumed in Russia was spirits and only 38% was beer. This vodka culture has had deadly consequences for Russian men, whose average life expectancy of just 64 years lags behind that in European countries due mainly to heavy drinking and tobacco use.

Now a new generation of “beer geeks”, as they dub themselves, is working to change Russians’ approach to beer – and to drinking in general. With a focus on savouring the taste rather than drinking to get drunk, at least two dozen craft bars have opened in Moscow since the summer of 2014, serving Russian and foreign microbrews. They’re getting so numerous that the cultural magazine Afisha declared in August that it was “refusing to write reviews of the craft beer bars that are opening every week”.

Few expect beer to displace vodka as the national drink, especially after the government reduced the minimum price of the spirit in 2015 amid economic troubles. But there’s a long tradition of homebrewing in Russia, and the growth potential of craft beer is huge thanks to its relative affordablity; local craft brews typically sell for between 200 and 300 roubles (£2-3) a pint. Moreover, it’s easy to start a craft bar: no liquor licence is required if an establishment serves only beer, and startup costs are minimal, since a large staff, kitchen and lavish interiors aren’t typically necessary. As a result, craft bars are spreading from Moscow and St Petersburg to the regions.

December 26, 2015

Moderate drinking and statistical health outcomes

Filed under: Health, Wine — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Aaron Carroll debunks some myths about booze and health:

Over the past year, I’ve tried to clear up a lot of the misconceptions on food and drink: about salt, artificial sweeteners, among others, even water.

Now let me take on alcohol: wine, beer and cocktails. Although I have written about the dangerous effects of alcohol abuse and misuse, that doesn’t mean it’s always bad. A part of many complex and delicious adult beverages, alcohol is linked to a number of health benefits in medical studies.

That doesn’t mean the studies provide only good news, either, or that the evidence in its favor is a slam dunk. You won’t be surprised to hear that, once again, my watchword — moderation — applies.

Research into how alcohol consumption affects health has been going on for a long time. A 1990 prospective cohort study included results of more than 275,000 men followed since 1959. Compared with those who never drank alcohol, those who consumed one to two drinks a day had a significantly reduced mortality rate from both coronary heart disease and “all causes.” Those who consumed three or more drinks a day still had a lower risk of death from coronary heart disease, but had a higher mortality rate over all.

A 2004 study came to similar conclusions. It followed about 6,600 men and 8,000 women for five years and found that compared with those who drank about one drink a day on average, those who didn’t drink at all and those who drank more than two drinks a day had higher rates of death. Results like these have been consistent across a number of studies in different populations. Even studies published in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research agree that moderate drinking seems to be associated with a decreased risk of death over all.

However, alcohol seems to have different effects on different diseases. Almost all of the major benefits of drinking are seen in cardiovascular illnesses. In fact, with men, even consumption of a surprisingly large amount can seem protective.

November 25, 2015

Food labelling laws and craft brewing … not a match made in heaven

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Health, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Eric Boehm on how well-intentioned laws can still have significant and unforeseen negative side-effects:

Brewers are facing the prospect of spending potentially thousands to determine calorie counts for every variety of beer produced. Unless they spend the money to provide the information, breweries may never get their products into chain restaurants, like Buffalo Wild Wings and Applebee’s.

As is often the case with regulations, smaller breweries stand to lose the most.

“A regional craft brewer or a major brewery can spread the cost over a much larger volume of sales and it’s not so unreasonable for them,” said Paul Gatza, a former brewer who now heads the Boulder, Colorado, based Brewers’ Association, an industry group.

“Smaller guys that are just trying to sell a keg or two here or there, they have a decision to make on whether it is worth the additional cost to try to get their beers into chain restaurants,” Gatza told Watchdog.

The Food and Drug Administration is in the process of finalizing menu labeling rules that were part of the Affordable Care Act. Intended to make Americans more aware of their dietary choices, the rules are subject to controversy on several fronts, and the FDA announced in September that implementation of the new rules would be pushed back one full year, until December 2016, as the feds try to work out the kinks.

My favourite local brewery isn’t even a micro-brewery (they’re somewhere between a pico- and a nano-brewery): every week when I drop in, there are three or four new batches ready to sample (and it’s rare that there’s anything left of last week’s offerings). If they had to spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars to comply with detailed labelling requirements for every small batch they brewed, they’d never stand a chance of making a profit. I understand the urge to ensure that people have a chance to avoid ingredients that might make them ill, but this is the sort of regulation that tilts very heavily toward the big companies that have regional or national markets. A thousand dollars per product isn’t even a drop in the bucket to them, while to a small local business, that might be more than their profit margin when you require it be done for everything they produce.

November 15, 2015

A countertop home-brewing appliance

Filed under: Randomness — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Pulkit Chandna reviews the “Brewie”:

Brewie 1

In the future, at-home beer brewing will be a set-it-and-forget-it cinch, and not the convoluted mess we have always known it to be. That’s the feeling one gets from looking at Brewie, the latest in a series of countertop appliances designed to automate the process of beer crafting.

The Hungarian startup behind it claims Brewie is better and more automated than the competition — including the PicoBrew Zymatic home brewery we reviewed back in June. That lofty claim has helped the company secure hundreds of pre-orders, worth more than $600,000, across two crowdfunding rounds on Indiegogo. It concluded the first leg in February with a funding tally of $223,878, only to return to the site late last month in search of yet more pre-orders. (Indiegogo, as part of its “InDemand program” allows project creators to accept contributions or orders even after their crowdfunding campaign has ended.)

The Brewie is said to distill the whole brewing process down to a series of simple steps requiring negligible human input, such that even the most hopeless of aspiring brewmasters can get started with it in no time at all. You can control the unit either through its 4.3-inch LCD touchscreen or via the companion app over Wi-Fi.

October 29, 2015

For a change, a sensible trademark ruling

Filed under: Americas, Business, Cancon, Law — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Timothy Geigner on a remarkably sensible trademark judgement from a BC court:

For this, we travel up to Canada, where a Federal Court judge presided over a trademark dispute between Pacific Western Brewing and Cerveceria del Pacifico over the branding of their brews. At issue was the labels on packaging for PWB’s Pacific Pilsner and Cerveceria’s Pacifico Clara. PWB argued at court that the branding and language was too similar and would confuse customers. Here are samples of each beer’s branding.

Pacific Pilsner vs Pacifico Clara Cerveza

So, yeah, other than roughly similar uses of the word “Pacific”, there’s not a whole lot of similarity here. Normally, this is about when we’d hold our collective breaths and wait to see if the court comes down with a sensible ruling based on the likelihood of customer confusion, or if the court instead chooses the over-protectionist route, focusing on the common language and nothing else. In this case, Justice Luc Martineau appears to have gotten every last bit of it right.

    Martineau said the first impression given by the label Cerveceria uses for its Pacifico brand “is of its obviously foreign origin” and that it’s “highly stylized, with many distinctive design elements, including strong and contrasting colours and font in red, gold, blue, green and yellow.” He further said the label “differs visually, phonetically, and semantically” from all of the marks PWB uses for its Pacific brands of beers.

    Martineau also dismissed as without merit PWB’s argument that contrary to a statement on the register, Cerveceria del Pacifico was not first sold in Canada as early as April 1986. He noted that an affidavit from Cerveceria stating the beer was introduced at Expo ’86, where it was sold at a Mexican restaurant called Ole Cantina, was not challenged by PWB counsel. By December 1989, Pacifico was listed with the B.C. Liquor Distribution branch and in August 1990, a registration protecting the mark was issued.

    “The delay of almost 25 years before attempting to invalidate the registration weighs heavily against a finding of confusion,” Martineau said of PWB’s action.

October 10, 2015

“We’re very inefficient … and proud of it”

Filed under: Business, Cancon — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Published on 3 Oct 2015

Craft Brewery tourism is on the rise. Ontario Craft Breweries are opening throughout the province; eventually there will be one in every community. These breweries are a catalyst for economic growth. They have become sought-after tourist destinations, event venues, culinary centres.

September 26, 2015

Straight Up: The Issue of Alcohol in Ontario

Filed under: Cancon, History, Law, Liberty, Wine — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Published on 24 Nov 2014

A documentary exploring the peculiar system of alcohol retail and distribution in Ontario.

The beverage alcohol system in Ontario is unique in the world. A government monopoly and a few private companies enjoy preferential access to the province’s consumers. Meanwhile, about 300 Ontario breweries, wineries, and distillers face a number of bureaucratic and structural barriers that effectively shut them out of the market in Ontario. This film tries to explain the origins of the beverage alcohol system in Ontario, and what it means for producers and consumers in the province today.

H/T to Eric Beiers for the link.

September 24, 2015

Ontario takes baby steps toward liberalizing the beer market

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At the Toronto Beer Blog, a less-than-enthused look at the latest changes to minimally change the just-barely-beyond-prohibition-era rules for selling beer in Ontario:

This has been a noisy day in the wonderful world of beer sales in Ontario. The Liberal government released the details of the new 195 page master agreement between The Beer Store, the Province (LCBO), and the new kids on the block, grocery stores.

Much of the information is what we heard when they announced it with the budget. Some more details have come out. If you read my thoughts in April, you will remember I was not happy. I’m still not.

The good from today’s news is there are some clear definitions of what constitutes a grocery store (10 000 sq/feet dedicated to groceries, not primarily identified as a pharmacy); that the 20% craft shelf space is for both grocery stores and The Beer Store, and that there cannot be a fee to get listed (though we all know how effectively the province enforces pay-to-play in bars around the province); and that they have some novel system to divide sales licenses between both huge chains and independent grocers.

The old news about shared shipping for smaller breweries and no volume limit for a second on-site retail location are accurate, and very good news.

But here’s the thing: This is just more Ontario political craziness.

This is to “level the field”, apparently for small brewers, who nobody would suggest get a fair shake in the current system.

But what could have been an actual leveling of the playing field, turned out to be more insanity and government control and meddling. And remember, I’m saying that as a sworn lefty nutjob, who generally thinks having controls and regulations is a good thing.

Remember, these are not the ravings of a far-right-wing free-enterprise-maniac … these are the regrets of a self-described “sworn lefty nutjob”:

A level playing field would be one where anybody could apply for a license to sell beer, and do it. A brewery can pick and choose who they sell to, as a retailer can choose who they do business with. Nobody would need to guarantee a percentage of shelf space, because the market would control what products were successful and got shelf space.

This isn’t a level playing field, it’s just a bunch of new rules to try to counter how horrible we’ve allowed our playing field to get. Yes, it will be more convenient for people who shop at one of the 450 stores that have a license. But the agreement still favours The Beer Store heavily (for instance, grocers are limited in the volume they can sell. They can exceed the limit, but then have to pay a fine to the LCBO who distribute it to, you guessed it, the breweries who own The Beer Store to offset their lost sales. Seriously).

September 18, 2015

Beer? In Ontario grocery stores? It’s more likely than you think

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Ben’s Beer Blog scores an exclusive interview with Tom Barlow, President and CEO of the Canadian Federation of Independent Grocers on the topic of liberalizing Ontario’s Prohibition-era market access rules for beer:

Some details about beer in grocery stores

  • We will likely see beer on grocery store shelves in the next 18 months
  • The province still hasn’t decided how to auction off licenses to sell beer in a way that is fair to small grocers
  • At least one grocery store chain has stated they’d like to sell “100% craft beer.”
  • If you have fears that bigger brewers are going to be able to buy shelf space, continue to be scared of that very real possibility
  • Brewers will be allowed to do direct-to-store delivery

A transcript of my chat with Tom Barlow, President and CEO of CFIG, edited slightly for length

Ben Johnson: Thanks for chatting with me Tom. It’s been pretty quiet in terms of the announcement about exactly how we’re going to get beer in grocery stores. So can you tell me a little about the process for becoming eligible to sell beer in your stores? Speculation has been pretty rampant that we’d only see bigger chains getting the privilege, so it’s interesting to hear that independent grocers are at the table.

Tom Barlow: Yeah, I’ll share what I can. The regs will be coming out soon, and the people that have been in discussions are under a non-disclosure but what I can tell you is that the original conversation was that it would be just large chains, then the government through consultations with [CFIG] and regions decided that it should be open to “grocery” under the North American definition of what grocery is, namely that they carry fresh produce, fresh meat, and that kind of thing. I don’t know if they’ve settled on a size — there was some discussion that there would be a minimum size — but for all intents and purposes it would be “grocery” and it would be wide open. The discussion we’ve had so far is that there would be so many licenses to start and they’d step it out, then get comfortable, then release some more, and then release some more. The number that was floated was around 450 licenses. That is, 450 retailers are going to have the opportunity to sell beer.

BJ: I’m assuming it’s a bidding process for getting the license and that’s the part you can’t talk about?

TB: They’re still working through the mechanism, but are looking at a biding process. I think we made our point that privately held — vs. publicly held — the access to cash is different, so there needs to be a plan made so all the licenses don’t all get swallowed up by —

BJ: Galen Weston?

TB: — Yeah, exactly. We were a little frustrated at first but after numerous conversations they’ve heard our position, and I think it’s the same with the corporate chains, is that they should have just opened it up to “grocery” from the start. If you’re going to go grocery, go grocery. This contest for picking winners and losers is a slippery slope to be going down.

September 3, 2015

The beer ineQuality index

Filed under: Cancon, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

I took a couple of weeks off over the summer and subsequently forgot some of the interesting articles I’d intended to link to from the blog (but no sensible person comes here for breaking news, do they?). Here’s one from the wonderfully named Worthwhile Canadian Initiative blog:

The conventional Canadian view is that American beer is bad; watery and weak. Yet American breweries produce some of the world’s best beers — superb brews coming out of microbreweries across the country.

Why is american beer

What is striking about the United States is the country’s level of inequality — or, to be more precise, the beer quality inequality. Countries like Germany, Belgium — the Scandinavian countries in general — have much less variation in the quality of their beer.

The question is: why? Does beer quality inequality result from other forms of inequality, like disparities in income and wealth? Or do the forces that produce income inequality also produce beer quality inequality? Is it a spurious correlation, or is the armchair empiricist’s observation that the US has more beer ine-quality simply wrong?

The income-causes-beer quality inequality story is easily told. Some people are poor. They demand cheap beer, and cheap beer is necessarily poor quality. Some people are rich. They demand high quality beer, and are willing to pay for it. Hence, in theory, we would expect income inequality to produce beer quality inequality. As an empirical observation, the US has substantially more income and beer quality inequality than other rich countries, including Canada, while Scandinavian countries have some of the lowest levels of income and beer inequality in the world (here). So income inequality causes beer quality inequality: Q.E.D.

This story is plausible, and there may be some truth to it. The problem with it is that not everybody drinks beer. Take a country like England, for example. There beer was traditionally a working man’s drink — the upper classes sipped Pimm’s on the lawn, or perhaps a gin and tonic. If the rich aren’t drinking beer, an increased concentration of income in the hands of the richest 1 percent will have no impact on the variation in beer quality.

August 17, 2015

Flying Monkeys …. in spaaaaaaace!

Filed under: Cancon, Randomness, Space — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Published on 11 Aug 2015

On June 4th, 2015 we sent Flying Monkeys SuperCollider 2.0 DIPA craft beer into space just for kicks. After 3 hours in flight it came back to earth from 109,780 feet. The footage is unbrew-lieveable!

August 12, 2015

Better hops through science

Filed under: Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

At Wired, Katie M. Palmer discusses an interesting (if only to brewers and beer fans) development in the quest for better beer:

For craft breweries, originality is everything. Your favorite microbrew prides itself on the particular combination of grains, yeast, and hops that go into its fermented nectar. Regardless of the magic that goes into the recipe, though, a lot of those ingredients come from the same big suppliers — bulk barley, high-yield yeast. So when agricultural geneticist Sean Myles was visiting his brewing buddies over at Tatamagouche Brewing Company in Nova Scotia, the conversation turned quickly to the one place where microbreweries can really distinguish themselves: hop varieties.

“I’m a craft beer fanatic…a little bit,” says Myles, who researches at Dalhousie University. “I ended up hanging around the hop yard, and we were taking a look at the vines.” In Nova Scotia, brewers grow the same varieties of hops you’d see elsewhere — Cascade, Willamette, Fuggle — which add aroma, flavor, and bitterness to a beer while helping to preserve it. But the vines don’t thrive like they do on the dryer, warmer west coast. The region’s high humidity makes the plants vulnerable to mildew. Myles looked at the hops growing in the brewers’ backyard, stunted and suffering from fungus, and had an idea: “I said, well, let’s go get some pollen.”

So Myles and Hans Christian Jost from Tatamagouche traveled from Nova Scotia to Corvallis, Oregon, where the USDA has one of the biggest hop collections in the world. “In order to get new varieties you need to let these plants have sex and generate some offspring,” says Myles. The National Clonal Germplasm Repository — which includes a gene bank in addition to physical collections of berries, mint, and nuts — is one of the only places where hopheads have access to pollen from male plants. (The pine cone-shaped hops that go into your beer are the flower of female plants, so most growers don’t bother keeping any males around.)

At the USDA hop library, which has dozens of varieties bred for different taste profiles, disease resistance, and viability in different climates, Myles worked with hop expert John Henning to find four different male mildew-resistant hops. But he couldn’t take the plant material across the border to Canada — so he stuck baggies over the top of the plants, collected their pollen, and brought it back to sprinkle on top of the female flowers grown by the brewery.

That’s the beginning of what will be a multiple-year process of growing, seed collection, and growing again to select the most mildew-resistant plants that still keep their floral hop character. When the brewers are done, they’ll have a unique variety of hops that they can call their own — and hopefully grow more of, thanks to its improved mildew protection.

August 10, 2015

Toronto craft brewers and beer cans

Filed under: Business, Cancon — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Ben Johnson explains the rising popularity of beer cans even among microbreweries in the Toronto area:

Whether it be memories of your dad’s garage fridge filled with industrial lager in little tins or visions of shotgunning affordable lagers at college parties, beer cans have, for the most part, gotten a bad rap as something like the poor-man’s beverage container.

But that’s quickly changing.

Increasingly, as Toronto’s craft beer scene booms and the city’s brewers seek out the best ways to sell their beer, cans are becoming the preferred option. But why?

Jeff Rogowsky, the co-founder of Session Craft Canning, has seen the popularity of cans grow in the last few years. Rogowsky’s company is a mobile operation that brings canning capabilities to craft brewers who often can’t afford their own expensive canning lines.

I spoke with Rogowsky via email and he told me that he thinks the increased popularity of cans is largely being driven by consumer demand. “Canning gained popularity,” he says, “because it allowed people to take beer to more places–golf courses, beaches, in a backpack, to a movie theatre–cans are infinitely more portable and easier to travel with.”

June 19, 2015

Even the Fed pays attention to the rise of craft brewing

Filed under: Business, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond had an interesting article on the rise of craft beer by Jamie Feik and Joseph Mengedoth:

In many places across the country, it’s hard not to notice the shift in product offerings at local bars and restaurants and in the beer aisle of the grocery store. The colorful, ornate tap handles of craft brewers have joined the classic blue, red, and silver posts of the traditional powerhouses, and bartenders play the role of consultant purveying the selections. Shoppers who once stood in the beer aisle trying to decide how many cans of beer to buy now stand in front of coolers filled with different brands and styles of beer available in single bottles, packs of four, six, or 12, and even on tap in a growing number of stores. Many of them have been made at a brewery down the street; according to the Brewer’s Association (BA), the trade association that represents the craft beer industry, approximately 75 percent of the drinking-age population in the United States lives within 10 miles of a brewery.

In 2014, there were 615 new craft breweries that opened, pushing the number in the United States to 3,418, more than twice the number that existed just five years earlier. The BA defines a craft brewery as one that produces fewer than 6 million barrels a year, is less than 25 percent controlled by an alcoholic beverage industry member that is not itself a craft brewer, and produces a beverage “whose flavor derives from traditional or innovative brewing ingredients and their fermentation.” The ownership restriction excludes the craft-style subsidiaries — such as Shock Top, Goose Island, Leinenkugel, and Blue Moon — of large brewers like Anheuser-Busch InBev and MillerCoors (the two largest brewers in the United States).

Although craft beer remains a relatively small segment of the market, accounting for only 11 percent of the beer produced in the United States in 2014, the segment is growing rapidly. Craft beer’s share of production has more than doubled since 2010, when it was just 5 percent. In 2014, craft beer sales volume increased nearly 18 percent, according to the BA, versus just 0.5 percent for the overall beer industry. The retail dollar value of craft beer grew 22 percent in 2014, while the total U.S. beer market increased only 1.5 percent in value.

The growth of small breweries runs counter to the trend of consolidation in the beverage industry that persisted through much of the 20th century. Why are craft brewers thriving?

April 17, 2015

QotD: Bitterness about bitterness

Filed under: Food, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

And if I may insert a personal plea: could the bittermongers please knock it off with the sneers? Somehow, in the collective cocktail consciousness of America’s hipsters, “bitter” has become synonymous with “sophisticated”. Bitter beer is good beer, bitter cocktails are good cocktails, and the louts who like things thin or sweet deserve what they get, which is everyone else at the bar struggling to conceal their bemused smile. Yet there are many of us who hate, hate, hate bitter flavors not because we haven’t been exposed to them, nor because we’re unadventurous slobs who would really rather be hooked up to a glucose IV. Personally, I find bitter flavors like Campari so strong that even a sip is on the verge of being physically aversive, as if you were punching me in the tongue. That’s not a matter of sophistication, but a matter of personal chemistry. There are people who can taste bitter compounds in broccoli and soapy-tasting substances in cilantro that make it completely unpalatable, while the rest of us dig into our veggies and say they don’t know what they’re missing. In fact, we’ve got it exactly backwards: we don’t know what we’re missing — and we’re moralizing our deficits.

Megan McArdle, “Dinner, With a Side of Self-Righteousness”, Bloomberg View, 2015-03-27.

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