It’s All Craft Beer Now

It may’ve been mentioned before but seeing this map, showing how many craft breweries each state has, really drives it home for me.

There isn’t a place in America where you can’t find craft beer. Something made by someone in your own state.

That is both a neat point of pride for people (hey, we make this here!) and a cool reason to travel (Oooo, I can’t find that at home!) I think we could use some more reasons to engage in some friendly rivalry with each other and if good beer isn’t the best one well, I’m open to other suggestions.

But you got a long way to convince me.

5000 Years

They found what is possibly the oldest brewery.

I mean. Either you find that sort of thing interesting or you don’t but if you don’t…I’m not sure what else I can tell you, while you’re here.

When The Going Gets Tough, The Tough Get Weird

I mean, flamin’ hot cheeto beer with pickle juice isn’t for me but I ain’t judging.

Underground

So, they found a beer cave in Missouri. I guess the notion of men hiding out in caves to drink beer and avoid life goes back farther than I’d thought.

Then again, if we’ve got scientists recreating medieval ale from the walls, maybe scientists can learn something from how beer was made in the 1800’s, too.

But Capitalism

Just chalk this story up as ‘another reasons large companies should be broken up’. Because I don’t think for a second that they aren’t trying to do similar things in the US-tech companies already do these kinds of things with our internet.

Also, if you have a $6.16 billion dollar share of the industry and your fines could hit a total of $250 million leaving you with 5.9 billion left, that isn’t a penalty, it’s just the cost of doing business.

Chips & Ale

Post title just to be cheeky to the Brits.

But: neat story about using new technologies to reduce CO2 emissions!

The Other Review

There have been a couple reviews of 2020, and well…they are a thing.

It’s been pretty weird pandemic for business and craft beer enjoyment at large, but it’s neat to see the places that people pivoted to a different method of production.

That said: I wish we’d just close everything for two months, pay everyone to stay home and start over in March.

I know we’ve been drinking a lot these days…

…but what surprises and disturbs me is how, relatively speaking, we’re not drinking much more than we tend to in a typical year.

Research done at the University of Victoria suggests that the average person in BC has had between five and ten more drinks a month in 2020 than the 2012-2019 average. Drinking spiked in March (unsurprisingly), dipped in April, and has gone up consistently until July (the last month for which the researchers have data). But again–not as much as I was expecting.

What is shocking to me, though? Those numbers represent “estimates of per capita monthly standard drinks of total alcohol consumption” for everybody in the province aged 15 and older. To put it in other words: if a standard drink is ~a 12 oz. beer at 5% alcohol, that means that in July 2020, it’s estimated that every single person in BC aged 15 or older drank the equivalent of fifty beers in the month of July. Which is, again, just slightly higher than the average of per capita monthly standard drinks of total alcohol consumption since 2012.

Fifty drinks is approximately two beers a night. Or two glasses of wine. Or two shots. Which is not bad.

But then you remember that the drinking age in BC is 19. And, of course, not everyone drinks fifty drinks a month; I’m probably at a third of that this month.

So spare a thought for those whose drinking keeps the average per capita that high in a regular year.

The Old is New

Beer history is making for a new frontier.

Halo Blight

I love these science stories: here’s one on how researchers at Michigan State University are trying to fight a new fungus that has been impacting Michigan’s hop crops.