Beervana Podcast

When we talk about great beer cities, the name Atlanta rarely comes up. After a visit to five excellent breweries in town—New Realm, Bold Monk, Monday Night, Halfway Crooks, and Elsewhere—I was convinced it should.

Larry Bell announced that he was selling his 36-year-old brewery, Michigan’s Bell’s, today. The language was weird and somewhat concealed the actual details. Yet unlike so many bloodless M&A announcements, the reason may have everything to do with the difficulty of this sale.

On today's show, we beam into Jeff’s book tour and take you to a live recording of a stop he made at Guinness’s Open Gate Brewery in Baltimore, MD. This was a planned stop on the tour, and Jeff, brewer Sean Brennan, and Guinness “ambassador” Ryan Wagner spoke in front of an audience when he was in Baltimore.

In a rather shocking development, the mailbag overfloweth! Long-time readers know that our begging for comments is a regular feature of the show, and we’ve been supported by a few reliable regular commenters. Since our last show, however, the emails have been flying. We have so many that we’ll devote the whole show to them today. You are a smart and observant bunch, and these are great questions.

The Beer Bible 2nd Edition will be available a week from today. Here’s the skinny on everything that’s new. It’s a lot!

Not long ago, listener Dan Cuzzocreo wrote us with this request: “I've really enjoyed the episodes you have done on a particular beer style. I'd love to hear more episodes in this vein, especially about important but less trendy styles, and in particular I was curious if you might consider doing one about brown ales.” Well Dan, you asked, and today we deliver. There is no style less trendy—nor badly-named—than brown ale, but today we’ll dig into its roots and see if we can’t discover why it was once a beloved tipple in both the US and UK. Brown ales forever!

Photo: The Yorkshire squares of Samuel Smith

Writers and brewers have identified most of the useful frameworks we use to understand beer. An important one, often hinted at but never fully explored, is national tradition. It’s never been more important to understand, though—especially now amid the birth of the American tradition.

If you speak to anyone in the service industry these days, the conversation eventually turns to the ongoing worker shortage. Increasingly, people don’t want to work as restaurant servers or dishwashers—or brewers or keg-washers. What’s going on? Today we have a special Beeronomics edition of the show, wherein Patrick will give us the scoop. He’ll provide an overview of the labor industry, explain what drives worker shortages, and how salaries fit into the equation.

Picture: Farmers Brewing

Today we’re going to try something new. Over on his blog, Jeff has an ongoing series called “Making of a Classic,” which investigates why certain beers have become world standards over the decades. They contain a bit of history, a bit of ethnography, and often a bit of technology. We’re going to kick things off today with a beer you’re all familiar with: Guinness Draught. It seems as unchanging as it is ubiquitous, yet it has gone through tremendous change since its early origins at the start of the 19th century. As a special treat, we also have the voice of the man who created the final, and current, version of the beer.

Pliny was a bright light in the fog. Despite its hurricane of flavors, it was more focused, refined, and elegant than other IPAs of the day. With the benefit of time, we can see that it reset expectations about what was possible, pointing to the future we now inhabit.