Beervana Blog Posts

The New Project

I'm just beginning year eight of full-time writing, and the project of supporting myself remains a work in progress. Writing itself pays crap, as most people are no doubt aware. There is a tier of professional nonfiction writing that is very lucrative (your Ta Nahisi Coates, Michael Lewises, and Malcolm Gladwells). Somewhere below that tier is the one I'm on--where it's possible to publish books and articles to your heart's content and still not make enough to live on. The entire enterprise of publishing--newspapers, magazines, books, online--has been hemorrhaging money for years, and there's less and less of it to go around.

Jeff AlworthJanuary 6, 2017Meta, writing life Comments

Posts of the Year Analyzed

Indulge me, if you will, with one last end-of-the-year post. As part of my year-end routine, I went back and looked at the top posts of the year, as measured by the number of direct visits--which basically indicates which posts went viral. When people start sharing my posts on social media, it sends people to direct links, and Google tracks those. Now, of course, there's no arguing that every post on this blog is a delight, so there are no wrong answers here. And yet...

Jeff AlworthJanuary 4, 2017Meta, best of, blogging, traffic patterns, year in review Comment

The Year in Pictures

A look back at my perambulations over the past year. This may or may not be the final year-end post--even though we're trotting merrily into 2017. (Click any photo to enlarge and get an (uncaptioned) slide show.)

Jeff AlworthJanuary 3, 2017Pictures, year in reviewComment

Thirty Years in Portland

My grandparents arrived in Eastern Oregon in the 1930s and raised their two daughters in various farming communities. One of them stayed, married, and has been farming around Vale since the 1950s. But one of them--my mom--decided to head off to the big city to seek her fortune. Thus was I born and raised (mostly) in Boise, Idaho. I made my way back to Oregon to attend college here, arriving when I was just a few years younger than my grandparents had been fifty years before me. That was 1986.

MeditationJeff AlworthDecember 31, 2016Portland, beer history, history Comments

Satori Award for 2016

In Zen Buddhism, satori is the moment of sudden enlightenment when the mind realizes its own true nature. The Satori Award honors a debuting beer that in a single instant, through the force of tastiness and elan, produces a flash of insight into the nature of beer. I award it for the beer released in the previous year (roughly) by an Oregon brewery (roughly) for a regular or seasonal beer.

Beer Sherpa RecommendsJeff AlworthDecember 28, 2016Satori Award Comment

Vignette #9: Stéphane Bogaert (St. Germain)

“Everybody thinks Belgium when you say beer. In this region, we are not so famous compared to Belgian breweries--but the history is the same.... That’s why I say to my colleagues that they should write ‘bière de garde’ on the label because it’s profitable for everybody. We want to be different from Belgium and we want the people, especially in America, talk about French beer. Bière de garde is something you can say, okay, it’s a French style.

VignetteJeff AlworthDecember 23, 2016vignetteComment

The Sacred and the Profane

Boak and Bailey direct us to a report by Britain's Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA), which is trying to figure out what its mission is in the age of craft beer. This presents the organization with an entirely new set of challenges than the ones it was created to address. Confronted with an influx of mass market lagers and cheapo non-cask knockoffs, a group of drinkers in the 1970s set about trying to protect full-flavored ales served on natural carbonation at the pub.

Jeff AlworthDecember 21, 2016 Comments

Satori Time of Year

Jeff AlworthDecember 19, 2016Satori Award, year in reviewComment

Won't A.I. Beer Inevitably Result in Bud Light?

Paging through Google search results, I see they got a massive amount of press for this, nearly all of it happy to goose the hype machine. (Admittedly, combining "AI" and "beer" is genius clickbait and I kick myself for not thinking of it first.) For some reason, there's a new round of hype, which is how I stumbled on this just now.

Jeff AlworthDecember 16, 2016algorithms, science Comments

Asahi Snags Urquell

Asahi is an interesting company. It was the first brewery to introduce "dry beer" back in 1987, and Asahi Super Dry became an influential hit in Japan. That allowed the company to grow, and it began doing all those things we expect from big breweries: entering in agreements with other bigs (Miller, 1995), expanding into other markets (five breweries in China opened by 1999), adding liquor to its portfolio (early '00s), and finally adding food products a couple years later.

Jeff AlworthDecember 13, 2016 Comments