Roundup the First of Session #124: Late, Lamented Loves

At a time when beer dorks seem obsessed with what's new and what's next, I thought, in this month's edition of The Session, we might take a refreshing pause to look back on beers that we remember fondly but which are no more.

Once again, apologies for the extreme lateness of the announcement of this topic. I'm doing a roundup here of those who met the 24-hour challenge. For those who could not, never fear! Send me links to your posts at annarborbeer@gmail.com or tweet me at @allthebrews in the days and weeks ahead. I'll do another roundup later in the month, if need be.

Before getting to the roundup, I'll briefly mention my own late, lamented beer loves. I have two in mind, one from my halcyon beer-discovering days in the 1990s and one of much more recent vintage.

Craft Beer Culture: Has It Jumped the Shark Or Do You People Just Need to Get Off My Lawn?

In a 2011 interview, Dogfish Head founder Sam Calagione famously referred to the craft beer industry as being “99 percent asshole-free.” At the time, it sounded about right. Maybe it still is. But craft beer’s exponentially increasing popularity has brought a host of new people into the fold, and when one takes a look at the larger beer community these days, one has reason to suspect that Calagione’s estimate may need to be adjusted downward.

I confess: It’s going to be difficult to make what I want to say sound like anything other than the gripings of an aging curmudgeon – or even one of Calagione’s assholes. But hear me out.

Lately I’m finding that I’m just not excited by the same things that so many more recent “beer converts” get worked up over. At Literature & Libation, Oliver Gray noted he was feeling something akin to a “beer midlife crisis.” If there is such a thing, I can think of many symptoms of this malaise.

A Brief History of a Bygone Brewery

This month's edition of The Session, aka Beer Blogging Friday, a regular roundtable of beer bloggers writing on a chosen subject, concerns local brewery history. Host Reuben Gray of The Tale of the Ale asked for a profile of a local brewery at least 20 years old, and as none of Ann Arbor's current breweries meet that criterion, I reached back in time to talk about one of the city's 19th-century establishments. And I'm a little late, so this is Beer Blogging Saturday.

I decided to write Ann Arbor Beer: A Hoppy History of Tree Town Brewing for two reasons. The first is that I already knew this Midwestern college town — like so many other older towns across America — had a solid pre-Prohibition brewing history. The second is that I also knew, apart from some scattered newspaper mentions over the years, that nobody had really bothered to seriously document any of this history.

Enter me. I did it. I answered the siren call of The History Press, a small publisher with a series of books out about the beer histories of various cities throughout the several states. It was a chore made so much easier by Ann Arbor’s colorful past.

Whither Beer Journalism?

“If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly,” G.K. Chesterton famously wrote in defense of hobbyists and amateurs. He wasn’t talking about beer writing, but “badly” does describe how a lot of the contributions to this relatively new and growing field are being done these days.

For years I’ve been saying to anyone sober enough to listen that one of my aims was to help make modern beer writing live up to the quality of all the great beers actually being brewed. That’s still what I try to do, but part of me also thinks the easily accessible arena of beer writing is actually part of its charm.