40 Years in Beer is a memoir of my life and times in the beer business. The first of these serialized installments came into being in 2022, the 40th anniversary of my inaugural shift in 1982 at Scoreboard Liquors in New Albany, Indiana.
Having sadly duped myself into thinking there’d be little to say (from me, really?), two years of writing have passed since then, and in mid-2024 I’ve just now made it to 1994 in the narrative.
Yep, this might take a while. Not only that, but apart from writing about beer, I’m not even directly involved in the beer biz at the present time, having lost my most recent beer programming gig at Pints&union in November, 2023.
But writing about beer counts, too. I’ve been doing it for a very long time.
I now have a page at my web site dedicated to a numerical listing of the installments (from the first to the most recent), preceded by the short-term schedule of what’s in the hopper. The current series word count as of 5 August is 139,351 — and I’ve only made it to 1994.
The “40 Years in Beer Compendium”: links, previews, and coming attractions
Note that today’s featured photo is of the brewmaster at Birra Tirana (Albania) in 1994, which I wrote about last week.
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When beer writer Jeff Alworth recently dove into the Oregon brewing industry during the course of building a “Celebrate Oregon Beer” website, something funny happened. The number of Oregon breweries Alworth ended up with was 30% fewer than the official tally recorded by the Brewers Association.
There are many reasons why such discrepancies occur, ranging from confusion in the aftermath of COVID to questions of definition (do all of a brewery’s taprooms count? Do any?), but the overarching conclusion is two-fold; first, 30% is a lot, and second, if this error rate is applied to American breweries as a whole, we’re all likely repeating bad information.
The real issue is that a lot of the breweries on the Brewers Association’s list, at least in Oregon, don’t exist. So how many breweries does the US contain? Probably more than 7,000, but certainly not 10,000. We should quit using that figure.
Meanwhile, writing at his web site, Kevin Gibson documents the utterly novel concept of a local brewery promotion that actually pertains to local beer – as opposed to corn hole, karaoke, Star Wars trivia or the lingering idiocy of hard seltzer: It’s Kentucky Common...Read more
