[00:00:05] Speaker A: Anchor brewing still hasn't hit the floor yet.
[00:00:07] Speaker B: American craft beer faces a bitter winter.
[00:00:10] Speaker A: Firestone Walker's quest to reboot the american pale ale.
[00:00:13] Speaker B: This is it's all beer.
Welcome to it's all beer, the official beer related podcast of the 20 presidential election. As we gear up for some premium vote tastic voting, we are here to make sure the craft beer scene is ready. So this week, a sanity self check, just to check to see if you are, in fact, sane enough for optimal voteage proficiency. Since the election will almost certainly be once again between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, which of the following would you rather do than be asked to participate in this abortion of democracy? A. Shove a splintery piece of wood up your urethra, jiggle it around till you pass out, and see God perform a self kidney transplant between you and a sea mammal chosen by your dumbest friends? C lay down in front of the treads of a bulldozer being operated by an Alzheimer's patient, learning how to run the machine via a series of YouTube videos, or d, none of the above. You are actually excited about one of these candidates and look forward to voting for them again. If you answered A, B, or C, you are sane. If you answered D, please seek therapy sometime between now and the 1 November. I am Jeremy Jones. Hi, Tyler. How are you doing?
[00:01:26] Speaker A: Good. That opening was way too long, and I thought it was hilarious because I was like, oh, man, did he write that? Before we had all the technical issues, trying to get this recorded about the shit show that is presidential elections, I was like, this is perfect. And then you kept rambling on, and I was like, and now I feel like I'm watching a presidential debate. Everyone's talking and nobody makes sense.
[00:01:53] Speaker B: I said, we're gearing it up.
I did write that, and I was trying to figure out something witty to say about the fact that this trying to get this goddamn thing recorded has been a goddamn nightmare. And we are still having some issues on Tyler's end. For some reason, in a mysterious. For mysterious reasons, the universe is, like, making him shut up at first until he's talking for a little bit.
[00:02:21] Speaker A: It's like, no one needs to hear this first.
[00:02:26] Speaker B: You, Tyler might.
He'll fade in at weird times. I don't know. I don't know how to fix this. This is just what's going to happen, and I'm tired of trying. Tyler, how are you today? Besides us fucking with.
[00:02:40] Speaker A: Doing pretty well, except, yeah, I think this is the universe telling us we just need to go back to in.
[00:02:48] Speaker B: That'S. I believe that is true.
We don't have as many technical issues when we're in the same room.
Some more flatulence, but fewer technical issues.
[00:03:02] Speaker A: Yeah. Hey, flatulence just destroyed a flight, so, I mean.
[00:03:06] Speaker B: Tyler, what are you drinking today?
[00:03:09] Speaker A: I am drinking some of the willatized stout from laganitas.
[00:03:13] Speaker B: Did they get some in town?
[00:03:20] Speaker A: I bought it at Whole Foods in Boise the other day. Still love the price point. 1299 for a sick pack of barrel aged stout aged in willett rye barrels at 12.4%. Like, you can't beat that.
[00:03:38] Speaker B: I apparently need to yell at my CSB rep.
[00:03:41] Speaker A: Apparently?
[00:03:43] Speaker B: Well, yeah, it's a long story, but, yeah. That particular distributor showing once again why they are Idaho's top beer selling organization.
[00:03:56] Speaker A: Yeah, because there was a whole stack of them at Whole foods.
[00:04:01] Speaker B: Maybe I don't want it after all. If it's like, there's a stack of it.
[00:04:06] Speaker A: They just had a floor stack.
[00:04:08] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:04:09] Speaker A: It's only, like, a four case display.
[00:04:12] Speaker B: How is it this year?
[00:04:14] Speaker A: Delicious. Boozy, little, like, rice spice, vanilla notes coming through. Silky chocolate. The best barrel aged stout for the buck.
[00:04:25] Speaker B: Fair enough.
I was toying with the idea of, like, I'm not actually doing dry January. I'm kind of doing what I typically do was, like, a slightly moist January.
Not really a commitment of any kind. More just after, like, two straight months.
[00:04:46] Speaker A: You're fooling around. Yeah.
[00:04:48] Speaker B: I'm just like, I need to just back it up a little bit, let things kind of heal. But I was thinking about bringing an NA beer for this recording in solidarity for those who are in the middle of dry January.
But the state of the world and then these fucking technical issues made that a non starter. I decided I needed booze, and so I went ahead and grabbed. I've been waiting for three days to open this goddamn beer.
The mother Earth urban solstice Hazy IPA is their latest.
[00:05:29] Speaker A: Oh, I saw that. How is that?
[00:05:30] Speaker B: The latest release from their project X series.
It is. As you'd expect. It pours nice, hazy, sunny in a glass.
Big, bright notes of orange peel, mango, papaya, touch of pine, little bit of dankness. It is.
Big flavor. Really nice mouthfeel.
It's a hazy ipa in everything that a hazy IPA should be nice.
Nothing overly fantastic, but solid. Extremely good.
And the burps taste a bit like candied orange.
That's a factor. I feel like that is left out of beer. Judging that should be a factor. Like, burps tasted like such and such. Because sometimes a good beer burp that can change your opinion about it or a bad one. Really?
[00:06:33] Speaker A: I don't know if I've ever had a beer burp. Change my opinion about a beer.
[00:06:39] Speaker B: Then you have not thought about your beer sufficiently, Tyler. You've never once like, oh, I liked that beer going down. But just me, I think it's just you too.
If a bad beer or a good one has changed your opinion about a beer, you should send that email into it's
[email protected]. Put it in the subject heading. Jeremy is right.
[00:07:11] Speaker A: Yeah. And everyone else who's like, yeah, I have no idea what he's talking about, is going to do the normal thing and not send anything to us. So when we get no emails to the email, that'll just be proof that I am right, you are wrong.
[00:07:27] Speaker B: Don't make me send an email to ours. You don't check the email. So you have no way of verifying what I'm winging.
[00:07:35] Speaker A: I will be like, I need to see the email.
[00:07:38] Speaker B: Okay.
I can fake an email with the best of anywho, Tyler. Part of it is because it's late in the evening and I'm in and fuck, it's been a long day and I'm tired. But Tyler, do you want to kick us off today?
[00:07:59] Speaker A: Favorite story of 2023 2024 is when will anchor Brewery finally fucking flatline?
[00:08:09] Speaker B: It's not. It's not going to die.
The dream is still alive. Don't stop believing, Tyler.
Just clap. Just fucking clap or the goddamn brewery is dying.
If you believe in fairies and or anchor, keep clapping, motherfucker.
[00:08:31] Speaker A: I will never clap again in my life. Now.
[00:08:36] Speaker B: Are you going to do that weird finger waving thing they did at some, I don't know, there's a college campus thing like they down clapping, too aggressive. So they started wiggling their fingers. Go ahead.
[00:08:50] Speaker A: So this is an article from NBC, Bay Area, that bidders are competing to buy anchor Brewing. So building equipment, IP, all of that's getting ready to go up for auction.
Some people are trying to buy it all as a bundle. Some people are just trying to buy the IP. Some people are just trying to buy the property or the equipment itself, according to Sam Singer, an anchor Brewing spokesperson.
In the last category, though, where they're trying to buy the whole kitten caboodle, you have Mike Walsh, who is a local venture capitalist out of San Francisco and has lived two blocks from the brewery for the last 30 years.
Walsh said their goal is to make the beer right here.
He is leading one of the groups that is going to try to buy anchor Brewery at the auction as a whole kit and caboodle package where you get the building equipment, IP, everything.
[00:10:03] Speaker B: And he's trying to resurrect anchor brewing, is what I understand.
His goal is to bring anchor back regionally. Regionally.
[00:10:13] Speaker A: And they will go back to the old labels.
Fucking scrap the twisted tea wannabe rebrand.
They're in San Francisco and northern California. And so really kind of from what I took from that part of the article, it seems like they're going to just shrink their distribution, which is kind of shocking to plan.
[00:10:40] Speaker B: Well, that was Sapporo's first plan before they were just. And their plan was less like, you know, we're just going to go to California. Actually, we're closing was.
[00:10:51] Speaker A: But with how much you're probably going to have to dump into this to buy it. You would think they'd try to keep that nationwide distribution for one more year.
Do one quick like, aren't you nostalgic that we're back and we're back in the old labels and so bummed we were going to be away, but now we're back and we look all nostalgic. You should buy some and get that nice little bump in sales before. After the end of the year, everyone goes, oh, yeah, I remember now why I don't drink anchor back onto my normal life. And you watch your sales tank again. And then you pull back to just northern California and, ah, there we go.
[00:11:41] Speaker B: I'm guessing if you're buying anchor at this point in time, profitability is not first and foremost on your mind.
If you can make this son of a bitch break even, I think you're doing a happy dance on the streets.
[00:12:00] Speaker A: The main concern, Walsh said, was he's worried that a conglomerate or a real estate investor might win the biding on the building and convert it all into condos without the understanding of what the brewery means to the locals.
And so he is really pushing to win this to be able to keep the brewery alive, keep brewing there in San Francisco, let the community kind of tap into it, start doing live music shows there. And according to Sam Singer, the spokesperson of Anchor, we should have a finalist for the brewery could be announced as early as next week, and they will be making, the super bidder will be made public at least by the end of March. So apparently there's a super bidder trying to buy something, and I have no idea what the fuck that.
[00:13:15] Speaker B: Like.
That sounds like someone trying to buy again the whole thing.
Or either that or Marvel is real and they're trying to get into craft beer.
[00:13:28] Speaker A: Oh, my God. Could you imagine a Disney owned craft brewery?
I mean, we're already going to see that stupid fucking mouse all over, like, fillating itself all over craft beer labels. Since it's now entered public domain in.
[00:13:44] Speaker B: 2024, I've not seen any auto fellatio of any kind on a beer label yet. Never mind. And it's only steamboat Willie.
Mickey Mouse.
[00:13:58] Speaker A: Yeah. Steamboat Willie's going to be getting brown eyed.
[00:14:03] Speaker B: Not on a beer label. I mean, yes.
You think we're going to see some erotic mouse art on a can in the next year?
[00:14:18] Speaker A: We saw reindeers fucking a couple years ago.
[00:14:21] Speaker B: Yeah, but we didn't see Winnie the Pooh. Fuck. Winnie the Pooh entered the public domain last year.
And fun fact, Tigger entered this year.
Personally, this is my opinion, not popular. But Tigger is way more fuckable than Mickey Mouse.
[00:14:41] Speaker A: Mickey Mouse has the brand name recognition, so they will go Mickey Mouse. Winnie the Pooh's, like, hit or miss whether people are like, oh, but look how much money fucking Disney makes. And everyone fucking hates Disney. So the chance they can get to stick it to old Walt by sticking it to steamboat Willie, he's going to be whistling his way all to the frozen ice.
[00:15:04] Speaker B: Except for you think that beer labels are going to hate fuck Mickey Mouse.
Again, I think you cut out right there. But that was, I think, an affirmative from Tyler. Is that right?
Okay. Yes. Keep on saying yes until it comes yes.
[00:15:26] Speaker A: That's what Mickey's going to be saying. He's going to be. Yes.
[00:15:30] Speaker B: You got to do higher, Tyler. You almost got the right voice.
[00:15:41] Speaker A: But we should know. And this whole anchor kerfuffle drama, let's just euthanize these fucks. Should be done here soon.
[00:15:52] Speaker B: Again, you seem to be of the might. The super bidder might well also be trying to resurrect anchor.
[00:16:00] Speaker A: If you're going to spend that much money, convert that bitch into condos and actually make some money.
[00:16:05] Speaker B: Well, I do believe that the employee consortium, or collector is still a factor up to this point in time. In my notes, they raised like half a million dollars, which is impressive. Extremely impressive, but nowhere near enough they need.
It's almost a shame that they are trying to buy anchor. You almost kind of go, guys.
Go start another brewery. Not like there's any other property in San Francisco that's much cheaper.
[00:16:53] Speaker A: Yeah, I was going to say fuck you couldn't even get a year's worth of rent in San Francisco for that.
[00:16:57] Speaker B: I guess it's probably inconceivable. To move all the employees en masse to somewhere cheaper.
[00:17:07] Speaker A: Fuck them. Brewers are dime a dozen these days.
[00:17:11] Speaker B: Yeah, let's move them to Idaho just to fuck with half the.
Just be like, oh, they're coming up here, taking our jobs.
[00:17:21] Speaker A: But, sir, you're against alcohol. Yeah, but they're still taking our jobs.
Jeremy, what do we got next?
[00:17:32] Speaker B: Everything is awful news. Now, scanning through the news this month, you might be forgiven for thinking we are living in the end times. The holy land is blowing up, the world is on fire, and all the fucking beer is going away.
The news in your area you've probably seen in the last few months, a brewery near you go belly up like a fish in a tank full of vodka.
I did a quick scan this month alone.
[00:17:58] Speaker A: I did try to have a goldfish and a bottle of Jack Daniels.
[00:18:02] Speaker B: How'd it.
[00:18:05] Speaker A: Jack Daniels?
But I didn't rinse it good enough in college, and so came home and the fish was dead.
[00:18:13] Speaker B: Okay, but there wasn't whiskey in the bottle.
[00:18:16] Speaker A: No, I put water in, but I didn't apparently get all the whiskey out. And so, yeah, that fish was probably fucked up, screaming a freebird before it went blunk.
[00:18:28] Speaker B: Of course you've killed a fish with alcohol.
Why would anybody assume anything different from you?
[00:18:34] Speaker A: I mean, we also bought some beta fish to try to have beta fish fights in college, too, but we were drunk and didn't realize we bought the females, which won't fight each other. So we were like, well, this is boring.
Now what are we going to do?
[00:19:01] Speaker B: And that was a glimpse into Tyler's dark inner soul right there. Let's get some fish. Watch them fight. They're not really fighting. This sucks. Get the toilet.
Just out of curiosity. Just out of curiosity, the goldfish, did you actually oxygenate the water?
You're looking at me as if you were like, I don't know what you're talking about. You need to have oxygen in the water for fish to live, too.
[00:19:30] Speaker A: I did. I shook up the bottle.
[00:19:32] Speaker B: Oh, Christ.
All right, assuming that. Let's just assume for a second that alcohol didn't kill this fish. I know this is way off topic, but now we have to go into this. Tyler, assuming alcohol did not kill that fish, what was your plan on keeping this fish alive?
[00:19:50] Speaker A: Well, as soon as I got home, it died. I was like, oh, you know, I may have not thought this all the way through.
[00:20:05] Speaker B: That fish was doomed.
[00:20:07] Speaker A: But, hey, it was. Either it dies in a Jack Daniels bottle or it died at the Walmart.
Shit. Options. Either way.
[00:20:17] Speaker B: At least it got to live a little bit. Anyway, according to the Sacramento Golden Road, Sacramento is calling it quits. This comes from a rather lukewarm welcome for the formerly ab inbevobe purveyor of mango flavored beer like beverages.
[00:20:41] Speaker A: Ab still owned Golden Road.
[00:20:42] Speaker B: Do they still own gold? I thought that was one of the ones they let go of.
[00:20:46] Speaker A: No, I think they kept them in, though.
[00:20:48] Speaker B: Okay, well, then strike the formerly the ab inbev owned purveyor of mango flavored beer like beverages. Like many places after the sale, Golden Road got a little side eye from the locals being owned by the craft curious conglomerate.
[00:21:07] Speaker A: They'Re still owned by.
[00:21:09] Speaker B: They also managed to score a rare, no strings attached alcohol license in California.
I guess that means you can pour beer and not have to give a handy to Arnold Schwarzenegger. But apparently this gave them also, Arnold.
[00:21:25] Speaker A: Schwarzenegger only gets jerked off by maids. Okay.
[00:21:29] Speaker B: This apparently gave them the ability to blast music at all hours of the night, among other things, which also angered nearby residents. But yeah, that tap room is now officially gone.
Eater.com reports that Winwood Brewery out of Florida will be closing its Miami tap room, although the brewery will continue on. It's kind of a contract brewery. Winwood was actually Miami's first craft brewery that got swept up in the craft brew alliance buy up.
Now that one, I think was, I don't know. I couldn't find what happened that wasn't part of the still might be Ab inBev.
[00:22:15] Speaker A: No, I think Ab sold them off a while ago or Craft brew Alliance sold them off.
[00:22:20] Speaker B: Craft beer alliance still remains Tyler's favorite beer deal.
[00:22:26] Speaker A: It's a thing of beauty.
[00:22:28] Speaker B: They were an early powerhouse with several GABF awards in the mid teens, but it seems like they, like a lot of legacy brands, have sort of dropped below the radar for lot of drinkers. The Philadelphia Enquirer announced that forgotten Boardwalk has popped its clogs after a disagreement with a landlord. It seems that the owners of the brewery wanted to stay and brew beer, and the owners felt the exact opposite.
They basically pulled the lease out from under the brewery, leaving them to the end of February to pour what beer they have. And that's it.
The funny thing is that building used to hold the original flying Fish brewery before they moved. That brewery also announced they were closing last month.
The street reported that vanilla pass out of Colorado and exito brewworks out of Florida both filed for chapter eleven. This week. Eater Austin announced the closure of Beerberg Brewing, the owner announced this month on Instagram quote, there's not one single issue we can point out, but rather a confluence of social, cultural and economic changes which made the whole brewery become an unsustainable business.
News Channel 34 reports that Water street brewing out of New York is calling it quits after this month. They point to a loss of nearby parking garage, making it hard for people to get to where they are.
WLWT out of Kentucky says that 16 lots southern outposts will close down this week unless they get some help from customers. On a Facebook post, they basically said this week is their last. Unless it's not like they don't want it to be. But it might be. So come out and buy beer, because it might be the last time. But if you buy enough beer, maybe it won't be.
That was kind of how it sounded.
The Harold net out of Washington reports that pen Grove brewing is being put out to pasture. The Patriot Ledger signs that article 15 brewing is fucking right off, citing the burdens of inflation, the rising cost of materials, equipment, maintenance, combined with constant regulatory challenges. Chapelborough.com out of North Carolina reports that Craftborough was saying in an announcement, quote, our financial and emotional resources are exhausted and it breaks our heart to close Craftborough. Yet this is the only option left.
Those, of course, are the ones large enough for local media to report on, and it's probably not better for those not big enough or without a legacy or a following or just kind of quietly close the doors in the middle of the night.
All in all, the brewers association reports last year, 420 breweries opened and 385 closed.
[00:25:23] Speaker A: Yeah, well, also, real quick, while you were reading that off it, I felt like I just tuned into the local news. Just hearing bad news after bad news after bad news.
[00:25:35] Speaker B: That's what I was going for. Happy 2024.
[00:25:40] Speaker A: But wanted to also add to that brew crew brewing out of New Orleans that I went to on my bachelor party posted four days ago on their Facebook that they are kind of in the dire straits and they had to take some pretty tough loans to get through the whole Covid-19 pandemic.
And with the kind of never ending cycle of rising cost of goods and really just struggling to get cheap equipment, cheap labor, and the rising cost of all that, they're struggling to pay back those loans and may have to shut down and are running a GoFundMe right now, which normally I'm pretty apt to talk, breweries trying to go fund me, that they can stay open because I really like their beer and they've been crushing the lager game.
[00:26:54] Speaker B: So let me get this straight anchor brewery puts something out on GoFundMe. You're like, fuck them. I hope they die.
I want to be there to shoot them in the head and pee on their corpse. And then this little Breonna, New Orleans, like, yeah, I want them to live.
[00:27:10] Speaker A: Yeah, they make better beer.
[00:27:13] Speaker B: Just want to see what your priorities are. I don't know.
[00:27:18] Speaker A: They only need 30 grand to stay afloat, and they've already raised 11,000.
Part of why I put a bullet in anchor's head is I know this GoFundMe is never going to buy the brewery back from Sapporo.
They are done. Cooked kit, caboodle.
[00:27:42] Speaker B: Not yet. It's not done yet.
[00:27:46] Speaker A: It's done.
[00:27:50] Speaker B: Notably, there are still more openings and closings. But the attitude I believe in the industry is distinctly morbid, and for good reason.
Yeah, we just went over the cost of all the materials to make the beer is shot up. Hiring people has gotten more expensive now that workers have options and customers throw a massive princess tantrum. As you so much even think about rising the price of a pint of beer, a dollar. But to be fair, here in Boise, the $6 is now on the low end these days, and I'm getting close to donning a tierra and a pretty, pretty two two myself. If I see prices creep ever closer to the $10 mark.
[00:28:34] Speaker A: Dude, also, I got a problem. Why the fuck can I drink at a bar cheaper than I can drink at a fucking brewery?
[00:28:42] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:28:43] Speaker A: All these breweries in town charging eight fucking dollars for a middle of the road fucking beer. I'm like, suck my ass.
[00:28:55] Speaker B: Please tell me that is how you approach the bar. You go to the local breweries, go up there and give that speech.
[00:29:06] Speaker A: If it was the fucking owner, I'd be like, what the fuck are you doing?
[00:29:11] Speaker B: It's like, I'm trying to live, man.
[00:29:15] Speaker A: I'd be like, bro, if you can't survive not selling $8 pints, just fucking shutter. You shouldn't have opened this bitch in the first place.
[00:29:28] Speaker B: That's financial advice from Tyler.
You should start a consulting firm. Really? Where we take you from brewery to brewery. Be like, bitch, you shouldn't be even opening this in the first place. This is all wrong. Your beer tastes of hot garbage. Shut it all down. Go home.
[00:29:47] Speaker A: We should.
[00:29:49] Speaker B: What do you mean, we?
[00:29:50] Speaker A: And that'll be $5,000, sir.
[00:29:53] Speaker B: If anything, I'm just like, your transportation.
I'm just kind of your assistant just behind you, like, sir, you got an appointment with three breweries today, so can we hurry this up. I got a little headset.
You've only got ten more minutes to berate this man, sir, and then we have to move on.
[00:30:16] Speaker A: Hey, I mean, John Taper from bar rescue basically does that and he makes a fuckload of money.
[00:30:24] Speaker B: But I'm inclined to believe. And Chris McKellen of Men's Health wrote an article this week that backs my conviction up. We're seeing two things. First, Covid supply shocks, and frankly, environmental factors that have hit craft beer harder than some other industries. And something happened after Covid. And there's been numerous studies that suggest that people driven inside during the pandemic haven't yet come out. They developed habits in 2020. They sat at home, they had all their shit delivered to them, and they rather like that. They haven't left their home since.
[00:31:07] Speaker A: Fucking hermits.
[00:31:09] Speaker B: And so combine that with craft beer's fading coolness factor, I think it's fair to say the market is worse for craft beer than some sectors of the economy. But overall, what you're seeing is a maturing market.
That's been my position until I see data that contradicts that. It's kind of where I'll stay.
A healthy market. You're going to have roughly the same number of entities entering a business as leaving it in a given year. And that's where we kind of are. Like I said, the 2023 numbers, 420 breweries opened, 385 closed.
[00:31:47] Speaker A: Yes. And that's honestly where we should be.
[00:31:50] Speaker B: Which is, I mean, that's pretty damn close. That's still 35 more breweries than we had in 2022.
[00:32:03] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:32:06] Speaker B: Even during the height of COVID as we reported, more breweries opened than closed. Despite the warning on every headline in every newspaper in every part of the country that half the breweries were going to close. And I think there is this narrative at this point in time that craft beer is a dying business. And news organizations who enjoy a good story as much, if not more than most of us, just run with it. I will say this.
Five years ago, when a brewery opened, you had to give them some leeway. That first year or so was kind of tough as they figured their shit. I figured out how to make beer and how to make it not suck. The breweries opened especially here last year. I didn't make it out to all of them, but they were solid. Nothing earth shattering, but no diastole bombs.
No, just super unbalanced IPA. They're making good beer.
[00:33:06] Speaker A: The baseline has risen.
[00:33:07] Speaker B: Yeah, there are a lot of breweries that go out. When they first started, you tasted like, well, they'll get better or they won't.
And most of them did. A couple did not. And they are on the verge of insolvency, some of them.
And there's another factor.
This is a skewed. The list I read is skewed. I think, again, they are mostly older breweries that have ties to communities. Thus people kind of care that they're going under, which makes the story worth reporting on.
But I feel like you're also getting a cohort of people who started breweries in the, have run them for like 20 years. A lot of these people were older to begin with. This was kind of their second career.
A lot of them left corporate America and were doing this as kind of a swan song. And after 20 years of struggling and putting in insane hours, they're kind of done. And I'd say I don't really.
Reading some of these stories, you kind of get this sense of exhaustion where there's nothing in there that indicates it. But I suspect that if this were 20 years ago, they would have fought. They would figured out a way to make this work.
Craft beer was notorious for just barely getting by. And after 20 years of just getting by, barely getting by, they were kind of like, we're done.
This is no longer fun.
We want to cash out and we want to go live on a golf course or something. I don't know what people after craft brew think live on a golf course, actually, probably.
But the, the other, the other factor, the beer isn't cool. The research suggests that, yeah, the damn kids in Gen Z aren't embracing the beer with the dough eyed gleefulness that our cohort did. But I don't know. Do we think this is going to go on forever? Craft beer, for all its hoopla, is a niche market. Give it a decade or two. And Gen Alpha, because so named because we were dumb, we started naming generations at the end of the fucking Alphabet.
I wonder if that's because it was the. We just assumed that we'd blow ourselves up before we got to Z. But anyway, that's neither here nor there. Gen Alpha or whatever fucking name they will come up for the cohort that would include both Declan and Parker. So there we go.
Maybe they will grow up and like my interest in vinyl records, they will dress up in their best flannel and oversized glasses and go down and hey, like, yeah, look, I'm drinking an ipa like my dad used to.
[00:36:19] Speaker A: Oh, fuck, I hope not.
[00:36:23] Speaker B: Look, we're being vintage. Like, fuck you, children. Fuck you.
[00:36:28] Speaker A: And then we'll be in the nursing home being like, back in our day, fat tire used to be an amber ale. And they'll be like, what's fat tire? You mean voodoo Ranger?
[00:36:39] Speaker B: In my imagining of this, they are in their. Which puts us. I mean, not in. That puts us in our honest.
[00:36:52] Speaker A: We work in the beer industry.
That's like 150.
[00:36:59] Speaker B: I didn't think it was going to be. I'm just saying not nursing home at that point, if I'm still alive.
[00:37:08] Speaker A: You barely have control of your bowels.
[00:37:10] Speaker B: Now, which is why I'm wearing a diaper now. See, I'm going to continue this game going and actually, that's a lie. I control my bowels just fine. The diaper I'm wearing, that's a fetish thing. Tyler, what's next?
Yes, I wanted to end the story with that. I didn't know that was how I was going to end that story, but that is how I'm ending that story, and I feel good about it.
[00:37:38] Speaker A: Well, Utah brewery not named Wasp after squatters just got served a cease and desist from the church, Jesus Christ of latter day saints.
[00:37:51] Speaker B: Hallelujah.
[00:37:55] Speaker A: Because of roll, please. Their deserette IPA.
[00:38:01] Speaker B: Wait, that's a copyrighted name, so bewilder.
[00:38:06] Speaker A: Brewing Company out of Salt Lake announced in a newsletter that it will phase out the Deserette IPA and replace it with a new product. They said, unfortunately, a large, tax exempt, Utah based entity wasn't pleased with our use of the word deseret.
We have been asked to drop our trademark and discontinue the brand. Filings with the US patent and trademark office show the brewery registered it last August. The church and a few affiliated business entities then submitted filings as potential opposers, and a bewilder abandoned the trademark in November.
They are claiming that by bewilder having the Deseret IPA, it can cause marketplace confusion, especially since.
[00:39:11] Speaker B: No, go ahead.
We'll enjoy that nugget in a second.
[00:39:17] Speaker A: Especially since they oppose alcohol use and their members from drinking alcohol.
So they said their members would never think the owner of Bewilder said their members would never think that the Lds church was putting a beer out.
He noted the church owned all alcohol production in the state at one point. So little hypocritical, but the word deseret is from the Book of Mormon and means honeybee, which is an animal associated with industriousness and hard work.
In the early 18 hundreds or in the 1840s, early Mormons wanted Utah to be called the state of deseret, but the federal government basically told them to fuck off. At that time, Deseret Ipa used honey, so they thought it was a.
I didn't know that. Great.
[00:40:25] Speaker B: That's what Deseret had to do with. What language does deseret mean, honey be.
Is it one of the ones they read out of a fucking hat?
[00:40:34] Speaker A: Basically. Okay, so in the Book of Mormon, they use deseret to describe honeybees.
[00:40:42] Speaker B: Okay, so the only thing almost is made up as Scientology.
[00:40:48] Speaker A: Yes.
So the owner of Bewilder said, I don't have any money to fight the Mormon church, so we're just going to move on from that beer.
[00:40:58] Speaker B: That's fair.
[00:41:02] Speaker A: The church did not respond to axio's request for comment, but they did bring up how the church manted a legal challenge against real housewife Heather Gay's bad Mormon trademark and have went after some coffee shops and other businesses for using images that relate to the.
[00:41:29] Speaker B: You made.
You're very coy about.
There's no.
[00:41:36] Speaker A: It's Taylor'sville coffee shop used little, like, gold angel.
[00:41:43] Speaker B: The Moroni statue.
[00:41:44] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:41:46] Speaker B: What we need to do is, now that it's quasi legal, have Mickey Mouse putting that trumpet right up Moroni's little.
[00:41:57] Speaker A: The.
[00:41:58] Speaker B: Or vice versa.
[00:42:00] Speaker A: Taking the trumpet up Mickey Mouse's keyster.
[00:42:06] Speaker B: While Tigger bounces on. You know what? Let's stop.
Actually bounces on a desiree. Two thirds of that is legal.
[00:42:18] Speaker A: Winnie the Pooh and Tigger. Too wobbly agent a honeybee. And call it the Deserette State.
[00:42:31] Speaker B: Mormon church. If you're listening. Wow. First of all, welcome to the show. You got the wrong episode.
And also, you can send your cease and desist to it's
[email protected].
[00:42:49] Speaker A: But I did find it funny that they're going after this, and I'm like, that brewery is about to sell that beer at a velocity they've never sold.
[00:43:03] Speaker B: Want to. I desperately want a can of that now.
[00:43:07] Speaker A: I know I'm like, road trip to.
[00:43:12] Speaker B: Every year there is a homebrew competition in Utah I like to enter. And now I'm tempted to name every beer I send down there, the deserette IPA or deseret, whatever style it is, just to have them appear on the awards. Not that I think anybody from the Mormon church will check, but it would bring me pleasure to do that. I might do that.
[00:43:37] Speaker A: Moroni's rusty trombone.
[00:43:41] Speaker B: No, that's a Mormon sex act. We all know what that entails.
[00:43:46] Speaker A: Jeremy, what do we got next?
[00:43:48] Speaker B: That's when they're getting kinky and doing it with the lights on the american pale ale, arguably one of the OG styles of american craft brewery, has a bit of some rough years lately as IPA balloons ever larger across beer menus across the country like Java the hut. Having finally discovered golden corral, very real question arises for the craft beer purist. Are pale ales dead? And what the fuck is a pale ale anymore anyway? This comes from craft beer and brewing, and Mike Birdleson and Sam Tierney of Firestone Walker are trying to reboot the style like a chronically underperforming comic book movie.
So let's talk a little bit how the style has evolved as important how ipas evolved as well. 1981 saw the release of Sierra Nevada's Pale Ale, a beer that changed remarkably little since its inception.
As for Sierra Nevada, more or less blazing the trail alone, basically what they did was they took the classic english pale ale, also known as an english bitter, tweaked it with american hops, and there you go. The gris contained a decent amount of caramel malt for sweetness and a balanced flavor profile. And at the time, the balance was tilted slightly towards the malt.
And I say for the style, Sierra Nevada still is, but the balance is tilted a little bit towards the malt. Sweetness was still a factor at the time in a pale Ale. Now, IPA was the cousin of the English IPA, but particularly well suited for the characteristic american urges. Namely, if it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing. And if it's worth overdoing, then you might as well take it to its illogical conclusion.
[00:45:40] Speaker A: America.
[00:45:41] Speaker B: America will do something stupid, and we'll do it harder than anybody else.
That's what we do. That's what we're good at.
[00:45:51] Speaker A: That's how we ended up with the cheeto as president.
[00:45:56] Speaker B: This was the time when the malt bill was kind of the same. But an IPA was less a beverage, and it was more of a bar bet, like 20 something college bros trying to basically chug the liquid equivalent of a neglected litter box.
Pale ale had a purpose. It was sweet. Not as sweet as an amber importer. It was bitter, but not the tongue scraping experience of ipas at the time.
Firestone Walker came out with the Windsor pale in 1998, and shortly after that, they started. Well, that was pretty much like the quintessential american pale as well. That was very comparable to Sierra Nevada.
Something started to happen to pale ale as ipas slowly started to find a larger audience, and people started craving hoppier and hoppier beers, especially featuring some of the newer american. And later australian and New Zealand strains. The urge was to start using some of the techniques developed when making ipas. Dry hopping, double dry hopping, triple dry hopping. Dear Christ, why are we still dry hopping? First word, hopping.
[00:47:09] Speaker A: We're just wasting money at this point.
[00:47:10] Speaker B: With the dry hop, mash, hopping. Shove a hop up the brewer's butthole. Hopping, hopping at every part of the.
If there's a hole, they'll shove a hop into it. That's what IPA became. And also a less reliance on caramel malt, a drier finish. So when they were reimagining pale ales, that's where they went as well. Beef up the hops a little bit, take back the caramel malt, reduce the sweetness, make it drier. Hence, pale 31 was born. At Firestone Walker. They claimed to have been one of the first, if not the first, to push the pale ale into this direction, where pale ale sort of, kind of became like, the line was starting to blur and that became a problem.
Pale ale started to lose that distinctive characteristic that defined it as kind of a hoppy but not really hoppy beer. As breweries dabbled with low alcohol versions of the IPA, the question started to arise. So is like a session IPA just a pale ale? Is a pale ale just a session IPA?
[00:48:18] Speaker A: The locale IPA?
[00:48:20] Speaker B: Yeah. And. And if it is, why have the IPA light when the IPA is right there? This is not the time to be, like, shaving off a percentage of alcohol.
So, gradually, as ipas took over entire menus, pale ale just wasn't selling. Firestone talks about how the pale 31 was a beer they dearly loved.
It is still their most award winning beer they've ever made. But nobody was buying it anymore. And if you know anything about Firestone, you can kind of see why they were and remained one of the powerhouses for bright, hoppy ipas. But that left pale 31 with pretty much no audience. So, in 2018, away it went.
But Firestone Walker is not done. They are going to bring it back with a solid try or true method perfected by one of the great overgrown adolescent billionaires of our time. They're going to slap a fucking x on it and call it a day. Firestone is set to release their XPA pale Ale 3.0, the x standing for extra pale ale. Tyler, we already fucking did that. I was going to say, you want to tell them.
[00:49:37] Speaker A: It was extra pale ale? And then it went session ipa, and then it went to fucking locale IPA, and now we're fucking back at extra pale ale. No, Firestone, you're drunk. Go home. We're not doing this.
[00:49:54] Speaker B: The funniest thing about this is on my end, when you lost your shit, whatever is wrong with your end compensated so it sounds like you were screaming at the end of a tunnel and it actually was somehow more effective because I feel like you'll get the visceral feeling of Tyler losing his shit, but you don't have to. Like, your ears are not bleeding in your car. I feel like you could get a better. Maybe it's because I can also see Tyler lose his shit in front of me. You don't have that experience, but I think you can get the anger in his voice when that happened.
Anyway, extra pale ale, a completely new and novel idea.
They're going for something even crisper and drier than before, so fucking dry that the bartender just hands you a dusty glass. I think the malt bill features wheat as opposed to Munich, which is just slowly eliminating any malt equality. It features mosaic cryo and Nelson Sovin hops for australian hop profile.
They think they are onto something as the XPA won bronze at GABF for international style pale ale.
So that's good for Gabf for me. So you're going to try to out IPA with a pale ale again?
Again? That's never been tried before. Listen, Firestone, real talk.
You've already heard what? Tyler, I do like that. Firestone, you're drunk.
[00:51:42] Speaker A: Put the bottle down and go to bed.
[00:51:45] Speaker B: Listen, commercially, I think Paleo had a great run. You still see it pop up, but we might be at the point where it just remains the purview of the pedantic home brewers that are just not quite ready to let go of the idea of americanized british English bitter.
Or maybe we are. Last year, I don't know if I told you this story, but I've told everybody else. I attempted to brew an IPA and enter it into competitions, mostly so I didn't have to judge IPA, actually, to be honest.
Sent it to a bunch of competitions to very lukewarm response. So finally, as a kind of goof, I sent it to a competition in New England. As a pale ale.
It won first place in its category. It was my best scoring beer of the year. I think it's my best scoring beer ever.
So I guess I'm making peace with this now, too. It's just pale Ale is like a failed IPA.
In fact, I should just name it failed IPA.
[00:53:00] Speaker A: If you name it that, and then they're like, this one wins and they see failed IPA. I think they'd be like nice.
[00:53:12] Speaker B: That's what it is. It's a failed IPA and I guess that's what Pale ale is anymore. Tyler, do you have anything else to bring this creaky ship to a close tonight?
[00:53:26] Speaker A: So we're going to transport you back to a grand old time.
Get a six pack of very patriotic beer for under a buck.
[00:53:37] Speaker B: I have a patriotic erection right now.
[00:53:41] Speaker A: Hell yeah, brother.
[00:53:44] Speaker B: My ding dong is singing zippity dooda.
[00:53:49] Speaker A: So you could in the 1970s, swing into a local store and buy a six pack of red, white and blue.
[00:53:58] Speaker B: Beer for could also smoke a cigarette while filling your gas tank. So let's not pretend this was an idealistic time to be alive.
[00:54:09] Speaker A: Which I know if you're like me, you're like the fuck is would equate to $7.24.06 pack.
[00:54:22] Speaker B: So about what a six pack costs.
[00:54:25] Speaker A: Show me where a fucking six pack is.
725.
[00:54:32] Speaker B: I don't know. Is that what they still tell them for?
Here's a weird thing. I don't buy beer. I make my own six packs now.
[00:54:40] Speaker A: Are all like 1099 to 1299.
[00:54:44] Speaker B: Oh fuck that. Okay. Inflation has been a bitch, hasn't it?
[00:54:48] Speaker A: Yeah, it's fucking done good.
[00:54:54] Speaker B: When I was working at a grocery store, the last time I really paid attention to beer price at the grocery store they were about $8 for craft beer.
[00:55:03] Speaker A: Yeah, crafts like twelve plus.
[00:55:07] Speaker B: Okay.
In other news, if you want to learn how to make beer, you should come see me because apparently it's becoming an economic essential right now.
[00:55:17] Speaker A: But back in the disco era, it was about half the going rate of a sixer in 1970 was the red, white and blue beer.
[00:55:30] Speaker B: So a six pack in 1970 cost the equivalent of like $14.
[00:55:35] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:55:36] Speaker B: Shit.
Woohoo.
[00:55:40] Speaker A: So this beer was owned by Paps. It clocked in at 3.2% and was ten ibus. And from a packaging perspective, it was basically PBR without the blue ribbon.
[00:55:56] Speaker B: I'm surprised the data on the ibus is available. I'm surprised that anybody actually has that data in 1970 where they're like the ibus. Yeah, I got that one time I had to take these big pills and I was strapped to the toilet for.
[00:56:14] Speaker A: Like a week back in the little while.
[00:56:18] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:56:19] Speaker A: It was basically construed as they were like, let's do a cheaper to make paps really just crank up the America. They released it just in time for 4 July weekend and it took off. They just called it red, white and blue super easy. And a lot of the early campaigns talks about price point and honest beer for an honest price.
[00:56:56] Speaker B: As opposed to all those lying beers for all their lying price.
[00:57:01] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:57:04] Speaker B: I had to pull up a picture of the can and wow, that looks just like a paps can, except for with just red, white and blue special lager beer.
[00:57:14] Speaker A: Prohibition snuffed it out for a little bit, but it was resurrected in 1933.
It became like the diehard beer of choice for many soldiers. It was kind of the GI Joe of beers, in part due to the Americana like nationalism that it really started with the grassroots. But in World War II and some subsequent conflicts, gis apparently were so loyal to the brand they wouldn't drink other beers while on deployment.
[00:57:54] Speaker B: This is neither here nor there. I typed in red, white and blue beer into Google. I'm going to put this picture up on our instagram feed.
But six pictures showed up, four of them. A can of red, white and blue lager, one a twelve pack of the red, white and blue lager, and a bottle of Smirnoff ice. All right, it's just one of those. One of these things is not like the other. One of these things does not belong.
[00:58:28] Speaker A: But by 1980, the recession had taken place.
Basically, because this beer was so dirt cheap, paps doubled, downed on it, got rid of the stubby bottle packaging and introduced it in the can, as well as a series of radio commercials that really capitalized on the patriotic sense of the cans.
They claimed it was more suitable and less expensive and a less expensive option for promoting our nation abroad than foreign aid was, and suggested that the beer be sent overseas instead of billion dollars worth of planes and computers and tractors.
[00:59:21] Speaker B: All right, that's not the dumbest idea I've ever heard.
[00:59:25] Speaker A: That ad increased sales by 60% in the months after it aired.
[00:59:32] Speaker B: Well done.
[00:59:34] Speaker A: Then taken over by Wisconsin's G Hyal mint brewery when it partially acquired Papst and it got an extra dose of popularity from broke college students at Marquette University in Milwaukee.
So there was a bar on campus called the avalanche, and there was a tradition that Marquette students started doing called the naked beer slide. In the lanch, as it was nicknamed, was a dive bar and a staple of campus culture. So the unofficial motto of students was get your degree at Marquette, but get your education at the land.
The naked beer slides would kick off around closing time. To participate, students, mostly male, because who's dumb enough to do that? In the dive, bar, men are, would strip down while onlooking patrons would dump out the dregs of their beers on the concrete floor.
Then, hopefully with spectacular grace, the new.
[01:00:48] Speaker B: No not with spectacular grace, with something.
[01:00:51] Speaker A: Get a running start and belly flop onto the floor, sliding across the suds and swill across the bar.
The article goes. Think of the gnarliest slip and slide you could imagine.
At the time, red, white, and blue cost fifty cents a can. So it was typically the beer that was getting poured on the floor and consumed during the era of the slide. Apparently, the avalanche sold more red, white, and blue per capita than any other tavern in the world.
[01:01:26] Speaker B: I can see that. Especially if they're pouring out half the beer. So frat bros can basically penguin ride across the system. Nothing about this. What is wrong with people?
[01:01:39] Speaker A: Well, sadly, the avalanche closed on April 24.
[01:01:44] Speaker B: Well, possibly because somebody slid headfirst into a table, or somebody broke a bottle, and someone got an inadvertent harakiri.
[01:01:57] Speaker A: But they started to lose any momentum they had by the turn of the century when Heilman dissolved and our red, white, and blue ownership returned back to Paps.
Paps blue ribbon had started surging as red, white, and blue's production slowed.
And with near identical packaging and slower alcohol and basically the same target market, paps really just kind of phased it out, but brought it back in the early aughts. They brought it back July of 2018 at its Milwaukee brewery and tap room. But the bargain prices were long gone. On premise draft pores were $4 a pint, and 32 ounce togo crowlers were $15.
[01:03:01] Speaker B: And actually, looking at the pictures again, one of these pictures, there's four pictures of the red, white, and blue special lager, one Smirnoff ice, and then there's an american lager actually produced by sweet water.
[01:03:16] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:03:19] Speaker B: And that was it. No longer could you fulfill your patriotic duty by drinking what is essentially a floor mop water, literally, in 2020, when.
[01:03:30] Speaker A: They shut down the taffy Covid, it has not been produced since then, and it has gone to a bygone era.
[01:03:40] Speaker B: Where was the last place to have that in stock?
[01:03:45] Speaker A: So in 2018, they brought it back for Pax. Milwaukee tap room.
[01:03:49] Speaker B: But I'm thinking that's what I'm saying.
Wisconsin was, like, last place. You could probably get that.
[01:03:58] Speaker A: Yeah.
From 18 to 20. Only had it at the PBR.
[01:04:03] Speaker B: Oh, okay. I'm following you. All right, listen, it's very late in the evening.
[01:04:12] Speaker A: Yeah, well, that is all for me.
[01:04:16] Speaker B: All right, well, this has been. It's all desiree, if you want to.
[01:04:23] Speaker A: Desire.
[01:04:24] Speaker B: Desiree. Excuse me.
If you are the ultimate Mormon Drinking podcast, the only podcast for the heavy drinking Mormon, which all Mormons are notoriously fond of, if you would like to get a hold of us, if you are the church of Latterday saints, we would love to do some promotional work with you. You can get a hold of us.
It'sallbeer at gmail. Listen, so far, I never got that abmbev cease and desist, okay?
And at this point in time, I think they got bigger fish to fry than me. And so, yeah, I feel like a cease and desist from the Mormons is as good, if not better, than ab inbeth. I'd take that. I'd hang that on the wall. That brewery should, too. Anyway, you can get a hold of us at it's
[email protected].
You'll see a few pictures pop up on our Instagram feed and our facebook. Find that at look at stuff. It's all beer.
Subscribe to our podcast on iTunes or on Google Play.
I had this all written down and now I can't find it. But there's like a couple of new places I was going to throw out there.
But, yeah, I'm failing at that even as we speak. So maybe by next week I will find that information again and you can find our podcast.
But yeah, there's some other places to get our podcast. Now. If you are dissatisfied with itunes for some reason, I don't know, stop rambling. No, I'm just going to keep on going.
That'll be quite enough from us. I'm Jeremy Jones.
[01:06:17] Speaker A: I'm Tyler Zimmerman.
[01:06:18] Speaker B: I'm gonna go to sleep, actually.
[01:06:21] Speaker A: Have fun.
[01:06:34] Speaker B: One more time.
[01:06:35] Speaker A: Still hasn't hit the floor yet. Still had to double it up. Still hasn't hit the floor yet.
[01:06:40] Speaker B: Damn this thing.
[01:06:41] Speaker A: Still hasn't hit the floor yet.
[01:06:43] Speaker B: You know what? I'll figure it out. I'll fucking figure it out.
Damn this.
