"Craft" beer recommendation

[Slowhand]

Throw in some recent Jester King releases and you'd be the beer king of any haul I've seen lately. Oklahoma finally has something worth drinking with those Prairie beers. Jolly Pumpkin just hit the Texas market.

Craft and Growler is the only place in Dallas I know of that has Panther City beers right now. Luck should have some this week but they got it first.

Well, I hate to be that guy, but...



Stopped by the brewery on my way from Fredericksburg to New Braunfels and had some beer and picked up these two, one each of the new-ish Provenance Brews. Was a little bit disappointed with their bottle selection out there, but it was late Saturday and I missed the Atrial Rubicite weekly release by a day, and I'm sure they had gotten a bit picked over. Pleased to say that the Provenances are really, really good. Should have picked up a few more.

I'll have an update here in the next week or two as a good buddy of mine is visiting from Denver and is bringing a whole smorgasbord of greatness with him. Really envy what he has access to up there.

Also chatted around with some of the employees and got the feel that a new release of Funk Metal should be coming soon, hopefully early fall

This, they are sort of like a Detroit version of Jester King. Only a lot bigger with a whole lot of gold medals on their wall.

Ha! I think that's pretty well stated.

Still need to figure out how to get some Cantillon distro here in Texas...

[BP]

Had some Schmaltz Jewbelation 17 last night, it's easily one of my top 5 greatest beers now. 17 hops, 17 malts, 17% abv for their 17th anniversary.

[Strychnine]

It's National IPA Day - go enjoy one.


Our local watering hole is doing a $4 IPAs all day:

Southern Star – Riker
St Arnold - Elissa
Oskar Blues - Deviant Dales
Founders - Double Trouble
Buffalo Bayou - Ginger Citrus IPA
Bear Republic - Racer 5
Ballast Point - Even Keel
SKA - Modus Hoperandi
Odell - Myrcenary
Laganitus - Nighttime
Stone - Ruination
Great Divide - Hercules

[BP]

It's National IPA Day - go enjoy one.

Had a goblet of DFH 120 last night from my local pub, it wasn't $4 though.

They have Elevation Apis IV, Clown Shoes Crunkle Sam, Jewbelation Reborn 17, Squatters Outer Darkness, Texian 1824 and Laughing Dog's The Dogfather on tap right now to go with the 120 minute.

I don't know how a little pub in Temple managed to get 7 whales on tap at the same time but it's awesome and they do flights! If any of you are in the Belton - Temple area this weekend definitely check out O'Briens.

[Strychnine]

People put waaaaaay too much effort into this research, but it's funny as hell.

Two part thing...

http://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/the-current/eat-and-drink/Have-We-Reached-Peak-PBR-.html

Have We Reached Peak PBR?

Yes, trouble is brewing in hipster paradise.




Last month, a curious thing happened: After a long day of work, my husband showed up on our doorstep with a six-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon.

“It was on sale,” he said, offering up the iconic red, white, and blue cans. “If the hipsters like it, how bad can it be?” (Spoiler alert: pretty bad.)

What you need to know about my husband is that, while I think he’s cool, he’s not, you know, hipster cool. Earlier this year, he asked me what Coachella was. And he’s been to Brooklyn exactly zero times.

As such, his buying PBR is the perfect example of what hipsters have been dreading—PBR has entered the mainstream, and it may be the beginning of the end for the brand.

To understand how we’ve come to this peak-PBR moment, you need to understand exactly how PBR became hipsters’ drink of choice. In May, two marketing researchers published a study in the Journal of Consumer Research that documented why PBR has been such a hit with the fixed-gear-riding, clove-cigarette-smoking crowd. The study—titled “What Makes Things Cool: How Autonomy Influences Perceived Coolness”—found that there’s a direct correlation between a brand’s perceived autonomy and a consumer’s level of counterculturalism.

“We were really interested in this idea of counterculturalism, or this idea that people differ in the extent to which they kind of buy into society’s norms, or think that society is a beneficial force as opposed to thinking that society is oppressive or controlling or overly limited,” explains Dr. Margaret Campbell, a professor at the University of Colorado’s Leeds School of Business and a co-author of the study.

“Hipsters are on the countercultural end of that spectrum. We showed that the point at which something is perceived as cool is more autonomous for people who are higher in counterculturalism than people who are lower in counterculturalism.”

PBR created its reputation as an autonomous product by marketing itself in a non-traditional way. By sponsoring bike messenger rodeos and DJ competitions, the brand formed an identity that was left enough of mainstream to be inline with hipsters’ counterculture tendencies.

And it worked. Big time. Hipsters bought PBR by the American Apparel-clad armful, despite the fact that Pabst isn’t indie (it’s owned by C. Dean Metropoulos, who also owns Hostess and Twinkies) nor is it considered a premium beer (the craft beer movement offers plenty of better alternatives).

If you don’t believe us, take a look at these cool heat maps [SEE NEXT POST] roduced by the data startup Locu. In 2013, Locu looked at the amount of PBR and Bud Light being sold in the same area. In New York City, Bud Light has a solid stronghold, although places like Williamsburg in Brooklyn burn bright red with PBR sales. The same thing happens in parts of San Francisco and Boston.

Of course, the fact that hipsters spent the past decade drinking “sub-premium” beer isn’t their fault. It's the fault of savvy PBR’s marketers—and also of human nature.

“[Food] is one of the main boundaries that we construct around community, representing who belongs and who doesn’t—and this has been important from the point of view of class, race, ethnicity, religion, nationality, region, age, gender, etc.,” explains Dr. Stella Čapek, a sociology professor who teaches a course on food, culture, and nature at Hendrix College in Arkansas.

“Identity is shaped...through everyday social interactions that symbolize who we are and who we want to be…Many sociologists (Veblen, Bourdieu, and others) have written about how we try to signal who we are by showing that we have certain ‘tastes,’ and these are very much shaped by social class, gender, and the other categories mentioned previously.”

In other words, when enough hipsters started drinking PBR, it became part of the group’s identity. The more it became ingrained in their identity, the more it became acceptable, and the more people like my husband started drinking it. Finally we arrived at the moment that Dr. Campbell calls “Peak PBR.”

“Consumers are very aware of the concept of true cool versus trendy cool. They’re very aware that at some point it’s too much and then it’s going to stop being cool at that point. With PBR, it may be it for them,” she says.

Her co-author, Dr. Caleb Warren, a professor at Texas A&M adds, “As a brand gains popularity, it seems less different, less autonomous. That makes it seem less cool to the counter-culture consumer.”

Which perhaps explains the guy with the ironic mustache crying non-ironically into his gluten-free macaroon as he waited behind my husband in the checkout line. As the cashier handed off my husband’s six-pack, this poor fellow realized that the PBR keg had officially been kicked—and done so by the very same Toms-wearing feet that so lovingly carried it to the party in the first place.

[Strychnine]

This is almost Nate Silver level shit for hipster beer analysis

http://blog.locu.com/post/46247974453/locu-digs-deep-into-pbr-data-hipsters-unphased

Locu Digs Deep into PBR Data: Hipsters Unphased

by Arsen Mamikonyan, Taylor Lahey, and Adam Marcus



Hipsters and PBR, two peas in a pod. That’s what everyone says, anyway, but is it true? At Locu, we’ve done a bit of research about these things.

While more than 15,000 merchants have signed up for Locu since we launched over the holidays, we’ve indexed nearly one million venues since Locu started. We do this by crawling thousands of merchant websites a day through a technology pipeline that we’ve previously described. As we near a million menus, we’ve learned our fair share of menu-related factoids. Our aggregate price list data allows us to answer lots of important questions for merchants, but also a few fun ones along the way.

In this post, we’ll see what our data can tell us about the fascinating world of PBR. Keep an eye on the Locu Blog for an upcoming series of deeper data analyses.

Taking a tour of some Hipster Meccas

To get a sense of whether there is a link between PBR and our skinny-jeaned friends, let’s take a trip to the home of the hipsters: Williamsburg, Brooklyn. (And yes, we know that the gentrification has moved on, but as we’ll see, the pioneering hipsters left a lot of PBR infrastructure behind for their fellow explorers.)

Take a look at this heatmap of venues that serve Bud Light (top) and Pabst Blue Ribbon (bottom). Areas that are red have the highest number of venues that serve a particular drink, whereas green and yellow areas are only lightly populated by these beer-serving establishments:



Bud light is the more prevalent drink, appearing throughout areas where people live and tourist flock. PBR has a sparser distribution, with less venues overall serving the drink. Still, it shines bright in one place in particular: Williamsburg. While one point does not make a trend, it certainly seems that bars in this hipster home know their audience!

Does this inkling of a trend find itself in other places where hipsters roam? Let’s head over to the San Francisco’s Mission District to see:



Bud Light again is more prevalent than PBR overall. But the Mission lights up for PBR, in what is starting to look like wonderful news for hipsters that like consistency. So far, so good: PBR is the less prevalent beer, and yet in two hipster hoods, we see its popularity at bars increase.

The San Francisco heatmaps show that PBR distribution is not quite so simple, however. Take a look at the relatively touristy area near Embarcadero in the top right. It’s brighter for PBR than it is for Bud Light, which is the opposite of what we’d expect. It turns out that a few liquor/wine stores in that area also sell PBR, but not Bud Light. This suggests either a mistake in understanding their clientele, or an insightful move to export hipster culture.

Slam Dunk?

It turns out that in the world of data, nothing is clear-cut. While the two most obvious pictures of hipsterdom seem to check out with the PBR hypothesis, going to other cities brings us other results. Take the Boston area, for example:




Bud Light stays true to form: it appears in more locations across Boston. What doesn’t follow our expectations, however, is where we find more PBR. Places like Allston and Inman Square, where you find lots of fixies, tight pants, and a fair serving of beards, don’t light up for PBR. This hurts our hypothesis around hipsters and PBR, but uncovers something more interesting.

The places we do see PBR light up are around universities. Cambridge and Boston have tons of schools, and larger ones like Harvard and MIT bring droves of college kids that can’t spend a boatload on drinks. That raises the next natural question: if you keep a tight budget, are you wise to flock to PBR to keep costs low?

Here are two charts from the San Francisco area that help uncover that question. These charts show the price distribution of PBR and Bud Light in SF:





We see that cost-conscious folks are right to stick to PBR. There are two reasons to develop a taste for PBR to save money. The first is expected cost: you can usually get a PBR for around $2, whereas the Bud Light price falls around $4-6. The other is variance: the PBR price distribution is a lot less scattered, so you’re more likely to be able to walk into a random PBR-serving establishment and get the expected price.

That is, if some hipster doesn’t finish the supply before you get there.

Zooming Out

It’s cute to answer questions about hipster migration patterns with our data, but Locu is focused on a bit more than that. Aside from merchant-oriented insights, we can use our data to answer other macroeconomic questions. For example, does The Economist’s Big Mac Index hold up with other foods? Stay tuned to our blog for more data analyses!

[lowthreeohz]

Picked up a Sierra Nevada Beer Camp last week and just got into it.

Sitting down to a Maillard's Odyssey imperial dark while I finish packing for a flight to California tomorrow.

[Strychnine]

[Tyrone Biggums]

Now that's a fuckin' downer.

[silverhatch]

Now I'm sad.

[BP]

One of their fermentation tanks was destroyed in a shipping accident a few years ago as well. Some bad luck there.

I guess it's better than having 7 guys get boiled alive in a brew tank like what happened at Modelo last year. Or having a check valve fail on a fermenter and it exploding during a tour like at Franconia a couple of years ago.

[Sgt Beavis]

I'm waiting for these guys to open their doors. They are literally on the other side of my back yard fence. I think I need to install a gate:

https://www.facebook.com/audacity.denton

[BP]

Bud is trying to buy Miller, sort of. Neither is independent anymore but AB Inbev is apparently doing pretty well financially and they are seeking world domination.

http://online.wsj.com/articles/ab-inbev-seeking-finance-for-sabmiller-deal-1410779802

Also Brew-HaHa is about to start in DFW.

http://www.brewhahacomedyseries.com/

Basically the breweries that do normal tours are opening up on a week night to host a comedy night. Free beer and a show. The first one is this Thursday.

[95DRGT]

Thanks for sharing on the Brew Haha- That looks cool and I will try and make a few

[GrayStangGT]

What is the shelf life on a beer like this? I bought it in either Jan or March.