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Tag: craft beer

Does Craft Beer Have A Sexism Problem? Binny’s Rejects Happy Ending

By Josh Noel, Chicago Tribune (TNS)

Atlanta’s SweetWater Brewing Co. began distributing beer in Chicago this week, but its most notable beer at the moment might be the one that’s missing.

The Binny’s Beverage Depot in Lincoln Park has declined to stock SweetWater’s Happy Ending imperial stout due to what the store’s beer manager called the “sexist, borderline racist” artwork on the bottle.

Happy Ending (a reference to male sexual climax, presumably after a massage) features images on its bottle that include a box of tissues, the face of a man achieving what looks to be the pinnacle of pleasure and the silhouette of a geisha. It all added up to a bit more than the store’s beer manager, Adam Vavrick, was comfortable putting on shelves.

“This label is about a female Asian sex worker manually masturbating a man…and cleaning up…with tissues,” Vavrick said. “Why is that appropriate on a beer label?”

It’s a question that has been increasingly asked in the rapidly growing craft beer industry. Responding to various labels construed as sexist — usually showing women in various states of undress or in suggestive poses — Time Out Chicago published a piece last year beneath the headline, “Time to grow up, breweries.” Chicago-based blog Guys Drinking Beer asked, “Why does craft beer suddenly seem to have a problem with women?” And the founder of Twins Cities beer shop The Four Firkins published a blog post in February called, “Let’s talk about sexist beer labels.”

Though mostly just chatter until now, Vavrick sending back three cases of Happy Ending — 36 large-format (22-ounce) bottles — is among the rare instances of a Chicago store declining to carry a beer due only to its label. According to SweetWater’s Chicago distributor, Lakeshore Beverage, no other store, in the Binny’s chain or otherwise, refused to stock the beer.

Vavrick said he became aware of the label when SweetWater beer arrived in Chicago this week, and a “visibly upset” male employee brought it to his attention. Vavrick said he polled three more Binny’s staff to gauge their feelings.

“They all felt the same way — it’s gross and it has no place in here,” Vavrick said. “A female employee said she wouldn’t be comfortable recommending that beer to anyone.”

Vavrick announced his decision this week on social media: “Breweries: One thing I simply do not tolerate in my department is sexist or racist beer labels. I demand better and will not carry them,” he wrote on Twitter. (With more than 100 “favorites,” Vavrick said, the tweet was his most popular ever.)

Lakeshore Beverage picked up the three cases of Happy Ending the next day. Vavrick said he never considered blackballing the brewery entirely; at least four other SweetWater beers, including its popular 420 Extra Pale Ale, are on the shelves.

In an interview this week, SweetWater founder Freddy Bensch said he has never heard a complaint about the artwork on the eight-year-old beer that until now has been available in mostly Southern states. It was simply intended as a joke, he said.

“No harm was intended,” Bensch said. “We maybe didn’t think this all the way through.”

He said the brewery would take corrective action regarding the Happy Ending bottle, though he didn’t specify what that might be.

“We’re going to be thoughtful about it and make it right,” Bensch said.

For Vavrick, and others who have claimed offense, the blowback was exacerbated by two factors: The text on the bottle describes the beer as “sporting a huge dry hopped stiffy resulting in an explosive finish!”

And the other was a promotional video uploaded to the Internet two years ago by the brewery that shows a man standing behind a bar taking a sip of Happy Ending, then staring into the distance and exclaiming, “Oh, god, that’s good!” A woman dressed as a geisha then rises from behind the bar, fans her face, offers a suggestive look, then descends back below the bar. Bensch, who said he was unaware of the video until this week, said he had it taken down.

Jason Alvey, founder of The Four Firkins, which has sold craft beer in the Twin Cities metro area for seven years, said he has declined to carry “about five” beers during the last seven years due to “objectification of women or crass, lowbrow sexual innuendo humor.” One of the offending breweries, he said, he refuses to carry at all because it showed no contrition when he raised the issue. He declined to name that brewery.

Alvey said he doesn’t object to a “respectful portrayal of a pretty woman” on a beer label, but acknowledged that one person’s respectful can be too far for someone else.

“It can be a difficult topic,” Alvey said. “We’re trying not to get carried away with this and we’re trying to be realistic. The ones we’ve said we’re not going to carry are generally blatantly obvious.”

The issue of sexist beer labels has only become more pronounced as more breweries open, Alvey said. Since 2012, more than 1,000 craft breweries have opened in the U.S., bringing the national total to 3,418, according to the Brewers Association, a craft beer industry group.

“We’re getting more little breweries that don’t have any training or professional experience in marketing, and they think this kind of thing will get them attention or is funny,” Alvey said. “A lot of new breweries forget their customer base isn’t just young males.”

When a questionable label pops up, he said, he’ll discuss it with his staff of 16, and put the matter to a vote. SweetWater is not distributed in Minnesota, but Alvey said he wouldn’t carry Happy Ending.

“It’s juvenile frat boy humor,” he said. “If I see something damaging to the industry as a whole and insulting to women, I’m not going to carry it.”

The Chicago area saw a similar blowup last year when Rockford-based Pig Minds Brewing Co. released a beer called PD California Blueberry Ale — the “PD” standing for “panty dropper” — featuring a label that showed a pair of female legs jutting from a short skirt and underwear hitched down to just above the ankles. Beer bloggers and social media took Pig Minds to task, accusing the brewery of promoting anything from sexism to date rape.

When the summer-seasonal beer returns, it will be rebranded as “Happi Daze California Blueberry Ale,” and with a new label featuring smiley faces, said Pig Minds’ general manager and brewmaster, Carson Souza.

Like SweetWater, Souza swore there was no intention to offend with PD California Ale. The beer had been on draft at Pig Minds’ brew pub for two years — with the same artwork on the tap handle that appeared on the bottle — with no complaints. The owner of the brewery, Brian Endl, drew the artwork, which was sold as an aluminum placard that became popular with both male and female customers.

“We never had one person sit there and say ‘That’s terrible, you should take that down,'” Souza said. “Quite the contrary — they said how much is that placard? That’s cool.”

But he acknowledged that as breweries grow and reach wider audiences, the ability to offend increases. And in the era of social media, it can take mere hours for a beer label that barely raised an eyebrow for two years in a Rockford brewpub to incur the wrath of the Internet. The Guys Drinking Beer website, which publishes the Chicago-area beer labels approved each month by the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, called PD’s art “the worst beer label ever produced” after it was approved last August. The Internet quickly agreed, and the “PD” label became a hotly discussed issue on Reddit within days.

Souza said the label was part light-hearted joke, part homage to beer history (think of the standard Oktoberfest dress, he said) and nod to a certain reality.

“Let’s face it, when people drink, they get laid — that’s both men and women,” he said. “It was just a joke. It takes a twisted mind to say that (the label) has something to do with rape.”

Though Souza said he was conflicted about changing the label, “the best business decision was to let PD subside.”

“We are not misogynistic and we are not sexist by any means,” he said. “We’re husbands, we have daughters and we are artists. But it was time to say goodbye to it. We offended too many people, and we don’t want to do that.”

Claudia Jendron, brewmaster at Evanston’s Temperance Beer Co., and one of the relatively few female brewmasters in the U.S., said that in her experience, the industry has no trouble accepting women. At beer festivals and public events, Jendron said, she feels just as respected as any male brewer.

“But this doesn’t help,” she said. “It puts women in a position that we have to fight a little bit harder to get back to the same level (as men).”

Marie Cummins, who blogs about beer and is a moderator for the Chicago Craft Beer Enthusiasts Facebook page, said craft beer is clearly becoming inclusive of women. Overwhelmingly male just five years ago, beer festival crowds have become about 40 percent female, she said. And while she takes offense at the Happy Ending bottle because “it’s so apparent that they’re saying this beer is really for a certain segment of the population that’s not me,” she doesn’t want to see the judgment of beer labels become too weighty.

“When you go over the line, as some of them have, it becomes obvious,” she said. “But you can’t get offended at every little thing. The moment you become too politically correct, you take some of the passion out of it.”

Photo: Pig Minds Brewing Co. via TNS

You’re Drinking Your Beer Too Cold, And Here’s Why

You’re Drinking Your Beer Too Cold, And Here’s Why

By Josh Noel, Chicago Tribune (TNS)

I have a drinking problem, and it makes me order two beers at a time in bars and restaurants.

My problem is this: We drink our beer too cold, America.

Beer typically flows from taps and your fridge at a frigid 38 degrees, an ideal temperature for the mass-produced brews designed to be refreshingly easy to drink while obscuring the cost-saving ingredients within.

But for beers aspiring to some degree of nuance — arguably the definition of craft beer — 38 degrees is the equivalent of plastic wrap around a Kandinsky: It obscures all the beauty within. Sipped too cold, most craft beer is a shadow of what its maker intends, with layers of flavor lost to a palate-chilling cold.

The ideal minimum temperature for most craft beer is in the low to mid-40s. For hearty yeast or hop-forward ales, a bit warmer. For even more adventurous styles, such as lambics or imperial stouts infused with flavors of oak, bourbon, chocolate, coffee, or vanilla, warmer still — arguably as high as the upper 50s. When you’re trying to meld an array of intricate flavors by pairing beer and food, proper temperature becomes even more important.

In the best bars, I therefore often order two (or more!) beers at a time: one that doesn’t mind the cold to sip immediately and one that’s higher alcohol, more complex and best served by 20 minutes of slowly warming. A double order sometimes furrows the brow of a bartender or companion — as if my drinking problem is far more serious — but of all the factors that influence beer taste, temperature is one of the easiest for a drinker to control. And so I do.

The idea of “cold beer” remains intact as ever, thanks mostly to the millions spent by Bud, Miller, and Coors to show us slow-motion pulls of glistening bottles from teeming buckets of ice. It reaches in every direction, from the innocuous (bars proudly trumpeting their “cold beer”) to the egregious (bars serving beer in chilled or — heaven forfend — frosted glasses). Though to be fair, sometimes, cold is exactly what a beer requires.

“If I’m drinking a (Miller) High Life, I want it to be cold because I don’t want to taste it,” says Gary Valentine, a beer consultant and educator, who has worked on the beer lists at Girl and the Goat and Little Goat in Chicago, among other restaurants. “Otherwise, if you have a beer you want to taste, it should be above at least 43 degrees.”

That means being a proactive beer drinker: dual ordering in a bar or restaurant. If served a beer in a chilled or frosted glass, request a room temperature glass and make a careful transfer. At home, pull a beer from the refrigerator for 10 minutes to an hour before opening it. Or, if you’re Ray Daniels, founder of the Cicerone beer education program, stick a beer in the microwave.

“Ten seconds takes that frosty edge off,” Daniels says. “I used to do it pretty regularly.”

The Cicerone program, which has certified the beer knowledge of 50,000 people worldwide, spends ample time discussing beer style, storage, tap line maintenance, and glassware but relatively little time on temperature “because of the practical challenges for making that happen and because there are so many other dragons to slay,” Daniels says. But as a consumer, he is acutely aware.

“It has a big influence on your perception of flavor,” he says. “That’s undeniable.”

Though Daniels no longer microwaves his beer — “I’m not that impatient anymore” — he does make a habit of wrapping his hands around a fresh-from-the-tap beer to warm the glass before taking a sip.

The issue is a beer’s volatile organic compounds. Bad for smelling when it comes to paints and cleaning products, VOCs are everything to beer, releasing the aroma and flavor (which combine to create “taste”) as they warm.

“So much of our sense of taste is in the sense of smell,” Daniels says. “In order to stimulate the olfactory nerves, you have to have volatile compounds enter the nasal passage and into the throat. If beer is too cold, it will release less aromatics.”

Daniels suggested an experiment: In identical glasses, pour a straight-from-the-refrigerator beer alongside a bottle that spent 20 minutes warming on the counter. Drink side by side. Voila — the joys of not-too-cold beer.

So why don’t bars and restaurants serve beer warmer? Practical concerns, mostly. Tap systems are standardized at 38 degrees for two reasons: It’s a temperature that keeps beer fresh and allows for easy troubleshooting when tap systems go awry with foaming issues.

“If everyone ran at a different temperature of their own choosing, then it would be really hard to ensure proper beer quality,” Daniels says.

That doesn’t mean breweries and bars aren’t trying to do their part. Jerry’s restaurant and bar in Chicago’s Wicker Park neighborhood has considered serving barrel-aged stouts at room temperature, or storing them at room temperature and chilling them when ordered to about 50 degrees.

“But it takes less time to go from 38 to 50 than down from 70 to 50,” says Chris Coons, who recently left a job as beer buyer for Jerry’s to work for a beer distributor. “If I’m opening a barrel-aged stout at home that’s been stored at room temperature, I’ll put it in the fridge for about an hour to cool it to about 50.”

He called it “a signature beer geek move.”

“The general public isn’t getting into beer temperature,” says Coons at the bar one afternoon. “But they should be.”

Jerry’s general manager, Trey Elder, who spent 10 years working at three different Chicago coffee companies, chimed in: “Any extreme temperature, cold or hot, will mask flavor. At room temperature you’ll taste everything. When coffee is really hot, you won’t be able to taste that much. Coffees that are really amazing, you taste what’s amazing as they cool.”

Or in the case of beer, as it warms. The more complex the ingredients, the truer it is. At Moody Tongue Brewing Co. in Chicago, for instance, brewer and owner Jared Rouben focuses exclusively on food-driven beers — Sliced Nectarine IPA, Caramelized Chocolate Churro Baltic Porter, and Dehydrated Tangerine Cacao Wheat are three recent releases.

On more than one occasion I’ve had a Moody Tongue beer at tap temperature and thought, “Eh — this is pretty good.” Twenty minutes later, the sentiment has usually changed to full-on “wow” as the complexity of the fresh ingredients emerged. Rouben professed no offense when I told him as much, and agreed that his beers are best between 42 and 55 degrees. That belief is what led him to pick a peculiar shape as the branded Moody Tongue glass used in bars: the 15-ounce Napoli grande, which, based on its design, steers a drinker toward wrapping a hand around the glass’ narrow base, which slowly warms the beer.

“In beautiful beers, all it does is open up layers,” Rouben said. “That said, I would encourage people to drink a beer at different temperatures and experience the changes.”

It’s a fair point. Beer isn’t just worth sipping at a precisely “proper” temperature, but across a range of temperatures that gradually unfold the flavor and nuance. Such an approach to beer drinking takes patience, thought and what some might consider fussing. But like wine, spirits, or anything else worth drinking, the best beers reveal themselves across a journey of sorts.

Though, if you’re in a hurry, the microwave works too.

(c)2015 Chicago Tribune, Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC

Photo: Quinn Dombrowski via Flickr