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What’s up, beer geek! This is The Beer Scholar 6-Pack weekly newsletter, a short clean email featuring 6 bulleted links with brief descriptions for each.

Hey there beer geek! I'm excited that the first fresh hop beers are just now dropping in the Pacific Northwest, I look forward to trying a bunch of those soon. Mostly though, I'm keeping my head down and working hard on The Beer Scholar Online Course for the CC exam.

Beer of the Week: I popped into a bar near my house this week and tried Herman, a Hazy IPA from Living Haus, the new brewery that took over the Modern Times space here in Portland, OR. It was tropical, dank, and balanced in all the right ways. At first I was surprised their first release would be so great, but I learned that the new Living Haus owners/brewers had worked for Modern Times and took over the space when MT walked away. Living Haus definitely seems like a nice addition to the city's brewery scene, from what I can already tell!

As always, here are 6 links for your Friday 6 Pack. Enjoy.As always, here are 6 dope links for your Friday 6 Pack. Enjoy.

TBS 6-Pack

HOW TO WRITE GOOD BEER TASTING NOTES 

How To (and how not to) Write Beer Tasting Notes by Mark Dredge. I’ve never seen anyone try to codify the various styles of writing beer notes, so this is interesting. Dredge breaks down 10 simple examples of different beer description styles, from beer judge style to marketing style to more place-based methods. It’s an interesting exercise by a guy who has been writing about beer for many years, so he’s thought about it more than most. We can all take something away from this, whether you’re prepping for an exam, writing a blog, or submitting pieces to a major media outlet. Thanks to Scott Fielder for sending this link in. 

IT’S STILL ALCOHOLISM EVEN IF IT’S CRAFT BEER

When Water Meets Water — Surviving the Myths of Jack Kerouac and Craft Beer by Jerard Fagerberg for Good Beer Hunting. There’s isn’t enough discussion of alcoholism in craft beer and beer writing, so hat’s off to Fagerberg for taking it on in such a personal way. “But I still worry about how I drink. And when. And how working in the beer industry makes it too easy to forget why…As I write this, I am finishing a beer: a delicate Cream Ale made in a nearby suburb by careful artisans. It is easy for me to tell myself that a 3 p.m. beer is dignified when it’s made like this; that drinking, in this instance, is an appreciation of a trade more than an act of hedonism. I am not afraid of Daisy [the author’s daughter] watching me drink this beer, because it is craft beer…” I had an experience early in my craft beer career in which an man approaching the age of being elderly and who worked in beer distribution sat next to me at a bar after a craft beer conference and warned me, as a noob to the business, to be very careful about alcoholism. Oddly, that very real danger had never occurred to me until that moment. I’ll never forget that and I’ll take the opportunity to do the same for other folks in the biz every chance I get. 

SO THAT’S HOW HOPS GET BUSY!

Yakima Chief Vid on Twitter. I’ve never even thought to wonder about how hops are purposefully pollinated for breeding programs. In this quick little video Yakima Chief shows how it’s done. 

ARE HOP COMPANIES TOO POWERFUL?

Who Owns Your Beer? by Douglas Mackinnon for the MacKinnon Report. This is a long and well researched piece about how the patenting of new hops is resulting in an extreme concentration of power among just a few hop companies (cartels?) in a similar fashion to how it has gone down for global food companies like Monsanto. Essentially, when a hop company owns a must-have hop, like the uberpopular Citra, they can exercise serious power over growers and beer makers and can manipulate market prices in their favor. MacKinnon points out that with breweries literally naming their most popular beers things like “Simcoe IPA” or “Citra IPA” they’re putting their futures in the hands of these companies. MacKinnon literally goes into Federal records to show who owns hop patents & trademarks and which companies they’ve been assigned to. There isn’t much independent investigative journalism like this happening anywhere, so thumbs up to MacKinnon for doing the hard work. 

FRESH HOP TIME! 

The first bunch of fresh hopped beers have just been released in the Pacific Northwest! This is my first fresh hop season here in Portland and I’m excited to taste these beers. Of course a few come out all over the place, but to actually be here in the area is exciting. This link from Jeff Alworth’s Beervana blog plugs us into some exciting new research on Terroir & Hop Selection — it turns out that Cascade and Mosaic hops grown in different regions have wildly different aromatic properties and brewers are on the case when they do their hop selection. By the way, hop selection is one big reason why some of the hypiest hazy IPA makers’ make much better IPAs than others, they actually go to the PNW and pick out their hops each year rather than just taking whatever hops they get. 

TOLKIEN’S ART & THE NEW LOTR SHOW 

J.R.R. Tolkien is widely considered one of the most important and influential authors of the 20th century. He pretty much invented the modern fantasy genre as we know it — you can thank him for D&D, GoT, and all the rest. There’s a new show coming out on Prime soon called The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (YT trailer 1 and trailer 2). If I had $163B and owned a major streaming service, I would create new LOTR shows, too. Not everyone knows that Tolkien was a multitalented artist, he was a great painter, calligrapher, and map maker, not just an author, linguist, and professor. The Tolkien estate just released some of his unpublished art on a new website. It’s a good time to be a Tolkien fan! 

Have a lovely weekend, y'all!

Chris