Craft Beer Is Doing the Unthinkable: Mimicking Macro Beer, InsideHook, Courtney Iseman, June 7, 2023

While they may have popped up sporadically in years past, styles more firmly rooted in macro-beer territory like light lagers and golden ales are suddenly becoming common, available from craft breweries across the country. Often, these crushable, low-ABV beers even come branded with can designs paying homage to regional lagers of decades past — your Hamm’s, your Schlitzes, your Genny Cream Ales — so there’s no mistaking it: yes, craft brewers are taking inspiration from non-craft beer.

Craft beer is a scrappy upstart all grown up, and more self-consciously commercial:

An industry of thousands of breweries pouring different styles to meet different preferences, and providing local gathering places with their taprooms? Sure. A drinkable method of sticking it to the man? Not so much. Maybe that’s why the craft brewers who spent their days making triple dry-hopped hazy IPAs and their nights unwinding with a crisp, uncomplicated Miller High Life finally feel safe to admit the latter is more what they look for in a beer.

Now there’s craft, and there’s craft; Sierra Nevada or Lagunitas or Saranac, and then those expensive, whimsical 16-ounce four-packs. I consider myself a craft beer fan, but maybe once in my life I’ve bought one of those latter products. So I wonder if the “mass craft” landscape will remain mostly the same (IPA-heavy, particularly), while this “boutique craft” stuff will ironically become more like macro beers at the far opposite end of the spectrum.

If any of this—the beer or the business—is interesting to you, read the whole thing.

What Were You Doing in 1964?, Pray Tell, Katharine E. Harmon, October 2, 2020

This is an interesting blog post with even more interesting comments, trying to answer the question of what the implementation of the Vatican II liturgical reforms was really like in American Catholic parishes. Were there really nuns playing electric guitars in miniskirts and Masses where Holy Communion was reduced to pizza and beer?

It’s interesting how these quasi-urban legends form even when the events in question are quite recent, all told. None of this means much to someone who didn’t live through it (and maybe to someone who isn’t Catholic). But I’ve always found it interesting. Here and here are two more pieces on this question.

She taught a generation to type. But who is the real Mavis Beacon?, Mashable, Natasha Piñon, October 10, 2021

“Mavis” was simply the image on the cover of Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, a software program developed by Software Toolworks in the 1980s. (It was later acquired by Pearson, the educational media behemoth.) Many over the decades came to believe in her as a living, breathing teacher and the folks at Software Toolworks didn’t try too hard to clarify that wasn’t so.

I had this disc when I was a kid—one of them, there are over a dozen versions of it— and I always assumed Mavis Beacon was a real person who licensed her name to the software. That was not the case! A fun read for any child of the ’90s.

Victor, Washington Post, Blaine Harden, October 12, 1978

Gifted grapplers like Man Mountain Mike and Haystack Calhoun have been so much cheap chopped liver in the ring with Victor the bear….

Victor drank grape soda, showing as much concern for the purple liquid dribbling down his fur as for the wrestling challengers he casually whipped later in the afternoon….

Victor frequently celebrates a victory by licking his opponents in the face with his long tongue, which is like a red ribbon. [Challenger] Brown escaped the licking.

This took place in the 1970s at Beacon Mall in southern Fairfax County. A later incarnation of that shopping center, now called Beacon Center, still sits on the site (formerly it was an airport).

The stuff that went on in suburban shopping centers in the old days was wild. Read the whole thing.

Related Reading:

New and Old #75

New and Old #76

Thank you for reading! Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to help support this newsletter. You’ll get a weekly subscribers-only post, plus full access to the archive: over 700 posts and growing. And you’ll help ensure more material like this!

Share