Clamps & Gaskets: News Roundup for Weeks 37/38, 2016.

A bi-weekly, non-comprehensive roundup
of news of beer and other things.

Weeks 37/38
11 September - 24 September 2016

• 24 September 2016
  A top official at Sierra Nevada Brewing, the nation's third largest 'craft' brewery, predicts that the brewery will experience a 4.4 percent drop in sales for 2016. Since only four percent of the nation's four thousand two hundred plus 'craft' breweries produce nearly seventy-eight percent of all 'craft' beer, will 2016 be the year that 'craft' beer sales growth stumbles?
  —Via Brewbound.


• 24 September 2016
  The state and future of the hop industry and its relation to craft beer in the United States.
  —A five-part analysis, via Bryan D. Roth, at This Is Why I'm Drunk.


• 24 September 2016
  Bready, empyreumatic, twang, mucilagenous, and sickly: 19th and early 20th-century beer descriptors, now (sadly?) no longer used.
  —Via Gary Gillman, at Beer et seq.


• 22 September 2016
  Hackers attack Yahoo in 2014, gain access to personal information of over a half billion users, largest data breach ever. Yahoo reports incident two years after the fact, says it is likely 'state sponsored.'
  —Via Yahoo.



• 22 September 2016
  Cask Ale Week begins today and continues through 2 October, organized by pub cask-ale accreditation organization, Cask Marque, but "but only in Britain, only in pubs."
  —Via Cask Ale Week.


• 20 September 2016
  August 2016 was the hottest August on record, and the 16th consecutive month of record-heat, says the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The summer period — encompassing June through August — was also the warmest on record, 0.07 degrees warmer than the summer of 2015, the previous record holder.
  —Via Washington Post.


• 20 September 2016
  Runner sets Appalachian Trail hike-through record: two thousand one hundred ninety miles in just under forty-six days, fueled with candy, pizza, and beer.
  —Via New York Times.


• 15 September 2016
  

  Beer sales in brewery taprooms have shown a major increase this year over 2015. Through the first six months of the year, the TTB recorded 851,142 barrels of the total 87.8 million barrels of domestic production as “Tax Determined, Premises Use.” Although that’s still less than 1% of overall volume, it’s up sharply from 2015, when the TTB recorded only 525,203 barrels at the same point. That means premises use is on pace to add roughly 600,000 barrels of volume in 2016. And that likely underestimates growth.[...] At-the-brewery sales will never be the majority of the beer business or even the craft business. What recent trends show, however, is that they are here to stay, and will be an increasingly important piece in the beer landscape in coming years.

  —Via Bart Watson, chief economist at [U.S.] Brewers Association.


• 15 September 2016
  The business of homebrewing contributed $1.225 billion and 11,672 jobs to the American economy in 2015.
  —Via American Homebrewers Association.



• 14 September 2016
  Observations by Gaia, a spacecraft operated by the European Space Agency (ESA), million miles away from Earth, have been used to create the most accurate map ever made of the Milky Way

  an atlas detailing the positions and brightnesses of some 1.1 billion stars in the Milky Way, based on 14 months of observations starting in July 2014. Over 400 million of these stars have never been seen before. By the end of its scheduled observation run [in 2020], the spacecraft will have tracked the accurate positions and motions of roughly a billion stars, or one percent of the Milky Way’s estimated stellar population.

  —Via National Geographic.


• 12 September 2016
  

  I would counsel someone not to get into the [American 'craft' beer] business today. — Greg Koch of Stone Brewing, at California Craft Beer Summit.

  —Via Craft Business Daily.


• 12 September 2016
  Brewmaster Mitch Steele —ex of Stone Brewing, author of book "IPA: Brewing Techniques, Recipes, and the Evolution of India Pale Ale"— announces plan to open prodution brewery/brewpub in Atlanta, Georgia.
  —Via Good Beer Hunting.



• 11 September 2016
  Scientists —at the University of Leuven and the Vlaams Instituut voor Biotechnologie (VIB)— have examined the genetic history of ale (and wine) yeast. They have found that brewers have been domesticating the yeast used to make beer — breeding it for the properties that suit their needs — since the 1500s, over a century before scientists actually discovered microbes. Since then, brewers have been, in effect, discouraging their yeast from having sex. According to the study's analysis of 157 different strains of yeast used to make beer, wine, spirits, sake, bread, and bioethanol, this process has caused the yeast used in beer brewing to grow more distinct from feral cousins than microbes used for other commercial fermentation. Vintners have been more lenient in such matters.
  —Via Washington Post.

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• Clamps and Gaskets is a bi-weekly wrap-up of stories not posted at Yours For Good Fermentables.com. Most deal with beer (or wine, or whisky); some do not.
• The Clamps and Gaskets graphic was created by Mike Licht at NotionsCapital.


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