Greetings, beer lovers! Happy (sort of, or maybe not, depending on how things are with you) Friday, and once (or not) again, ‘tis chingchongchinaman as your guest FNBB blogger tonight, with esquimaux taking a well-earned evening off from FNBB duties. The starting point for tonight’s FNBB is this article by Jasmine Ting from the CraftBeer.com website just shy of 2 months ago, about the Asian-American craft beer scene. From the start of the article, self the loser admits to being clueless about all the Asian-themed foodie mentions like matcha, ube, gochujang, and calamansi. (Lychee, that I knew about, though more from childhood than foodie trends.) Ting mentions that Asian-American craft brewers hover at around 2%, from a 2021 report from the Brewers Association.
Digging back through web searches, it turns out, of course, that Ms. Ting’s article isn’t all that novel. T.M. Brown covered the same subject back in June 2023 in the NYT here, with many of the same names in craft brewing mentioned as well as the same 2% stat. One can dig back even further to this May 2022 article from the “Hop Culture” website by Grace Lee-Weitz, again with the same names and the same 2% stat. It’s perhaps no surprise to read that the % of craft brewers who are white is around 93.5%.
Of course, the larger and more fun point is that Asian-American add new elements to the craft beer scene. In fact, for fans of sours — you know who you are :) — from Brown’s article, it’s cute to read about Dokkabier (Oakland, CA) and its kettle sour that incorporates kimchi, according to Youngwon Lee, Dokkabier’s founder (with a bit of irony on the initial source of the kimchi element:
“My head brewer, who is white, makes kimchi at home, so we pulled out the culture from his kimchi and used it to make a kettle sour. The sourness of the culture was the inspiration, and then we added chile and ginger to round it out.”
Living / being stuck where I am now, I’m certainly not aware of any Asian-American craft breweries near me. The closest might be Azadi Brewing Company (Chicago, IL) from the list in Ms. Lee-Weitz’s article of Asian-American craft brewers. And tonight’s featured beer chez 3CM doesn’t fall into the featured demographic at all. As you can see from the picture, it’s a “Wolf Among Weeds” IPA from Golden Road Brewery (Anaheim, CA), which has both a bright look and a bright taste.
With that, time to turn it over to you folks. What are you sipping tonight? Anyone brewing their own? Inquiring minds, etc..