Apparently, during the ’90s microwbrewery craze, a lot of hop farms emerged in Eastern Washington. When that nascent industry experienced a shakeout, many of those farms went under, sold out, or switched to other crops. Now, suds-biz experts warn we may have a serious hop shortage. When combined with a tight barley market, the result could be skyrocketing prices for the Northwest’s better brews. Will we have to turn to wine, or gin, or (Heaven forbid!) low-hopped swill from the mega-beer factories?

• The exodus of established stars from the decaying music industry continues, with Madonna signing a concert management company, not a record company, to distribute her next few CDs. Other artists, including space-heater heir Trent Reznor, are going further and selling direct to fans.
• That quintessential “legacy media” company, NBC, is buying up Oxygen (one of the last big non-conglomerate-owned cable channels) and vacating its historic studios in Beautiful Downtown Burbank. Under California laws intended to preserve media-biz jobs, the network has to offer the lot to a buyer that’ll keep it operating.The Tonight Show will move to the Universal Pictures lot, which NBC also now owns; the NBC News bureau, the KNBC-TV local news, and Access Hollywood will move to a new building nearby. The other network show still made on the Burbank lot, Days of Our Lives, is rumored to be ending in ’09.

  But by that time, the whole company might be sold off.

• Get ready for more Letterman “Network Time Killer” segments: The movie and TV industries are bracing for the first writers’ strike since 1988. The difference this time: The networks and cable channels might let a strike go on for a while, running a bunch of cheap reality shows instead of scripted fare.
• Our pal Sherman Alexie is in the running for a National Book Award. It’s for The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, a “young adult” novel about a Spokane Reservation teen who finds himself an outsider everywhere he goes.It’s also got fabulous illustrations by another of our ol’ pals, the one-n’-only Ellen Forney. It couldn’t have happened to two nicer folks.
• Looking for an industry even more moribund than recorded music? Try mass-market beer. Miller has already merged with South African Breweries; Coors has merged with Molson. Now both seek to merge their respective U.S. operations.The deal would turn the once competitive domestic swill market into a duopoly between “MillerCoors” and Anheuser-Busch. (The Pabst brands are now owned by a marketing company that contracts out its production to Miller.)

  I can still remember when there were five mass-production breweries in the Northwest alone, each operated by a different company.

  Fortunately, we now have a wealth of microbreweries, whose broad range of tasty product has long since rendered superfluous the likes of “Colorado Kool-Aid.”

• As the world gets hotter, it also gets humid-er.
• Ann Coulter inanity of the day: Now sez she wishes all Jews to “perfect” themselves, by becoming Christians.
• Office whoopee? Go right ahead, say many companies. Just don’t try to cover up the aroma by burning microwave popcorn in the break room.
• While other commentators wax nostalgic about the fiftieth anniversary of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, P-I business columnist Bill Virgin gushes undeserved laurels on the semicentennial of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (that other favorite novel of male virgins everywhere).Let’s compare n’ contrast, shall we?

  Both Kerouac and Rand are better known today for their celebrity and their ideas than for their prose stylings.

  But both authors’ rambling self-indulgences actually serve their respective egotisms.

  Both liked to hype themselves as daring rebels, valiantly crusading against the stifling anti-individualism of grey-flannel-suit America.

  Kerouac helped provide an ideological excuse for generations of self-centered dropouts and anarchists to proclaim themselves above the petty rules of mainstream society.

  Rand helped provide an ideological excuse for generations of self-cenetered tech-geeks and neocons to proclaim themselves above the petty rules of civil society and rule of law.

  But at least Kerouac’s devotees don’t go around declaring that the oil companies and the drug companies somehow don’t have enough power.

  (P.S.: Digby has much more lucent thoughts than mine i/r/t Randmania.)

…since a post to this site. What can I say except (1) I’m sorry, (2) I’ll try to do better, and (3) I’ve got some great print work I’ve been workin’ on that’s comin’ at ya real soon?

Meanwhile, our Capitol Hill Times friends have a full list of all the beer and wine products you can’t buy downtown anymore. Yet that abominable California product sold under the once-respectable Pabst name still remains freely available.

Autumnal conditions gracefully settled into the greater Seattle area on Tuesday, Sept. 12. We’re cloudy and cool once again, and will probably stay this way, more or less, for the next six months. I like it. If you don’t like it, here’s the URL for Florida real estate.

How high are fans’ expectations for the Seahawks? Let’s just say they’re undefeated, but not undefeated by enough.

And the UW Husky footballers are doing better than expected, having won two squeakers.

Roq La Rue’s Tiki Art Now 3 exhibit is still up. If you go this week, you’ll probably have a more pleasant viewing experience than was had by we who attended the packed-to-overflowing opening night.

I’m sending off the page proofs of my next book, Vanishing Seattle, to the publisher today. There’s only a slight chance copies will be available prior to Xmas; but you’ll still be able to preorder. If you do so through MISCmedia.com, you’ll get a truly lovely gift card to let your lucky recipient know of the memorable reading experience awaiting when their copy does arrive.

Excuse us if we’re not yet really impressed by the newly corporate-approved legal movie download hype. Even if one (1) of the services is Mac-friendly. At this point in time, those physical artifacts known as DVDs still provide greater selection, higher image quality, (usually) lower consumer costs, and fewer pesky rights-management shackles.

It looks like Seattle First United Methoidist Church may move to Belltown after all, even as its previously announced deal with developer Martin Selig goes pffft. Under the new deal, rival developer Nitze-Stagen will take over the church’s historic sanctuary for commercial uses, put an office tower on the rest of the church’s existing land, and help the church buy the Third and Battery site Selig was going to give away to it.

Tomorrow’s primary day here in WashState. I beg of you to all get out and defeat the far right’s highly funded drive to pack the state Supreme Court with anti-environmentalists.

…fortified wine or malt liquor in Belltown as of today. Now if they’d only ban PBR, I’d be happy…

…in ad-industry lingo, as “a promise which cannot be legally substantiated.”

…talks about “millionaires’ post-Microsoft pursuits;” including those of early-middle-aged tycoons who’ve vowed to give back to their communities.

I can think of a few other ways to use local private money to help the region–capitalistic, potentially profitable, ways even.

I’m talking about taking back key parts of the Northwest commercial identity that have been run into the ground by out-of-region consolidators.

Specifically, I call for the de-Cincinnatification of Northwest retail.

Kroger is ruining QFC and Fred Meyer. Kroger’s crosstown colleagues at Federated Department Stores have trashed The Store Formerly Known As The Bon Marche, and are preparing to do the same to Portland’s Meier & Frank.

Let’s get some locals with spare cash together to buy these chains back, to bring them home, to make them again responsive to local consumers and local communities instead of stock-market speculators.

If these tasks take more money than we can round up, we can always start smaller, by buying the Rainier and Olympia beer brands back from the Pabst/Miller joint venture that controls them now, contracting their production to underutilized local microbreweries, and making them ours again.

…they’re worried that the Northwest drought might lead to a beer and wine shortage.

…on a list of “Signs You Might Be Too Canadian”: “You dismiss all beers under 6% as ‘for children and the elderly.'”

(via Steve Mandich):

“Hey Clark -Steve here. Longtime reader, first time emailer.

So I’m flipping through the channels late Saturday night and at 1 a.m. this super-low budget, ‘Wayne’s World’-looking call-in show comes on channel 11 with two dudes talking about Rainier Beer. So I watch for a few minutes and then they flash this URL on the screen:

http://www.rememberrainier.com/

So I dial it up and it’s just a corporate website touting Rainier in Gen-X language with Seattle-based overtones – obviously the show is just an infomercial masquerading as a public-access quality show.

Rainier left Seattle for Olympia a few years ago, and then left Olympia for California not too long after that. So, for over a year now, ‘Rainier Beer’ is only brewed in Irwindale, CA (an LA suburb), and is just a subsidiary label of Miller or Stroh’s or some shit. [Ed. Note: It’s Pabst.] ‘Mountain Fresh’ my ass.

Just thought you’d be interested.”

Actually, I am interested. Pabst’s collection of brand names and wholesale contracts is currently up for sale. I’d love to see, or even help, some local consortium buy the Rainier and Oly brands, contract their production out to an underutilized microbrew facility in Wash. state, and thus bring our local heritage brews back home. Any takers?

The Miss Budweiser hydroplane team will be disbanded at the end of this year’s boat-racing season, along with the beer giant’s whole 41-year sponsorship of the sport. The move follows the death of Bernie Little, a promiment regional Bud wholesaler and owner of the Miss Bud operation. In the past, us hydro lovers have complained on end about the Bud team’s Yankee-esque dominance of the circuit. Now the question is can the sport survive without its prime benefactor?

…but if you look long enough you can still find a Stroh violin, a strings-with-horn instrument designed to be heard by primitive gramophone recording equipment.

PLACEHOLDING AT A PARKING SPACE in beautiful downtown Madison Park.

NOW YOU KNOW how the good ship Goodtime gets its times so good.

Recent articles in the NY Times, the Wall St. Journal, and elsewhere have noticed the apparently sudden resurgence of Pabst Blue Ribbon in the national beer marketplace. The articles all credit PBR’s comeback to an apparently instantaneous spike in the product’s young-adult hipness factor, or to a stealth-marketing campaign to create such a hipness factor. None of the articles tells the real story:

In the ’80s, both Pabst and Stroh bought up dozens of second-tier mass market beers across the country. They included Heilman’s, Lone Star, Iron City, Hamm’s, Schmidt, former national powerhouse Schlitz, and all of the Northwest’s onetime Big Five (Olympia, Rainier, Heidelberg, Lucky Lager, and Blitz-Weinhard). Pabst bought Stroh in 1998 and decided to retire or de-emphasize all these legendary names. The plan was to use the strong distribution networks of these local beers to relaunch Pabst Blue Ribbon as a national major. Bars and taverns were given deep discounts and promotional incentives to switch from Pabst-acquired local brands and make PBR their principal swill on tap.

With the former Olympia brewery, the last of the Big Five, having closed last week, it’s clear at least around here that PBR’s comeback has little to do with street cred and nothing to do with the movie Blue Velvet. It has everything to do with the familiar themes of corporate consolidation and the homogenization of regional cultural landmarks.

WIRED PONDERS whether PCs are from Mars and Macs are from Venus.

SURE ENOUGH, as soon as I’m no longer writing Obits a major passing occurs in the Northwest scene. Miller Brewing is closing the 106-year-old former Olympia Brewery, the region’s last mass-market beer factory and Thurston County’s biggest industrial employer.

It comes four years after Seattle’s Rainier Brewery came to a similar end. Both shutdowns (along with those of Blitz-Weinhard in Portland, Carling/Heidelberg in Tacoma, and the Lucky Lager plant in Vancouver WA) were directly caused by the industry’s massive consolidation. Miller’s contract-brewing arrangement with Pabst meant the Oly plant made the brand names formerly produced at all five big Northwest breweries (though Pabst has been phasing out what was left of the Olympia and Rainier brands this past year).

The Oly site was once the west’s second biggest brewery after Coors, but is now the smallest of Miller’s seven facilities. Management apparently decided to surplus it rather than add a recently required wastewater-treatment facility. So, just maybe, It really was The Water.

(The 125-year tradition of sudsy manufacturing in the PacNW, of course, at dozens of microbreweries and brewpubs, whose business plans aren’t as brutally reliant on mass production and mass marketing.)

…was celebrated all over town on Sunday. Hundreds of bibliophiles prepared for the long indoor season ahead at the semiannual Friends of the Seattle Public Library book sale, held at a former Sand Point naval-air hangar. (This is also where Northwest Bookfest is moving next month.)

Nearby in Magnuson Park’s no-leash beach, local dog owners gave their pets one last vigorous round of wet exercise.

Also nearby, Magnuson’s public-art collection of military submarine diving-plane tails, arranged to resemble orca fins, might just help one remember the sacrifices incurred in past wars, and thus help one resolve to try to prevent future carnages.

But let’s return, for now, to celebrating the equinox. A fairly large crowd gathered at Gas Works Park to do so, under the auspices of Seattle Peace Concerts. Hundreds paid varying degrees of attention to an all-day lineup of “blooze” music (you know, that music that’s sorta like blues, only all-white and all-aggressive).

Hundreds of others sipped, chatted, and danced at the second Fremont Oktoberfest. Some of my favorite current local acts (Peter Parker, the Beehives) performed, along with an all-polka afternoon slate.

But serious autumnal responsibilities waited just outside the beer garden, with a street-poster reminder of the monumental tasks ahead of us.

(Thanx and a hat tip to loyal reader Stephen Cook for research help on this piece.)