But this beer didn’t have to travel to India on a boat

21st Amendment Hop CrisisOops. Forgot to send a change of address to the guys at 21st Amendment Brewery. (The fact is the people who bought our house in New Mexico likely will be receiving stray beers for years. Should have advertised that when the house was on the market.)

So this can of Hop Crisis Imperial IPA traveled a thousand more miles than they might have expected. But it’s not like it spent months at sea, bobbing away. I’m pretty sure it arrived fresh because it was packed in hops that hadn’t gone over to the cheesy side. Instead, lots of citrus and pine, and maybe something a cat left behind.

The basic package for Hop Crisis includes four cans in the colorful box pictured here. The press package contained one can and loose hops that quickly made a mess of my desk. I once joked you could smell the hops in Deschutes Hop Henge Experimental IPA through the crown. Well, I did smell hops when I put this can in the fridge, because it was covered with sticky hop resin.

The fact sheet lists Columbus, Centennial and Cascade as bittering hops, but I think that means those are the ones used at various stages (in others words, also adding flavor and aroma) of the boil. It is dry hopped with Simcoe, Ahtanum, Amarillo and Cascade; thus the blast of citrus (from oranges to grapefruit) and pine that jumps from the glass. They say it has 94 IBU (International Bitterness Units), but I don’t know if that was measured in a lab or calculated. Either way, properly bitter. For good measure, it was aged on oak spirals.

The resulting beer won a silver medal at the 2010 Great American Beer Festival. It’s bold, complex and balanced in the Imperial IPA way.

Mid-week beer links and observations

“Everything’s going up.”

Bill Night updates his Portland Beer Price Index. “Two pubs raised their draft prices this quarter, and the six-pack and bomber prices are not surprisingly continuing an upward trend.”

I’m pretty sure it’s not just happening in Portland,Oregon.

* Speaking of beer prices, SaveOnBrew.com is an interesting notion but right now appears to be more useful when shopping for a deal on Stag rather than where to find Goose Island IPA and how much it might cost. What direction will it grow?

* The neighborhood pub. Several worthy ideas at the KC Beer Blog and one comment that I have to pass along: “I haven’t met a bar that managed to infect the bottles yet.” But they can subject them to lighting that skunks the beer inside (even brown bottles) or fail to rotate stock or otherwise keep it fresh.

* The Farmery will be Canada’s first estate brewery. Challenges ahead, as nicely summarized in the Winnipeg Free Press: “They’re betting the farm on estate brewery.”

* A press release announcing a new brewery for Los Angeles, Golden Road Brewing (actually in North Atwater Village), explains it will be laid out in a three-building campus. “The distinctive primary colored buildings are easy to spot, just off Interstate 5 and Highway 134. The blue building will be production, the red building will be barrel room & storage and the yellow building will be for offices, on-site sales, and eventually a pub and beer garden.” It’s supposed to open in the fall. Personally, I figure if you are going to go to the trouble of color coding your buildings you might as well have them change with the seasons.

*Merchant du Vin, one of the first distributors of specialty beers to launch a web site (like maybe pre-Google), has redesigned its site. Pretty easy to find the basic specs on any of it’s beers. More impressive: “Find Our Beer” actually works.

* Yuengling wasn’t already in Ohio? That’s a bet I would have lost. Apparently Ohio residents still drive to the Pennsylvania border to buy the beer.

* Just plain stupid. Flying Monkeys Craft Brewery in Ontario claims Alpha-fornication contains “2500 IBUs (International Bitterness Units) and 13.3% ABV.” That’s about 2,400 bitterness units beyond possible.

Making a connection, beer included

Jake Leinenkugel autographs a fan's head?

Chippewa Falls, Wis., is a town with about 13,000 residents. Drive in from the north, taking County Highway S to county Highway Q, turning south and driving past a couple of big parks and it doesn’t look that much different than Cameron on Bloomer or one of the other towns along U.S. 3. Maybe a little bigger.

Next, boom, a brewery complex, Jacob Leinenkugel Brewing Co.

It’s a tourist attraction, for sure, and good for the town’s business. However it feels perfectly appropriate that the gift shop/museum may be new (much newer than other parts of the brewery) but is designed to look like a cabin from the nineteenth century and called Leinie Lodge.

Saturday Leinenkuegl’s hosted its eighth annual Leinie Lodge Family Reunion. Thousands attended. I expect many spoke with a distinctive northern Wisconsin/Minnesota accent (think Frances McDormand in “Fargo.”) And a PR person sent along this photo of Jake Leinenkugel autographing one attendee’s head.

You think it was staged? I don’t.

But I’m pretty sure that the man did not immediately tweet, “@jakeleinenkugel just signed my head. I may never wash it again.”

The smell of the ocean . . . stinks in beer

This isn’t exactly new. Live Science explained that the key had been found to the “smell of the sea” more than four years ago, but it appears I was absent that day. Instead, the basics just popped up in an audio book Daria is listening to.

And it turns out dimethyl sulfide, otherwise known as DMS, gives the ocean air “sort of a fishy, tangy smell.” Good when you are strolling along the beach. Not so good in beer, other than at very low levels in a few and full on in Rolling Rock. If you are judging beer you might comment DMS causes a sample to smell and taste of canned or cooked vegetables.

Not surprisingly, some people find it reminds them of shellfish. Recently I judged beers with somebody who said one tasted just like SpaghettiOs.

So let’s say you and a friend order the same beer. You notice DMS and hold your nose. He remembers the night he proposed to his future wife on a beach in Jamaica.

Context. It matters.