Month: November 2012

Session #70 announced: Don’t believe the hype

The SessionDavid J. Bascombe has announced that The Session #70 will be all about hype.

He explains: “Back in the summer, I shared a bottle of Westvleteren 12 with my brother and my father. Whilst I was aware of it’s reputation as ‘best beer in the world,’ they were not. Whilst we all enjoyed it, we all agreed that we much preferred the other beer we had that night. The question that came into my head was this . . . If I had told them it was the best beer in the world, would their perceptions have changed?”

So the ground rules for The Session on Dec. 7:

How much does hype have an effect? Are we much better off knowing nothing about a beer, or is it better to have the knowledge as to what the best beers are?

Which beers do you think have been overhyped? How do you feel when a beer doesn’t live up to it’s hype.

Is hype a good or bad thing for beer?

Participating is easy. Post on Dec. 7 and drop David a note or leave a comment.

Assorted beer links

– Localism + Beer.
Read it all for the complete thought. If you need more encouraging, consider this this snippet: “. . . beer is less a destination than a journey, and you make the road signs yourself.”

– Foaming at the mouth about craft beer.
This vitriol against this rant jammed my Twitter feed Saturday a.m. Perhaps I’m just paranoid, but my first thought was, “Do my friends think I sound like the people he is describing?”

– Beer geeks, let the guessing begin.
Greg Kitsock muses on the spices in Anchor Our Special Ale (Washington Post)

– Oskar Blues’ Dale Katechis talks about beer and brewing in North Carolina.

– The resurrection of Baderbräu, “Chicago first craft beer.”
Raising a few questions, like a) What was Chicago’s first “craft” beer? and b) Isn’t a little early to get nostalgic about beers first brewed in the 1980s?

– Cocktail blogging is dead.

Move over Burton upon Trent, there’s a new pale ale capital

Joel Nosh of the Chicago Tribune explains why it was a coup Chicago-area brewers won all three medals in the American-style pale ale category at the Great American Beer Festival.

First, the Chicago area took the top three spots from among 109 beers entered, one of the most competitive categories at GABF. Also, American-style pale ales and their bold use of hops were pioneered on the West Coast, and the top honors in the category usually go to those brewers. But not this year.

For the record, they were:

– Gold: Brickstone APA, Brickstone Restaurant and Brewery, Bourbonnais, Ill.

– Silver: The Weight, Piece Brewery and Pizzeria, Chicago.

– Bronze: Zombie Dust, Three Floyds, Munster, Ind.

Piece brewmaster Jonathan Cutler was sitting directly in front of me during the awards ceremony. The Weight was brewed as a “tribute and a celebration” after Levon Helm died last spring. When the silver was announced, Cutler stood right up, made a fist, punched a giant hole in something, and shouted (yes, it was pretty loud), “F**k, yeah.” It made everybody around flat out grin, maybe even laugh.

Cutler has won plenty of medals at GABF and the World Beer Cup. Perhaps he was a little more excited because had just won silver after Zombie Dust had won a the bronze. He and Nick Floyd of Three Floyds are the best of friends, but who wouldn’t want to one-up that cult beer?1

In any event, when I saw Cutler in the past I thought first of weiss bier and then about the delicious Piece pizza.

Now, I’ll see him bolting to his feet, bumping his fist, and . . .

*****

1 Zombie Dust is brewed with immensely popular and hard-to-get Citra hops. Certainly part of the reason they are popular is because demand exceeds current supply, and perhaps Alan McLeod is right when he suggests they could be just a fad. But they also have an aroma different than hops that came before. This might be like more than a hundred years ago, when brewers in Britain began using the Fuggle hop. Wow, that’s different. And, despite various agronomic issues, Fuggle is still around. In fact, she’s a great grandmother of Citra.

Turns out I predicted homebrewing in White House

If you see these posts through a feed reader — as the majority of you do, in fact — then you won’t be aware that I’ve done some remodeling/reorganizing here. As part of the process, I’m working my way through old posts, cleaning up special characters (mostly dashes and quotation marks) that got turned into something that looks cyrillic because of some strange digital transformation.

During the course of this, and it is ongoing, I’ve come across a number of “cringe” posts. I really wrote that? I should have known better. (Hops, in particular.) A lot of things I’ve forgotten about, to be honest. Including what were intended to be silly predictions, posted at the outset of 2007.

But, hey, look at this one:

6. Barack (is there anything he can’t do?) Obama wins Homebrewer of the Year in the National Homebrew Competition and declares that if elected he will name Fred Eckhardt the nation’s first Craft Beer Czar.

Jan. 2, 2007. You can look it up.

Tick-tock, today a cover, soon a book

For the Love of Hops

I threatened to retweet the link hourly last week when Kristi Switzer posted the “For the Love of Hops” table of contents and passed along the absolutely gorgeous cover.

But then I realized I’d be all over the unfollow button if somebody else did that. So instead, here’s the cover. Book should start shipping beginning of December. You can find out more at Brewers Publications, and read endorsements from Ken Grossman, Jim Koch and Vinnie Cilurzo.

Man, I hope they know what they are talking about.