On Saturday it captured a silver medal at the 2012 World Beer Cup in the Irish-Style Red Ale category.

In the event this result poked your curiosity button, here are the guidelines for the styles in question used by the 2012 judges:

Irish-Style Red Ale
Irish-style red ale ranges from light red-amber-copper to light brown in color. These ales have a medium hop bitterness and flavor. They often don’t have hop aroma. Irish-style red ales have low to medium candy-like caramel sweetness and a medium body. The style may have low levels of fruity-ester flavor and aroma.

German-Style Brown Ale/Düsseldorf Style Altbier
Copper to brown in color, this German ale may be highly hopped and intensely bitter (although the 25 to 35 IBU range is more normal for the majority of Altbiers from Düsseldorf) and has a medium body and malty flavor. A variety of malts, including wheat, may be used. Hop character may be low to medium in the flavor and aroma. The overall impression is clean, crisp, and flavorful often with a dry finish. Fruity esters can be low.

But I’d already decided that since I’d be surrounded by brewers and others involved in the beer industry during the Craft Brewers Conference I’d let attendees contribute.

I asked them to play a word association game. To warm up, we started with “soul of beer,” then moved on to “extreme beer,” and finished with “The beer moment.”

Chances are the results would be different if I simply walked up to people at the mall or a St. Louis Cardinals baseball game and said, “Beer moment,” or perhaps put it in question form, “Beer moment?”

What I learned and who I learned it from.

Tony Simmons, Pagosa Brewing
Soul of beer: craft beer
Extreme beer: trendy
Beer moment: epiphany

Patrick Rue, The Bruery
Yeast (which he made a three syllable word)
Different (Steven Pauwels of Boulevard Brewing provided some coaching while Rue considered this one and suggested passé.
Trying something new

Jean-Francois Gravel, Dieu du Ciel!
Yeast (no, really, he didn’t hear Rue’s answer)
Challenging
All the time

Carl Kins, World Beer Cup Judge from Belgium
Life’s blood
United States
24/7

Matt Van Wyk, Oakshire Brewing
Passion
Triple IPA
Experience

Melissa Cole, Let Me Tell You About Beer
Conviviality
Good when skilled
Seeing the people you love over beer

Brother Christian, Monastery of Christ in the Desert
Joy of life
Going to far
Any time

Brother Christian was at the conference because Christ in the Desert is shopping for a slightly larger pilot brewery. The monks have a small brewery on the monastery grounds. Monks’ Ales are brewed under contract nearby, and several monks travel there on brew day to lend a hand.

I’ve only listened to a bit of it — I was there, I’ve heard enough of my stories — but I was struck immediately by how many times I uttered the “um” sound. Perhaps I was trying to sound thoughtful. Mostly I come across as a person who should stick to the written word.

But if you want to hear how variations of “um” I can come up with or see what one of the walls in my office looks like, here’s the link.

That’s Urban Chestnut Zwickel in the plastic cup, raised to toast Jackie Robinson on Jackie Robinson Day. The thought occurred to me Sunday at Busch Statium that it is the ballpark that makes ballpark beer worth ballpark prices. Yes, I should have figured that out years ago.

The second photo, below, shows what’s on tap at Captain’s Corner, which is located behind Section 265 (loge level).

- If you are in the vicinity of St. Louis, a cask-conditioned beer listed as Session IPA on the menu at the Schlafly Tap Room (pictured at the right). This year’s batch is 4.1% ABV, perhaps 35 IBU, generously dry hopped with Galaxy and Simcoe hops. Very new world and juicy, smelling and tasting of tropical fruit.

The full name is House in Session Ale and it was brewed for the first time last year to send to Washington, D.C., to help draw attention to The Small Brewer Reinvestment and Expanding Workforce Act, legislation that would reduce taxes for small breweries. Most of this year’s 15-barrel batch also went to Washington, with a few kegs and one cask remaining in St. Louis.

- It’s about the conversation. And if that’s going well, remembering when it’s your turn to buy the next round.

If you aren’t going to be in St. Louis, there’s a list of participating Session Beer Day establishments here. Lew Bryson’s Friday post at The Session Beer Project nicely recaps a discussion that’s been going on for-what-seems-like-ever about stuff like defining Session Beer and finding American beer culture. Might be more detail there than you want want or even need. Just skip to the end if you lose interest: “And while you’re drinking, let’s do what folks do while they’re drinking session beer: let’s discuss.”

File this postcard under “beer nightmares.”

You, like I, probably won’t be in London April 19-21 for the society’s annual meeting and surrounding events, but you should wish you were. The schedule is here. The official meeting is at Fuller’s Brewery, which is cool enough in itself. But the following day there’s the “North Kent Meander.” Beer meandering. The best kind.

The news for those you can’t be there is that a special issue of Brewery History, the society’s journal, will include a reproduction in full of Mathias’s The Anchor Brewery: Park Street, Southwark. Written in 1953, this was unpublished until now.

Ken Thomas, curator of the Courage archives, explains in the introduction why the work goes beyond simply telling the story about another brewery. He writes, “although ‘The Anchor Brewery’ is important as it opens a window on the early stages of the study of business history, it is also much more than that. It tells the story of the rise of one of England’s largest breweries against the backdrop of the industrial revolution.”

The society website has information about subscribing to the journal or ordering the special issue.

I’m not sure that you’d say an easy way to get a treasured stein from Bluebonnet is to make the keynote speech and return the next morning with a technical presentation, but it somehow seems easier than winning one. The Bluebonnet had 1,805 entries this year. Steins go to first place winners. You need to brew a really good beer and be equally lucky to win one of these.

The Bluebonnet is, in fact, the biggest one-site homebrew competition anywhere, but really bigger than that. Texas big, for sure. Something like 800 people attended the Friday night tastings (commercial beers, followed by the “room crawl,” some not so good homebrews and many you’d be happy to find packaged it your local beer store). They needed five large buses for the Saturday afternoon pub crawl.

I’m back in the air tomorrow, so it will likely be a while before I can mentally organize some thoughts about homebrewers, or really the culture surrounding homebrewing, and to steal an idea from my friend Evan Rail, why they matter.

Earlier this month Lew Bryson mentioned skepticism about “the vaunted impact of homebrewers on American craft brewing.” Alan McLeod ran with it a bit, and Lew added some clarification.

I don’t disagree that some homebrewers occasionally get carried away, about almost anything and everything, and sometimes not always in a charming way. But the view from here, imperfect as it may be, is that homebrewers are an essential part of the evolving beer culture, changing beer landscape (tectonic plates and all), however you want to characterize what’s going on.

More on this . . . eventually. Please be civil with comments, since my ability to participate will be limited.

I care not about that vintage. Actually, I’d love to taste those wines, but ain’t happening, so we can move on. Instead, notice the point he makes about how the wine world changed in 1982. “It’s a clear dividing line between the end of the old way of making and thinking about wine, and a new way that, for better or worse, defines our current age,” he writes. And there’s more.

If you could transport yourself back to 1982, you’d find a much more constrained world, where great wine meant Bordeaux and Burgundy, with perhaps some Champagne thrown in. The Rhône? In a great shop you might find Rhônes in a section marked “country wines.” Italy? Straw bottles of chianti, perhaps some dusty bottles of Barolo and a lot of awful Lambruscos and Soaves. California? Just moving out of the jug wine era into the age of white zinfandel.

Except for the great names, wine was still largely a local business. As had been true for centuries, most of the different wines of the world would be sold within 100 miles of where they had been made.

Beer was a local product in 1982 and it was not. Heck, by 1882 in the United States local was in trouble.

So was there a year that changed beer?

On second thought, maybe this is a local question. Perhaps there was a year that changed beer globally, but as likely different years in the UK, in Bavaria, in Bohemia, in the north of Germany, in Flanders, in . . .

I’m leaning toward 1918 myself.