Bring on the vestal virgins.

The White IPAs are upon us. This is not a bad idea, marrying Belgian White beers with New World hops, at least until somebody starts writing new style guidelines. Last year’s collaboration beers from Deschutes Brewery and Boulevard Brewing proved that. Boulevard’s version even won a medal at the Great American Beer Festival (in the American-Belgo-Style Ale category).

The skinny:

* Deschutes Chainbreaker White I.P.A. It will released be in the Northwest in March. Not the same recipe as in the collaboration with Boulevard (no sage, for one thing). 5.6% ABV, 60 IBUs.

* Samuel Adams Whitewater IPA. Available now in the Brewer’s Choice Variety 12-Pack and soon in six-packs. Hops from the American Northwest and Australia. 5.8% ABV.

* Saranac White IPA. “We’ve taken a delicious American IPA bursting with Citra hops, and given it a whole new direction by adding the refreshing fruitiness of orange peel & coriander and the softening characters of wheat malt and oats.” 6% ABV.

And, yes, there’s every chance I posted this only so I could add still more links to different versions of “Whiter Shade of Pale” . . .
- A version with strings (tent included).
- Joe Cocker. I apologize if you get an obnoxious ad.
- Gov’t Mule.
- Percy Sledge. Not at his best, but comes with lyrics you can read.
- Annie Lennox. Honest to goodness, you have different Annie Lennox versions to choose from. I went with artsy.
- Willie Nelson. Yes, there’s every chance I’ve spent too much time fully vetting these videos.

Having once accidentally driven a car into a large pedestrian-only square in Brugge I can assure you this is a city best enjoyed on foot. You can just stop and stare at the architecture. That the streets are narrow and winding becomes charming instead of exasperating. And there are the chocolate shops.

We are partial to Chocolatier Dumon. I cannot guarantee the chocolate there is any better, although I know it’s pretty good. First of all, I’m a sucker for molded chocolate “art,” even if everything we tried to bring back from our first trip didn’t make it in one piece. Second, the variety is spectacular. It’s a great place to just stand and inhale.

And that was the first thing I thought of when I worked the cork free of a bottle of Boulevard’s Smokestack Chocolate Ale. Cocoa dusted truffles. Rich dark fruits. Caramel and rum. A rush of aromas that themselves must be fattening.

Plus, on a personal note, there’s the Brugge (or Bruges) factor. In the movie “In Bruges” Colin Farrell’s character (Ray) mutters, “Maybe that’s what hell is, the entire rest of eternity spent in f*cking Bruges.” He’s nuts. You want to spend New Year’s Eve here; you hope your niece marries somebody Flemish and the reception is here on a bright June day. No doubt that Chocolatier Dumon and the city of Brugge itself provide a halo effect for Chocolate Ale.

Last year seemingly every beer drinking soul in Kansas City went nutso over this beer brewed in collaboration with local chocolate hero chef Christopher Elbow. There were stories about people following delivery trucks and trying to bribe drivers into selling them a bottle directly. Some liquor stores were asking $25 a bottle (instead of the standard $9-$12) and we won’t even mention eBay. The beer disappeared fast.

I can’t tell you how fast it went here in St. Louis, because Sierra and I were still in New Mexico. However a month after the madness had subsided in Kansas City we visited St. Louis and drank it at Pi Pizzeria on Delmar. It was even brighter on tap.

Last year Boulevard produced 1,600 cases of Chocolate Ale, a standard run for a Smokestack seasonal. This year they brewed two-and-a-half times that, more than any of its limited releases ever. It’s on the shelves. I’m not predicting how long it will last.

I’m pretty sure they won’t have to advertise every bottle comes with a chocolate memory of Brugge. But they could.

A) If you want to start a heated online conversation then making beer rating the theme seems to be the way to go. Witness the dust up at Beer Advocate that was followed by commentary in 718 722 beer blogs. Or the 57 comments (so far) following Stephen Beaumont’s Sh*t Online Beer Raters Do (But Shouldn’t) post.

Several of the comments in the second focus on serving size. Well, I checked and it turns out NEW BEER RULE #3: You must drink at least two servings of a beer before you pass judgment on it is almost four years old.

B) Yesterday Alan McLeod wrote about the arc and width of beer. His essay drew upon several blog posts and a multi-contributor Twitter conversation. Give it a read to to make complete sense or settle for the conclusion.

When industrial brewers – or, for that matter, any brewers who believes that beer should only taste as they conceive – demand our obedience we are being asked to believe. To believe there was a mythical big bang of flavour when it was truer and more perfect is to believe that you are not a participant in the process.

The latest from wine columnist Matt Kramer seems relevant here.

Today, if you want to experience a wine that is at all different from anything that might be understood as “mainstream,” you have to drink “small.” Put simply, big wineries are all about predictability.

I’ve written about this phenomenon before, suggesting that today’s wine landscape is divided between what I call “wines of fear” and “wines of conviction.” True, small wineries can be fearful and make their wines accordingly. But mostly they don’t, while big wineries almost invariably do.

And, by golly NEW BEER RULE #4: The god of beer is not consistency seems to apply. (And I will be sure to file this in the Beers of conviction category.)

It makes me think I should be writing about something new. Except for many people only recently more interested in beer these topics are new. And there are new revelations within the conversations for and from those who’ve been chatting away a while — witness the Twitter exchanges Alan refers to.

Certainly, there are new areas to explore. In fact, as soon as I hit publish here I must return to examining why two people can smell the same dry hopped beer and one will describe exotic tropical aromas and the other cat pee.

Does it matter where beer is brewed?

Yes. At least that’s one of the premises behind Appellation Beer. Some of the others:

- It matters what the ingredients are and where they come from.

- Wines and cheeses aren’t the only products that can claim terroir.

- Beer should be considered in context. That context might be the food it’s served with. That context might be where the beer is enjoyed and the company it is shared with.

Basically a link to the “About” (or “Mission”) page. There were no comments.

There seem to be seven posts in December, and one comment (a grammatical note from Stephen Beaumont). Three posts in January, seven in February.

I might have had more common sense when I was younger.

The Weeping Radish, North Carolina’s oldest micro brewery, will debut its first beer produced from all locally grown hops and malt.

A year ago, the brewery began producing the first beer dry hopped with the first commercially available hops grown at Ecoview Farm in Weaverville, NC. Named IPA 25, in order to celebrate 25 years of micro brewing in NC, this beer has a unique fruitiness which comes from the young hops plants grown in the North Carolina mountains.

Now the Weeping Radish has expanded the local ingredient list of its annual Christmas Beer to include malt grown at Chris Hoffner’s dairy in Mount Ulla, NC. This would not have been possible without the groundbreaking work of Brent Manning and Brian Simpson, the founders of Riverbend Malt House in Asheville.

“We are proud to have received the malt with the ‘Invoice #1′ from Riverbend,” says Uli Bennewitz, owner of the Weeping Radish. “The 20 barrels of Christmas Beer are currently aging at the brewery’s cellar.”

This very special batch will be launched at the Carolina Farm Stewardship Conference in Durham on Nov. 12. “This is the most appropriate place to launch this beer” according to Uli. “This organization has been in the forefront of the sustainable farm movement for over 20 years, growing from obscurity to being one of the leading organizations in the country.”

“We did not limit ourselves to 20 barrels because we wanted to be coy, we had to because that was all the local malt which we could get at this time,” said Nick Williams, the brewer.

The trend towards a more “local” based economy is catching on all over the United States. From an explosive growth in farmers markets and local food systems, to “made in the USA” stickers on manufactured goods to a doubling of members of the N.C. Department of Agriculture and Consumer Service’s “Goodness Grows in NC” program. All of these signs point to the fact that consumers are seeing the value of local products.

The micro brewing industry has also received a boost by the fact that the two brew giants, controlling by far the largest share of the U.S. beer market, are now in foreign hands.

And the truly “non planned” twist of the story: Chris Hoffner, who grows the barley, also works with the Weeping Radish’s Master Butcher, who turns some of the beef from Hoffner’s dairy into delicious local hot dogs and beer brats. What a story: Christmas Beer and Beer Brats with ingredients from the same farm in North Carolina! The local movement has truly arrived!

Goodness, I’m all for local beer. I even own a related domain name, drinklocalbeer.com (don’t bother, you’ll just end up back here). I appreciate when a brewer allows his or her beer to express a bit of terroir. And part of the reason I started this blog was to rag on the importance of ingredients.

The Weeping Radish — now officially Weeping Radish Eco Farm & Brewery — had been around 25 years, so obviously is not in the gimmick business (my bullshit antenna start twitching when the word trend creeps into the conversation). A few more details about the ingredients, other than they are “local” would make that clear. For instance . . . I’m ornery enough to want to know all sorts of things about growing conditions and processing. But a good place to start would be a press release that includes descriptions of the varieties of barley and hops in the beer.

Like the one about what he learned not long after Alaskan brewed its Smoked Porter for the first time in 1988; a beer that recently won its twentieth medal at the Great American Beer Festival.

Larson smoked the malt he used in Smoked Porter at Taku Smokeries, at the time located across the road from the brewery (Taku since moved to a bigger plant and Alaskan bought the old facility, using it smoke malt for the once-a-year release). He had a few reservations going in, most notably about fish oils somehow ending up in the beer, changing the aroma and killing the head. Those concerns disappeared when he tasted the beers and it sold out in a matter of weeks, then . . .

A customer told Larson the beer tasted of salmon. “I took it inappropriately and defensively,” he said, measuring his words and making it clear how bothered he was. It was months later before he had a conversation with the late Greg Noonan of Vermont Pub & Brewery about Noonan’s version of smoked porter that he learned something important about aroma and memory.

“Greg talked about first using hickory and customers would ask if he put hickory smoked ham in the beer,” Larson said. “Then he used maple and they asked, ‘Hey, did you start throwing sausage in your beer?’”

Larson began to understand the powerful memories smoke evokes. He realized it wasn’t salmon that drinker noticed but the alder wood both the malt and fish were smoked over. In Southeast Alaska smoke from alder wood conjures up memories of campfires and smoked salmon, while elsewhere maple smoke reminds consumers of Jimmy Dean Sausage.

(And in the upper Franconian region of Germany where beechwood is used to smoke pork as well as malt to brew the local rauchbier some drinkers describe the more intense of these beers as “liquid bacon.”)

“One smoked malt is not the same as another smoked malt. You can taste the difference between woods,” Larson said.

Last week Alaskan released the 23rd vintage of Smoked Porter. Alaskan doesn’t sell beer in Missouri, so we opened a 2009 bottle we bought a couple of years ago in Arizona.

Still smoky, from the start to the finish. But for us, the real pleasure? It smelled just like Alaska.

a) Blue Moon Belgian White
b) Brooklyn Winter Ale
d) Southampton Double White Ale
d) Smuttynose Pumpkin Ale
e) Saranac Pumpkin Ale

In case you’ve forgotten: Round one ~ Round two ~ Round three ~ Round four ~ Round five.

a) Mission Street Pale Ale
b) Perennial Artisan Ales Hommel
d) Revolution Ales Anti-Hero IPA
d) Three Floyds Alpha King
e) LaCumbre Brewing Elevated IPA

In case you’ve forgotten: Round one ~ Round two ~ Round three ~ Round four.

First beer today: Augustiner Pilsner after driving through scores of German hop fields sparkling in the late afternoon sun. No stopping for photos on the autobahn, but maybe I can post one or two tomorrow. Augustiner is one of the sponsors of the Hallertauer Volkfest that starts Friday. Tuesday they choose a new hop queen. I will report back.

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.