Perhaps it’s because I live in a state where Area 51 is famous, but Category 23 has an ominous ring to it. Particularly when you are asked to judge the category in a homebrew competition. Strange beers, experiments, successful and otherwise. This year the Samuel Adams LongShot American Homebrew Contest is all about Category 23. [...]

This started as a comment within the conversation following the previous post, but when it hit the third paragraph I thought it better to start anew. Perhaps I should have made myself clearer. – This is the opposite of marketing. We now have a broader choice of beers — some obviously better than others, and [...]

Last Wednesday, just hours after arriving in Chicago for the Craft Brewers Conference, I dutifully posted a photo of Halltertau hop queen Mona Euringer, linked it to via Twitter and Facebook and after that pretty much went back to 1998 or some other CBC in a different technological era. Blog? Tweet? I didn’t even attend [...]

Were Mr. Sixpack (otherwise known as Don Russell) to participate today in our monthly session then he might quote liberally from his entry in 1001 Beers You Must Taste Before You Die Three Floyds Dark Lord Russian Imperial Stout. “The Dark Lord exists mainly by reputation. His power is rumored, his character praised with cultlike [...]

This is my contribution to the Session #37: “The Display Shelf: When to Drink the Good Stuff” or, if you prefer, “Raid the Cellar.” Visit The Ferm for links to more posts. Is there a perfect beer for every particular special moment? Is there a time in every beer’s life when it tastes better than [...]

Was Harriet Beecher Stowe thinking about beer? “To do common things perfectly is far better worth our endeavor than to do uncommon things respectably.” Just so I don’t get injured when an empty bottle that once held *xtr*m* beer rattles off my skull, it’s also OK to do uncommon things perfectly.    

Truth is sometimes I turn these lists into a post so I have the links saved for more careful reading later. Why Should Terroir Matter . . . from a speech by Randall Grahm. I don’t care about “saving” high end wines, but thought provoking. I suspect most of the time we should be happy [...]

(Note: This post was amended Feb. 24 to eliminate babbling that got in the way of actual story.) Tomorrow’ s The New York Times carries an article about “tasting Belgian golden ales.” Perhaps surprisingly American beers claimed four the first five spots although half of the 20 beers tasted hailed from Belgium. The first and [...]

You can buy used spirit barrels from Port Brewing (aka The Lost Abbey). Cheap. Until you try to figure out how to get one home. Particularly when home is Vermont or Florida or another place not San Diego.    

Watch to the end. Think about it.