beers of conviction

The Session #15: Beer and epiphanies

The SessionWriting about beer certainly changed my relationship with beer, and made what might look like a simple question next to impossible to answer.

I got to thinking about this because for The Session #15 Boak and Bailey asked those of us in the beer blogosphere to answer this question: How did it all start for you? And going further, “We’d like you to write about the moment when you saw the light.”

Looking over the early posts I’ve been startled that people can single out a beer or a where, because there is no single moment or beer I can point to. From the time going on 40 (gulp) years ago I thought “Hey, there’s something different about this Stroh’s from the the basic what’s-in-the-pitcher beer we’ve been drinking in campus bars” my relationship beer has been evolving. Still is. So across a few decades . . .

1980s, Central Illinois. Schlösser Alt. German bars in the Midwest moved enough beer that we told ourselves it was probably fresh. Dortmunder Union sure had more flavor than American lagers, but then we discovered this alt and bitterness.

1993, a lookout tower north of Mancos, Colorado. New Belgium Abbey Grand Cru. We were still Illinois flatlanders, enjoying a view of four states at 10,000 feet. The beer was brewed with yeast acquired from a Chimay bottle, but it was made nearby.

1994, Lyme Regis (south of England). Five days before a pint of Royal Oak (Eldridge Pope) in Sherbourne had been simply spectacular. This totally living Bass buried it. Bass. A lifeless beer not worth drinking in the States.

All of those experiences occurred separately from writing about beer. But we’ve also trooped into hundreds of brewpubs in the last 20 years, I’ve visited monastery breweries, only scratched the surface with American small-batch brewers and then there are hops . . .

Anyway, I also wouldn’t have been at the last 15 Great American Beer Festivals if I didn’t write about beer. So in October I wouldn’t have had either Cable Car or Toronado 20th Anniversary, brewed and blended by Lost Abbey and Russian River respectively to celebrate Toronado’s anniversary. (Yes, an option would have been to go to Toronado’s party.) One-offs that proved for the hundreth (or is that thousandth?) time that a beer can reveal something no other beer has before.

And no, it doesn’t have to be a new-fangled creation — later this year we’ll be sampling beers in the south of Germany and not much later in the north of Italy, which should be a pretty fun compare and contrast. And no, a beer doesn’t have do that to be great. And yes, perhaps I’m a little dense, but that beer can still surprise me is a joy.

For more Session posts, and perhaps even epiphanies, be sure to see Boak and Bailey’s roundup.

‘Extreme beers’ still sell newspapers

And now we step outside the beer blogosphere — where it might seem there is nothing new to say about “extreme beers” — to recognize that to normal people they are still a topic of discussion.

Peter Rowe, whose work in the San Diego Union-Tribune I’ve pointed to many times, used the occasion of the Craft Brewers Conference to revisit the subject: The art of crafts: Extreme or balanced? The great beer debate continues.

Much from the the usual suspects, such as Garrett Oliver of Brooklyn Brewery saying, “If a chef tells you this is the saltiest stew you’ve ever tasted, that’s not what I want to hear. Anybody can put more hops in a brew kettle. That’s not a skill.”

And Greg Koch of Stone Brewing countering: “There may be a brewer somewhere that is just shoving more hops in. But the ones that really shine are the big beers that are artfully made.”

Certainly worth your time.

Rowe also has a six-pack of beer trends.

Dark Lord Day: Passion on display

The Hoosier Beer Geek has pictures. Check out the line. Let’s just say showing up as late at 1:30 was not such a good idea.

Passion on display. Mostly. Unfortunately a little cold-hearted greediness. From a thread at Beer Advocate:

I drove from Minneapolis with a trunk full of Surly to enjoy and trade. Instead, I stood next to frat boys from Chicago who couldn’t stop talking about selling their Dark Lord on Ebay. I waited 5 hours in a line. The Dark Lord sold out 50 people in front of me. My girlfriend was upset because of the cold and I am leaving empty handed

Later in the thread: “It was frat boy hell. There goes the neighborhood…”

Also read the discussion at The Beer Mapping Project.

And at Rate Beer.

Let’s hear it for the Hoegaarden appellation

Hoegaarden breweryInBev has given up moving Hoegaarden out of the city of the same name, the place that it originated.

As of June 1 all the Hoegaarden beer will be brewed there. Much different than in 2006, when InBev announced it would move production to Jupille.

Seems that didn’t work out so well. By 2007 production was a problem. Part of that was because of increased demand, but a union official claimed, “The beer they produce there often has to be thrown out because it is not at all fit for consumption. So a lot of the white beer coming from Jupille is being shipped to the Netherlands to be made into pig feed. It really is a crisis.”

In any event, InBev has revamped the Hoegaarden facility, boosting capacity to 1 million hectoliters. Hoegaarden won gold last week in the World Beer Cup.

Drink vicariously through Twitter

Yesterday I mentioned Luke Nicholas’ Twitter feed.

(What’s Twitter? This is a good way to found out.)

Luke, a New Zealander who brews Epic Ale, landed in San Francisco on Thursday and I can’t count how many beers he’s had since. As I type he’s working his way through the lineup at Russian River Brewing in Sonoma. He reports the brewpub is out of Pliny the Elder “because we drank it all at Toronado.”

Luke’s on the way to San Diego, where he’ll be judging in the World Beer Cup. How much fun would it be to read his tweets from there? I don’t expect the Brewers Association would permit that.