musing

So I’m standing in a gas station in semi-rural Maine admiring three cooler doors wide of craft beers &#151 mostly beers of the region — when a woman opens one of the doors and shakes her head.

“Did they get rid of all the regular beer for this specialty stuff?” she asks, apparently speaking to me.

I look on down the coolers and noticed beers like Corona, Bud Lime and Michelob Ultra. Then I look behind her. Two doors of there was Budweiser, Miller Lite, Coors Light, etc. I point to them, she smiles, grabs a bright red 12-pack of Bud and heads on her way.

No, I don’t see gas stations getting rid of “regular beer” any time soon.

Our travels through Wisconsin allowed us to update our photo of the “World’s Largest Six Pack” i LaCrosse.

We’ve got a little collection of the “world’s largest . . .” going on this trip. We’ve seen the world’s largest cross country skis, the world’s largest fly fishing rod, America’s biggest mall and more. So an update seemed like good enough reason to drive through the heart of LaCrosse.

When Heileman, then Stroh, owned the brewery the six pack, as you can see, featured cans of Old Style. When City Brewery bought the operations the cans were remodeled as LaCrosse Lager. Prettier, don’t you think?

The sign with information about what in the lagering tanks may have been touched up a bit, but otherwise looks exactly the same. It says there’s enough beer inside to fill 7,340,796 12-ounce cans and placed end to end these cans would extend 565 miles. They would provide one person a six pack a day for 3,351 years.

Thought you needed to know that.

I love the name of this store in Banff, Alberta.

Although I think the name is meant to imply it’s a place for locals rather than tourists the cooler included a few regional beers.

I grabbed Hop Head from Tree Brewing in Kelowna, B.C., located about half way between Vancouver and Banff. The clerk was less than helpful — “It tastes like the name” — but the beer was fresh and focused.

To answer a question, since I received a friendly (it seemed friendly) e-mail asking why I wasn’t posting more drinking notes . . . Yes, one of our goals on this extended adventure is to eat and drink local products, but I have no plan to write about all of them. We’ve had some excellent beers, which I may eventually mention, and some duds, better forgotten.

They point of our journey is better summarized by what occurred in a few seconds along U.S. Route 2 in Minnesota.

Driver: (There’s the) Big Fish Supper Club. (We’re keen on supper clubs.)

Navigator: Look at the fish.

Driver: Holy shit!

Passenger: Laughing loudly as driver tries to brake without the contents of the RV banging around too wildly.

We managed to turn around without any damage, just to capture this photo.

There’s more about the journey at The Slow Travelers, but I’m running behind on updating Flickr photos because campground wi-fi connections continue to suck.

Neal Stewart of Flying Dog has started another personal blog, calling it The Mount Rushmore Of . . . The premise: debate the most influential people (within a certain topic) of all-time.

He starts with baseball, listing Jackie Robinson, Babe Ruth, Walter Johnson and Ted Williams or Willie Mays. About as good a list as you could expect from a Cardinals fan.

It shouldn’t be long before he gets to American “craft” (supply your own definition) beer, but that likely will be boring, won’t it? Pretty obvious choices. You have to include Charlie Papazian, Michael Jackson, Fritz Maytag and if allowed the Williams/Mays cop out you don’t have to pick between Ken Grossman and Jim Koch. Is it really that easy?

– Thirsty in Regina. In a last second effort to participate in The Session, and because we’d heard good things about Bushwakker, we swung off the road in Regina with hopes of drinking a doppelbock (the out of season beer) and whatever else looked interesting. Regina, in Saskatchewan, is a big enough city that getting around in a motor home proves a bit of a challenge but at least there was plenty of parking on the street.

The problem was when we walked through the door and learned nobody under 19 was allowed inside. It didn’t seem like leaving Sierra in the motor home while we drank beer was the responsible thing to do so we headed on down the road. Funny, or not so funny, thing is we’ve become so used to brewpubs in the States being family friendly we never think about the possibility Sierra might not be welcome.

– Re-Discovery. One of the questions the late Michael Jackson received most often was when he would produce new editions of his “Beer Hunter” television series, or if he could at least motivate the Discovery Channel to re-release the video tapes first available in 1990 — preferably on DVD.

Never happened, but Evan Rail reveals in his Beer Culture blog that Discovery finally is working on something similar.

I’ll be working with a crew shooting a Discovery Channel television special on beer, which, back home, will include brewing stars like Sam Calagione from the offensively good Dogfish Head and Professor Charlie Bamforth from my old alma mater, the University of California, Davis.

Can’t wait.