Kendall Jones at Washington Beer Blog has chosen the topic for #60: Growlers Galore.

Tell us about your growler collection. Tell us why you love growlers or why you hate them. What is the most ridiculous growler you’ve ever seen? Tell us about your local growler filling station. Ever suffer a messy growler mishap? Anything related to growlers is acceptable.

There are some beautiful growlers out there, but I tend to think about what’s inside of them. That will likely be the focus of what I write about. I don’t know if I can tell you anything revealing as Jones did in introducing the topic: “I even have a special device installed in the back seat of my car to securely transport up to three growlers at a time.” I’m impressed.

We do drink other stuff in our house. We had Tom & Jerry’s when we decorated our tree, enjoyed homemade eggnog on Christmas, chatted at length over a wonderful bottle of Italian wine a few nights ago. But those aren’t things I’m keen on writing about.

When The Session began nearly five years ago the premise was pretty basic. Pick a theme, write about it, maybe focus on a specific beer. Not sure how to do that with eggnog.

So let’s talk beer, pretending this one qualifies because winemakers played a major role in creating it. Firestone Walker XV. Which — like for X, XI, XII, XIII and XIV — a bunch of otherwise grape-oriented guys help blend. I wrote about X for Imbibe magazine, and a some of the others here. Most notably XI, with more fawning here.

Now that I’ve stocked up on XV I’ll fess up. It might be as good as XI. Of course, this is totally my palate talking. You might not agree at all. I’ll let you know how the two compare in a couple of years, assuming I can actually stand open that last bottle of XI. Looking at the blend for XV — 76% barley wines, no dominant anchor, Double Jack (fueled by dry hop aromas that are bound to fade) — I wasn’t all that optimistic. But there’s already deep dark character beyond the rich fruitiness that’s downright beguiling. And hints there’ll be something different next year, then something altogether different the next.

Fifteen Paso Robles area winemakers showed up this year to contribute their opinions about the blend — or perhaps simply to drink beer — and Firestone Walker brewmaster Matt Brynildson set them off in groups of two and three. Each group came up with a favorite mixture, brewery workers replicated the blends and the winemakers voted to determine their favorite.

Brynildson now has 600 barrels to draw from, and emptied almost 200 for XV. I’m pretty sure that means there’s going to be a XVI and that plenty of winemakers will show up to help.

Host Mario Rubio offers a topic that won’t quite fit in a headline: “I Almost Always Drink Beer, But When I Don’t . . .”

So as we are all incredibly interesting people, and almost always drink beer, let’s talk about what we drink when not drinking beer. Maybe your passion for coffee rivals that of craft beer, or it could be another alcoholic beverage such as scotch. My daughter being a root beer fan would appreciate her dad reviewing a few fizzy sodas. Maybe you have a drink that takes the edge off the beer, be it hair of the dog or a palate cleanser during the evening.

Beer cocktails, wines, ciders, meads, you name it as long as it’s not beer. Try to tie it in with craft beer in some way for extra credit. Be creative and I’ll see you guys in the new year.

Got milk?

If you were going to buy Scrooge a beer for the holidays, realizing full well he wouldn’t be getting the next round, which one would you choose?

This is easier to think about when you can put a face to Scrooge, or the face of one of the many actors who have played him on film. Plenty of contrasting choices — for instance George C. Scott (Patton) or Bill Murray (Stripes)? Jim Carrey, Kelsey Grammer, Tim Curry (well, his voice), Reginald Owen, the list goes on.

I’m partial to Alistair Sim from the 1951 film Scrooge (and later in the voice in an animated TV version of A Christmas Carol). Who wouldn’t want to buy a beer for a “sad-faced actor, with the voice of a fastidious ghoul?”

And what beer?

Ebeneezer from BridgePort Brewing in Portland, of course. Pour it in a snifter and put another log on the fire.

Which Scrooge would you pick? And which beer?

The idea for me was based loosely around the visits of three ghosts to Ebenezer Scrooge, but relayed in a post about the beers of Christmas past, present and future.

What did you drink during Christmas holidays of old, have you plans for anything exciting this year and is there something you’d really like to do one day, perhaps when the kids have flown the nest?

Do you have your own interpretation, was Scrooge perhaps a beer geek?

Or maybe it’s all one day. What will you drink Christmas morning, Christmas afternoon and what will you top off the holiday with that evening?

Just a few examples there, but the idea was to keep the topic as open as possible to allow you free rein to write about a subject with a seasonal twist in whatever way the title grabs you.

As the headline on the announcement post suggests, it’s a “Dickens of a topic.”

I am a man without a beer epiphany. At least one of the aha sort.

I don’t remember the what, when or where of my first beer. Or my first “better” beer. Or my first “craft” beer.

That’s my beer confession. I don’t feel guilty about this. Just a little embarrassed. It seems that since I’ve been around to report on much of what has happened within niche beer the last 20 years that I should recall that first xxxxxx beer in xxxxxx bar in xxxxxx city.

Instead I realize I come from a different time (before New Albion Brewing; or before CAMRA) and a different place (central Illinois). The beer options changed gradually. The quality of imported (mostly German) beer in the bottle was all over the map, but on draft it was definitely a step up from Stroh’s at $11.15 a case (inflation adjusted) and Michelob (on draft, which I only drank if somebody else was buying). And some year along the away I remembered that Sierra Nevada Celebration tasted pretty good last year and was back again.

That’s why, for me, the guilty pleasure will still be the next beer I drink.

One of the things I most enjoy about blogs and personal writing in general is the ability to have a window into another’s life, in a semi-voyeuristic way. So I’d like to know your beery guilty secrets. Did you have a particularly embarassing first beer (in the same way that some people purchase an atrocious song as their first record) or perhaps there’s still a beer you return to even though you know you shouldn’t? Or maybe you don’t subscribe to the baloney about feeling guilty about beers and drink anything anyway?

You’re also welcome to write about bad drinking experiences you’ve had as a result of your own indulgence or times when you’ve been completely wrong about a beer but not yet confessed to anyone that you’ve changed your mind.

Its fairly wide open, take your pick. Variety is the spice of life as they say (and I hope there’s more than 57 of them…) Blogs are due this Friday (3rd November) but as its short notice I’ll accept submissions until next Friday (11th November), but as soon as your blog is uploaded post a link to it in here, or send me an email stephanos1986 AT gmail DOT com if you don’t have a blog and still want to contribute.

This might be the time for me to resuscitate the rumor I’ve thrown up in every state in the Lower 48.

A pretty good turnout for a topic Reuben feared wouldn’t generate much interest. Not everybody was inclined to actually thank the “Big Boys” (a category not everybody viewed the same way), at least without sarcasm dripping of their posts.

But Phil at Beersay was only briefly intimidated by the subject matter. “As this is my first dabble as a contributor to The Session and I have to confess to nearly backing out waiting for an easier topic,” he wrote. Then the inspiration came to him, not quite in a dream . . .

Pete Brown will host The Session #57. Look for his announcement soon.

- Henry King (1921-2005)

Even though seven-plus years after I interviewed Henry King for a story in New Brewer magazine I think he’d notice how many “microbrewers” had acquired the political and business savvy he was talking about back then the fact is their fans have a little catching up to do.

This month the theme for The Session #56 is “Thanks to the Big Boys” (visit Reuben Gray’s The Tale of the Ale for a recap). Big, of course, is relative. Steve Lamond chose to write about Fuller’s. Here in the United States, Boston Beer and New Belgium are far larger, but generally considered small (OK, not by everybody, I get it).

Take a look at this list of the nation’s biggest breweries 50 years ago (courtesy of BeerHistory) and think about what they have in common.

Right. Most are gone. A graphic reminder that brewing is a business. One that Henry King served well. Consider this story from 1966:

The deaths of 16 men where linked to cobalt salts that Quebec’s Dow brewery put in its beer to promote foam stability. That caused liver damage among frequent drinkers, the brewery’s best customers, and Dow ended up closing.

After King learned the deaths were related to cobalt, he spent 72 hours locked in his office, always on the phone, talking to every brewer in the United States.

“In retrospect, for what I did, I probably could have been sued,” he said. “We gave the brewing industry 72 hours to discontinue the use of cobalt in their products. We never asked a brewer whether he used it or not. We just made him give us an affidavit to give to the government that said on a given date 72 hours later, he was not using cobalt.

“We beat the federal government by seven weeks. We reported the cobalt problem, we were out of it and no longer had production seven weeks before the Food and Drug Administration even got their act together on it.”

He acted decisively not just because it was good for the beer industry, but because it was right. When the nitrosamine proved to be a carcinogen in the 1970s, King again moved swiftly. The USBA spent $1 million buying all 2,600 brands of the beer on the market and had each analyzed.

“Then I asked every brewmaster what they were using,” he said. “Three of them gave me false reports. I called the president of the brewery and told them that they had 36 hours to clean up their act. Boy, were they furious.”

By then, King had put a medical advisory committee into place. The same committee laid the foundation for the USBA’s Alcoholic Beverage Medical Research Foundation, of which King was particularly proud

King retired from the USBA in 1983, and by then he’d been instrumental in getting the small brewers tax differential approved (in 1976). He returned to the industry in 1992, serving six years as executive director of the Brewers Association of America. The BAA, which served smaller breweries, merged with the Association of Brewers in 2005 to form the current Brewers Association.

Small brewers have plenty to thank Henry King for, and in a way he was a gift from the Big Boys.
.

What I ‘m looking for is this. Most of us that write about beer do so with the small independent brewery in mind. Often it is along the lines of Micro brew = Good and Macro brew, anything brewed by the large multinationals is evil and should be destroyed. Well I don’t agree with that, though there may be some that are a little evil….

Anyway I want people to pick a large brewery or corporation that owns a lot of breweries. There are many to chose from. Give thanks to them for something they have done. Maybe they produce a beer you do actually like. Maybe they do great things for the cause of beer in general even if their beer is bland and tasteless but enjoyed by millions every day.

There is an alternative: “If you honestly have nothing good to say about a large brewer, then make something up. Some satire might be nice, It will be a Friday after all.”

October 7, as a matter of fact.