Bryan Roth has posted the roundup for The Session #74: Finding the Balance.
Lot of participants this month, interesting reading. I was struck by the amount of thought many of the bloggers gave to where and how beer fits into their lives. That’s just one more thing that’s different than it was in the mid-1970s.
I makes me thankful to have beer worth paying attention to, but reminds me not to pay too much attention.
The topic for the 74th gathering of The Session is “Finding Beer Balance.” Visit This Is Why I’m Drunk to see what everybody else is writing. It will be more interesting than the sad story that follows.
A.J. Liebling — a journalist who ate and drank to excess, and who described himself as bald, overweight, and gluttonous — once wrote: “The primary requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite. Without this, it is impossible to accumulate, within the allotted span, enough experience of eating to have anything worth setting down. Each day bring only two opportunities for field work, and they are not to be wasted minimizing the intake of cholesterol. They are indispensable, like a prizefighter’s hours on the road…. A good appetite gives an eater room to turn around.”
Liebling wrote very well about food. He was not an advocate of balance.
I write about beer. I’m pretty much bald and I can be gluttonous. Food, drink, zydeco, smoked meat, the theater, the theatre, high school basketball (in a previous life), things worth doing seem worth doing to excess.
I’m not sure this is going to end well.
Did I miss the memo?
Stories about — and therefore praising, because almost all stories about beers not brewed by large corporations include a certain amount of praise — “extreme beers” seem to be appearing less often.
(And, yes, I’m aware that the Beer Advocate “Extreme Beer Festival” recently concluded. That’s one reason for the question.)
Maybe my radar needs adjusting. Or maybe they’ve been drowned about by tales of passionate nano-brewers.
The subject popped up again yesterday when Adrian Tierney-Jones wrote about the Charles Wells/Dogfish Head collaboration beer DNA New World IPA. Sam Calagione (who wrote a book titled Extreme Brewing) was there for the roll out, of course, and Adrian talked with him.
And afterwards I had a few words with Calagione and asked the question that was bugging me. Extreme beer? ‘It wasn’t about strength but innovation and flavour. I’m not hung up on nomenclature.’
And in that millpond the ripples keep spreading.
I’m still trying to wrap my head about this DNA beer, and understand just what “a reduction of our 60 Minute IPA” means, but it sounds like something that would have been called “extreme” not long ago.
Things you would not have seen twenty years ago:
– A “multimedia web narrative” created by college students.
– Farmers in Colorado growing hops.
– A Colorado brewery making a “fresh hop beer” — that is using hops taken directly from the bine.
The project is called “Hop to Sip” and the website promises regular updates between now and harvest in August, when Odell Brewing will produce a beer with Crystal hops grown in the Colorado Gold Hop Yard. It is a collaboration of stories from the Rocky Mountain Collegian, CTV, KCSU, and College Avenue at Colorado State University.
I’m already thinking I’d like to have that beer Odell is brewing with Larry Leinhart, the farmer in the video. He worked for both Pabst Brewing and Anheuser-Busch.