musing

Alan and Jeff (aka Stonch) are back at it, announcing the 2008 Yule Beer Blog Photo Contest, here and here.

They’ve already got a wealth of prizes lined up, so get your entries in. I’ll see what I can find, but I’m oh-for-two in this event and I expect you can do better (thus the invitation to “kick my butt”).

Here’s a photo I won’t be entering, taken in July at Dieu du Ciel! in Montreal shortly after the pub opened on a weekday afternoon.

As you’ll see if you visit Alan or Jeff’s blog it looks way too much like last year’s winner.

Here’s a case where one dog hasn’t been paying enough attention to another beer loving dog.

UK upstart BrewDog’s “Beer Rocks – Brewing up a Revolution!” is worth a look, but the idea of brewing a “democratically designed” beer isn’t totally new.

Case in point. Flying Dog Brewery’s Open Source Beer Project.

Back to BrewDog. This is different than Open Source, Beer Rocks voting has begun, and you might decide the winner. So go click for Black IPA (OK, sorry for campaigning so close to the voting booth).

As a total aside, we saw BrewDog beers a couple of weeks ago in Rome and several months ago in Jasper, Alberta (as in Canada). The revolution seems to be pretty widespread.

Too much time on the road? I thought I posted this and some other bid of news last week, but just found it in my draft cue. With a few revisions, because Jonathan moved to quickly to get the Google group going, here’s the top item. The others also need a little updating, perhaps later today (today being Croatian time).

Chatter continues here and there about the possibility of a beer blogging conference, mentioned here a while back, and also opportunities for bloggers to work together. So a couple of quick thoughts:

* It won’t happen over night, so maybe we begin with regional meetings as suggested here by Alan.

* Such meetings would be facilitated by the Google group suggested and quickly created by Jonathan Surratt. This is something that would help us all every day of the week. It would also make it easier, for instance, for five bloggers to discover they’ll be at the Great Taste of the Midwest and arrange a meeting. Or perhaps a group Twitter effort. One note I read from the American Wine Bloggers meetup is that everybody was twittering.

* If we all end up at a American Beer Bloggers Conference the event will be a reflection of the beer blogging community, and while our blogs have a lot in common with wine blogs I think the agenda would be much different than at the wine conference. One of the best posts out of that one came from Steve Heimoff (be sure to read the comments as well.). I like wine and I like wine blogs, but one of the joys of life is that beer and wine are different. There’s no reason beer and wine blogs shouldn’t be as well.

Holy rss feed, Batman, there are 500 to 800 wine blogs.

Enough that more than 100 participants have gathered in Sonoma County for the first American Wine Bloggers Conference. Take a minute to check out their agenda.

Alan, it might be time to get serious about an annual summer gathering.

This photo was taken relatively late in the afternoon Oct. 11, the day medals were handed out at the Great American Beer Festival. Late in the afternoon in Switzerland, that is. Still morning, eight hours earlier, in Denver.

When I sat down on a bench, pulled out my camera and shot the photo was I wondering about who might win GABF awards? Was I wishing I could taste a few old friends (beers that is)? Was I curious about what crazy new beers might have created a certain buzz?

Nope. I was thinking my feet hurt a bit, that the trees in the Alps are much prettier than those up and down the Rockies, and that wine and cheese was going to be awfully satisfying in several hours.

To be honest, I remembered GABF was going on. If Scotty could have beamed me 5,000 miles from Switzerland to Denver for a few hours I would not have complained. I was interested enough to track down a good awful smoky bar with wi-fi the next day to download the results of judging. Now, since the 150-year-old stone-walled French farmhouse we currently call home has a good Internet connection, I’ve been able to catchup up on a rather enormous amount of blog coverage.

I just typed, and deleted, five paragraphs full of links and notes about what I really missed (like checking in with friends I see only every year or two) and drawing some contrasts between what I read and what Daria and I saw at GABF in 1993. Instead one link to a video with Charlie Papazian (disclaimer, protagonists Neal Stewart and Mark Silva are friends).

And a bit of perspective from far away, after spending a little time with European beers (and sometimes their brewers), and a lot more looking at stuff hundreds to thousands of years old.

When I read and listen to a zillion words about the festival it’s easy to see why beer enthusiasts (including both brewers and drinkers) both admire what’s happened with American beer the last 30 years and also think we are more than a bit full of ourselves.

We are.

Sometimes that seems perfectly appropriate. Other times it reminds me of the American woman in a Swiss ice cream shop asking if she could pay using dollars. Not a moment I wanted to show off my passport.