musing

I give Jeff Allworth credit for bucking the crowd and suggesting the New Yorker feature on Sam Calagione and Dogfish Head Brewery wasn’t perfect in every way.

It wasn’t.

But his post titled “Wrong” is just as wrong when he writes “I see that he [Burkhard Bilger] has done a great injustice to the world of craft brewing” and that “Calagione’s model for brewing seems to be: pull something out of your ass, think it through incompletely, run with it, and sneer ‘neener neener’ at the naysayers along the way.”

In the second case he totally overlooks innovative and terrifically drinkable beers. Later he implies that Dogfish Head’s brewing style is less than disciplined — despite the fact the story documents Dogfish Head’s growing level of sophistication when it comes to quality control.

That’s not my real point, since Sam hardly needs my help defending himself. Instead . . . My initial reaction to the story was “How can you write about ‘extreme beer’ and not mention a brewery whose clock is not set to Eastern Standard Time?” Then I refocused and viewed it as a feature on one brewery (and its founder). It gets a lot better.

Jeff’s post makes me realize others viewed the story as I did on first reading. So he’s right. Even if he’s wrong.

Further reading: The Beer Advocate discussion includes input from the author, Sam and plenty of Garrett Oliver (in case you missed it).

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.