That’s Urban Chestnut Zwickel in the plastic cup, raised to toast Jackie Robinson on Jackie Robinson Day. The thought occurred to me Sunday at Busch Statium that it is the ballpark that makes ballpark beer worth ballpark prices. Yes, I should have figured that out years ago.
The second photo, below, shows what’s on tap at Captain’s Corner, which is located behind Section 265 (loge level).
Two suggestions on Session Beer Day:
– If you are in the vicinity of St. Louis, a cask-conditioned beer listed as Session IPA on the menu at the Schlafly Tap Room (pictured at the right). This year’s batch is 4.1% ABV, perhaps 35 IBU, generously dry hopped with Galaxy and Simcoe hops. Very new world and juicy, smelling and tasting of tropical fruit.
The full name is House in Session Ale and it was brewed for the first time last year to send to Washington, D.C., to help draw attention to The Small Brewer Reinvestment and Expanding Workforce Act, legislation that would reduce taxes for small breweries. Most of this year’s 15-barrel batch also went to Washington, with a few kegs and one cask remaining in St. Louis.
– It’s about the conversation. And if that’s going well, remembering when it’s your turn to buy the next round.
If you aren’t going to be in St. Louis, there’s a list of participating Session Beer Day establishments here. Lew Bryson’s Friday post at The Session Beer Project nicely recaps a discussion that’s been going on for-what-seems-like-ever about stuff like defining Session Beer and finding American beer culture. Might be more detail there than you want want or even need. Just skip to the end if you lose interest: “And while you’re drinking, let’s do what folks do while they’re drinking session beer: let’s discuss.”
Last year during the evening in which Veronika Springer was crowned Hallertau Hop Queen a man with a tray full of one-liter glass mugs stopped at our table, perhaps noticing I had an empty glass in front of me.
I went to pick up one. Roland Bitti, brewmaster at Augustiner-Brä, raised his hand to signal me to stop. He pointed to a slight difference in color between two glasses and spoke a single word.
“Radler.”
I took a deep breath and picked up a liter of Augustiner Edelstoff instead. Rookie mistake (hey, it was dark, they looked much the same).
I thought about this today a) when I saw a story on the press release that the Alchemy & Science, the collaboration between Alan Newman and Jim Koch, has created The House of Shandy and that Curious Traveler is its first release. There will be more.
The press release says, “The shandy tradition dates back to the 17th century and is typically beer mixed with a citrus-flavored soda or carbonated lemonade, ginger beer, ginger ale or cider. Today, English publicans pour a blend of traditional English ale with various lemon and lime beverages for their patrons though real lemons or limes are rarely used.”
I expect that beer-mixed-with-whatever purists can explain the difference between a shandy and Radler to me, but I’m lumping them together when considering “beer trends.” (I thought that Germany’s history with the Radler — “cyclist” in German — was confined to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but let’s try to stay on point.)
So b) yesterday Jon Abernathy suggested he might have to stage a “Shandy Shootout” between the new Shock Top Lemon Shandy and Leinenkugel’s Summer Shandy. I’ve had the Shock Top (4.2% ABV) and it certainly delivers the lemonade flavor the label delivers.
And before the evening was over c) Jeremy Danner declared it the Year of the Radler.
Yes, this looks like a trend.
File this postcard under “beer nightmares.”
In a few weeks, the Brewery History Society will honor Peter Mathias, author of The Brewing Industry in England, 1700-1830, making him its first Honorary Life Member.
You, like I, probably won’t be in London April 19-21 for the society’s annual meeting and surrounding events, but you should wish you were. The schedule is here. The official meeting is at Fuller’s Brewery, which is cool enough in itself. But the following day there’s the “North Kent Meander.” Beer meandering. The best kind.
The news for those you can’t be there is that a special issue of Brewery History, the society’s journal, will include a reproduction in full of Mathias’s The Anchor Brewery: Park Street, Southwark. Written in 1953, this was unpublished until now.
Ken Thomas, curator of the Courage archives, explains in the introduction why the work goes beyond simply telling the story about another brewery. He writes, “although ‘The Anchor Brewery’ is important as it opens a window on the early stages of the study of business history, it is also much more than that. It tells the story of the rise of one of England’s largest breweries against the backdrop of the industrial revolution.”
The society website has information about subscribing to the journal or ordering the special issue.