Angelo De Ieso has posted one of the most complete Session roundups ever for #62: “What Drives Beer Bloggers.” And as a bonus (or not, depending on your tastes) he included photos.
As far as navel gazing1 goes, Friday’s Session was above average (again, your mileage may vary). As he concluded:
“Lots of commonalities and dissimilarities amongst beer bloggers and why we elect to write and post about beer.”
1 See previous references to blogging and navel gazing.
Angelo at Brewpublic hosts The Session #62, asking us to write about “What Drives Beer Bloggers?” You’ll find more confessions there.
The about/mission page pretty much explains why this blog exists. I’m not sure you should care what motivates me to serve that mission (on at least 4.57 posts out of 10), or in fact that want to share it.
So, as is often the case here, I’ll leave it to you to connect the dots between point A and point B.
A) During our Grand Adventure in 2008 I visited Alaskan Brewing. I saw the mash filter they were in the process of installing. I pitched the story to a few beer-related publications, but nobody was interested. I thought this was one of those stories somebody should write about, so when the filter was up and running I wrote about it here.
B) On June 4, 1968, I fell asleep listening to a Pittsburgh radio station broadcast Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Don Drysdale’s sixth consecutive shutout. I awoke to the news that Robert Kennedy had been shot later that night in Los Angeles. As I did six mornings a week that summer I headed to the offices of The Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette.
I liked to get there by 5:30, so I could pull the paper off the teletype machines before the “wire editor” (his title) arrived. He tended to be way too slow sorting out the sports stories, because he’d probably rather have been working in the sports department just as much as I’d rather have been working in news. Plus he was an alcoholic and I didn’t much care for the phlegm that ended up on the paper he passed along.
On this day, though, I just wanted to be able to stand in front of the machine and watch it type out the news one letter at a time, before anybody else in town would read it. This was news, to me more real than watching television replays of the shooting itself, because it was “real time.”
Beer is not that important. I understand that. I constantly remind you of that. But there are times when I learn something interesting enough I can’t wait for that clattering machine to bang out the next sentence. This blog gives me a place to pass along those stories. Maybe I’m just a beer gossip.1
1 I just checked and the domain beergossip.com is taken, but thebeergossip.com is available.
This month host Matt Robinson asked us to write about “What makes local beer better?” for The Session 61. I found myself staring at his marching orders like a deer in headlights (or a thirsty drinker in front of 62 tap handles). Matt asked a series of questions that left me feeling as focused as his Twitter feed. And 852 words into answering each of them individually I realized I still hadn’t pointed out that we have a St. Louis ZIP and there are six breweries between our house and Anheuser-Busch, and the closest is Schalfly Bottleworks. It’s Schalfly’s production brewery, but the beer to drink right now is Amarillo Session Ale, available only at the attached restaurant/pub. In other words, only locally. 852 words? I’m sure you would have loved the technical discussion about volatile hop aromas, but I hit delete. Instead, one thought.
Beer is a sum of its parts, which include the humans who make the beer and the consumers who drink it. It’s not beer when the ingredients arrive on a truck, wherever that truck might have come from. It turns into beer locally. Magic.
The Session #60, Let’s Talk Growlers, is in the record books.
Now we begin Year Six of The Session in Indiana. (Year Six, meaning we started five years ago. Pretty amazing. “What Goes Around… Comes Around” was atop the music charts.)
Hoosier Beer Geek Matt Robinson asks we consider this question over beer: What makes local beer better?
Of course I think this is a good idea. www.drinklocalbeer.com is one of those stray URLs I’ve given a home (don’t bother with the link, it brings you to the Appellation Beer front page). So to Matt’s marching orders:
We are hosting the March edition of the session. The topic I’ve been thinking about is local beer. The term is being used by just about every craft brewer in the country. What does it really mean though? Is it more of a marketing term or is there substance behind the moniker? This month I want to think about what makes local beer better? I’m not just talking about the beer itself, although it’s the focal point, but what makes local beer better? My connection to local beer is far from thinking that my beer is actually “local.” Maybe you don’t agree with me, and you can write about that. Bonus points for writing about your favorite local beer and the settings around it being local to you.
I just realized that last year for the March Session we visited Urban Chestnut Brewing in St. Louis. It wasn’t local then. We were still paying property taxes in New Mexico. Perhaps I should hum “What Goes Around… Comes Around.” If I only knew the tune. The fact is, though, there are two breweries closer to our house than UCB, and in addition three breweries opened in the months after UCB. Local has taken on new meaning in St. Louis.
Oops, it appears I failed to report Mario Rubio posted the roundup for The Session #59: “I Almost Always Drink Beer, But When I Don’t.” I did and I apologize.
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.