the session

The Beer Babe has announced the topic of The Session #43 (Sept. 3) and “Welcoming The New Kids” challenges bloggers “to seek out a new brewery and think about ways in which they could be welcomed into the existing beer community.”

How does their beer compare to the craft beer scene in your area? Are they doing anything in a new/exciting way? What advice, as a beer consumer, would you give to these new breweries?

Take this opportunity to say hello to the new neighbors in your area. Maybe its a nanobrewery that came to a festival for the first time that you vowed to “check out” later. Maybe it’s a new local beer on a shelf on the corner store that you hadn’t seen before. Dig deeper and tell us a story about the “new kids on the block.” I look forward to welcoming them to the neighborhood!

All bloggers are welcome to participate. Just leave a link below The Beer Babe’s announcement.

Derrick Peterman has posted the roundup for The Session #42.

Once again, the beer blogosphere provided many unique, memorable personal perspectives, this time, about how beer connects us to places. In many cases, the “special” beers associated with special places where rather ordinary, even substandard, as most posters readily acknowledged. And as I anticipated, “place” clearly meant different things to different people.

This seemed like an excellent topic to me, but only a dozen bloggers chimed in with contributions. Perhaps we should blame the summer doldrums. However it’s also fair to consider if the beer blogosphere has “moved on.”

Beer blogging certainly is alive and well. Look at the number of attendees for the first Beer Bloggers Conference (first in the U.S., that is, since the initial international gathering will occur earlier in Prague).

Anyway, it wouldn’t be shocking if The Session has run its course. After all, it looks as if the separate site created for Wine Blogging Wednesday has not been updated more than a year ago, although it would seem the project continued until at least the most recent May.

Just an observation . . .

For the 42nd gathering of The Session Derrick Peterman asks we write about “A Special Place, A Special Beer.” Visit his blog for a recap of all the posts.

I told this story in Brew Like a Monk. This is the condensed version.

Inside the brewery café at the monastery of the Saint Benedictus Abbey of Achel, only a single food server and one monk putting items on his cafeteria tray remained when Marc Beirens opened the door and stepped into a chilly December evening.

Beirens, a businessman who has been visiting monasteries since he was a child, took a few strides into a terrace area that was once the abbey’s courtyard. As the sky above turned from dark blue to black, he nodded back toward the brewery, located in a space that once housed the monastery dairy, then to a new gallery and gift shop to his right. Those buildings held pigs and more cattle, before it became obvious agriculture would not sustain the community.

“You should have seen this all a few years ago,” he said, his voice bouncing lightly about an otherwise silent courtyard.

*****

During the next few hours Beirens and Brother Benedict, the monk in charge of marketing when I visited in December of 2004 gave me a complete tour of the monastery and its small brewery. Always a good host, Brother Benedict insisted I try the beers.

Staring with Extra, a substantial 9.5% beauty served from a 750ml bottle. He didn’t drink himself, talking a little business with Beirens, answering my questions about the monastery, and excusing himself after his cell phone rang. He returned a little later. “This is the same bottle?” he asked, knowing the answer was yes. “You don’t like the beer.” He laughed mightily.

He ordered we have another, then headed off again. Both Beirens and I ordered the Achel 5, a blonde beer of 5.3% abv, and compared it to the 5% abv Westmalle Extra. When Brother Benedict returned, he looked at our blonde beers, working on a scowl. He took a sip of one. “Water,” he said, once again laughing.

*****

Beirens appreciates the importance of commerce to the monasteries, and that the six Trappist breweries are part of a larger family. He distributes a range of monastic products ? beer is the best selling, but they include cookies, soap, vegetables, wine, and other goods ? throughout Belgium and France. His father did the same. “I’ve been visiting monasteries since I was this high,” he said earlier, holding his hand below his waist. That’s why he understands something else about monasteries.

It was dark now, and the courtyard empty.

“I love the silence,” Beirens said. “I used to have a friend who was a monk. He’s gone now.”

We walked along in silence.

“When he was 80 or so, I’d still call him. If I had a problem I could go see him. He didn’t have to say anything and I’d feel better.

“All it took was silence.”

The Wallace Brothers have posted the recap for Session #41: Craft Beer Inpsired by Homebrewing.

And Derrick Peterman, who these days is calling his blog “Ramblings of a Beer Runner,” has issued marching orders for #42: “A Special Place, A Special Beer.”

I ask that you write about a special place in your life, and a beer or brewery that connects you to that place. It can be the beer from the childhood home, your current hometown, a memorable vacation you once took, or a place you’ve always wanted to go to but never had the chance. Please take a few moments to think about the how the beer connects you to this place, and share this with us. Of course, the definition of “place” is rather open ended, and in some cases, highly debatable, so it will be interesting to see the responses on what constitutes a place.

Seems one of the reason I started this blog is to discuss just that. As well as considering how a beer connects us to a place I’ll likely be writing about ways in which that beer and that place are themselves connected.

What place? What beer? I’ll try to make up my mind before Aug. 6.

In the words of the immortal Alan McLeod, “Holy Frig – it’s already time for the 41st edition of The Session.” The topic for discussion is “Craft Beers Inspired By Homebrewing,” Lug Wrench Brewing is hosting and it appears a coyote (we don’t have a dog; coyotes live nearby) ate my homework.

But I can tell you a little something you might not have noticed. The champion Scotch & Barley Wines at the 2010 Australian International Beer Awards was the Samuel Adams LongShot Barley Wine released earlier this year as “Mile High Barley Wine Ale.”

Quick background, in case you aren’t familiar with the LongShot contest. Boston Beer, brewer of the Samuel Adams beers, holds a national contest each year for homebrewers. Regional winners send their beers to Boston, where they are judged by a panel that includes Boston Beer founder Jim Koch.

Two winners are chosen, and the brewers at Boston Beer turn those recipes into beers distributed nationally in a six-pack that also includes a recipe from the Boston Beer employee contest. Two beers from each winner, six beers total.

“Mile High Barley Wine” is called that because the recipe comes from Rio Rancho, just up the hill from us (we’re at about 5,100 feet). So I’ve had the homebrewed version, the batch that Boston Beer brought to the Great American Beer Festival when it was announced Ben Miller’s recipe was one of the two winners, right when it was released in April and just the other day. Never quite the same, but that’s an aside.

So I’ve heard the story more than once about how when Ben brewed the beer the yeast he used pooped out, and he had to add more (so the beer wasn’t sickly sweet). Thus it was interesting last fall to talk to Koch about the beer.

“It had a lot of fermentation complexity . . . that consumed the alcohol,” he said.

He also discussed his own approach to the judging process (he gets but one vote).

“I drink it, I think, I close my eyes. I see a number and I write the number down.”