Move over Burton upon Trent, there’s a new pale ale capital

Joel Nosh of the Chicago Tribune explains why it was a coup Chicago-area brewers won all three medals in the American-style pale ale category at the Great American Beer Festival.

First, the Chicago area took the top three spots from among 109 beers entered, one of the most competitive categories at GABF. Also, American-style pale ales and their bold use of hops were pioneered on the West Coast, and the top honors in the category usually go to those brewers. But not this year.

For the record, they were:

– Gold: Brickstone APA, Brickstone Restaurant and Brewery, Bourbonnais, Ill.

– Silver: The Weight, Piece Brewery and Pizzeria, Chicago.

– Bronze: Zombie Dust, Three Floyds, Munster, Ind.

Piece brewmaster Jonathan Cutler was sitting directly in front of me during the awards ceremony. The Weight was brewed as a “tribute and a celebration” after Levon Helm died last spring. When the silver was announced, Cutler stood right up, made a fist, punched a giant hole in something, and shouted (yes, it was pretty loud), “F**k, yeah.” It made everybody around flat out grin, maybe even laugh.

Cutler has won plenty of medals at GABF and the World Beer Cup. Perhaps he was a little more excited because had just won silver after Zombie Dust had won a the bronze. He and Nick Floyd of Three Floyds are the best of friends, but who wouldn’t want to one-up that cult beer?1

In any event, when I saw Cutler in the past I thought first of weiss bier and then about the delicious Piece pizza.

Now, I’ll see him bolting to his feet, bumping his fist, and . . .

*****

1 Zombie Dust is brewed with immensely popular and hard-to-get Citra hops. Certainly part of the reason they are popular is because demand exceeds current supply, and perhaps Alan McLeod is right when he suggests they could be just a fad. But they also have an aroma different than hops that came before. This might be like more than a hundred years ago, when brewers in Britain began using the Fuggle hop. Wow, that’s different. And, despite various agronomic issues, Fuggle is still around. In fact, she’s a great grandmother of Citra.

Turns out I predicted homebrewing in White House

If you see these posts through a feed reader — as the majority of you do, in fact — then you won’t be aware that I’ve done some remodeling/reorganizing here. As part of the process, I’m working my way through old posts, cleaning up special characters (mostly dashes and quotation marks) that got turned into something that looks cyrillic because of some strange digital transformation.

During the course of this, and it is ongoing, I’ve come across a number of “cringe” posts. I really wrote that? I should have known better. (Hops, in particular.) A lot of things I’ve forgotten about, to be honest. Including what were intended to be silly predictions, posted at the outset of 2007.

But, hey, look at this one:

6. Barack (is there anything he can’t do?) Obama wins Homebrewer of the Year in the National Homebrew Competition and declares that if elected he will name Fred Eckhardt the nation’s first Craft Beer Czar.

Jan. 2, 2007. You can look it up.

Tick-tock, today a cover, soon a book

For the Love of Hops

I threatened to retweet the link hourly last week when Kristi Switzer posted the “For the Love of Hops” table of contents and passed along the absolutely gorgeous cover.

But then I realized I’d be all over the unfollow button if somebody else did that. So instead, here’s the cover. Book should start shipping beginning of December. You can find out more at Brewers Publications, and read endorsements from Ken Grossman, Jim Koch and Vinnie Cilurzo.

Man, I hope they know what they are talking about.

Session #69 roundup posted

The SessionJorge does not mess around. He’s already posted the roundup for The Session #69: A Perfect Beer World.

Alas, my post didn’t make the cut. This happens every few months, although in this case it appears it is because I pissed off the comment gods. I see my comment (with a link) is still being held for approval. I don’t really mind, because it also has a typo. Quite obviously, news that Sierra Nevada Celebration had hit town rendered my mind, and fingers, pretty much useless.

Anyway, and this could change, but there’s also no link to Alan McLeod’s fine post (So What’s Not Perfect So Far?). Much better thought out than mine and worth your time.

In a better beer world, more beer is local

The SessionThe topic for The Session #69 is “The Perfect Beer World,” a concept I’ve struggled to wrap my head around. How does that fit in with the idea of a perfect world? Can you have a beer utopia without achieving overall utopia? These are the sort of questions you need a beer to help sort out.

So here’s one suggestion for a better beer world, which according to my logic, makes the world a better place in general: More local beer.

I could have typed “in a perfect world all beer is local,” but that would require overlooking the fact that some people here have wanted the beer from there for hundreds of years, and sometimes that beer was from pretty far away.

And I’d also be overlooking the fact that we’ve been waiting for the 2012 vintage of Sierra Nevada Celebration to arrive. I probably rambled on long enough about drinking local during our Great Adventure in 2008 and 2009, but it’s worth adding . . . pardon the interuption, but it appears there is news from the Wine and Cheese Place:

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Sorry, gotta go.