The Session #38: 1 beer or 1001?

The SessionWere Mr. Sixpack (otherwise known as Don Russell) to participate today in our monthly session then he might quote liberally from his entry in 1001 Beers You Must Taste Before You Die Three Floyds Dark Lord Russian Imperial Stout.

“The Dark Lord exists mainly by reputation. His power is rumored, his character praised with cultlike obsession, yet he is rarely seen. Until, that is, Dark Lord Day, a holiday ritual for the devoted who flock from around the world to Three Floyds Brewing in Munster, Indiana, for his annual appearance.”

I don’t have such a description or such a beer to offer for this session, for which you’ll recall, Sean Inman provides these guidelines:

What beer have you tasted recently (say, the last six months or so) that is worthy of their own day in the media sun?

And to add a little extra to it, how does “great” expectations affect your beer drinking enjoyment?

AND If you have attended one of these release parties, stories and anecdotes of your experience will be welcomed too.

I’m not opposed to standing in line, literally as well a figuratively. On the first day of March I spent four straight hours calling a number in Colorado with hopes of getting through to book two nights in Jersey Jim, a former Forest Service lookout tower can you rent, and then I did the same the next day. Some years we get lucky and some years (like this) we don’t. I can drive to Mancos (where reservations are taken) in four hours and probably would if they accepted in-person applications.

Anyway, back to The Session. I’ve had a beer or two in the last six months as worthy as Dark Lord, but I wouldn’t exert as much effort to acquire any of them as I would for another night in Jersey Jim. Still one of these years I might try to make it to Dark Lord Day for the experience.

I promise to write about it.

(Head on over to Beer Search Party for more Session entries.)

What would you ask a hop queen?

Mona EuringerNo, seriously.

Next week judges stream into Chicago to taste their way through 3,500 or so entrants in the World Beer Cup and soon they will be joined by thousands of brewing industry members for the Craft Brewers Conference.

I expect only the toughest will make it up Saturday morning for “Brewing Belgian White and Wit Beers,” the panel I’ll be moderating. Fortunately there will be many more exciting moments. First up, Wednesday afternoon is a chance to meet the Hallertau hop queen, Mona Euringer. She’ll be in Chicago along with members of the German Hop Growers Association.

She’ll give a brief talk about life on a hop farm and also be around for the trade show Thursday and Friday. Last year the hop growers caught some grief when it was suggested Nicol Frankl, the previous hop queen, was invited along only because she has a pretty face.

Not true. “To be elected hop queen, you have to have grown up and helped work on a hop farm all of your life, you have to know hops, hop farming, and all the machinery involved,” said Eric Toft, brewmaster at Private Landbrauerei Schönram, who doubles as a representative of the hop growers.

I promise to find out just how much she knows. So if you have a question you want asked please leave it as a comment. As long as it’s not rude I’ll ask her.

The hop growers will also be serving a variety of beers. Toft wrote the recipes and Victory Brewing in Pennsylvania made the beers. They will include three different Belgian-style pale ales — each brewed with a single German aroma hop varieties: Hallertauer Mittelfruh, Smaragd, Hersbrucker — a new Bavarian-style pale ale, and a tripel hopped with Saphir.

I promise to ask questions first and drink beers later.

Waiting for RSBS

Belgian lacingWith apologies to Samuel Beckett . . .

The current, but perhaps not ongoing, demise of really simple BEER syndication has been noted in comments here and in a devoted post by Alan McLeod. For those of you don’t know, it is a site that aggregates the latest rss feeds from hundreds of beer blogs.

Jonathan Surratt invented both RSBS and The Beer Mapping Project, another free web utility that has improved the quality of our beer drinking lives. He wrote in an email that Twitter now works for him much as RSBS did before, but he’s not ready to let it pass. He’s got a lot going on — he’s the web director for Draft Magazine and devotes (gives away) time to various other projects — so cut him some slack.

When I started this blog I did a lot more pointing to “good reads,” but between RSBS and bloggers discovering how to use Twitter and Facebook to promote their posts that seemed redundant. I figured, probably incorrectly but I’ve learned to live with such ignorance, that if I was seeing three to five notifications every time a new beer post went up that you were seeing at least one.

I wouldn’t begin to attempt to replicate the service RSBS provides, with sometimes more than 100 posts a day, but here are a half dozen recent posts you might have missed and should read while waiting for RSBS.

  • The first ever reference to IPA. You shouldn’t need more than the headline to motivate you. But just in case, it’s a Martyn Cornell post.
  • What’s a pilsner? “Should Pilsener be considered a beer made with Saaz or Hallertauer or other noble hops only, or even be reserved for beers that actually come from Plzen?”
  • Take that, Philadelphia. “A unique blend of climate and tradition make the Great Lakes region the best in the country for beer brewers and drinkers.”
  • San Francisco versus Portland. Because they aren’t aware that the Great Lakes region is really No. 1.
  • Reviews for something that doesn’t exist. What if Schrute Farms B&B were a beer?
  • Now this is just stupid. Pilsner Urquell versus tiny Pivovar Kout na Sumave. I point you to this not only because I’m a big fan of Kout na Sumave (despite the fact I can’t get WordPress to show the various marks above the S and e correctly), because you must read the story at the end.

    • I am not a brewery

    Requests like this seem to arrive in cycles and unfortunately we’re in an up cycle.

    So I thought I’d pass one of them along, in this case with the name and contact information removed. The subject line is “My Home Museum Beer.” I’m not trying to be anti-social but the PS tickled me (I don’t usually read that far).

    Hello.
    My name is [removed]. I the citizen of the Ukraine. I the big admirer and the collector of Beer and beermats. I have my own family collection.
    In addition to beer and beermats I collect any information concerning alcoholic production and alcoholic manufacture.
    Now I work as that that I collect the catalogue of brands various alcoholic drinks from all world.
    I plan to write the book – the catalogue about the description of drinks, the companies, and features of cocktails. I hope for the big circulation and popularity of this book.
    If it probably I like to ask from you the information on your company and about beer made by your company.
    From myself personally I would like to ask and to you would be grateful for what or a souvenir with a logo of your brewery in my collection.
    I hope I have not taken away from you a lot of time the request.
    Yours faithfully [name removed].

    My adress:
    [details removed]
    Makeevka
    86154
    UKRAINE
    P.S.: Perhaps you have received many requests for souvenirs from Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, and probably faced with such people as lovers freebies. I am very ashamed of these people. Please do not ignore my message.

    See, I didn’t.

    Numbers don’t lie, but they may seduce

    Seduced by numbersSouthern Star Brewing in Texas basically doubled production from 2008 to 2009 and expects to do the same again this year, according to a story last week in the Houston Chronicle.

    Curiously, a the manager at a Houston bar says the founders are smart to grow the brewery “at a slow, deliberate pace.” One hundred percent hardly sounds slow, but obviously he remembers that past performance is no guarantee of future results.

    Because of a story (for print) I just finished I happen to have an example at my fingertips.

    From 1991 through 1997 the number of brewpubs in the United States increased from 155 to 845 (growing about 5.5 fold). Those pubs brewed 112,154 barrels of beer in 1991 and 691,879 in 1997 (increasing 6.2 times over).

    What would have happened had they done the same during the next six years (until 2003) and then again for the next six?

    Goodness. There would have been more than 25,000 brewpubs in the country in 2009 brewing 26.5 million barrels. And that was just brewpubs, which produced 12.5 percent of craft beer in 1997 and make a little less than 8 percent today.

    We knew that wasn’t going to happen. In fact brewpub production turned flat in 1998 and has remained pretty much the same since. Craft beer sales kept climbing, reaching 9.1 million barrels . . . but who knows when they will hit 26 million?