Historic IPA: Filtered, pasteurized?

I’m taking my time reading Hops and Glory, enjoying each page and reading some of them twice. So it may be a while before you get a review out of me. You’ll find early returns at the link above, as well as Stephen Beaumont’s take here.

I’m a little surprised that nobody has mentioned (though in fairness Adrian Tierney-Jones sort of does in passing) this most interesting statement:

“(Eighteenth century) IPA was more similar to a modern filtered and pasteurized beer than it was to traditional cask ale.”

Given a certain predisposition among beer lovers that filtration and pasteurization are modern and bad and that Brown and Martyn Cornell have established everything your mother taught you about IPA is wrong mighty interesting statement indeed.

 

#41 – Where in the beer world?

Where in the beer world?

Think you know where in the beer world this photo was taken?

Please leave your answer as a comment.

Yes, I will be impressed if somebody nails this one. After I shot the photo (a few, in fact) one of the people who works where it was taken told me they’d only added this beer and a few other “good” (his word) beers in the last few weeks.

 

Driking local: 50 beers, 50 states

How’s this for thinking/drinking local?

The July/August issue of Draft magazine, now online and presumably on the newsstands, includes a list of 50 beers you can only drink in the states where they are brewed.

You’ll also find details of our romp through Texas pit barbecue heaven last April. And yes, we really did see one of the workers at Smitty’s Market set his boot on fire.

 

Preserving history, Allagash style

When somebody writes a big ol’ history of small-batch, micro, whatever-you-call it brewing Sierra Nevada will be a chapter and Rhinochasers a footnote. But what’s clear in retrospect isn’t always clear at the time.

So I love it when I see stuff like a photo Rob Tod referred to on Twitter. Here’s the link to the picture of Mike Dixon of the Great Lost Bear in Portland, Maine, with the original handle that poured the first pint of Allagash White at the GLB on July 1, 1995.

Tod was a one-man brewery at the time. I sure as heck hope he knows where that tap handle is.