Do you think less of a local beer, or for that matter a faraway brand you always thought was hard to get, when it shows up in the cooler at your grocery store?
Asked because of this story about upscale wines and grocery stores.
Which one is the IPA?
If you guessed the beer on the far right, sorry, you are wrong.
The styles, left to right at Angry James Brewing Company in Silverthorne, Colorado, are: IPA, a hoppy light lager, German pils, and hefeweizen (a very good one, in fact).
When I asked, before ordering, if Tricentric IPA (the beer on the left) was a see-through beer the man behind the bar did not hesitate. “West Coast IPA.” That’s the world we live in.
#nottwitter 12 (terroir edition)
Would you call this terroir?
Asked because Coors Light Champions Ice will be available in Denver this week. It is brewed with shavings from the rink at Ball Arena, home of the Stanley Cup winning Colorado Avalanche.
“Brewers blended the ice into a batch of Coors Light, and the company maintains that it is sanitary to drink, stating that its brewers ‘filtered the ice during the brewing process using reverse osmosis membrane ultrafiltration technology.’ (Here’s hoping they got samples before one fan spread his friend’s ashes on the ice.)”
#nottwitter11
Shark jumped?
Asked because West Coast IPA v? (I don’t known, version 2.0, 2.2, 3, 9, whatever) showed up Thursday in The Wall Street Journal.
“Just bitter enough.” Hmm.
See you when the summer’s through*
Remember “Where in the beer world?” Time to play again. The answer will be posted in this month’s Hop Queries. Consider that a hint.
Almost every link I saved during the past week to post here you will find at a Good Beer Blog or from Boak & Bailey. That gives me an excuse to jump the gun on my plan to put That Was The Beer Week That Was (TWTBWTW) on pause beginning Memorial Day and instead start now. Monday transmissions may resume the Monday after Labor Day.
But please drop by once in a while so see if there are random posts. Here is an example.
Two stories from last week:
A) Goose Island Brewing put a million dollars worth of NFTs (non-fungible tokens) up for sale. Read it in the Chicago Tribune if you know the way around its paywall, or at Eater.
B) NFTs and building a community around a beer brand.
Now highlights from a story from the New York Post two-plus years ago about Brooklyn hops hipsters, an average-looking guy from the Midwest and White Claw:
Chaos erupted outside [Other Half Brewing in Brooklyn] when an apparently annoyed craft-beer hater pulled a gun on a long line of people who were waiting to buy the latest designer IPA, according to cops and online reports.
The gun-slinging skeptic struck around the corner from the brewery, where beer lovers with camp chairs and hand trucks regularly line up overnight to buy limited-run, $18 four-packs in collectible cans, sold when the doors open Saturday mornings.
It was at around 9 p.m. when the gunman and a woman he was with allegedly confronted the long line of hops hipsters.