Chances are the beer will be cold

North Pole beerYou can decide what this might mean. And “nothing” is an OK answer.

Lew Bryson writes that he’s off to Miami, where he and Stephen Beaumont are both making presentations to beer industry members at the Cheers Beverage Conference. That’s Miami, as in Florida.

I, on the other hand, soon will be bound for Minneapolis-St. Paul, as in Minnesota. It has warmed up since Sunday, when it apparently didn’t get above zero in parts of the Twin Cities, but I’m packing long underwear rather than shorts.

I’ll mostly be judging some of the 828 beers entered in the Upper Mississippi Mash-Out and hanging with homebrewers. I also will stand up and talk briefly about brewing the sort of beers included in Brew Like a Monk.

And maybe drinking a few local beers.

Monday morning musing: Czech reality check

I had planned to muse on women and beer this morning — it seems like such a pleasant way to begin the week. But that’s going to have to wait.

We start with good news for the Beer Blogosphere: Roger Protz has started blogging. (Thanks to Jeff Bell for the heads up.)

Protz’s credentials are impeccable, and he writes in a way that makes you feel smarter just reading him. His posts are bound to be great conversation starters. Just look at Friday’s about Budvar.

It gave Evan Rail has so much to say that he put together The Truth About Budvar at Beer Culture, his view of Budvar “as it appears on the ground here in its home country.”

Must reading for a reason that Evan gets to up front: “I do think that foreign beer lovers’ emotional attachment to Budvar sometimes tends to cloud their our judgment: it’s as if we are certain Anheuser-Busch is pure evil, therefore Budvar, as its opponent, must be perfectly righteous. Of course, this line of thinking would make sense only in a comic book — in real life, situations are generally more nuanced.”

Evan carefully provides facts about Budvar and its large and small competitors you may not have seen before.

The Internet doesn’t always work this well. Misinformation abounds, but this single blog-to-blog exchange offers proof of all that Andrew Keen gets wrong in “The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture.”

For me and others concerned about if there is a where in our beer, Evan offers a bonus by pointing to Primátor. Not just because of the the innovative beers he describes.

With a list like that, Primátor is among the most innovative breweries in the country, and it doesn’t hurt to know that the profits go to its owner, the eastern Bohemian city of Náchod, paying for schools and roads and parks and more.

That’s a brewery I want to visit.

New Beer Rule #8: More beer, less analysis

NEW BEER RULE #8: Always take beer more seriously than yourself.

This needs little explanation.

But to be clear, this is a beer rule. Not a life or work rule. The alternative version goes like this: Ask yourself if it’s the beer you are taking too seriously or yourself.

The rule popped into my mind not long after I hurriedly posted my Thursday morning musing, so here are those links again and one to a discussion that followed.

– Over Analysis Syndrome (from brewer Matt Van Wyk)
– Armchair Brewer Syndrome (from brewvana)
– Drinking the same beer way too long (from The Beer Mapping Project)
– Rating Beer Raters? (Rate Beer discussion – Matt must still be amazed what he wandered into)

You connect the dots.

How expensive are hops? They’re on eBay

Samuel Adams hops sampleWe should have seen this coming. The “hops crisis” has reached the point that hops are up for sale on eBay.

Forget the bottles of Stone Epic Vertical and Lost Abbey Angel’s Share. Now you can buy the pure stuff. Just rip open the package and stick your nose in (somewhat like the drawing on the package).

Dump the hops into your beer. OK, that might not be such a good idea.

Granted, these promotional packages from Boston Beer won’t take you far. One weighs about 4 grams (and that includes the packaging). But think of it like gold &#151 the price is only going up.

Don Russell (Joe Sixpack) had a terrific column last week in which Dan Weirback of Weyerbacher Brewing in Pennsylvania talked specifically about how much more he is paying for hops and what it means for prices. Double Simcoe IPA (the No. 2 rated beer in the NY Times “extreme” tasting) will cost $15-$18 per case more.

It’s scary out there right now.

I got a look at latest prices on a one-page price sheet from GW Kent (dated Dec. 20) when I stopped in at a local brewery. A 44-pound box of German Hallertau Select is selling for $440, or $11 a pound. Not bad, until you notice the alpha acids on this delicate hop are just 1.5%. That’s not going to add much bitterness.

This provides a graphic illustration that it’s really a worldwide alpha shortage driving up hop prices. Not alpha that is going into niche beers like Double Imperial IPAs but into the millions of gallons of industrial pale lagers with just enough bitterness to balance any malt sweetness.

The giant brewing companies making those beers shop for “kilograms of alpha.” In November the going price was about 600 euros per kg of alpha. If my math is correct, the prices on this sheet are more like 870 euros per kg. Doesn’t seem we’re headed in the right direction.

Hallertau Mittelfrueh (which is in the Samuel Adams package) costs $1,144 for a 44-pound box (4.5% alpha), while Hallertau Tradition has a little more pop (5.5% alpha) and costs $1,276.

Disclaimer: I received one of these packages in a press kit. Words on the back support the notion “Hops are to beer what grapes are to wine,” discuss the hopping levels of Boston Lager versus industrial beers and promote “noble” hops.

But I particularly like a warning on the front that hops “are NOT intended for ingestion. So please smell, do not eat.”

The package is going on a shelf with Daria’s collection of Prohibition-era hop boxes, many of which still contain hops about three quarters of a century old (none of which we are tempted to sample).

Thursday morning musing: Take the quiz

One quick link this morning if you want to see just where your priorities lie.

Matt Van Wyk of Flossmoor Station Restaurant & Brewery assembled a quick quiz. A couple of his questions:

4) Did you lose a friend this year because you said SNPA was so yesterday?

5) Do you only drink a beer once and then move on to the next one?

Plenty to read if you follow the link to brewvana that provoked his post and a similar conversation at The Beer Mapping Project (be sure to scroll down to Matt’s comments for another giggle).

Perhaps I’ll have some thoughtful musing about this later, but I’ve already used up my thinking-about-beer time for the morning. Priorities are priorities, right Matt?