Lots of catching up to do after a wonderful time in balmy St. Paul, Minn. Great beers, not so good beers. More important, great conversations and stories, not all of them about beer.

So just one bit of musing, then off to all that e-mail. First stop Thursday was The Muddy Pig in St. Paul, which bills itself as a “neighborhood bistro.” And it is. Good looking food menu, beer menu that includes descriptions of 48 beers on tap and a an excellent bottle selection, all set in a comfortable pub/tavern. (Photo is from their website.)

Places like this barely existed when we started research on the first Beer Travelers Guide in the early 1990s, and the best did not have a beer selection so inviting.

I considered beers from Belgium. I looked at the Bell’s offerings — who could turn down Two Hearted Ale, Hopslam or Expedition Stout? I’ve got the latter in my cooler, but Expedition Stout on tap . . .

Aside from my interest in drinking local I also did a bit of math. This was going to an 18-to-20 hour day, and drinking would continue from this moment on. I ordered Surly Mild.

Not a a beer that would have scored well in the Upper Mississippi Mash Out. A session-friendly 4.2% abv with the rich chocolate, caramel and roast you expect in a mild, but brimming with juicy hop character. The description said 31 BU but against a modest malt bill it seemed like more.

Much of the discussion about session beers has focused on alcohol content, but that should be only part of the conversation. A session beer needs to understand its place at the table. It’s there to facilitate the session, not to star.

Saint Arnold Brewing founder Brock Wagner defined this perfectly in a conversation several years ago.

“We want you to think about what you are drinking. I’ll think about the beer when I first taste it. After that I’m sitting there with my wife and with friends shooting the breeze and it becomes background,” he said. “But periodically I will think about the beer again.”

Maybe you have to be a hophead, which I am, and you certainly need to set aside your idea of traditional mild, but to me Surly Mild qualifies as an outstanding session beer.

Had I stuck with it my head would have thanked me the next morning.

I’m not sure (and neither is he) how Stephen Beaumont’s BeerTrends for 2008 #3: Chicks Dig Beer is going to turn out, but it looks like writing about marketing to women is a trend in the making. Witness:

– “6 women, 6 decades, 6 beers,” at brewvana, which is not about marketing but how women perceive beer. Something marketers need to read.

– Lew Bryson wrote about “One of the beer industry’s biggest oversights: not marketing to women.” And several beer blogs quickly cheered his suggestion beer execs make 2008 the year they discover women.

– Beaumont chimed in to vote for the idea, but added the disclaimer: “Maybe it will happen this year, and maybe (more probably) it won’t.”

– American Brewer magazine arrived with a story by Alan Moen headlined, “The Female Factor: Marketing Beer to Women.”

– Fort George Brewery announced a Craft Beer Appreciation Workshop for Women with Lisa Morrison, which pretty much brings us full circle. Lisa has been beating this drum longer and louder than most.

In fact, I sent her and e-mail shortly after Lew’s piece appeared to ask if it felt like this is something we’ve been talking about a long time.

“For us, yes. What Lew says has been said before,” she wrote back. “But it bears repeating until there’s actually a change.”

And then she reminded me why she’s known as the “Beer Goddess”:

“I don’t necessarily think beer should be marketed to women or men. Ads featuring women quaffing beer while scantily clad men hover around them is just as silly as the Twins/Swedish Bikini/babe of the day marketing we’ve been subjected to for decades. I certainly don’t think we need to start marketing beer ‘to’ women.”

An image comes to mind that we don’t want to see in a Bud Light commercial during he Super Bowl.

You 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.

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.