Fall is in the air. The mornings are crisper, roll down your window as you pass the Fruit Basket on Fourth Street and you can smell green chiles roasting, RVs are already parked around Balloon Fiesta Park . . . and the Men’s Journal fourth annual guide to “The World’s Best Beers” is out.

All I have to say, well not all, is that the Germans and Czechs will not be pleased.

I rambled on long enough last year about “best” lists so I won’t repeat myself.

Once again you start with 25 really good beers, then get a bonus of 25 “Best Beers for Every Occasion” (with one repeated from the first list). This is meant to be fun page, with the best beer “For an All-Nighter” (North Coast Red Seal) and best “For a One-Nighter” (Ayinger Celebrator). Memo to Men’s Journal: That’s not a horse dangling from the neck of Celebrator, but a goat.

To their credit, many of the beers listed in previous years are here again (nice to know the best can still be the best). Not to their credit: They explain “How we did it,” as if we are to believe this proves that Deschutes Mirror Pond is really the third best Pale Ale, not the 1st, 9th and 103rd.

So that you too will feel compelled to spend $4.95 to buy the magazine and learn “How Carbs Are Killing You” I’m not revealing everything. Just that they picked a top five in five different categories (listed with their first choice):

Best Pale Ale – Firestone Walker Pale Ale. No. 4 Dogfish Head 60 Minute IPA is called “America’s best India pale ale.” Them’s fightin’ words.

Best Stout or Porter – Deschutes The Abyss. They must feel a Bell’s [fill in the blank] Stout is a must. Expedition got bumped for the lower abv Kalamazoo to make room for two other Imperials.

Best Belgian – Saison Dupont. That’s really Belgian-style because Ommegang Three Philosophers and Russian River Damnation are both on the list.

Best Wheat – Aventinus Doppel Weizen-Bock. Looks like they are running for office and out to please every voting group. We get a weizenbock, two traditional weiss beers (though one is from Pennsylvania), a Belgian-style white (from Maine) and an American wheat.

Best Lager or Pilsner – Lagunitas Pils, followed by four more American beers. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

Overall this list doesn’t contain as many pleasant surprises as last year, but I’m going tear the pages out of the magazine and keep them with me for when I’m in a pub (like to toast Michael Jackson on Sept. 30). Arguing the merits of the list will make for great conversation. Maybe we’ll start by trying to find a European lager worthy of it.

Brewers across the nation will be cringing when they read the investigative report in today’s Milwaukee Journal Sentinel about dirty beer lines.

Of course this a local story, even quoting a vendor that “Milwaukee is a real horrible town for draft beer.”

But this will have repercussions in craft beer land because the “dirtiest” beer the reporters found came from a brewpub and the second dirtiest was another “microbrewed” beer. Both contained large amounts of lactobacillus (left), bacteria that produces lactic acid, souring a beer’s flavors and smells. It is the same microorganism responsible for spoiling milk.

So does that mean you should be concerned about the beer on tap at your local brewpub? Or that small breweries aren’t able to control quality – clear through to what is poured into your glass at a bar – as well as large?

First, this isn’t a safety issue but a quality one. Trust your senses, and if you notice foul aromas or sour beer point it out to your server. Second, a Budweiser checked at a place called Chasers Pub contained 1,950 cells of lactobacillus per gram and a yeast count of 16,400 cells per gram (sounds like a lot, doesn’t it?).

That’s not to say that breweries don’t recognize they’ve got a problem. In delivering the keynote speech at this year’s Craft Brewers Conference, Vinnie Cilurzo of Russian River Brewing said: “The integrity and quality of our beer is more important than hitting a certain growth number each year. Making sure the consumer is purchasing fresh craft beer is just one example. Taking care of draft lines and cleaning them properly is yet another example of the integrity I speak of.”

Boulevard Brewing founder John McDonald has been and an industry leader in addressing the problem and outspoken on the topic. “It depresses me how deplorable the state of draft lines has become,” he said a few years ago.

You might say the Brewers Association is taking the Journal Sentinel story head on – posting two stories about draft quality on the front page of its website and issuing a press release for an upcoming manual to improve draft quality (obviously in the works well before the Milwaukee investigation).

A Draft Quality Standards Committee comprised of small, large, and foreign brewers is in place and slated to release a standards manual in the first quarter of 2008. This document will be available to distributors, retailers, and the public. The goal will be to produce a comprehensive manual addressing draft beer dispensing and serving.

Let’s be straight. Addressing the problem is not the same as solving the problem. Dirty lines are always going to be a danger, and while we appreciate it when brewers choose not to filter out flavor those unfiltered beers also leave more sediment in lines. A dozen years ago a vendor told me the dirtiest lines he came across were always in brewpubs because it was distributors who trained bars and restaurants to clean lines (and most brewpubs didn’t buy draft beer from distributors).

But there’s reason to be optimistic. Everybody agrees that clean lines are good business. “I have never heard a bar customer say, ‘Gee, this bar does a lousy job of maintaining and cleaning their lines,’” New Belgium Brewing co-founder Kim Jordan once said. “They say that the beer they ordered is lousy.”

And then there is the matter of pride. The Journal Sentinel reported that New Glarus Brewing brewmaster Dan Carey takes it personally when one of his beers is served through a dirty line at a bar.

“It ruins my evening,” Cary told a reporter. “It’s my baby, and damn it, you’ve ruined it.”