#FlagshipFriday #2: Alaskan Smoked Porter

Glacier field, AlaskaSmoked Porter is the first beer from Alaskan Brewing Company that I ever drank.

In Twilight of the Gods, author Steven Hyden writes, “The experience of discovering an artist after he’s built a body of work is much different than following an artist as that work is created in real time. For people who grew up with (Paul) McCartney, it’s the hits that matter, because those are the songs that soundtracked your life. But if you come to an artist later, after all that music is released and initially assessed, the perspective often skews away from hits, which seem overfamiliar, and toward the lesser-heralded gems, which are fresher.”

The other day, I thought about these things in the context of considering flagship beers while looking over the pretty decent beer selection at our local Kroger grocery store (in Atlanta). We all come to a brewery’s beers at a different time in their history and a different time in our own histories. Our Kroger sells just one Victory Brewing Co. beer, Golden Monkey, a 9.5% ABV Belgian tripel. If I hadn’t read Bryan Roth’s story last year I would not have known that for several years Golden Monkey, not HopDevil IPA, has been the brewery flagship, the best-selling beer that introduces new customers to Victory.

Read more

Monday beer briefing: Resilience, the future of lager and Bitter?

04.29.19, BEER LINKS

– Resilience. As well as everything else as astonishing about this beer, a logistical masterpiece.

– Breaking Surprising news: Spotted Cow contains no corn.

– Could lager be headed to decline (at least in the UK)? This leads to a larger question: How do brewers (everywhere) duck the “what your dad drank” bullet?

– Pete Brown explains why it’s OK to be sad about the demise of the word bitter, but maybe not bitter.

– Do the people who drink Steel Reserve care about rankings like this one?

– A millennial question: Is my wine (or beer) more interesting than avocado toast?

FROM TWITTER

Thread.

MORE LINKS

ReadBeer, every day.
Alan McLeod, most Thursdays.
Good Beer Hunting’s Read Look Drink, most Fridays.
Boak & Bailey, most Saturdays.

Monday beer briefing: The sameness of craft, Beer Jesus & adorable cans

04.22.19, BEER LINKS

Draft beer selection in Manhatten– “Regional variety is exciting,” and . . .
Will Hawkes worries about craft beer “making everything the same, everywhere.” Saturday, Boak and Bailey commented regional beers aren’t generally that hard to find and, “The international craft beer approach might seem to dominate the conversation, but it’s a parallel dimension, clearly signposted, and easily avoided.”

Having spent much of last week in the boroughs of New York City, I poked my head into plenty of places with more than a dozen beers on tap and none of them from the state of New York. Fortunately, I entered with no thought of actually ordering beer and already knew the next brewery taproom where I would drink one, but that parallel dimension is a scary place.

– As promised, Joe Stange provides insights about Stone Brewing and Berlin from where is happened.

-A shot over the bow of the Brewers Association, a dissenting view, and a follow up.

– As adorable as they are, will smaller cans catch on in a way nip-size bottles did not?

– What might pub chain’s ban on cell phones mean for Untappd and other similar apps?

– ”Day in the life of a brewer” stories were once standard fare when print publications rule the brewing earth.

– South Africans experiment with social justice-oriented grower cooperative.

– Meanwhile, “Why is the wine industry ignoring black Americans’ $1.2 trillion buying power?”

FROM TWITTER

Thread.

MORE LINKS

ReadBeer, every day.
Alan McLeod, most Thursdays.
Good Beer Hunting’s Read Look Drink, most Fridays.
Boak & Bailey, most Saturdays.

Monday beer briefing: rhetoric and craft beer morality

04.15.19, BEER LINKS

Travel plans during the next two months mean transmission of Monday beer links may be erratic for a while. When dispatches do arrive they may be late and they will be, let us say, succinct.

– “Hand-Raised Wolverines” is the most terrific song on Tom Russell’s latest, October in the Railroad Earth. And there is a beer connection. He uses craft beer to provide context in a story that includes change, pop culture, fear and more.

Now it’s snowing down there in Florida
And Niagara Falls is frozen
And all the rhetoric and craft beer morality
Is coming at us line to line

– Another study documenting gender bias in beer.

– London pubs from a woman’s perspective (1964).

– 17 years later, Skip Virgilio is brewing again in San Diego.

– Ed Wray wonders about the moment that keg beer becomes evil. Pray for his soul.

– What happened to calling a beer bitter?

– Phoney Peroni.

– How Greg Higgins made beer “visible” in Portland’s best restaurants.

– Beer writers guild announces diversity in beer writing grant recipients.

– You’re either on the bus or off the bus. Out of the loop or in.

– An argument that terroir comes at a price.

FROM TWITTER

Everything you always wanted to know about “hop creep.”

MORE LINKS

ReadBeer, every day.
Alan McLeod, most Thursdays.
Good Beer Hunting’s Read Look Drink, most Fridays.
Boak & Bailey, most Saturdays.

Experiencing beer out of (historic) order

What if we tasted beer in some sort of historic reverse? That is, starting with a particular type of beer as it is brewed today, and following it with previous episodes of the same beer.

I ask this, and ask it this way, because the Game of Thrones returns Sunday, and like Zak Jason I didn’t start watching the series when it debuted in 2011 and haven’t since. This has saved some time, not just hours that would have been spent watching 67 episodes broadcast so far, but still more for reading (think The Wire or Breaking Bad). And in recent weeks there has been plenty to read, including an intriguing article Jason wrote in Wired about binge-watching GoT backward. He wanted to experience it spoiler first, then learn what caused what he was seeing.

This “is much closer to how we encounter people in adult life when they play DE Nokzeit games,” he writes. “We don’t meet new colleagues or acquaintances via origin stories with swelling violins or rumbling timpani telling us how to feel about them. We meet them as testy, anxious, or guarded humans with many other quirks tied to unknown histories that require patience to uncover.”

In the process, he found he began “to pick up on things other viewers may not.”

Beers are not people, and I couldn’t tell you what episode of beer history we are on, or which one would feature Albany Ale, or Geronimo’s favorite fermented grain drink, tiswin, or whatever. But I do think it is relevant that origin stories have been an important part of beer marketing (be it Budweiser or Anchor Steam), and may not matter for a beer like Rhinegeist Cobstopper (a gose brewed with peach, vanilla and lactose and packaged in a can with nitrogen gas).

I met gose, so to speak, at Bayerischer Bahnhof Gasthaus and Gose Brauerei in Leipzig in 2008, and the next day had Döllnitzer Ritterguts Gose at a nearby cafe. There is an origin story. In 2010, Tiny Bubbles, a gose from Hollister Brewing in California, won a silver medal at the Great American Beer Festival. There were other goses out and about by then, some of which tasted more like Ritterguts and Tiny Bubbles than others. Fal Allen chronicles the evolution that followed, one he helped instigate with beers at Anderson Valley Brewing, in Gose: Brewing a Classic German Beer For The Modern Era.

The path from Bahnhof Gose to (potentially, should I encounter it) Cobstopper, with several stops along the way, is different than the path from Anderson Valley Blood Orange Gose to Cobstopper with various beers between. And the experience of drinking Cobstopper first, then Perennial Suburban Beverage is different than starting with Westbrook Gose and moving on to Creature Comforts Tritonia with pineapple and lemon. Change the order, change the experience and the understanding.

Just think of the fun you could have with IPA.

*****

There must be a variation of this game that includes several different types of beers from an era, similar types (call them styles if you must) from another, and from another, and so on. I’ll leave it to you to write the rules. It might also be fun to, if you can find the beers hiding in cellars somewhere, to mix and match the officially sanctioned Game of Thrones beers. Brewery Ommegang began collaborating with GoT to produce these 2013.

©2005-2024 Stan Hieronymus ~ Powered by GeneratePress