Session #140 announced: Pivo

The SessionAlistair Reece has announced the topic for The Session #140 will be Pivo, or Czech beer — they are, after all, the same.

He writes, “In the autumn of 1999 I jumped on a bus at London’s Victoria Bus Station and spent the next 20 or so hours making my way across Europe to the mother of cities. The Czech Republic, most specifically Prague, would be my home for the next ten years, although my original plan had been just one year and then moving on to visit as many former Soviet countries as possible, best laid plans of mice and men, and all that jazz. I still remember my first Czech beer in situ, I’d had a couple of Czech lagers as a college student in Birmingham, a half litre of 10° Budvar in a little pizza place among the paneláky of ?erný Most. Beer was to be part and parcel of life for the duration of my stay in the country I still wistfully think of home. That my dear readers is the theme then for The Session this Friday, Czech beer.”

And he asks for, “a love song to Bohemia and her beers, the land that gave us the original pilsner, and so much more.”

My wish is that @evanrail and @beervana join The Session on Friday.

Pop-up beer links

Monday beer links and musing remain on hiatus, but here are a few “just the links” that shouldn’t be overlooked.

– The Calamity of Cultural Confusion: Appropriation vs Appreciation.
and
– A Look At Cultural Appropriation Within The Hip-Hop Culture.

– In Trump era, breweries and bars wear politics on their sleeves.
and
– The Beer Politic.

– Lagunitas brews Newcastle Ale.
and
– Light Beer, Big Opportunity — Lagunitas Enters the Low-Cal Market.

– Brewer Lee Hedgmon Learned the Rules in Order to Break Them.
and
– Lee Hedgmon Oral History Interview.

– Just the Essentials — How Distilled Oils are Expanding the Impact of Hops.
and
– The Complex Case of Thiols.
Disclaimer: These are my stories. If hops interest you consider signing up for Hop Queries.

While waiting for numbers from @BrewersStats

If you take the time to work through all the comments that followed Andy Crouch’s suggestion (click on the bird) you might not make it back here, but go look anyway.

As happens on Twitter, different threads developed and more questions came up. Bart Watson will be answering some them soon with what has turned into an annual crunching of numbers. I’ll add the link here. Meanwhile, his reports from 2017, 2016, 2015, and 2014. Lots of fun stuff, including the fact that he calculates expected medals versus actual medals won based on the difficulty of categories entered.

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Pop-up beer (and drinks) links

Monday beer links and musing remains on hiatus, but here are a few “just the links” — because breweries are small businesses and what is written about wine is often true about beer.

– Remember when a glass of wine a day was good for you? Here’s why that changed.
– What Millions of Retiring Small Business Owners Could Mean for Cities.
–America’s Newest Monastic Brewery Opens in Oregon.
– The wonder of the fresh hop: How Washington’s special autumn beer gets made.
– Fifth Hammer Brewer Chris Cuzme Would Take Orval and John Coltrane to a Desert Island.
– Metallica Talk Top-Secret Distilling Process Behind New ‘Blackened’ Whiskey.

Gose: Balancing tradition and innovation

Stephen Beaumont tweet

I was already thinking about the speed at which beer seems to be barreling ahead when this tweet from Stephen Beaumont showed up in my Twitter feed early (he’s in Italy) yesterday. The reason being that I’ve just finished reading Fal Allen’s Gose: Brewing a Classic German Beer For The Modern Era. Allen had never heard of the style months before Anderson Valley Brewing made its first one in July 2013. Now he’s written a book about it that fills 221 pages.

Gose: Brewing A Classic German Beer For the Modern EraThat he knew nothing of it is a bit humbling, given that it one of the “wheat beers from the past” I wrote about in Brewing With Wheat, which was published in 2010. Later that year I provided a “how to” guide on how to brew a gose for The New Brewer, the magazine for members of the Brewers Association. The point was that gose was a oddity. Now it is everywhere and includes beers that go well beyond your basic sour German ale with a bit of salt and coriander.

This allows Allen to dig into the history of the beer — yes, I’m jealous — while, as the title suggests, also placing it in a modern context. Are you drinking gose, and a lot of people are, and want to know all about it? This is a book for you. Want to learn everything about how to brew it from somebody who is really good at it. Again, the book for you.

One example. Goslar, where there style originated, was once a brewing center, with 300 breweries in 1500. As Allen writes, the gose origin story “has it that the salinity of gose once came from the mineral-laden water of the Gose river.” Later, as beers from Goslar gained in popularity other brewers added salt to emulate their character.

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