{"id":4285,"date":"2010-07-02T10:11:57","date_gmt":"2010-07-02T16:11:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/?p=4285"},"modified":"2010-07-02T10:11:57","modified_gmt":"2010-07-02T16:11:57","slug":"session-41-it-always-starts-with-an-idea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/session-41-it-always-starts-with-an-idea\/","title":{"rendered":"Session #41: It always starts with an idea"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.appellationbeer.com\/images\/00-thesession150.jpg\" alt=\"The Session\" class=\"alignright\"\/>In the words of the immortal <a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/agoodbeerblog\/status\/17576611718\">Alan McLeod,<\/a> &#8220;Holy Frig &#8211; it&#8217;s already time for the 41st edition of The Session.&#8221; The topic for discussion is &#8220;Craft Beers Inspired By Homebrewing,&#8221; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.lugwrenchbrewing.com\/2010\/06\/announcing-session-41-craft-beers.html\">Lug Wrench Brewing<\/a> is hosting and it appears a coyote (we don&#8217;t have a dog; coyotes live nearby) ate my homework.<\/p>\n<p>But I can tell you a little something you might not have noticed. The champion Scotch &#038; Barley Wines at the 2010 Australian International Beer Awards was the Samuel Adams LongShot Barley Wine released earlier this year as &#8220;Mile High Barley Wine Ale.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Quick background, in case you aren&#8217;t familiar with the <a href=\"http:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/category-23-looking-for-harmony-in-beer\/\">LongShot contest<\/a>. Boston Beer, brewer of the Samuel Adams beers, holds a national contest each year for homebrewers. Regional winners send their beers to Boston, where they are judged by a panel that includes Boston Beer founder Jim Koch.<\/p>\n<p>Two winners are chosen, and the brewers at Boston Beer turn those recipes into beers distributed nationally in a six-pack that also includes a recipe from the Boston Beer employee contest. Two beers from each winner, six beers total. <\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Mile High Barley Wine&#8221; is called that because the recipe comes from Rio Rancho, just up the hill from us (we&#8217;re at about 5,100 feet). So I&#8217;ve had the homebrewed version, the batch that Boston Beer brought to the Great American Beer Festival when it was announced Ben Miller&#8217;s recipe was one of the two winners, right when it was released in April and just the other day. Never quite the same, but that&#8217;s an aside.<\/p>\n<p>So I&#8217;ve heard the story more than once about how when Ben brewed the beer the yeast he used pooped out, and he had to add more (so the beer wasn&#8217;t sickly sweet). Thus it was interesting last fall to talk to Koch about the beer.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;It had a lot of fermentation complexity . . . that consumed the alcohol,&#8221; he said.<\/p>\n<p>He also discussed his own approach to the judging process (he gets but one vote).<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I drink it, I think, I close my eyes. I see a number and I write the number down.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the words of the immortal Alan McLeod, &#8220;Holy Frig &#8211; it&#8217;s already time for the 41st edition of The Session.&#8221; The topic for discussion is &#8220;Craft Beers Inspired By Homebrewing,&#8221; Lug Wrench Brewing is hosting and it appears a coyote (we don&#8217;t have a dog; coyotes live nearby) ate my homework. But I can &#8230; <a title=\"Session #41: It always starts with an idea\" class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/session-41-it-always-starts-with-an-idea\/\" aria-label=\"More on Session #41: It always starts with an idea\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4285","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-session"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4wTn-177","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4285","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4285"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4285\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4293,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4285\/revisions\/4293"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4285"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4285"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4285"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}