Category: News from Other Beer Writers

Suggested websites to visit to further your beer education.

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Archival Pods


I am not big on podcasts in general, except for My Dad Wrote a Porno, but I dabble a bit. And sometimes when you scroll down a bit, you can find beer related topics in unlikely spots.

Case in point, Stuff You Missed in History Class which, at the beginning of the year, had a perfectly right sized podcast about beer history. It was a fun 45 minutes that touched on multiple topics and had information enough for both beer newbies and those who know more (too much?) about the topic.

Idly scrolling can find some gems.

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Needed?

In your beer interwebs travels, you may have stumbled upon a website named The Beer Necessities. It looks slick. There are some listicles. A post about cellaring. Heck it even mentions one of my favorite bands of all time, Radiohead.

But lurking at the bottom is this….

Why is SABInBev blogging? That is the question to ask. And why are they doing it in suck a “golly gee Pollyanna positive” way? To get all Shakespeare, they are bringing Birnam Wood to Dunsinane.

Hidden in the list of best canned beers for camping is a Breckenridge lager. Who owns that? Why the High End does. And lo and behold, another post is a puff piece on the advertorial show hosted by Meg Gill of Golden Road. Who owns that? You get one guess.

Why the “High” End can’t just create a website touting it’s brands is beyond me except for the fact that they want to still be considered “craft”. They need to have that association for some economic reason. It is the same reason that they have owners of the sold brewery band together to tell their story to the media. It is why they try to horn into an L.A. craft brewers festival and when that doesn’t work, throw their muscle around to block it completely.

In the end, a website that appears to be hiding their motives is a site that is hard to trust. A site that nakedly espouses their views is preferable to me because I don’t have to read between the lines or be wary of content. We are bombarded with fake news and alternative facts so be aware of what you are reading.

Epilogue: A day or two after writing this mini-rant, Beachwood Brewing let it be known that unknowingly a piece about them was on this “High End” blog. They did not take kindly to it and asked for it to be taken down which it was. When I checked back in on the blog, it seemed to have a greater percentage of posts about Elysian, 10 Barrel and others of their ilk. Hmmm.

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Hop Newlsetter

Since this world of craft beer is so hop crazy, why not dig even deeper as Stan Hieronymus, author of “For the Love of Hops” , has set-up an e-mail newsletter for the lupulin crowd, that will be, “…a bit of agriculture, a dash of science, an occasional new variety, and always some hop geekery.”

Yes, I have already signed up.

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Help the Pour

I have been attempting to keep up on podcasts and in a recent search through beer audio, I stumbled across Help the Pour.

HtP is a new podcast (only one episode up as I type) and it has a very specific goal: “a podcast with women, about women, over some great craft beer” hosted by Jamaal Lemon and Myron “Shep” Jenkins, of the Wayfarer Study website and the “One Beer” video series.

In an impressive start, they interviewed Kathy Rizzo of the DC Craft Brewers Guild. Talking about the 11 breweries operating in DC today. It was really good to hear where DC is at in the craft beer stage. The conversation was lively and didn’t really flag at all. And it was good to hear people from a much different beer perspective talking.

It will be interesting to see how this progresses as they interview more women in the industry. I hope they talk more in depth about the topic instead of skirting it. As much as I like the talk of cool TV shows to stream and such, more about the tougher questions would be welcomed, no matter the comfort level.

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Speaking of Tweets

Since our now, new (unfortunately) Commander in Chief seems to love the Tweets, it seemed appropriate to highlight his beer Twitter….

For those who can’t separate their ACA from Obamacare, this is a parody account. Might be good for a few laughs in between Baldwin impersonations on SNL.

If like me, you wish to live the next four in sweet ignorance of Washington DC, then may I suggest following the this instead….

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Podcasts @ All About Beer

All About Beer has doubled down on their podcasts with John Holl hosting the new After Two Beers and adding the Beervana podcast to their roster for a formidable duo of beer podcasting.

I listened to the latest After Two Beers with guest Rebecca Newman of Summit Brewing and was treated to a science lesson that focused on packaging of beer. From there it went to how Newman conducts torture tests on the Minnesota beers either with intentional spikes of off-flavors or by warming incrementally or extremely.

The Golden Nugget that I took away from the under an hour long talk was that consumers should buy a six pack. Review one that is cold and treated well and leave one in the garage for a week and see what the difference is. I have heard that before but now it is back in my mind to try again.

The other bit of knowledge that I will incorporate is before I review a beer and say that it is off, I should go to the brewery website to check if the beer is what the brewery describes it as or not.

Beervana had Linfield grad (my alma mater) Alan Taylor as guest talking primarily about the process of opening his new brewery Zoiglhaus in the Lents section of Portland. It’s a great interview and boy does Taylor have a great command of German. Check it out HERE.

The next podcast to arrive sounds great too as the Women of Portland beer are the guests.

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The Session – The Recap

UPDATED
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Well, the weekend started late Friday with an April Fool’s prank from Lagunitas which spiralled into less than a stellar response to my Session writing prompt.

Maybe my example of the long form tweet from Ray Daniels wasn’t the best see the Appellation Beer 1st paragraph but I thought it might break people out of the bubble of looking at Twitter. Further on in his contribution he let us in on some “could have been” Michael Jackson tweets that I think would make great beer conversation starters.

Speaking of conversation, Derrick from Ramblings of a Beer Runner brought up part of my issue with Twitter. How it doesn’t really lead to an exchange of ideas. He also doesn’t see the usefulness in comparison to Facebook or Instagram which I also agree with.

The Beer Nut took the tack of relaying the story of how Twitter piqued his interest in a beer from the British brewery Cloudwater. But he also worries that it is the same five or six breweries that seem to be getting all of the Twitter love.

Reuben Gray from The Tale of the Ale folded in the the foolish holiday and Twitter to show an example of using the day and social media together. More importantly he talked about the Daniels tweets in relation to Ireland craft beer.

Jon Abernathy who covers the Bend, Oregon beer beat under the Brewsite Blog threw a curve ball and used photos to talk up a brewery hundreds of miles away on the beach of Pacific City at the lovely Pelican Pub. It shows the power of photography and his skills at shooting glasses of beer.

Jack Perdue over at Deep Beer (which has a great logo) gave some insight into the world of beer in Baltimore in both the past and present. Having lived there for a few months a long, long time ago, his tweets made me nostalgic. Not for the beer scene then, but for what I missed and wish I could do over. Certainly there is Brewmore going on there.

Sadly that was the lot. I was hoping to hear a bit of vitriol maybe a bit of Twitter love but obviously my topic did not resonate. I was a bit put out that Jay Brooks, one of the Session founders couldn’t add something to the mix. I would have loved to read his thoughts.

Keep blogging’ about beer and have a great April!

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The Session # 110 – Twitter Beer

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It is easy to hate social media. It is cluttered, loud and repetitive. Then there is the privacy angle to untangle or the trollery from really hateful people. The sheer number of posts and photos and links is enough to make me turn off my iPad and head to the ‘fridge for a beer.

So, why then did I choose Twitter as a topic for beer bloggers? There were external factors such as the 10th anniversary of the first Tweet that happened in March as well as the possibility of Twitter expanding to more than 140 characters but really, I wanted to show that it is woven into the fabric of craft beer. With six tweets, I can show a concise little history of Los Angeles beer evolution. (Thanks in part to the First Tweet website)
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Starting with me and my blatantly stolen quote from Fred Eckhardt. That I joined Twitter a full two years+ after I started beer blogging lands me directly into the late adopter crowd. Unlike the brewery that is the base for L.A. brewing, Eagle Rock Brewery. They jumped right onto the bandwagon and said hello.
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At around the same time as Eagle Rock both Strand Brewing and Ladyface Ale Companie opened up shop and L.A. beer drinkers could entertain joining the ranks of cities that celebrate their local beer with a Beer Week all of our own. And later in 2009, LA Beer Week tweeted out the ticket information for the first fest that was held at Descanso Gardens.
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After that, more breweries started opening around Los Angeles. One that has gone on to great Great American Beer Festival acclaim is Beachwood Brewing based in Long Beach. Back in 2011 they were just getting ready to open. Little did they know that the block they live on would soon house two restaurants with craft beer an integral part of the menu but also their own Belgium-styled Blendery as well.
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Not all the news was rosy though. Just as it seemed LA was hitting its beer mile stride, Golden Road sold itself to SABInBevMiller (or whatever mashed-up name it is AKA now). I could find many an expletive filled tweet to illustrate this point but instead, chose another craft beer industry tweet to show that beer can be promoted on Twitter and then talked about over a pint while the video streams across the world.
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But that is so last year, it would take a lot of scrolling to find that vitriol now especially when at about the same time, another brewery on the same road that was golden opened up. Brewyard has taken the mantle of the small and local brewery and will hopefully be Tweeting for years to come.
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