Follow Sean Inman to the best in craft beer
Suggested websites to visit to further your beer education.
It can be daunting just to keep up with the craft beer in your own backyard. But keep in mind that the beer revolution is not just happening here.
It is also happening in places as far flung as Australia. That’s where resources like the Beer Cartel come into play.
You can buy rare (to us) beer, join a beer of the month club or just learn more about the scene in Australia. If you don’t check it out today, it has been added to the links section for future viewing.
Zak Avery one of the leading lights of great beer in Great Britian has opened up a writing contest. I love entering contests so here is my entry. The theme is beer and time.
Flight of the Passing Fancy
Buckhorn in a ten ounce stubby bottle.
Leads to…. Thomas Kemper Weizenberry
Leads to…. me at the Crown City brewpub in Pasadena, California
Leads to…..grander travel to St. James Gate in Ireland and Andechs in Germany
Finally the curiosity turns to passion and blogging.
All of us at one time or another has wanted to go back in time to re-do a certain event. Especially if we came up with a cutting remark for the school bully AFTER being punched. There are some pivotal points that I would like a do-over on. But when it comes to beer, I would only like to add one thing to those times spent at the bar or brewery. I would like to go back and appreciate it MORE.
I am 40 going on 41. Thanks to a technically illegal start to drinking beer (if you can call Buckhorn beer), half of my time on earth has been spent drinking mostly good, a few spectacular and even fewer horrible beers. My journey has seen the fall of regional breweries, a famine of decent brews, the rise of micro-breweries, followed by a contraction that seemed permanent, then a fiery burst of growth that I am in the midst of enjoying now.
But that macro level view of the passing years is not what I remember most about the wide world of craft beer. What really fascinates me, as I grow older, are the varied beers that not only my palate experienced but also provide snapshots of where my life when I was enjoying that beer. I sincerely hope that it also is indicative of an evolution in my appreciation of beer.
Oh, how I would like to go back and speed that evolution along. I could tell my younger self to stop complaining about the changing label art on the Thomas Kemper WeizenBerry bottles and just enjoy the fruit bomb of a beer. Because in a few years, that beer would be no more and then the brewery would be no more. Folded up into Pyramid and just a footnote in craft beer history.
I would talk more with the people brewing the beer at Crown City and let them know that their oasis in a dry Los Angeles of the mid ‘90’s was really appreciated. I should have said it while Crown City was still packing them in. Because in a few years, they would be gone just shortly before the craft beer craze swept through Los Angeles.
I could go on and on but I need to spend the time fully enjoying this strange beer from Epic Ales that is in front of me as I type this. Coffee and cardamom combined into a fragile base beer. Does it work? Maybe. Only time will tell.
from BrewPublic
from 2 Beer Guys
from Girls Pint Out
from The Beer Babe
and finally from NovaBeerFly
I drank about 45+ separate beers over the three day weekend.
I shall start with the best….
Rising Tide Brewing / Ishmael – A wonderful effervescent alt-bier with loads of malt taste.
Russian River Brewing / Sanctification – Sour and funky and fruity while still being easy to drink.
Quaff Brothers / Jones IPA – Not an IPA but a wonderful caramel and vanilla bourbon concoction.
Avery Brewing / Jerry’s Roggenbier – A great spicy and heavy brew for a fall day.
Great Lakes Brewing / Edmund Fitzgerald Porter – Just a perfectly done porter.
On my next level of must mentions are….
Twisted Pine Brewing / Ms. Jackie Brown – A pumpkin saison that was delicate and spicy.
Mountain Sun Brewpub / Cleveland Brown – What can I say, I’m in a brown ale mood.
Upslope Brewing / Pale Ale – Cool can design and great beer inside.
Brooklyn Brewing / Black Ops – Would be in top 5 if I was more of a imperial stout afficionado. A very smooth but strong offering.
Southern Star Brewing / Buried Hatchet – Another great stout. And this one is canned and from Texas. Wonders never cease.
The weird brews of the weekend are…
Epic Ales / Beatrice – Pepper and other spices in a weird flavor medley.
Avery Brewing / Ruminator – Rum aged but as strong as bourbon to me.
But what really got me excited was seeing….
Crow Peak / IPA – South Dakota off the list
Sun King / Wee Mac – Indiana off the list
Here is the final quick impression posts from the 1st Beer Bloggers conference.
I had to pace myself on Saturday night but I still tasted a few new beers from places here-to-fore never sampled. Upslope, Odell’s and Boulder Beer. Then I had to get up and listen to Eric from BeerTap TV. The very cool Kerry Finsand from Taplister and eminence gris, Jay Brooks. “Had to” seems harsh, like an assignment. I don’t mean it that way. I had to so I could learn from the folks that have a knowledge set that I do not possess yet. They were great. I picked up new bits from all three.
That’s all for now. Complete wrap up to land in the next few days along with photos and beers drunk list (that will blow you away, that is a promise)!
Here is the Day 2 report. Starting with two great presentations on blogs and tech and two that did not have info for me. But that may be due to me being un-tech-geek and obstinate. I will talk in more detail later about what I learned and what may appear on this very blog in the coming months later since this is more of an itinerary post
Then on to Avery where me and my band of cohorts from Olympia, Santa Barbara and Portland were really treated well because of that Beer Blogger badge. Avery is housed in a little industrial park. Great little tap room. Got Ruminator, Rumpkin and Moloch among other gratis samples! Highly recommended.
Speed beers were next. In two words: exhausting but great. 12 beers. 5 minutes each. I dare you to fully enjoy Great Lakes Edmund Fitzgerald porter (which is awesome, as were the people from the brewery) then turn around and have World Wide Stout from Dogfish Head. I ended up stockpiling tasters and slowly catching up.
The massive bottle share and Oskar Blues dinner will be covered in later posts along with the Boulder Beer dinner and Pearl Street Pub crawl.
Our 45th Session will be hosted by Bruce Tichnor, who runs the Canadian BeerTaster.ca. He’s taking us back to our roots, to spend a cloudy afternoon with wheat beers, or has he describes it:
We wanted to get back closer to the roots of the Session and pick a topic which was simple and yet gives a wide range of interpretations so we chose, simply (or perhaps not so simply), Wheat Beers.
Feel free to take this topic in any direction you like, specific reviews, historical information, or any other twist you’d like to use. Wheat beers are a pretty wide topic and actually cover German style Weizen, Heffe Weizen, etc. along with Belgian style Witbier and even Flavoured Wheat beers.
There are very few guidelines here, just have some fun drinking Wheat Beers in the fall instead of the summer.
Whenever I see or hear the words “wheat beer”, my steel trap of a mind heads straight to the first beer that made me think that beer could be more than plain and watery. Thomas Kemper WeizenBerry which the RateBeer sites describes thusly, “This wheat-brewed beer is bursting with refreshing all-natural raspberry flavor.”
I drank a lot of that beer. Mainly because it was sparkly and fruity and low in alcohol. I did not care one bit of the Weizen part of the equation. It was all about the berry.
At the time it was probably one of the better NW beers out there. Nowadays, it would probably not rank high due to the prejudice against fruit beers and most wheat beers. And truth be told, if I was handed a bottle today, it probably would not taste or rank as well as I remember. Part of me is glad it is not made anymore. A treasured memory can’t be tarnished by your own self or made fun of by others.
Now, wheat beer conjures up a more complicated stream of thought. Which sub-style are we talking about? Is it German or American? Sessionable or not? All good questions and part of my evolution in craft beer but sometimes I wish I could go back to that first WeizenBerry and just really enjoy it, unencumbered by all the thought.
The craft beer world is filled with reviews. And there is a process underway, in my mind, of winnowing down to trusted craft beer sources. I hope to be one such person for those just embarking into the realm of flavorful beer.
Another great source is KSW Beer. They are review focused with good, solid writing. But they have two twists that I think differentiate themselves from other sites.
1. Female Perspective. They are prominently featuring women drinking beer. Awesome. The beer industry cannot grow without 1/2 the population behind us. They give voice to an under heard group and to that I say bravo.
2. Single Hop madness. They discuss hops and their flavors straightforwardly and because of home brewing knowledge, they aren’t feeding you a bucket of bad internet information.
So check them out.