from BrewPublic
from 2 Beer Guys
from Girls Pint Out
from The Beer Babe
and finally from NovaBeerFly
Beer Blogger Conference – What I Photographed
Beer Blogger Conference – What I Drank
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
Beer Blogger Conference – Day 3
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)!
Beer Blogger Conference – Day 2
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.
Beer Blogger Conference – Day 1
Session # 45
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.
another beer blog to check out
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.
Pete Brown videos
I have sung the praises of Pete Brown’s books and blog. Now he has added video to the mix.
After kicking a few ideas around, we decided to start off by making a series of video blogs. Once a month, we will be filming in a particular region of the UK, to produce monthly pairs of blogs. I believe (though I may be wrong) that these represent a bit of a depatrture for V-Blogging in that they´re made with a full film crew and hopefully therefore have a veneer of professionalism to them.
They´re not necessarily aimed at a beer geek audience but at a more general public, and we´re exploring ways to give them a wider reach in an age where TV channels won´t commission many serious content about beer. So if you´re a fellow beer blogger and you´re thinking ´this is rally basic stuff´ – fine, but it´s not basic to most people.I certainly will watch and learn. Us Yanks tend to forget about the ongoing British craft beer revolution.
Beer Bloggers scholarship
Scholarships aren’t restricted to just students. Beer Bloggers can get one too.
I will be heading to Boulder this November for the 1st ever Beer Bloggers Conference. And if they are any craft brew bloggers out there who have been on the proverbial fence about joining up, here is a financial incentive.
The Beer Bloggers Conference scholarship.
