Category: Opinion

my humble and correct opinion

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Come on Down, You are the Next Contestant on the Hop is Right!

First, I want you to hop (sorry) over to the Beervana Blog and read this POST and don’t give me any TL:DR guff.

OK, now that you are back, there are two golden nuggets in that piece. First is that a hop can have rum and caramel and banana notes. That is mind blowing. And second, is that a brewery can sponsor an up and possibly coming hop in exchange for dibs on the crop.

And the big takeaway that I want most beer fans to keep in mind is how veeerrrryyy long it takes for a seedling to be an actual crop. Hats off to the potent combo of science and farming that can do it that quickly while satisfying IPA fiends.

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Newly in Style

The 2021 style guidelines dropped at the end of February and here is the news people are tuning in for, what new styles have been added?

Per the Brewers Association press release…

“Hundreds of revisions, edits, format changes, and additions were made to this year’s guidelines, including updates to existing beer styles and the creation of new categories. New additions to the beer styles include:”

  • Kentucky Common Beer
  • New Zealand-Style Pale Ale and India Pale Ale
  • Belgian-Style Session Ale

I bet local Ten Mile Brewing will be sending their Common, Hidden Hollow on to GABF but this also helps the IPA focused breweries who now have less crowded main categories as the entrants shift to hazy. My interest lies in which of Kentucky Common and Belgian Session have more entries.

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Enough is Enough

In between folksy aphorisms, puns and calls to re-post even though they doubt anyone will, Facebook can offer up some actual thinking points. The needle in the haystack as it were….

Now how does this fit into beer? Well, there is no doubt that beer fans chase down, stand in line for, mule and trade beers in a quest to, if we are being generous, tick the trendy and famous beers but less optimistically one-up others.

Lately, I have fallen into Full Fridge-itis. Beer cans tucked into nooks and crannies leaving me with enough beer to last well through the rest of this month. I have enough beer but still find myself scrolling through what each bottle shoppe is posting and drooling over new releases.

And I think this not enoughness leads us to undervalue what we have right in front of us. I am not advocating a sudden buying freeze but rather, to stop and think about what enough is.

Thus ends the beer philosophy for today.

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Bone-chutes

Looks like two Bend, Oregon breweries are partnering…

Most SoCal beer fans will have seen and most likely had a few Deschutes beers but Boneyard does not have a footprint down here so will be lesser known. Think of it as the heritage brewer / older sibling getting together with the rough edged / younger sibling. You can read more HERE. But I expect that more neighboring breweries may combine forces. Some will work and some will divorce later depending on how well they can balance the union.

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3241

Since I am not on the Twitter or the Reddit, I miss some of the posts from Worst Beer Blog.

Bearing in mind this packaging is a one-off for publicity, the math becomes very fun…

You would have to drink 8.9 cans a day for a year to exhaust the insanely large box. A box, mind you, that wouldn’t fit into many brewery cold boxes. Because geometry. After a week, I would guess you would not want to hear the name Keisari ever again. And after a month you probably would drink anything other than this beer. But the math that is the most important is how un-fresh that last beer would be.

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The Firkin for February 2021

Maybe I am the only one feeling this way but I get the feeling that beer world has been pretty quiet lately. Granted, I avoid beer Twitter and have a really pared down beer social media but either beer life is moving back toward normalcy with Biden in office or that we are passing through the eye of a larger economic storm.

I am really hoping it is the latter because the smaller confines of buying a 4-pack and running away from human contact has lost its luster, if it ever had it. This coming from a big introvert who has loved working from home.

Whether we get back to February 2020 in two months or six, I do believe that how we all experience beer will be weird for even longer. Some people are going to avoid gatherings for a long time. New brewery taprooms, especially in California will be designed with patios in mind. Creative packaging solutions will arise to offset 16oz can shortages.

I really hate the phrase new normal because it implies a certain stasis when life is always changing. But, it is a handy phrase in times like this.

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To the Moon

There are not a lot of strawberry beets out there and I can’t imagine that there are many strawberry IPA’s out there that are actually IPA but come April you will have Moon Boots IPA.

This is a partnership between 21st Amendment Brewing with the Pink Boots Society.

With this spring release, the brewery will be sponsoring 4 Pink Boots scholarships:

(1) Women in Leadership Certificate scholarship with eCornell University at $3,800
(3) Level Two Cicerone Course + Exam scholarships for Pink Boots members at $400 per recipient.

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You “Can” Recycle

One side effect of buying pretty much nothing but 4-packs is that you create quite the colorful collection of snap-tight plastic can holders. Maybe you have been recycling them but another way to help the green new deal is to return them to a brewery. Boomtown recently messaged how they would take them and I have seen that Common Space has a collection box too. Call or message first for other breweries but let’s all pitch in.

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Which is It?

I know a fair bit about beer styles and I understand that labels will stretch definitions for marketing reasons but I am a bit confuzzled by this Sierra Nevada label that says both Pale Bock and Malt Liquor.

There is probably a flavor overlap and I am quite interested to try the beer but it seems to be sending a mixed message to me.

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DINO

The only (semi) reliable comic strip nowadays is Pearls Before Swine especially when beer comes into the bubbles and the art. But this recent strip had me thinking about Fans of Craft Beer In Name Only. You know the ones. You will see them in release lines, they trade a lot, they post pictures of what look like slurpees but are the latest fruited beer concoction and they are very sure of themselves. Mostly “beer-splaining” white dudes.

What I want to encourage is exploration, learning, changing your mind, listening (and reading). Don’t be a DINO, they went extinct.