Follow Sean Inman to the best in craft beer
Paso Wine Podcast – Where Wine Takes You had a recent episode with guests from Firestone Walker and Re:Find Distilling. One cool section of the discussion is when they talk about a collaboration white dog that the two companies made for a bunch of us beer bloggers way back in the day. I still have my empty bottle in my office.
Another reason to take a listen is to hear about beer from a wine show’s perspective.
Stephen King made his mark with horror but he has a firm grasp on many genre styles including pot boiler, thriller, crime. The dude could probably write books for toddlers and sell them like hotcakes. He is back into fantasy with the somewhat blandly named Fairy Tale.
It takes awhile to get to the tale and the action as King patiently sets up the main character that you will be following through the journey, Charlie Reade. Unless you are a dog person, then the main character might just be Radar.
As usual King books move. Even the early pages turn quickly. But I felt the book tried too hard to make Charlie a saint by his actions but a flawed one by his early teenage bad days which were continually brought up again.
And I almost preferred the front half story about the father and the son and the mysterious man in the crumbling house. The fairy tale land is purposefully pale but that makes it less interesting.
To pair with a book with such a there and back again quality, I would go for a one beer, then a variant of that beer. A pilsner, then an Italian Pilsner, West Coast IPA then Cold IPA or maybe a Pale ale with a past like Sierra Nevada paired with a Belgian Pale ale
Or, and hear me out, I could buy a bottle of wine or can of cider in less than an hour at, say, Trader Joe’s. Instead of straining a pour little cranberry into un-natural positions.
Or, you could head to a home brew shop and learn how-to make your own wine and cider in probably the same amount of time.
Leave poor Ocean Spray out of it.
So very Not Needed.
Welcome to 2023! Are the years moving fast for you as well? I know time is a construct of humans but boy does it move fast at times. This blog now enters its 14th year!! Crazy. Let’s start strong with….
~ e-visits to (3) breweries from the Hop Culture Best New Breweries list of 2022 like Fox Tale Fermentation Project, Bizarre Brewing and Mahalo Ale Works
~ special featured reviews of ciders received for Christmas from Portland Cider Co.
~Heads-Up on Los Angeles Beer Events
~ Three suggested beers to buy this month. One light, one medium and one dark
~ A Book & A Beer reads Fairy Tale by Stephen King
~ A Podcast & A Beer listens to Seen Through a Glass
~ New Beer Releases and Best Beers of the Month
~ I will tap the Firkin and give my no holds barred opinion on the craft beer world.
Before I dive into my quick thoughts for the end of the month, I would like to give a quick R.I.P. to Mumford Brewing in DTLA as they close after 7+ years. I visited when they first opened and thought the beers were only OK, but then a subsequent visit showed a fast growth. It taught me that some places need time to gel. From there on out Mumford was a solid winner especially with their hazy IPAs. Buy those few cans out in the wild still if you can.
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Bourbon Pursuit and Breaking Bourbon have noticed that bourbon and spirits tend to run the opposite of craft beer. Big brands dominate. Making it hard for craft distilleries to get air where in beer bigger seems to default to worse or boooring.
As we head to a new year, both good beer and good bourbon will need to learn from the other. Heritage breweries will need to figure out how ubiquitous brands like Jim Beam or Maker’s Mark can remain popular even though they are much larger than little distilleries.
Craft distilleries need to ponder how chasing new trends works for small breweries and how they harness that energy to stay on the tips of tongues and front of minds.
And what I think might be more important is how do bourbon and beer combine past the simple fill a bourbon barrel with an imperial stout.
All my choices for best of December were hoppy. I did have sone really good Christmas beers but those lupulins won out again.
First is the MadeWest and Fieldwork Short Lived collaboration IPA. As usual the artwork was great. Comic panels work wellon a 16oz can and the beer was excellent. Another collab earns a place with Native Son and Common Space meeting up for an IPA called Step Sons. If only Native Son had made their new LA home more them.
Runner Up gets a Christmas bump, Docent Brewing’s Life Coach Pale Ale was nice and hoppy without leveling up to IPA status. Was also first Christmas vacation beer.
First was a new hoppy pilsner from Highland Park, Thiol Dial which had a great musty, fruity hop note to it. Proving that HPB and pilsner is a fantastic combo.
Samuel Adams has a beer connection, you might have heard of it. Now I got the chance to read Stacy Schiff’s take on The Revolutionary, Samuel Adams.
This is an atypical biography for sure. It does not march lockstep from birth to death with hearty doses of familial backstory. Nope, Schiff has Adams on the run from the very start. A trio of Adams, John Hancock and Paul Revere are wanted whether thet be on land or on sea.
Adams comes across as a prodigious writer. His hand must have hurt all the time. Penning tracts for newspapers, writing correspondence and then almost as quickly destroying it lest it fall into wrong hands. His true strength also lay in his thinking about how to outwit the British governor and Lieutenant governor in Boston. He was a prime antagonist.
He seemed built for this particular slice of American history. To joust with words over the definition of liberty and freedom. As Schiff points out, his life had been just kinda normal before and them quiet again after the revolution. Almost a designated hitter for the birth of America.
For beer, I would lean towards something that was revolutionary for craft beer when microbreweries and brewpubs were starting out. Look for an amber ale, a fruity wheat ale or a brown ale. They are not in supply at some breweries and you probably won’t find a 16oz can but maybe on tap and maybe you can read the paper (on your phone) and see what the city, state and world is up to.
What better podcast for the holidays than an uplifting podcast about the power of breaking addiction and turning your life around. Well, the Sunshine Place has that to start before it starts swirling into cult territory and becoming really, really bad.
The podcast is hosted by a child of one of the members of Synanon and it is executive produced by Susan and Robert Downey Jr. whom you may have heard about.
It is a really interesting look into someone who you start off sorta rooting for and then it quickly turns into all sorts of nonsense including shaving heads and rattlesnakes.
To drink, I would start where Synanon did in Santa Monica and pick a pint from Santa Monica Brew Works. Then as the commune moved north, I suggest finding a beer from Lagunitas, maybe their hop water to nod to abstinence.
Congratulations! You made it to month 12! Some people are into Easter eggs, some love a BBQ on the 4th while others love a costume and scares. Me, I like Christmas even in Southern California. There will be holiday beer fun all month so get ready…
~ e-visits to (3) breweries from Western New York where the snow is as deep as I am tall
~ special featured reviews of Winter Seasonals
~Heads-Up on Los Angeles Beer Events
~ Three suggested beers to buy this month. One light, one medium and one dark
~ A Book & A Beer reads Revolutionary Samuel Adams by Stacy Schiff
~ A Podcast & A Beer listens The Sunshine Place
~ New Beer Releases and Best Beers of the Month
~ I will tap the Firkin and give my no holds barred opinion on the craft beer world.
Both Stone Brewing and Oskar Blues have gone back to their back catalog of beers and re-released beers that had not been on tap or cans for a while. And while the nostalgic part of me thinks that is a fun idea, I do wonder if the constant stream of new releases from breweries over the last few years will make this idea a non-starter when the hip breweries get to the same age as Stone and Oskar.
Because, you have to build a following for a beer. You can’t really do that if there were two new beers the previous week and another on the next week. It is the same long-term issue I have with pre-season seasonals that are off shelves before the season is over. You disconnect the beer from the time of the year that you are celebrating.
This is not an Old Man Yelling at Clouds post, if a brewery chooses a new, new, even more new path, that is absolutely fine. But that path means that you are bound to lose some nostalgia as well as a chance to have a flagship beer. You will create a new mindset in the customer who will open the door expecting a new beer on tap or in 4-packs.
Maybe the pendulum will swing back to core beers.