Follow Sean Inman to the best in craft beer
Let’s start off the year with more of a world view as the BBC presents us with a podcast about food (and spirits). The Food Programme is chipper and upbeat and is just very British. Perfect for the new year ahead.
I would pair this with the Samuel Smith variety pack that I have seen in SoCal Trader Joe’s. But even if TJs is not your thing, you can probably find one where you beer shop.
We are back around the calendar horn. A whole beer year stretches before us. All sorts of new brews and new news are waiting for us craft beer fans. Starting with…..
~ e-visits to (3) breweries from Craft Beer & Brewing’s Best of 2023 Canadian picks.
~ special featured reviews of beers of ciders from 2 Towns Ciderhouse
~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 Roughhouse Friday by Jaed Coffin
~ A Podcast & A Beer listens to The Food Programme from the BBC
~ Sports & A Beer returns with Streaming Sports
~ 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.
One last kvetch for 2023 before the craft beer world moves into 2024.
Hours of Operation. Why do I have to be Sherlock Holmes or an investigative journalist to find them and once found, why am I wary that they don’t really reflect the actual open hours?
A little backtrack first. My father was an inveterate gambler when it came to going out to a restaurant. He barely checked the address, let alone if the darn place would be open. God forbid he call the establishment.
My genome carried some of that devil may care attitude but it has been slowly and surely burned out of me. In my last road trip, I read and re-read the hours of one spot that I wanted to visit. It seemed clear but it was clearly at odds with the sign on the closed door that said different.
Another brewery that I checked and re-checked was closed for a staff event. No where was that mentioned. Guess it was expected that people would find out when they drove their and saw a darkened taproom. Another brewery was lit up and an employee was inside but that employee was apparently the only one who showed up and so the brewery was staying locked.
If I had called the brewery with the staff event, would the message said that? If I had called the one employee brewery, would the phone have been answered. I suspect no in both instances.
Why can’t hours be easy and clear? Are they changing with such frequency that social media cannot be updated quickly enough? Does no one have that job?
The fix is simple. Check your hours on your website and social media pages. Then fix if needed. If hours for a certain week, like Christmas or New Year’s is different, then post that.
Of the three places where I traveled and met with no welcome, I did not go back to two of them. That should say something.
It has been a pretty dismal year for quarterbacks in the NFL. The hapless Jets of New York have cycled through four already and have probably come to the realization that Aaron Rodgers on one leg is easily their best option. The other New York football club is on a back-up from a QB who wasn’t lighting the world afire either but they must be thanking the football gods that the Jets are getting most of the bad press.
We aren’t even near the worst as the Patriot combo of Jones and Zappe cannot get you more than 10 points in a game as they showed in stunning fashion losing to the yet again underachieving Chargers 6-0. Not even one point!
Even Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs don’t look good. And that is a troubling sign for the NFL. Maybe GMs are thinking that if Brock Purdy can pilot a devastating 49er attack that any old fourth-rounder can succeed but that is so not the case.
The injured list is growing each day. Rodgers, Cousins, Burrow, Jones, Lawrence, Richardson, Pickett and Carr. Other teams are going with the likes of Sam Howell, Desmond Ridder and Aidan O’Connell. Not many Heismans there.
Your beer task for this exercise is to stock your ‘fridge with the C.J. Strouds and Jalen Hurts of the beer world wherever you may be because more QB1s are going to get injured and you are going to need really good beer to talk about because some of these upcoming games are gonna be real hard to watch.
It seems a bad idea to have an author who can dissect complex issues and have them made into movies follow you around. The Big Short laid bare the housing fiasco, Moneyball traced the Oakland A’s baseball club who have tried but not gained full success and will try again in Las Vegas. But Sam Bankman-Fried allowed Michael Lewis access and the reader reaps the reward as long as they didn’t buy bitcoin.
I am no financial guru but even I could smell the stink of Bitcoin from a mile off. And this book along with Easy Money by Ben McKenzie paints a damning portrait of Scam Bankrupt-Fraud as a weird and damaged human with basically a half-formed idea and no moral compass.
The Lewis book starts trepidatiously, too much so for my taste but as the evidence builds, you just start shaking your head at the fact that people threw scads of money at this guy when we have actual, real problems to solve. He basically drug both effective altruism and digital coins into the trash and doesn’t seem super fazed by it.
Now I don’t want to be too mean but I see a beer correlation in the few breweries and gypsy brewers who make super limited quantity barrel-aged, high adjunct beers that normal beer fans will never see because they do not make it to a shelf. So if you have a $20.00 + bottle stashed away or a $30.00 + bottle, then crack that open while you read.
If you need to know just two things about me. I like books and I like my podcasts short. I can’t believe that it took me so long to find the Book of the Day podcast from NPR.
Basically, book segments from other NPR shows packaged up neatly into a bite sized under 20 minutes. It is a wide variety of books to, not just best sellers but a little bit of everything.
That short running time is key because there are a lot of books on my “to-read” list and it would be easy to see a 45 minute episode and take a pass but now I can take a quick dip to really see if it is something that I want to check the library for.
If you are in L.A. then a very obvious choice would be to pick-up a mixed pack from Paperback Brewing. A deeper cut would be to check past episodes and see if you can find a beer that pairs with that episodes book or author. There was a memoir episode that talked to Henry Winkler and Arnold Schwarzanegger. So you could find an Austrian beer or find a beer to match Happy Days or Barry.
I saw this quote about a weird as hell brand offshoot from Modelo called Shyft, and I could feel the anger rising. “a first-of-its-kind, patented, flavor-shifting” flavored malt beverage that’s “designed to hit different taste buds at different times.”
First, the idiot who decided that vowels were replaceable need to have all the vowels removed from their name permanently. It is well past annoying at this point.
Second, the focus group that gave the thumbs up to Shyft as a name should also have all vowels removed from their names permanently. This is why America can’t have good things.
Rant complete.
Why Modelo isn’t spending their money on say paying employees more or plant upgrades or more Damian Lillard commercials is beyond me. But the sugar-ification of America must march forward until everything we eat is either sugar, salt or Pepper X.
Leave the flavor changing to candy and keep it out of beverages. Not needed.
If you want to get my wife’s podcast attention, there are two topics that will succeed. One is cults. Second is scams. And the Ringer Podcast Network has one of the latter, The Wedding Scammer. A seven part series hosted by Justin Sayles about a character that you just can’t make up. And a shit ton of aliases.
And what is good about this series is that Sayles is in on the whole true crime podcast tropes. You get a peek behind the curtain and see how it came together while you also get the story. You will rip through this in no time, it is that engrossing.
I would look for beers from all of the cities and states that the villain of the piece has moved through. Los Angeles, Oakland, Houston, New York and rural Pennsylvania too. Have a different style for each of the different names used.
It is the end of the road for 2023. 31 more days until 2024 starts smacking us around. It has been a doozy. Strikes. Indictments. Wars. Inflation. And we are probably gonna run it back again. But, before you say we are doomed, we still have great craft beer and Christmas beers!
~ e-visits to (3) breweries from Craft Beer & Brewing’s Best of 2023
~ special featured reviews of beers if I find room amongst the seasonal beers.
~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 Going Infinite by Michael Lewis
~ A Podcast & A Beer listens to NPR’s Book of the Day
~ Sports & A Beer returns with Where are all the Good QB’s?
~ 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.
There has been a wee bit of gnashing of teeth as noteworthy breweries have changed hands. Ecliptic into the Ninkasi portfolio. Many breweries huddled newly under the Tilray banner. Anchor in a weird limbo.
Beer fans can ponder the economics of it all but I would say that we also need to learn how to let go. There was a run on Anchor beers only when supplies became limited. The only other notable press they received was for their design change that no one liked.
My question becomes, if Anchor or Ecliptic or pick a brewery in trouble were to be lifted magically to in the black and not red, would that amount of beer be sold? I doubt it.
As SoCal belatedly settles into fall, we should all understand that seasons change. Your favorite brewery, my favorite beer, that great taproom you traveled to will most likely all be gone and that is OK. Not great. A bummer for sure but it opens the door for a new wave to try their hands at this crazy brewing game.