Category: Monthly Features

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Sports & A Beer – The Transfer Portal

When Deion Sanders moved to coaching the University of Colorado, he touched off a massive amount of player movement, most prominently out from last year’s football team into what is now called the transfer portal.

Now I am all for Name and Likeness deals and college players getting paid (and maybe coaches not getting paid more than 10 college professors) but this wholesale switching from college team to college team just seems even further from the collegiate ideal than before.

Why not just have a football minor league with academies for younger players? That way players can learn about agents and handling money and life after sports.

But I digress from the topic at hand. I think that a portal can be good but it does need to have some guardrails. A coach can’t push someone into a portal and neither should a player move into it just because he was passed over for a starting position.

I thought of this in connection with beer because brewers leave breweries to work at a different brewery or start their own. I saw Kevin Davey who was at Wayfinder who now is under the Heater Allen umbrella. Iam McCall from Riip Beer in the South, South Bay is going on to his own place. They are using the brewer portal to start freah.

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Spirits & Cocktails D-F

Each month, I am going to pick one entry from the Oxford Companion to Spirits & Cocktails that I feel is the most interesting. This month, I will be choosing from letters A-C.

I do not know why this entry tickled me so much but I just love the idea that far gets added to a spirit and that there is a fancy French word for it. Just fantastic. Also, I do need to learn how to gently wash a cocktail glass with a touch of absinthe before adding the cocktail.

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A Podcast & A Beer – Vinfamous

Since this is a Paso Robles focused month to start with, you kinda have to talk about wine. And maybe crime too. Vinfamous is a podcast from Wine Enthusiast magazine.

They have piggybacked on the true crime podcast by finding stories of wine crime and it is well done even though I am not usually a fan of that genre of podcast. Plus there are only eight episodes so it id an easy binge for weekend.

My first beer choice is to highlight Smog City’s Grape Ape IPA which has had a recent label re-design but more importantly uses pomace from grapes in the recipe. If you are not in Los Angeles, go find a beer loaded with Nelson Sauvin hops to get that full grape experience.

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In the Tap Lines for June 2023

June is a special month on the calendar. You have the Firestone Walker Invitational, you have L.A. Beer Week and the weather ain’t like a pizza oven yet here in Los Angeles. This month plenty of posts about the festivals and less about the weather.

~ e-visits to (3) breweries from the Central Coast

~ special featured reviews of beers to and back from Paso Robles

~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 Lone Women by Victor Lavalle

~ A Podcast & A Beer listens to Vinfamous

~ Sports & A Beer returns with the transfer portal

~ 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.

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The Firkin for May 2023

At the start of this month, the Craft Brewers Conference was held in Nashville, Tennessee. There was a bit of dismay at both the choice considering the hostility towards, well anyone not a white male, in that state as well as disappointment at the Brewers Association for not either moving it (may not have been feasible) or at least using their voice to condemn recent laws.

Let me preface the next bit by saying that I am an over 50 white guy who is trying to be more aware each day and who tries to keep rose colored glasses and blinders away from my face to see the world as it is.

There are some steps to be made that I think will help.

  • Create a city selection committee who will make suggestions based on current optics and politics and not on facilities or hotels or cost and maybe not have any white people on it, just to see what happens
  • Have a grievance list for the city chosen because you can easily find problems in literally every city in this country, then air your grievances like at Festivus
  • March to the state house of representatives and hand them your grievances and let them know that if they are in the red, as it were, that they may not get the conference again until things change
  • Allow dissenters to participate virtually if they feel unsafe going to a city. Or better yet, create an alternate conference where views can be spoken

It is easy to sweep things under the rug. It is easy to just say craft beer is broken. The truth is in the middle. There are great people in craft beer and there are shitty people in it. No one in this country is doing well by women, minorities or anyone not a rich white male. To expect that craft beer will be an exception is naive. But, we can all push the ball forward. Might only be a yard and a cloud of dust but we can all enjoy our beer and make good change.

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The Best Beers of May 2023

To be transparent, I did take a pre-Invitational beer break so May drinking was cut short a few days but since I am a very picky beer buyer, the quality is there if bot the quantity.

This was a particularly strong beer class as well. I had Green Cheek’s Illusion of Choice (great name – by the way) Hazy on draft at North Hollywood’s Hop Merchants and it was great. Had the haze but didn’t have that unfiltered apple cider brown look. I also had a collaboration lager from two Washington State breweries, Lowercase and Machine House which was fantastic. Glad to see super high quality lagers in cans.

But the winner was Seoul Searching IPA from right here in Los Angeles. Party Beer Co. teamed with LA Mill Coffee on a tea driven IPA and it had such a bright tea note, very floral, without sacrificing the hoppiness. A really grand aroma when the can was cracked open.

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Sports & A Beer – Another New Jersey

Not talking about the state but rather the state of multiple jerseys in sports. Every team seems to have a home jersey, a road jersey, a third jersey for home or away, a themed jersey just for one season, then the process starts again next year.

Digression – Maybe the way to stop tanking is to force teams in the bottom five to wear only two styles all year.

I follow the Timbers and Thorns of Portland and Dear God, it is a design rollercoaster from weird dusty pinks to punk Shakespeare when the best uniforms are almost always the most simple. Now, that is not to say a refresh isn’t warranted or that creativity should be stifled but more does not always correlate to better. Don’t get me started on the Oregon Duck football jerseys. Why highlighter yellow? And with advertisers added onto it, things can get squeezed in with bad results.

Maybe this is the old man, back in my day coming out but, my vote is for a standard every year home and away pair and them have one alternate that changes year by year. It’s hard enough to keep track of players and also keep track of which jersey is from what year.

Now your job is to find a branded extension set of beers and decide if they really need them all, or which one is your favorite in a group. Find a bunch of Sculpins or Torpedos or Hopnosis and really check if more is better.

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A Book & A Beer – Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy

I am a bit of a completist but I also do not like being told what to do, so when Cormac McCarthy wrote a duo of novels with one being a clear addendum to the main book, I was attracted more to that addendum than the main book.

The books in question are The Passenger and Stella Maris. The latter being the name of a psychiatric hospital that a woman named Alicia turns herself into for care. She is a mathmetician with a complicated past with her brother who headlines Passenger.

The year is 1972 and twenty year old Alicia starts talking to her therapist. The book is basically just the conversations between the therapist and Alicia. It is a testing set of exchanges as they verbally circle each other. Her life is slowly teased out over the pages.

At first it worked for me but the reveals were slow for me and a little drastic especially at the end but it was enough for me to grab the other book to read in backwards order.

For beer, I would look to finding beers thar you can blend. Maybe a Radler or a Black and Tan or whatever half and half pairing that you think would work. Experiment a bit like a scientist, test your math as well with what percentages work well.

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Sean Suggests for May 2023

Staying SoCal local with three bigger picks than normal.  So come along to Venice, Anaheim, Long Beach and San Diego.

Firestone Walker Idaho Secret IPA -6.5% – “Limited-release West Coast IPA bursting with fruity and citrusy hop flavors of pineapple, blackberry, and mojito.  Idaho Gem & Vic Secret hops.”

Pure Project / Radiant Beer Co. Clearer Thinking – 8.5% – “bold and flavorful West Coast DIPA brewed in collaboration with the 2022 Alpha King Challenge winners, Radiant Beer Co. We experimented with new techniques to create this beer and, as our first centrifuged West Coast DIPA, we are extremely pleased with the final result. Its sensory profile is sure to impress, with aromas of resin, dehydrated pineapple, and grapefruit rind that grace the nose, and flavors of melon, dank, and apricot that are rounded out by a clean bitter finish on the palate.”

Beachwood Brewing Barrel-aged Vanilla Fudge – 11% – “Bourbon barrel-aged imperial milk stout infused with cacao and vanilla beans.”

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A Podcast & A Beer – Doctor Dante

This month we get into hypnotism with Doctor Dante. And boy is this guy a huckster with a radio announcer voice of the ages.

Hosted by Sam Mullins with a mixture of awe and incredulity, Dr. Dante tells the tale of a man driven to be successful no matter what the cost. To go from being married to Lana Turner to an Arizona penitentiary is quite the roller coaster.

For the beer to drink with this podcast, what beer would you need to be hypnotized to drink? Me, overly sweet pastry stouts or too smoked Rauchbiers would be on my list. So pick a beer you would normally turn up your nose at, make a bad beer decision, heck, everyone in this podcast made bad choices.