Tag: craft beer

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Los Angeles Craft Beer timeline

Saw this on the Craft Beer Chronicles and thought it should get another audience after bouncing around Facebook and Twitter last week.


These two timelines really show how young we are as a craft beer community. I sometimes feel impatient with the growth of breweries and bottle shops here in LA but I have to stop comparing to Portland and Denver and see that that most of the places that I frequent aren’t even 5 years old. We have to walk before we can run. And here is what I think we will need in the future to really make LA a beer destination.

1. More breweries. We are on the path and if the City of Los Angeles would just get the hell out of the way we could have a bumper crop in a couple years. A community of brewers will only create higher standards and more experimentation.
2. A couple specialty beer bars. We need a real ale establishment or a sour beer house or heck even a bar that serves out of town beers to all the LA people who came from someplace else. Maybe a movie house with taps like the Alamo Drafthouse.
3. More media coverage. I’m looking at you LA Times and KCRW’s Good Food.
4. A lot more summer beers. LA gets hot if you didn’t notice over the 4th of July weekend. We can’t be drinking high ABV Triple IPA’s and Barrel aged stouts. We need light session beers and pilsners and we need more of them in cans so the active set can take them to where they want to go.

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New plan for St. Patrick’s Day

You would expect a craft beer fan to love St. Patrick’s Day.
Well, I don’t. Not because of the Irish people mind you. But because of how it has become an “excuse to drink too much” day.
st-patrickB

Imagine you are Brandon Roy of the Portland Trailblazers. He is the best in the NBA (just saying). Now imagine one game a year where you have to play hoops with players from the couch potato league and not LaMarcus or Camby or Rudy Fernandez. That is what St. Patrick’s Day is to me. People who gulp neon green beer, just to get drunk. People who don’t drink Irish Stout all year, show up and get plastered. Then moan over getting pulled over by the cops.

Afficionados like me then have to deal with the anti-alcohol people the rest of the year because of these bone-headed bingers.

Of course, in this analogy, I am nowhere the beer guy that Brandon Roy is the basketball all-star.

Here are my proposals:
1. Use St. Patrick’s Day to cleanse your palate. Then return to normal craft beer imbibing the next day. Your tastebuds need a break after all the DIPA’s you’ve had anyway.
2. Avoid the crowded bars and drink a special beer at home with friends. This year, I am opening and sharing Bridgeport’s Highland Ambush. You won’t have to deal with long lines at your favorite beer bar and being pinched by strangers or faux Irish dancing.

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White or Red

Pete Brown is one of my favorite beer writers (though of late, mostly focused on the new prohibitionists). His three books are great and this POST really looks at the beer vs wine issue from a fresh vantage point. I strongly suggest reading it and then buying his books.

Personally, I think the first step in beer education may have nothing to do with beer. It is educating people on food and drink and how they play with and enhance each other. And even that comes after educating people on real, whole food. Once people understand these basics, they can made informed decisions based upon what really makes their particular palate sing.

Until then people will be staring at the wine and beer choices with a dazed look and just pick the cheapest because if the choice is bad at least it’s cheap. We as beer writers need to continually push to open up beer minds but we can’t overlook the forest for our favorite tree.

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Why should I trust / read the Beer Search Party blog?

The reason that I post all of this “beer stuff” ?

I want people to drink better beer.

That is it. You are not going to see ads for Budweiser or MillerCoors on this blog. Hell, the only ad on this blog was added today, July 4th, for a charity. There are not going to be negative posts about people or products. This blog is about “searching” and “locating” great beer. Not tearing down lite beer. More eloquent people can do that.

I just want to talk to people about the beer I am drinking, beer tastings that I present, places to drink great beer, the breweries that are crafting great seasonals and so on. To keep up with all that is going on, you will see one or two short posts a day. So even if you miss a day or two, it won’t take you days to catch up.

My goal is to be a beer guide (like Siskel or Ebert was for movies). Then eventually, I want to own a store that sells quality beer and has a couple of taps so that people can come in and talk with me about what they like and dislike. A new type of bottle shop.

To get there, I will need monetary help. No getting around that. Hopefully, I will be able to bootstrap this goal myself. But in the meantime, I sell branded merch through CafePress and soon I will have a “buy me a beer” link (if I can work out the technical side of it). But you, the reader, need not feel guilty about reading without literally buying into it.

If I suggest one beer that makes one person re-think what beer is and what it could be then this blog has succeeded.