365 Days, 365 Beers

Over a year ago, Austin Sherwood, the beer buyer and general manager at Coaltrain Wine & Spirits, told me that he was inspired to try a new beer every day for an entire year. He documented his journey on Instagram at @asherwoo24 with weekly photos of the beers he drank. I gotta say that as the weeks went on, I was not only impressed, but downright jealous of some of the beers he was able to try. It looks like he had a blast. As the last couple photos were being posted, we asked Austin if he'd like to share his journey with our readers. Here's his story.

The journey is complete. It was fun and educational.

So why did I do it?

The new hops have me rethinking the term "hoppy"

The article that Josh wrote about Mosaic hops and this post from Beervana about the new breed of fruity hops has got me thinking a lot about the term "hoppy" and what it means. In the Beervana link, Jeff makes the observation that even though Deschutes puts 60 IBUs on the bottle of their Fresh Squeezed IPA, the beer does not come off as bitter at all, it's rather sweet.

***UPDATE see below

I've been thinking about the term "hoppy." When you say a beer is hoppy, everyone knows immediately what you mean. We can expect some fantastic hop aroma and flavor, ranging from spicy to grassy to grapefruity to evergreen-like to quite recently (and extremely unfortunately) cat-pissy.

An inconclusive and meandering thought process on the question - Are Beer Reviews Bullshit?

My favorite science-fiction blog, io9, recently published a fun little article titled Wine Tasting is Bullshit. Here's Why. where they humorously point out a number of studies where wine tasting experts contradict themselves, or they fail to differentiate between red and white wine when white wine has been dyed with food coloring. They point out one review that describes a wine like this, "The overall character is that of a sex loaded scarlet."

One wine maker, wanting to understand how his wine could win accolades at one competition and be ranked incredibly low in another, decided to give multiple glasses of the same wine to a panel of judges. None of the judges rated the wine with the same results, and it's implied that none of them realized it was the same wine. Now, it can be said that wine changes character over the course of minutes once you allow it to breathe in your glass, so there is some level of subjectivity in this experiment. Another wine maker replies that:

More beer on campus please

Okay UCCS, it's your turn. It looks as if CSU Fort Collins is about to add a brewery to their campus that will provide hands-on training to university students. The news came from the Coloradoan this morning:

The lengths a Beer Snob will go for the perfect pour

I've never thought of myself as a beer snob, just a beer geek. Isaac made this for me today though, posted it on my facebook wall, and now I'm second guessing myself and my actions.

Last night I went to Brewer's Republic because they have their new "tourist tap" and they tapped North Coast's Barrel Aged Rasputin. This is one of my favorite beers, it's rich, smooth, and beautiful. The problem is Brewer's Republic only serves beer in shaker pint glasses and 10oz pilsner glasses. For a huge Russian Imperial Stout with whiskey notes, a pilsner glass just isn't appropriate. A pint glass is even worse. I wanted a tulip glass where I could stick my nose in and get big whiffs of the aroma. I really like this beer! So, I brought my own glass, everyone made fun of me but I guarantee my beer was better tasting/smelling than theirs was. I'm friends with everyone there, I frequent the bar, it was all fun and games. I did it because it was funny, I thought, but perhaps now I just look like an ass.

Cheers Isaac! ;)


[UPDATE - I'd like to clarify a few things. I'd like to just mention that I don't mind drinking out of shaker pints, I do it all the time and I'm happy to do it. I drink beer straight out of the bottle and out of the can too, whether it's Oskar Blues Ten Fidy, Deschutes Mirror Pond, or Coors Light. I don't think beer HAS to be served in special glassware, I just wanted this one particular beer in nice glassware and I also thought it would be funny to do. It was funny. Cheers!]

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Collecting Beer is a form of Subconscious Art

Warning - this post goes down multiple layers of large rabbit trails. I've attempted to make it relevant to beer drinkers, but I think most of its relevance lies in artistic expression and life in general, as it's more of a philosophical pondering. Hopefully our readers will appreciate the small departure. To be honest I'm not sure the post has any real point, it's just a written account of something that's been going on in my brain the last few days.  :)

Recently we've written a number of articles on aging beer in your personal cellar, and so this topic has been on my mind a lot. I also just started teaching again after the winter break. One of the classes asks students to look at some of the more symbolic forms of creativity that go on from a day-to-day basis. All of a sudden these two worlds (art and beer) conceptually collided, as they will occasionally, and it hit me that collecting beer, storing it away, making cellaring space in your basement is certainly a form of artistic expression. Perhaps the collector has not thought of what they do in these terms but I'd like to explain where my head is at here, and I have to go on a tangent or two to make sense of it.

In 2009 my wife and I went on a 10,000 mile road trip. We started in Portland, drove to Michigan and then up into Canada, cross country to the Yukon Territory before heading into Alaska and then back down the Canadian coastline. In the Yukon we had the opportunity to try to drive up to the Arctic Circle but after a couple hours we were afraid our little car wasn't going to be able to handle it. We decided to stop, so we got out of the car and went on a little walk in the sub-arctic tundra. I grabbed a twig off one of the plants as a memento and the little branch has sat in the windshield of our car ever since. At first the twig was purple, green, orange, and red but overtime it turned brown, and is now quite frail. I kept it in the car because every time I look at it I think about that three-month period of my life, looking back it is my favorite time. About a year ago my wife asked me if we could get rid of the branch because, frankly, it's getting old, messy, and it's not really that pretty any more. I said No Way, there's no chance in hell that I'm getting rid of that plant, it reminds me of some of the best times ever, how could we get rid of that!

Beer vs. Good Beer

It's hard to miss this sign when you're walking up the stairs to get giant slices of pizza at New York Pizza in Aspen, CO. You can see it before you start climbing the stairs, you're practically still on the street when you discover you can order beer or you can order good beer. I really like the sign and I think it's a nice way to introduce people to great locally made beer. When I got there I had to ask the question "So what's the difference between beer and good beer?" The lady at the register chuckled and said people always ask that. She pointed to Miller High Life and said "This one's beer" and pointing to the rest she said, "And these are good beers." The good beer lineup included two beers from Oskar Blues, an oak aged IPA from Great Divide, and Pilsner Urquell.

Meet Dale - He's Drinking a New Local Beer ever day this year!

I'm happy to introduce you all to a local beer drinker, Dale Stevens. I met Dale at the first Meet the Brewer event with Crooked Stave and we've seen each other here and there and have been in touch ever since. A while back Dale told me that he was starting a little endeavor to try a new local beer every single day for an entire year. That's right 365 new beers this year! I've followed some of his  finds on facebook and decided to check in on him and see how he's doing. Let's catch up with Dale together:

So our readers know, can you tell us again what you're up to? Drinking a new beer a day? Are there any other rules? How many days are you in?
I am drinking a different local beer every day this year. My rules are that the beer has to be brewed in the state I am consuming it in (so far: Colorado, New Mexico, Oregon, California, and Hawaii), and I must not have consumed it already this year. I started on January 1st with a Summit House Whiskey Barrel Stout from Pikes Peak Brewing and haven’t had a duplicate since. I am just over 2/3 the way through – 245 different local beers so far! Homebrew beers do count. I have a friend in Falcon and a son in Denver who have shared their creations with me which is much appreciated!

A couple stories from the bar

There were a few standout memories from the bar this week and I thought I'd share them with you.

I'm back to teaching, this was the first week after an eventful summer. Daniel called me up and said he and Isaac were going to Southside Johnnies for a pint or two so I met them down there. New Belgium rep Travis Flett happened to be there, it's easy to run into people that you know when you hit the downtown bars. I ordered a Ranger IPA and a burger for $5, which is a pretty great happy hour price. The pint really hit the spot and I drank a bit faster than everyone else at the table. I still had over a quarter of my beer left when the server came up to the table with another pint and put it in front of me. She didn't even ask me if I'd have another beer, she just did it. It left a good impression on me, I'll head back to that place again soon.

Last night, after an awesome Meet the Brewer event, I headed down to Supernova again to play Street Fighter and have a nightcap or two. Supernova is the new arcade bar, and it's close to my house so I can walk there and back easily. I'm doing pretty good on Street Fighter but there are these guys behind me that are in complete control of the jukebox and they're playing hardcore and punk rock tunes that I recognize and they're singing along and having a good time. The thing is, they were too loud and I think a lot of people were annoyed with them and it was the only type of music playing. I was drinking PBR because I had just come from an event with some bigger beers that had a lot of character and I was in a mellower mood wanting something really light. Supernova offers the tallboy cans and they have the 12oz option too. The first one I ordered was a tallboy. The next time I went to the bar I ordered another PBR but they gave me the 12oz can. The two jukebox-controlling-guys are now sitting at the bar and they look at me and say in a baby voice "Baby PBR! Baby PBR!" Well, I would have ordered a can of Shift if I could have but they don't have those yet, and then there wouldn't have been any chance of getting a baby beer. I walked away and didn't care that I was drinking what I wanted to drink.

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Musings on Beer in Liquor, Corner, and Grocery Stores

I spent most of the month of July in Oregon visiting family and putting together a few Beers Made By Walking events. The summers there are wonderful, after nine months of clouds and drizzle the sun comes out for about 60-90 days. Luckily this year I didn't have to sift through the grey skies, I just showed up at the right time. While I was there, I was reminded of how much I appreciate having beer half a block down the street. I'd like to share a few of my experiences. Unlike what I've done in the past I'm not trying to come to any conclusions on Colorado convenience stores and 3.2 laws, I just want to share my experiences.

2000 Breweries Isn't All We've Got

The Brewer's Association just released a statement that we've hit 2000 US Craft breweries. There are 2051 breweries, 51 of them are domestic, and the 2000 number doesn't include contract brewers, just actual physical breweries. Whoazas!

As we've approached B2K many people have asked if we're going to hit some sort of saturation point and my thought has always been that this probably won't happen until we can all conveniently walk to our nearest brewery. Perhaps I am wrong on this, but beer is a social drink and the less I have to drive to drink it, the more likely I am to grab a pal and consume it. Perhaps we'll see the market become so full that the newer folks, the newest innovators that want to start great new breweries won't be as welcomed. That would be a loss.

On our roadtrip last week we found that not only are there all sorts of new breweries opening up (we must have visited ten breweries that opened in the last two years), but the new breweries and old breweries alike are expanding. 1 barrel brewers moving to 7 barrels, 7 barrels to 15, 12 barrels to 30. A few breweries are opening up entire new production facilities. Even here in Colorado Springs I know of four breweries that are expanding, doubling their capacity (or more), and Trinity just finished their expansion.

One thing I heard a lot from the newer breweries is "We just can't get the type of hop we want to make the type of IPA we want." Now, that's a situation to think about. Perhaps the expansion and opening of breweries is outpacing the ability to produce raw beer ingredients. One brewery said there was a two year wait-list for a certain type of hop. I had never thought about it until last week, but perhaps expansions will hasten the saturation point, if there is to be one, and unfortunately that will not do well for my idyllic vision of "walkable breweries for all."

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On Reviewing Beer That's Meant to Age

Last week we re-reviewed the collaborative Buddha Nuvo beer. As we said, the beer has seen a lot of changes in the last nine months now that it's aged for a while. A lot of the alcohol burn is gone and the subtler flavors are shining through, the creaminess is more apparent, etc. This made me curious about how to properly review beers that are going to be different the next time you open a bottle. Or at least how to talk about them on this blog. I'm not sure I have any real good ideas.

The simplest plan would be to buy a couple bottles of the same beer, review the beer when it's young and add the stipulation that we believe it should/could sit longer, as we did originally with the Buddha Nuvo. Then when we think it's time, we open up the other one and review that, linking to the old one. Do we talk about what has changed, or do we not mention the differences, just talk about the current profile of the beer without mentioning previous flaws? I don't know. Maybe this isn't that big of a deal, but what if some of the negative things said about a young beer may have hurt that beer's reputation even though now the beer happens to be turning out really nicely. Do we even talk about a beer that's too young? I suppose so if it's released in the market?

Like I said, maybe it doesn't matter that much, but I do want to say that I felt it would have been irresponsible of us to only review the beer when it was young, knowing full well that the beer was meant to change. There are many other beers that we've sampled recently that would be very interesting to check back on in a year's timing, like Crooked Stave's WWBGreen or Odell Footprint. I suppose too we could always update the original review, linking to the most recent review (as we've done here)?

It's a strange situation as a blogger, but one that I feel is important in terms of education and responsibility and will perhaps be a growing concern now that increasing amounts of breweries are bottling beers that are barrel aged or or adding yeasts that will drastically change with age. This post was just a quick rambling, a bit unorganized and not really thought through, but I imagine I'll have more to say in the future. If any of you have additional ideas, let me know what you think.

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What in the World Do We Call These Wild Beers Anyway?

I've been thinking a lot about Wild Beers lately, appreciating them more and more, and also wanting to stay educated about them. I've heard brewers say they don't want people going around calling all wild beers 'sour beers' because, well, they aren't all sour. Take Trinity's TPS Report, Oakshire's Skookumchuck, or any of Crooked Stave's Wild Wild Brett series as an example, many of these could be described as delicate, rosy, lightly citrusy, and some of them have light acidity. These beers are neither Ales nor Lagers in the yeast-sense of those words, here's what Chad Yakobson says, "Brettanomyces is not ale or lager because those designations refer to a species of yeast, when you boil it down, Saccharomyces Cerevisiae ale yeast and Saccharomyces Carlsbergensis as lager yeast. Brettanomyces Bruxellensis and other species variants are a different type of yeast thereby not making ale or lager beer." So it's actually a bit strange to call one of these beers a 'Wild Ale' because it is not an ale if it's fermented with Brett...or is it an ale if it's fermented at ale temperatures? It get's confusing eh?

Chad forwarded me an email he recently sent around to some of his colleagues. He goes on,

...But what can we call it? Brettanomyces, that's the yeast.. So how to properly designate what it is like in Belgian Ale...Belgian Brettanomyces? That doesn't fit for me...But what is going to? Maybe nothing because we are so ingrained in ale and lager. Brett isn't even much of a top fermenter...and it is aged for a while (you should or else it keeps eating away in the bottle and the bottles gush unless carefully opened...(All of our beers sadly do this.. I'm working on it..) So my best comparison for Brett is actually to lagers. That is more reasonable. Flavor wise, no.. but it's not about flavor it's about fermentation characteristics and genetics.

On Buying AC Golden's Beer

Earlier today I gave a recap on the Wild Beer and Wild Game beer dinner and I talked about an absolutely fantastic beer by Troy Casey of AC Golden called the Hidden Barrel Project Apricot. The beer, masterfully crafted had two pounds of apricots per gallon and had been aged for 10 months in Chardonnay barrels. The beer was tart, but not overwhelming, it was incredibly balanced and absolutely delicious. I want to drink that beer all the time.

In case you didn't know AC Golden is a part of Miller/Coors, operating in a 'small' 30 barrel brew house right down the hall from Coors in Golden, CO. AC Golden is most known for their Colorado Native brand. Troy informed us that this Apricot Beer will be bottled and sold at Mile High Liquor in Denver starting in March. It will be a limited batch and the people at the brewery are not sure how well the beer will sell because it will be priced at $22/bottle. Not only that, but the beer is sitting somewhere between 5-6% ABV so it's not a big beer at all. Troy wasn't sure if people who are used to paying higher prices for higher ABV beers, like for Avery special beers, would be willing to pay the same price for these. Well, let me assure you that the beer is of the highest quality and is an absolutely lovely 'sour' apricot beer. I do believe it's worth $22, easily.

For me the question isn't whether or not people will buy this because of the ABV, but rather because of a moral and/or philosophical question of whether or not they want to put their money in the pocket of MillerCoors, a joint venture with MolsonCoors, whose beer  is not exactly known for being in favor with the craft beer crowd. Will people support AC Golden? The answer is clear to me, AC Golden is making damn fine beer and they are paying guys like Troy Casey to make these innovative beers. It's a clear yes for me.

Looks like it's also a clear yes for our Denver Off The Wagon buddies, who were somehow thinking the same thing as me at the same time. Collective consciousness!

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Brewery Closings

In the past few weeks about six breweries have closed their doors. Some people have wondered if this will be a growing trend as we have literally hundreds of new breweries opening this year around the country. We have three new ones in Colorado Springs and about forty or so in the whole of Colorado state. Have we reached a saturation point? I don't think so, in fact, I'm not sure we're anywhere near that point and we won't be until breweries are filling up our neighborhoods. We see many breweries expanding and many new ones filling in the gaps. I wasn't even going to mention these closings on the blog but then I read an interesting post on Appellation Beer titled Brewery Closings: No Trends Here Folks...

More Thoughts on the Prices Beer Festivals (and Beer in General)

This morning I've been catching up on beer blogs and there's a couple recent posts from Portland, Oregon that have caught my attention. The first comes from It's Pub Night and he's essentially lamenting the rising price of beer festivals in Oregon. Generally in Oregon you will pay a base amount for a cup and then a dollar per ticket, each ticket gives you a 3oz-or-so pour. But some of the cups are starting to go up in price. Here's Bill:

A couple weeks ago, I thought the Hood River Hops Festival was a little cheeky for charging $6 for an empty plastic mug; then the obligatory pint glass at the Oaks Park Fresh Hops Fest was $8. The pint glass was nicer to drink from and more of a keepsake than a plastic mug; ditto the $8 tulip glass at the recent Beermongers 2nd Anniversary. Either way, $6 or $8 seems like a pretty steep price for entry...

Can you believe that people are saying that $6 and $8 entry fees are steep prices! We're over here in Colorado and we're paying $40 to get into a festival. Sure, we get all we can drink of little 1oz pours but the beer is all stuff we've had over and over and over at every festival.

Then Jeff at Beervana wrote a post about how people in Washington DC are really unhappy to be paying $6-7 for a pint of beer and he offers some of his thoughts on how the price will eventually come down. Every now and again the Portland beer blogs will have a short tirade about prices being too expensive for beers from places like Rogue Brewing. I used to side with the bloggers, thinking to myself 'Yeah Rogue is charging $5.25 for a pint of beer, that's crazy!' And it is crazy, when you can expect $4 pints anywhere you go. The problem is that here you'd be hard pressed to find a $4 pint of good beer in a regular bar or pub. Some places are charging up to $7 for a pint of beer. How about that? (Yes, I know that some beer is more expensive than your daily run of the mill beer).

I still go out, I still pay these higher prices, but I very rarely order the $7 beers, and I go out a lot less than I'd like to because it hurts my wallet. Now I'm not writing this to say that people in Portland are whining to themselves about things they shouldn't be whining about. I'm asking us, here in Colorado, how is it that we've settled for these steep prices and is there anything to be done about it? Is it a non-issue?

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