Home For The Holidays Session

November 19, 2015 By Jay Brooks

For our 106th Session next month our host will be yours truly, who writes this here Brookston Beer Bulletin. For my topic, I’ve chosen Holiday Beers, by which I mean this.

For seasonal beers, the Solstice/Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanza/Mithra time of the year is my mostest favorite. This past weekend, we had our fifteenth annual holiday beer tasting for the Celebrator Beer News, and sampled 42 of this year’s Christmas beers. Here’s how I’ve described them in the introduction of the tasting notes for the holiday edition each year:

Holiday beers are by design no one style, but are a chance for individual breweries to let their talent and imagination run wild. At the holidays, when people stop their busy lives and share some precious time with family and friends, the beer they choose should be equally as special as the time they’re sharing. So a holiday beer should be made to impress, to wow its audience, to stand out. That’s the only criteria that should be met by one of these beers. Will it impress? Different breweries, thankfully, do this in many, many different ways. Some use unusual spices or fruits, some use special malts or hops, some use other uncommon ingredients like spruce or rye, and some make a style that itself is unusual. So there’s nothing to tie these beers together apart from their celebration of the season. That makes it both a delight and a challenge to judge. Ultimately, perhaps more than any other tasting, these beers are simply a matter of what you like and our judging is a matter of what we like. So try them and discover for yourself the many flavors of this holiday season.

Beer and hat of Santa Claus

As I said, I really enjoy the variety of holiday and winter seasonals, and they often seem especially well-suited to colder weather. I don’t really care what they’re Celebrating, be it:

Christmas

Xmas

Chanukah

Winter Solstice
AVBC-winter-solstice

Krampus

Festivus

And despite the fact that the rightwing nutjobs insist there’s a war on Christmas because people use “holidays” to be inclusive instead of “Merry Christmas,” a lot of seasonal beer labels from the first half of the 20th century used “holiday” rather than Christmas. And what do you know, civilization didn’t end. And that’s usually the time that conservatives point to as being what we need to return to, when America was a more innocent place, pre-1960s. But they drank holiday beers, what do you know? And as far as I can tell, nobody freaked the fuck out like they do today. After the brouhaha with Starbucks cups, it actually made me want to go to Starbucks — a place I don’t normally frequent — just because of how ridiculous it all was.

Special-Holiday-Beer-Labels-The-Peoples-Brewing

Holiday-Special-Beer-Labels-Remmler-Brewing

Walters-Holiday-Beer-Labels-Walter-Brewing

Kochs-Holiday-Beer--Labels-Fred-Koch-Brewery

Christmas-Brew-Beer-Labels-Auto-City-Brewing

So for this Session, write about whatever makes you happy, so long as it involves holiday beers.

Discuss your favorite holiday beer.
Review one or more holiday beers.
Do you like the idea of seasonal beers, or loathe them?
What’s your idea of the perfect holiday beer?
Do have a holiday tradition with beer?
Are holiday beers released too early, or when should they be released?
Do you like holiday beer festivals?

Those are just a few suggestions, celebrate the holiday beers in your own way. Happy Holidays!

So start your holiday celebration early. It’s never too soon. To participate in the December Session, on or around Friday, December 4, write your post, then leave a comment below or shoot me an e-mail or copy me (@Brookston) in your Twitter feed with your link.

christmas-beer-coaster

Next Session Has You Seeing Double

October 9, 2015 By Jay Brooks

So our recently back-from-the-dead Session next month will be our 105th monthly outing, and our host will be Mark Ciocco, who writes the Kaedrin Beer Blog. For his topic, he’s chosen Double Features, by which he means ” comparative tastings,” meaning “[d]rink two beers (usually of the same style) with a critical eye, compare and contrast.” But I’ll let him give the full explanation of what he’s looking for:

For this installment, I’d like to revisit that glorious time of beer drinking when I was just starting to realize what I was getting into. One of my favorite ways to learn about beer was to do comparative tastings. Drink two beers (usually of the same style) with a critical eye, compare and contrast. Because I’m also a movie nerd, this would often be accompanied by a film pairing. It was fun, and I still enjoy doing such things to this day!
So your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to drink two beers, compare and contrast. No need for slavish tasting notes, but if you want to, that’s fine too. The important part is to highlight how the two beers interact with one another during your session (pun intended!) For extra credit, pair your beers with two films to make your own Double Feature. Now, I’m a big tent kinda guy, so feel free to stretch this premise to its breaking point. The possibilities are endless!
Drink two beers of the same style, pair with a double feature of horror movies (it being October and all – it’s what I’ll be doing!)
Drink two vintages of the same beer, pair with a famous double album (The White Album, The Wall, Exile on Main Street, etc…)
Throw caution to the wind and do a triple feature!
Drink a base beer and its barrel aged variant, pair with two episodes of your favorite TV show.
Actually, lots of other types of variants out there too: base beer and it’s Brett-dosed counterpart, base and a fruited variant, base and spiced variant, base and a dry hopped variant, many possibilities here… Pair with video games.
Play master blender by taking two beers, tasting both, then blending them together in the perfect proportion for the ultimate whatever. Then say nuts to pairing it with non-beer stuff, because you’re just that cool.
Test your endurance by taking down two bottles of Black Tuesday solo, then documenting the resultant trip to the emergency room*.
Recount a previous comparative tasting experience that proved formative.
Drink a fresh IPA and a six-month old IPA and discuss where you fall on the “Freshness Fetish” scale.
Drink a beer and compare with wine or bourbon or coke or whatever strikes your fancy. One should probably be beer though. I said “big tent” not “no tent”…
“These two beers are in my fridge, I should probably drink them or something.” (Pair with leftovers.)
Drink a beer and a homebrewed clone of that beer (an obscure one that requires you to have both readily available, but this is part of the fun!)
Hold a March Madness style beer tournament, pitting beer versus beer in a series of brackets in order to determine the supreme winner.
Devise a two course beer dinner, pairing two beers with various foodstuffs.
If any of you people live near an Alamo Drafthouse, I think you know what you need to do. Do it for me; I don’t have the awesomeness that is Alamo anywhere near me and wish to live vicariously through your sublime double feature.
Collect an insane amount of barleywines and drink them with your friends, making sure to do the appropriate statistical analysis of everyone’s ratings.
Go to a bar, have your friends choose two beers for you, but make sure they don’t tell you what the beers are. Compare, contrast, guess what they are, and bask in the glory of blind tasting.
Lecture me on the evils of comparative tasting and let me have it with both barrels. We’ll love you for it, but you’re probably wrong.
Truly, there are a plethora of ways to take this, so hop to it!

So start choosing your beers (and your movies, too, for extra credit). To participate in the November Session, on or around Friday, November 6, leave a comment to the original announcement if you’re on WordPress. If not, since he’s had some issues with comments, send an e-mail to mciocco at gmail dot com or notify him via Twitter at @KaedrinBeer.

Session #104: Reports Of The Session’s Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

October 5, 2015 By Jay Brooks

For our 104th Session, our host is Alan McLeod, who writes A Good Beer Blog. For the topic, he’s extending the discussion I started a few weeks ago in The Monthly Session: Should It Continue Or Should We Let It Go? Twenty people weighed and cast a vote, and the ayes held the day, 15 to 5. So there you have it, we’re still alive, though perhaps on life support. Alan, who magnanimously offered to step in this month, did just that, donning his cape and wearing his matching knickers on the outside, is here to save the day. In his announcement, Session 104: Quick! Write… And Make It Good!!, he’s challenged people to step up, calling us all a “bunch of sookie babies” and get to it, meaning writing blog posts.

So, time to suck it up. I am hosting and you bunch of sookie babies are writing blog posts. Got it? I was going to tell you to write anything you feel like whether it makes any sense or not… but then I realized that’s what you do anyway. Especially you. Yes, you!! So you are going to write about this: if we just “take the philosophical approach, that the Session has run its course” aren’t we really admitting that beer blogging is a massive failure? I say no. I say this is a fabulous way to cover up problem drinking with anti-social internet addictions. Maybe you know of another reason we should keep writing and try to make some sense of the beer and brewing world. Well, goodie for you. Write about it. Explain yourself. Because if you can’t you are really admitting (i) you’ve wasted the best part of the last decade or (ii) you live in a fantasy world where think you are a beer writer and not a beer blogger and that’s soooooo much more important… as if your friends don’t share concerned messages about you behind your back:
Linda? It’s Barry. Yes, I saw him. He still pretends he writes about alcohol as a job… she’s the strong one… poor things… where will it end?
Make it good.

session_logo_all_text_200

So I’m obviously late with my Session post this month, being that it’s Monday and The Session really took place last Friday. But this time I wasn’t just busy, I waited until today on purpose. I wanted to see what people had to say. As Alan noted, I had the shakes and even was a bit verklempt, as Stan and I wondered aloud and in print if The Session might have run its course. At best, it was on life support as people were no longer volunteering to host and keep it going.

life-support

Between the polls I took and my post, The Monthly Session: Should It Continue Or Should We Let It Go?, from a two weeks ago, I had an idea that many people would say that The Session should continue. And largely that seemed to be the case, even if participation seemed … well, not enormous. But more importantly, I wanted to see if anybody offered to host, to actually do something to help The Session survive. Happily, several people did.

alive

I’ve now reached out to the people who offered to host and confirmed a month for them, adding them to the schedule. A few have already come up with a topic. But don’t let that deter you. Even if you haven’t been plugged in to host an upcoming Session, don’t despair, it’s not too late. Leave a comment here with your e-mail and I’ll reach out to you to find a month for you to host.

The Upcoming Session Schedule

November 6, 2015: Mark Ciocco at Kaedrin Beer Blog
December 4, 2015: Jay Brooks at Brookston Beer Bulletin
January 1, 2016: Dan Conley at Community Beer Works Blog
February 5, 2016: Jon Abernathy at The Brew Site
March 4, 2016: Mark Lindner at By the Barrel: Bend Beer Librarian
April 1, 2016: Sean Inman at Beer Search Party
May 6, 2016: Oliver Gray at Literature and Libation
June 3, 2016: Carla Companion at The Beer Babe

And Stan also offered to host again, as well, though on the poll said he would “after some others step up.” We now have eight months scheduled, nine once Stan chimes in with his favored month, which is a pretty good result.

See you next month. Same beer time, same beer channel.

its-alive

Quick! Hurry Up! The Next Session’s Tomorrow! Write… And Make It Good!!

October 1, 2015 By Jay Brooks

For the 104th Session, our host will be none other than Alan McLeod, who now holds the title for hosting The Session more times than any other human alive today. Alan, of course, writes A Good Beer Blog. For the topic, he’s extending the discussion I started a few weeks ago in The Monthly Session: Should It Continue Or Should We Let It Go? Fifteen people weighed and cast a vote, and the ayes held the day, 10 to 5. So there you have it, we’re still alive, though on life support. Alan, who magnanimously offered to step in this month, did just that, and donning his cape and wearing his matching knickers on the outside, is here to save the day. And he’s not fooling around, writing in his announcement for the October Session, Session 104: Quick! Write… And Make It Good!!, “I am hosting and you bunch of sookie babies are writing blog posts. Got it?” Got it. Read the full monty here:

The first Friday of the month is tomorrow. And no one signed up to host it. So, they called the undertaker. Me. The voice of beer blogging doom. Gloomy dour Cain to all you cheery half-lit passion-wracked Abels. See, Jay got the shakes mid-September. Got them bad. He struck by a bought of existential angst about where things were going. I understand that’s fairly common after a big batch of beer judging gigs. Bear with me. Jay gets a bit verklempt:
… I fear we may have hit a wall. With just two weeks to go before Session #105 is scheduled to take place, we have no host and no prospects for one, or so it seems. I could start asking previous hosts to step up — and perhaps I should — but that also seems a little contrary to the spirit of it being organic, something that just chugs along all by itself. I could also start begging and cajoling bloggers who have never hosted, but then again I don’t want anyone to feel obligated. It’s supposed to be fun, otherwise it won’t work. Which brings me to the elephant in the ether.
Poor lad. He’s clearly schwazzled. It’s only Session #104 for one thing. I hear Stan’s no better. He’s in a ball in the corner of the rec room now, sobbing… comforted with only the thought of upcoming affordable local post-season baseball and enough freebie liquor samples in the basement to calm the Soviet army after their victory at Stalingrad. These guys have been giving and giving and giving and what the hell do you losers do? You let them down. You heartless bastards.
So, time to suck it up. I am hosting and you bunch of sookie babies are writing blog posts. Got it? I was going to tell you to write anything you feel like whether it makes any sense or not… but then I realized that’s what you do anyway. Especially you. Yes, you!! So you are going to write about this: if we just “take the philosophical approach, that the Session has run its course” aren’t we really admitting that beer blogging is a massive failure? I say no. I say this is a fabulous way to cover up problem drinking with anti-social internet addictions. Maybe you know of another reason we should keep writing and try to make some sense of the beer and brewing world. Well, goodie for you. Write about it. Explain yourself. Because if you can’t you are really admitting (i) you’ve wasted the best part of the last decade or (ii) you live in a fantasy world where think you are a beer writer and not a beer blogger and that’s soooooo much more important… as if your friends don’t share concerned messages about you behind your back:
Linda? It’s Barry. Yes, I saw him. He still pretends he writes about alcohol as a job… she’s the strong one… poor things… where will it end?
Make it good. Leave a link in the comments when you do.

So start listening to your existential angst now. What is it telling you? There’s isn’t much time. Just a few hours. So let us know. To participate in the October Session, leave a comment to the original announcement, on Friday, October 2.

ch950107

The Monthly Session: Should It Continue Or Should We Let It Go?

September 18, 2015 By Jay Brooks

Way back in early 2007, Stan Hieronymus had an idea, one he’d borrowed from the wine bloggers, who at the time were further along in both numbers and longevity. That idea was Beer Blogging Friday, the monthly Session that takes place on the first Friday of each month. The plan was simple. Beer bloggers from around the world would get together and write from their own unique perspective on a single topic each month, on the first Friday. Each time, a different beer blogger would host the Session, having chosen a topic and then afterwards would create a round-up listing all of the participants, along with a short pithy critique of each entry. Over time, I had hoped that we’d collectively have created a record with lots of useful information about various topics on the subject of beer. And for a while, it worked great.

Around 2008, Stan went on an 18-month around-the-world trip with his wife and daughter, and I took over keeping track of the Session, and put up a page here listing all of the topics with links along with instructions on how to host and participate. When he got back, it was simple enough for me to keep the archive going and between the two of us keep recruiting hosts. It’s now been 104 months in a row, a little more than eight years, and somebody has stepped up each month volunteering to be the host and keep it going. There have been a few months when it looked like nobody was going to host, but so far something always seemed to work out. In the early days, we were booked out months ahead with hosts, which was great, and made things a lot easier to manage. Lately, however, it’s been hard finding hosts and fewer and fewer people have been stepping up. For the last year or so, we’ve limped along, and we’ve been able to keep going only by the skin of our teeth. There have been more than a few months when someone stepped up just in the nick of time and offered to host.

But I fear we may have hit a wall. With just two weeks to go before Session #104 is scheduled to take place, we have no host and no prospects for one, or so it seems. I could start asking previous hosts to step up — and perhaps I should — but that also seems a little contrary to the spirit of it being organic, something that just chugs along all by itself. I could also start begging and cajoling bloggers who have never hosted, but then again I don’t want anyone to feel obligated. It’s supposed to be fun, otherwise it won’t work. Which brings me to the elephant in the ether.

elephant-in-the-room

Should we keep the monthly Session going, or put it out to pasture, and declare it past its prime and no longer of any enduring interest? Certainly beer blogging has changed in the eight years since we started the Session. When I asked Stan yesterday — since it’s really his baby — he wondered if we should “take the philosophical approach, that the Session has run its course,” noting that “it lasted longer than the similar wine project” that inspired it.

We originally looked at it as an opportunity to promote one’s own blog, but more importantly to take part in a larger discussion and build cohesion or community or something vaguely positive among our fellow bloggers. I can’t speak for everybody, but that was at least my hope. None of us thought about it in terms of boosting traffic, but it certainly feels like that’s become part of the equation. There are so many ways to engage with readers, one another and just people in general nowadays, with Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr and who knows what else that blogging itself no longer seems as relevant as it once did as a medium. And indeed, it does seem like there are lots of beer blogs that have been abandoned or are no longer maintained.

According to the Beer Bloggers & Writers Conference, as of August of 2015, there were 677 beer blogs in North America, 365 more internationally, 133 considered industry blogs, and another 71 they consider to be press beer blogs. That’s a total of 1,246 beer blogs. I feel like that’s number is getting smaller, that there actually fewer beer blogs then there used to be, although I have no evidence to support that whatsoever.

I do know that when I started the Bay Area Beer Bloggers in 2008 there were a little over fifty beer blogs here in Northern California but today’s list on our dedicated website includes less than half that number, and a quick perusal shows me a couple of those are now fairly dormant, bringing the total ratio to around 2/5, meaning three out of every five beer blogs in the Bay Area are no longer posting regularly, or at all, seven years after we started BABB. And that’s the trend I’ve seen around the country, if not the world.

Although to be fair, 1,246 is still a pretty big number. With only 104 Sessions under our belt, and ignoring the fact that a few people have hosted twice, there’s still theoretically 1,142 beer bloggers who have not yet hosted The Session.

So the question I have for the beer collective hive mind is should we continue to do the monthly Session, Beer Blogging Friday? Please vote below, whether you’ve hosted, participated or never even heard of it before now, whether you think it should continue, or whether we should move on to other pursuits. Maybe there’s something else, similar, or whatever, that could replace it, or perhaps we should just go our separate ways altogether. Please vote “No” or “Yes” below:

And if you voted “Yes,” are you willing to put your time where your mouth is? Or something like that. If you’ve never hosted before, would you be willing to? (If you don’t know what hosting entails, The Session page has a description of what’s involved.) If you have hosted before, would you be willing to again? Answer that $1,000,000 question below. If you are willing to host and chose either the first or second answer, please add your e-mail address in the field marked “other” before clicking on the “VOTE” button and it will send it to me. I’ll then reach out and see when you might be willing to host. Right now every month is open from Friday, October 1, 2015 and on. If you already know when you’d be willing to host, just drop me a note directly at “Jay(.)Brooks(@)gmail(.)com.”

Session #102: A Beery Landscape

August 9, 2015 By Jay Brooks

For our 102nd Session, our host is Allen Huerta, who writes Active Brewer. For his topic, he’s asking us to look at the big picture, the entire landscape of beer; yesterday, today, and/or tomorrow, or as he more fully explains what he has in mind for the August Session in his announcement, “The Landscape of Beer:”

SURPRISE, SURPRISE! The Landscape of Beer in America is changing. It has even begun influencing beer in countries all around the world. Everyone has their opinion on Local vs Global, Craft vs Macro, and Love vs Business. Those who were at the Beer Bloggers & Writers Conference in Asheville this past weekend had a brief talk about how “Small and Independent Matters”. Something that quite a few people say matters to them, but where is the upper limit? Does a purchase of another brewery still allow a brewery to fall into the Small and Independent camp?
Our topic this month is, “The Landscape of Beer“. How do you see that landscape now? What about in 5, 10, or even 20 years? A current goal in the American Craft Beer Industry is 20% market share by the year 2020. How can we get there? Can we get there?
Whether your view is realistic or whimsical, what do you see in our future? Is it something you want or something that is happening? Let us know and maybe we can help paint the future together.

session_logo_all_text_200

Because the weekend’s all but over, I decided — as usual — not to follow instructions per se, and instead found four literal landscapes of beer’s constituent parts in my library of photographs.

P1110947
The River Trent, in Burton upon Trent, although the brewing water actually comes from an aquifer deep below the town (but the photo of the aquifer is pretty dull).

Untitled
Barley growing in the San Luis Valley of southwest Colorado.

P1010500
Hops in the Yakima Valley, Washington.

P1040238
Yeast bubbling at White Labs in San Diego.

A Landscape View Of Beer For The Next Session

July 19, 2015 By Jay Brooks

For our 102nd Session, our host will be Allen Huerta, who writes Active Brewer. For his topic, he’s asking us to look at the big picture, the entire landscape of beer; yesterday, today, and/or tomorrow, or as he more fully explains what he has in mind for the August Session in his announcement, “The Landscape of Beer:”

SURPRISE, SURPRISE! The Landscape of Beer in America is changing. It has even begun influencing beer in countries all around the world. Everyone has their opinion on Local vs Global, Craft vs Macro, and Love vs Business. Those who were at the Beer Bloggers & Writers Conference in Asheville this past weekend had a brief talk about how “Small and Independent Matters”. Something that quite a few people say matters to them, but where is the upper limit? Does a purchase of another brewery still allow a brewery to fall into the Small and Independent camp?
Our topic this month is, “The Landscape of Beer“. How do you see that landscape now? What about in 5, 10, or even 20 years? A current goal in the American Craft Beer Industry is 20% market share by the year 2020. How can we get there? Can we get there?
Whether your view is realistic or whimsical, what do you see in our future? Is it something you want or something that is happening? Let us know and maybe we can help paint the future together.

tigercr_barley_landscape

So start painting your thoughts in broad strokes, and give us your take on the beer landscape. To participate in the July Session, leave a comment to the original announcement, on or before Friday, August 7.

beerlandscape-view

Odds & Ends For The Next Session

June 21, 2015 By Jay Brooks

For 101st Session, our host will be Jack Perdue, who writes Deep Beer. For his topic, he’s asking us to look beyond what’s in the bottle, and to the bottle itself, along with the crown, the label, the carrier, the mother carton and all of the odds and ends, or detritus, that go into the beer’s packaging, or as he explains what he has in mind for the July Session, the “Bottles, Caps and Other Beer Detritus,” which he describes below.

There are many great creative people involved in the beer industry: the brewers designing and creating the stuff of our attention, marketers bringing the product to market, graphic artists making the products attractive and informative and writers who tell the story of beer. The list goes on. And thus, many great products, that may or may not get your attention. The focus is on the liquid inside the bottle, can or keg, and rightly so. What about all the other products necessary to bring that beer to you? What about the things that are necessary but are easily overlooked and discarded. This months theme is, “Bottles, Caps and Other Beer Detritus”.
Detritus, according to one definition in the Merriam Webster Dictionary is “miscellaneous remnants : odds and ends”. While the number and quality of our beer choices has certainly improved over the recent decade, have you paid any attention to the rest of the package. Those things we normally glance over and throw away when we have poured and finished our beer. These are sometimes works of art in themselves. Bottle caps, labels, six-pack holders, even the curvature of the bottle. For this month’s The Session theme, I’m asking contributors to share their thoughts on these things, the tangential items to our obsession. Do you have any special fetish with bottle caps, know of someone that is doing creative things with packaging, have a beer bottle or coaster collection.

So drink the beer, but then think about what’s left over when it’s gone.

Let us know about the bits and pieces from your point of view. To participate in the July Session, leave a comment to the original announcement, with , on or before Friday, July 3.

beer-crown-rainbow

Session #100: One Hundred Beers You’ve Probably Never Heard Of

June 6, 2015 By Jay Brooks

It’s hard to believe we’ve doing this 100 months in a row, but it’s true. For our 100th Session, our host, Reuben Grey — who writes the Tale of the Ale — has decided to send us all on a quest to find the ark of the holy grail filled with lost beer styles, or something like that. Actually, for the June Session, the topic is “Resurrecting Lost Beer Styles,” which he describes below.

There are many [lost or almost lost beer styles] that have started to come back in to fashion in the last 10 years due to the rise of craft beer around the world.
If you have a local beer style that died out and is starting to appear again then please let the world know. Not everyone will so just write about any that you have experienced. Some of the recent style resurrections I have come across in Ireland are Kentucky Common, Grodziskie, Gose and some others. Perhaps it’s a beer you have only come across in homebrew circles and is not even made commercially.
There are no restrictions other than the beer being an obscure style you don’t find in very many places. The format, I leave up to individuals. It could be a historical analysis or just a simple beer review.

session_logo_all_text_200

Not content to follow directions, I recently spent way too much time thinking about beer color and creating several lists as a part of that. So I’m feeling whatever the opposite of listless is. Listical? Listful?

I have a love/hate relationship with beer styles. I think of them as both useless and necessary at the same time. And I’m hopeless when it comes to the instinct to categorize and organize everything, I can’t help but do it. I want to believe it’s simply human nature but I clearly have an advanced case of whatever disease causes people to catalogue, classify and codify the world.

I see beer styles as a dichotomy that will never be resolved. I understand both sides of the divide and think both are correct, and wrong, at least sometimes. The way we think about beer styles is a modern construct. Michael Jackson created the taxonomy that’s still with us (more or less) as a way to write about different beers around the world, and then Fred Eckhardt expanded on it and codified it for homebrewers, sealing its fate as the way we generally talk about beer styles. And I think it worked pretty well … for a while. It’s undoubtedly useful in judging and creating expectations. But I remember fifteen or so years ago Charlie Bamforth, my professor at U.C. Davis for the short course, telling us how beer styles don’t matter at all. And he was right, of course. They don’t. All that matters to a commercial brewery is that people like, and more importantly, buy the beer, no matter what “style” it is.

But where all these different beers came from has to do with geography, climate, agriculture and culture. Place is the single most important factor in having created so many different types of beer. Every local area had its own unique, or a mostly unique variation, of beer that took advantage of what the brewers had on hand, be it the grain, hops or other flavors they could get, what the local water was like, the local customs, and the politics or culture itself. What we call traditional beer styles today are simply the winners, the local or regional styles that survived industrialization and displaced more local styles as breweries grew larger and expanded their reach. Beer, slowly at first, and then much more rapidly, became commodified, became all the same, especially in the U.S., but all over the world to a greater or lesser extent. Popular regional, national and global brands displaced local ones and many of those can now be considered “lost,” if not entirely forgotten.

atlas-beer

A favorite line from Elvis Costello’s 1977 song “I’m Not Angry” is “there’s no such thing as an original sin.” And I think that applies to beer styles, too. Just about everything has been tried before, and we fool ourselves that modern beers are more innovative. That’s not to take away from brewers trying to make distinctive beers, whether by trying to break tradition or finding beers that have become extinct or nearly so and resurrecting them, so to speak, or more often making a modern interpretation. I think these are all good developments. I’m not sure we need another IPA, so I find it much more interesting that brewers are exploring different flavors in an effort to stand out and make their mark in the beer world. So I’m not as interested in opining if they’re styles or not, I just want to taste them.

So for this Session, still feeling listful, I decided instead to do some searching around to simply find how many old, mostly forgotten types of beer I could find. As I said, I came up with the title before I even knew if I could find 100. It took maybe an hour to go past the century mark, and in the end, was no problem at all. And that tells us quite a bit about how much the landscape of beer was changed by industrialization and the consolidation of the industry worldwide. When beer became very much the same, the local, more unique beers were lost. We saw the same thing happen with food, too, which spawned the artisanal movements for better cheese, meats, chocolate, heirloom fruits and vegetables, etc.
Blue metal compass
So the list of 100 beers below is not strictly all extinct beers, but also includes beers nearly so, ones that are starting to come back, beers that are only made by a very few breweries and some so ancient we don’t know much about them beyond their names. The beers are from all over the compass. I gathered them from a variety of sources, mostly websites and a few books in my library. When I say you’ve probably never heard of them, chances are you know the names of at least a few of them. You could probably test your beer geek quotient by how many you recognize.

Aarschotse Bruine
Adambier
Black Cork
Black or Spruce Beer
Bremer Bier
Brett-Fermented Stock Ale
Breyhan or Broyhan
Burton Ale
Chicha
Citronenbier (Lemon Beer)
Cock Ale
Coirm
Colne Spring Ale
Cöpenicker Moll
Dampfbier
Danziger Bier
Deutsches Porter
Devonshire White or Devon White Ale
Duckstein
Dutch Black Buckwheat Beer
Ebla
Eilenburger Bier
Einfachbier
Erfurter Bier
Erntebier (Harvest Beer)
Fern Ale
Fränkische Biere
Gale Ale
Garlebischer Garley
Geithayner
Gotlandsdrickå
Grodziski (a.k.a. Grodziskie or Grätzer Bier)
Grout Ale
Hamburger Bier
Heather Ale
Hellesroggen
Hogen Mogen
Hosenmilch
Humming Ale
Jopenbier
Kash or Kás
Kashbir
Kashdu
Kashdùg
Kashgíg or Kashgíg-dùgga
Kash-sur-ra
Kassi
Kennett Ale
Kentucky Common
Keptinus Alus
Kiszlnschtschi
Kodoulu
Kotbüsser Bier
Koyt
Kushkal
Kuurna
Kvass
Leipziger Stadtbier
Lichtenhainer
Light Bitter
Light Mild
Lübecker
Makgeolli
Merseburger
Moskovskaya (Old Moscow Brown Ale)
Mum or Mumme
Münster Beer
Naumburger
Pennsylvania Swankey
Peeterman
Potsdamer Bier
Preusishce Bier
Purl
Rheinländische Bitterbier
Rostocker Bier
Ruppiner Bier
Sahti
Säuerliche Bier
Scotch Ale
Seef
Sloe Beer (Schlehenbier)
Sour Bock
Sour Ofest
Sour Old Ale
Stein Beer
Stingo
Stitch
Strong Pale Mild
Sußbier or Einfachbier
Uitzet or Uytzet
Ulushin
Vatted Old Ale
Vatted Porter
Weizenschalenbier
West Country White Ale
Wettiner
Windsor Ale
Winter Warmer
Wurzner
Zerbster

How much fun would it be to try every one of them? Beer, of course, is a global drink and is the third most-consumed liquid (after water and tea) so I suspect the number of lost beers is far greater than this, and probably numbers in the hundreds, or possibly thousands, depending on how you differentiated them. Should we try to catalogue them all? Now that would be a real fool’s errand, but it would be fun to try.

foolscap

« Previous Page