If you live in the Bay Area or are planning to be one of the nearly 16 millions travelers who visit us each year, then have I got a useful website for you. Beer By BART began less than a year ago, created by two San Francisco natives, Steve Shapiro and Gail Ann Williams. The site is a labor of love for the pair, who I was fortunate enough to meet at the Bistro’s Double IPA Festival yesterday.

Since mass-transit is all but non-existent where I live (and where the annoyingly self-centered NIMBY ethos keeps anything from improving), I hadn’t run across this before. But in many parts of the Bay Area, BART is a convenient and relatively inexpensive alternative to driving. In these days of draconian laws brought on by overzealous neo-prohibitionists, this a very valuable resource. So far, there are thirty places mapped out with all the information you need to get from a BART station to your destination, including how long your walk will be from BART. For each it’s roughly one-quarter mile. If you see four shoes on a listing, you know it’s about a mile to the brewpub or bar. The list on the main page is divided by station, and the list is starting to include what bus to take to get you to a slightly more remote, but worthwhile place. Nice job!

This is my first pick for “Website of the Month,” which I’ll begin featuring on the right sidebar. I get so many link requests and have so many in my blogroll, that I want to highlight the best ones I come across.

While searching for an image of a beer delivery truck yesterday, I noticed a photo of this truck kept popping up in the search results, but always identified as a beer truck, or words to that effect. However, take a close look at the bottle.

Cool as the image is, it sure didn’t look like beer inside the bottle to me. So I did a little research to find out what Bionade is. It turns out that it’s organic soda made in Germany. But interestingly, it does have a brewing pedigree. Here’s the story, from Wikipedia:

Bionade was created in 1995 by Dieter Leipold. Leipold was the master brewer at Privatbrauerei Peter in Ostheim, a town in northern Bavaria with just 4,000 inhabitants, and a friend of the family that owned the brewery. He was worried about the future of the company, which was about to go bankrupt, as import beers like Corona and Miller Lite were taking over the German market. He got the idea of creating a nonalcoholic drink produced with the same principles and under the same purity laws used to brew beer:[3] not using corn syrup or other artificial additives and making it by fermentation. The drink would consist only of the natural ingredients malt, water, sugar, and fruit essences. For eight years, Leipold experimented spending €1.5 million of the brewery owner Peter Kowalsky’s money. His lab was a bathroom. He isolated a strain of bacteria capable of converting the sugar that normally becomes alcohol into nonalcoholic gluconic acid, which he used to ferment the new drink.

Bionade’s premise was that it tasted like soft drinks, but contained little sugar and no stabilizing or flavor-enhancing additives. It thus combines the taste of soft drinks with the healthiness of juice. It also contains both calcium and magnesium, in such quantities that they do not cancel each other out and is low in sodium and free of phosphorus

To this day, Leipold refuses divulge the exact chemical process he used to do this. the gluconic acid also has the advantage that it allows him to reduce the amount of sugar, because it strengths the sugar’s taste. After fermentation, the natural flavors, elderberry, litchi, orange-ginger, and herb are added along with carbonation.

Apparently sales Bionade started out slowly but with the recent popularity of healthy food and drinks, things have picked up considerably. Since 2006, it’s been sold in the U.S., though I can’t say I recall ever seeing it. But then I don’t drink soda so I wouldn’t have been looking for it, either. It might be worth giving it a try, since it was created by a brewer and he’s managed to keep the secret of how it’s made. There’s also an article about it from Time Magazine that was published last January.

The 8th annual Double IPA Festival took place yesterday at the Bistro in Hayward, California. We couldn’t have asked for better weather. After weeks of rain, blue skies and a warm sun filled the sky. I think a lot of festival-goers were coaxed out of hibernation by the beautiful day. And what better way to spend it but enjoying countless Imperial IPAs?

As noted in the previous post, Flying Dog‘s Double Dog was chosen best in show. Kenny Gross, who works for their local distributor, shyly accepted the medal on their behalf.

The crowds came out to the Bistro to sample over thirty Imperial IPAs.

For many more photos from this year’s Double IPA Festival at the Bistro, visit the photo gallery.
 

Flying Dog‘s Double Dog was chosen best in show at the 8th annual Double IPA Festival today at the Bistro in Hayward, California. The full winner list is below.

• 1st Place: Double Dog, Flying Dog Brewing
• 2nd Place: Racer X, Bear Republic Brewing
• 3rd Place: Hopsicle, Moylan’s Brewing

• People’s Choice Award: Pliny the Younger, Russian River Brewing

The Beer Judge Certification Program, or BJCP, released today the new 2008 style guidelines, the first revision since 2004. The new guidelines are available in a variety of formats. There’s also a one-page pdf that gives a short summary of the changes.

In case you didn’t know, the BJCP certifies judges for homebrew and commercial competitions, administers tests, and performs many other worthwhile functions in the beer world. If you’ve ever wanted to be a beer judge or just learn more about beer styles, they’re a very good place to start.

A great friend of mine, who lives in Seattle, has a new CD out with his new band, called Dyslextasy. Four out of the six songs on it have something to do with enjoying a tipple now and then. The album is called “Live. Die. Repeat.” and has this great tagline: “Drinking songs for the New World Order.”

The last song on the compact disc is an anti-war song that was even inspired by Rogue’s Imperial Stout and the red star on the old label before they switched to the ceramic bottle. The first line of the song is:

As I was sitting there, at the bar
Drinking Imperial Stout
(that one with the star)

Click on the play button below to hear the Imperial Stout song. You can also hear previews of the other songs on their website. The CD is a mere eight bucks and can be ordered online directly from the band or on several other online stores, such as CD Baby. Sure it’s a shameless plug, but as he and his wife are some of our best friends, and the music is great, too, I want to help it go platinum so he can retire from his nine-to-five job. Enjoy.
 

Firestone Walker is releasing their first India Pale Ale under the name Union Jack. It’s a double dry-hopped IPA and will be released today in bottles and on draft. It will be available through California and in parts of Nevada.

Even for those of you old enough to remember Thomas Kemper beer, not just the soda, you may not have known that there never was a Thomas Kemper. Instead the name came from the family names of the two founders, Andy Thomas and Will Kemper, who began brewing on Bainbridge Island in 1984 and soon after moved the brewery to the small town of Poulsbo, Washington, on the Kitsap Penninsula. My wife and I visited the brewery on our honeymoon in the summer of 1996. That was four years after it had been sold to Hart Brewing (later Pyramid Brewing). Initially ales were made under the Pyramid label and lagers under Thomas Kemper. For a trip down memory lane, check out their old labels at Corey and Nate’s Beer Labels website. Rande Reed, in fact, was the brewer there early on but later moved to Pyramid and then Snoqualmie Falls Brewing, before returning to musical pursuits.

But I was never sure what happened to the founders after their involvement ended. In turns out Will Kemper became a brewery consultant, helping launch such breweries as Philadelphia’s Dock Street, Seattle’s Aviator Ales, Capital City Brewing in D.C. and Denver’s Mile High Brewing. For the last year or so, Will and his wife Mari have been in Turkey, building a brewery in Istanbul called Taps. Now that the Taps project is completed they’ve returned to their home in Bellingham, Washington with plans to open a new brewery there this spring. It will be located in the Old Town part of town and have a capacity of 1,000 barrels, with expansion to 5,000 possible if successful. The new name will be Chuckanut Brewery & Kitchen, and the plan is to have six different beers and a lunch and dinner menu.

I’ve found that liquor stores in Colorado tend to be, on average, larger than in the rest of the country. And that’s most likely because of their laws. In an effort to keep chains out of the state, any business is only allowed to own one liquor license. So that means instead of successful companies opening new locations (which is prohibited), they instead make their one location larger. So there’s Applejack’s in Denver or Liquor Mart in Boulder and probably countless others I’m unaware of. Then there’s Daveco Liquors in Thornton, Colorado (a few miles north of Denver along I-25). The Guinness Book of World Records has certified that it’s the “largest liquor store in the world.” The 102,000 square foot store has 7,500 bottles in the wine cellar, 9,000 types of wine, 2,400 brands of liquor and 800 different beers (though that last one actually seems small to me).

From an article in today’s Denver Post:

“I kept saying this is the world’s largest liquor store, and people kept saying ‘You can never prove that,’ ” said [owner Henry] Sawaged. “But now people know I am a man of my word.”

Congratulations to Daveco.

Business Week online yesterday had an interesting article entitled Micro Beers Brew Up Big Business, with this promising subtitle: The brewing industry is becoming more consolidated, but for aficionados in the U.S. there has never been a better time to drink—or make—beer.

Typically, Adam Smith’s ghost is invoked and misapplied to suggest that “markets do work over time” and that’s why “[t]hroughout the 20th century local and regional breweries in the U.S. closed by the thousands as improved transportation and the economies of scale led to increasing consolidation” and that today because of it “the [beer] business is dominated by a handful of industrial-scale giants.” Smith, for anybody who’s actually read what he wrote, would have been appalled by the consolidation of so many industries. Even in his day, he thought large corporations were dangerous and needed to be kept in check. Conservative humorist P.J. O’Rourke, of all people, has a book out right now called On the Wealth of Nations, that offers a witty overview of Smith’s famous work.

That annoyance aside, what follows is a quick overview of the last 35 years in beerdom and his choices for 10 absolutely top-notch winners. From the text, I assume he attended GABF last year as he confesses to not trying all 1,884 that were poured at the festival. So while others who’ve picked up this story are saying they’re the “Top 10 Best American Beers,” the author himself is not saying that. They’re just ten great beers that he did manage to try, though in a remarkable coincidence each of his ten is available in a bottle.

There are, of course, some world class beers on his list — Anchor Liberty definitely deserves to be there — and a few head-scratchers (not that I’m naming names) but this is the sort of list that no two people will ever agree on. There’s also a slideshow showing the bottles and labels to all ten beers.

1. Alaskan Pale
2. Anchor Liberty Ale
3. Anderson Valley Boont ESB (formerly Belk’s ESB)
4. Breckenridge 471 IPA
5. Full Sail Amber
6. Ommegang Abbey Ale
7. Ringwood Old Thumper Extra Special Ale (Shipyard)
8. Rogue Shakespeare Stout
9. Sprecher Black Bavarian Style Lager
10. Stoudt’s Scarlet Lady Ale