Blogging… If it looks like this you are doing it wrong.If this post offends you, it is probably because you write about beer and it hits a little too close to home.
If you don’t write about beer, then this post will be unlikely to offend you and you will without a doubt agree with it.
You see, there are plenty of beer bloggers that receive media kits or invitations to breweries. This a great thing and it is an important part of marketing for brewers. It also helps bloggers and readers. Unequivocally… this is a good thing all around in my opinion.
Bloggers can use these opportunities to learn more about a brewery or a new beer that is being released. For the reader, it is a look inside the business or an opportunity to learn about a new choice on the market for which to watch.
Many beer bloggers, video bloggers (YouTubers), or podcasters are not journalists by trade; me neither. But that does not mean that some of the basic tenets of journalism do not apply when plying this hobby or in some cases a business. The one that regularly gets short shift is disclosure of what I described above; free beer.
When bloggers receive early access, media kits, or free beer along with a back stage view of the brewery they should provide that information in the blog post or video review. Many do just this. Many clearly do not.
I have been offered free beer from a couple local brewers. The unspoken inference was that I would write about it. I have declined each time. This is not some noble act. It is simply that I am not interested in feeling obligated to write something on this blog. It is already way too hard to find the free time to post what I feel like writing without obligation.
I recently had a local brewery on the podcast. They offered to provide me with a couple bottles of their beer to drink during the show. I politely declined and paid for it myself. I mentioned that fact on the show.
Transparency is a political buzzword. The word gets tossed around by everyone to the point of being meaningless. Who is against transparency? But the lack of transparency on the part of many bloggers is unacceptable.
If the interaction between the brewer and the blogger or YouTuber is as clear as a milkshake IPA then the blogger is not doing his job. It is not the brewer’s job to say who has been offered products, lodging, or money. That is on the writer.
So bloggers and YouTubers… If you are reading this and you have been clear with your reader about disclosure then you understand and agree, but if you don’t agree what does that say about your relationship with your readers?
The point of The Six-Pack Project is to identify six local beers that best represent our area’s craft beer offerings. Bryan lays down a couple rules:
1. This isn’t simply a “best of” list. The goal is to pick a collection of six beers that represents your state and/or state’s beer culture.
2. Beer must be made in your state, but “gypsy” brewers are acceptable, so long as that beer is brewed with an in-state brewery and sold in your state.
3. Any size bottle or can is acceptable to include.
4. Current seasonal offerings are fine, but try to keep selections to year-round brews as much as possible. No out-of-season brews preferred. Specialty or one-off brews are not allowed.
After you listen, if you want to flame Tierney or I for the our selections, be sure to yell at us on Twitter: @tyrannytierney and @BearcatOnBeer. We are ready to defend our hot takes!
Be sure to stick around for the After Show. Special thanks to Tierney for coming on the show.
You can listen by clicking above or find The Operation Shutdown on iTunes. If you use iTunes, please consider subscribing. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider leaving a review and sharing it with a friend.
No After Show this week because things like work got in the way… Most of it was not fit for public consumption anyway.
You can listen by clicking above or find The Operation Shutdown on iTunes. If you use iTunes, please consider subscribing. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider leaving a review and sharing it with a friend.
Fetish Brewing Company has some really fresh labels.
In Ep. 6 of The Operation Shutdown I am joined by friend of the show Ed Grohl and very special guest Mike Simpson from Fetish Brewing Company. Their beer is brewed and locally distributed in Lancaster County, PA. As it states on their Facebook page Fetish is “Lancaster’s sexiest smallest brewery, we make each beer by hand for a small community of local beer drinkers & we’d like to make a few for you too.” I could not have said it any better.
We had a great discussion about, Fetish’s business model, Lancaster brews, brewery equipment, what does it mean to brew small and local, and the name of Ed’s cat.
Special thanks to Mike for taking time from his busy schedule to talk with us. There is tons of good stuff in here. You can find Fetish brewing on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. If it is not sold out already (and I both hope it is and that it is not as there were only 4 tickets left when we taped) check out Fetish on the Farm. I would love for an Operation Shutdown listenter to be the one to buy the last ticket.
Update — It just sold out this morning. So happy for them! If you missed, it go next year. I am going to be there.
Also, if you listen to the show and are going to Fetish on the Farm be sure to tell Mike and the guys you listen; that would be cool. You can tell them it was probably not the worst mistake they have ever made.
You can listen by clicking above or find The Operation Shutdown on iTunes. If you use iTunes, please consider subscribing. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider leaving a review and sharing it with a friend.
Cheers!
Post-Script:
Shit… You are doing this here too now, Bearcat? Yes.
This week we are trying an “After Show.” So keep listening after I hit stop.
Think of the Aftershow as the post script for a weird Bearcat on Beer blogpost but in audio form.
I think it works and plan on making this a regular part of the podcast. If you like it, leave a note below or let me know on Twitter. If you think it sucks, yell at Ed on twitter.
There are two pieces of technology in my lifetime that immediately after I saw them I understood everything would be different going forward.
The first was Napster.* The summer before Napster turned all of Gen X into pirates, my college strung all the dormitories with high speed internet lines in every room. It was uncanny.
I will never forget the awe of watching Heart of Glass download onto a computer in 30 seconds and then playing it out the booming speakers of my roommates DJ level audio equipment. The Internet officially grew up in that instant for me. Connectivity was real and it was profound.
At that moment everything changed. The music industry in this country can be broken into pre-Napster and post-Napster eras. Nothing was ever the same once music could be stolen.
Similarly, the first time I got to try a North-East Style IPA I knew this would be a shift.
For me, it started like it does for many people coming to this style, with Heady Topper. Here was a beer with moderately high ABV, hazy looks, solid mouth feel and juicy crushable flavors that makes it quaffable. It was unlike anything I had experienced before in an IPA.
The West Coast style IPA hop bomb had been put on notice. We have a new player in town.
West Coast IPA still have their place. In years past, I made a special trips for Blind Pig and Pliny the Elder and the Younger. I love Racer 5 and Sculpin. Sierra Nevada Torpedo is a widely available classic. I have sought out some of the greatest of these hoppy, bitter, and floral beers and plan to continue to enjoy them. But… its the NE style that gets me excited now.
This past weekend I saw Everclear in concert at The Vineyard at Hershey for their annual Merlot and Flash Gord’n release party. It was nostalgic listening to music from my high school years. Music that pumped from my beloved Sony Discman into my car stereo through a cassette tape adapter.
Everclear is both pre and post-Napster. Pre-Napster, the music industry was in balance. Music labels controlled the distribution, consumers paid too much, and artists got screwed by management. It worked…in a sense. After the Napster revolution the revenue plummeted, control by the labels went to hell, and artists still got screwed.
While I was standing there listening to Art Alexakis embody the North West grudge sound and singing about his deadbeat dad, I sipped on a solo cup of Hippie Ki-Yay! by Brewmaster Ryan DeLutis for The Brewery at Hershey. Its a juicy and fruity NE Style IPA, as hazy as it is crushable.As such, Hippie Ki-Yay! rises with this newest wave of craft beers.
Is the NE IPA here to break up the West Coast IPA’s reign of dominance? Unlikely and only time will tell. Yet, the differences between the two styles of IPA is stark. A well done West Coast IPA is floral, bitter, and in its most extreme, punishing to the palate. NE IPAs are crushable, easy drinking with low bitterness and a subtle sweetness boosting the citrus of copious hops.
Everclear’s second album So Much For the Afterglow was their biggest success. Debuting after the MP3 file sharing revolution, the album’s title could have been a send off for the height of a once dominate industry. Unlike Napster crumbling the foundation of music, NE IPAs should be welcomed as a buttress to a growing movement.
Ryan DeLutis’ Hippy Ki-Yay! shows a brewer coming into his own after several years of plying his trade professionally. While not quite to the standard of the stalwarts of this burgeoning style it is very good nonetheless. In Hippy Ki-Yay!, the Citra and Mosaic hops come through but minus the punishing bitters of the west coast style variants while having that full bodied mouth feel. More importantly it is a way to try the NE IPA style minus the hundreds of miles and days stalking around New England bottle shops and breweries.
It is a very good beer that shows even the small local breweries can push a revolution.
Post-Script:
*The second of the two pieces of tech was when Steve Jobs introduced the first iPhone. No one had any way of knowing that it would become the most successful piece of hardware in tech history. What I did understand immediately was the power of having the Internet in your pocket. I assumed it would change everything and I had to have one. I still love my iPhone(s) more than any other piece of tech I own. They are personal.
I am also a Apple Fanboy so take all that with the biases regularly associated with this disclaimer.
If you are a Gen Xer you really should watch Downloaded a 2013 documentary about the rise and fall of Napster. It is very, very good and a great run through the music of our youth. Also it has a bunch of Kurt Loder MTV news clips.
Listening to Everclear these days it is easy to assume that they have more daddy issues than can be found on a porn set.
The first time I had Blind Pig down at Monk’s Cafe in 2012 it was easy to see how this beer sparked the West Coast IPA. Years later I would get to enjoy Russian Rivers’ Pliny the Elder and the Younger. Transcendent beers still to this day. The West Coast IPA style is not in decline in my opinion but the NE style is making waves.
Hippie Ki-Yay! is better than Hoppy Ki Yay by Lonerider Brewing Company out of Raliegh, NC, which I also liked. But the name with the “Hoppy” works way better than Hippie. Sometimes being first pays big dividends.
Also the art work for Hippie Ki-Yay! just does not work for me. Is that a hippie Bruce Willis/John McClain? That is just wrong on so many levels. But it is way better than the stupid meme at the top of this post.
In a twist, John McLaughlin’s theme music was used to usher in a reign of tyranny. Or in this case, the reign of Tierney Pomone from Stouts & Stilettos for Ep. 5 of The Operation Shutdown.
In this episode, Tierney and I drink Four Loko. (Spoiler: It was awful.)
Just looking at this gave me a headache.
Harrisburg craft beer devotees, know Tierney for her work as founder and chief of Stouts & Stilettos, but in my mind her greatest claim is that Harrisburg Beer Week was her brain child. We had a great discussion bouncing around a number of topics with ease.
You can listen by clicking above or find The Operation Shutdown on iTunes. If you use iTunes, please consider subscribing. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider leaving a review and sharing it with a friend.
In the can? No, I think I will just have it right here.
For Episode 4 of The Operation Shutdown, I welcomed back friends of the show Easy Pretzel and Ed Grohl.
We also welcomed Bryan Roth. Calling Bryan a beer blogger seems trite when that is what I pretend to do. Bryan has the journalistic chops of working in newspapers. He writes for Beer Advocate and Good Beer Hunting, when not writing for his blog This Is Why I Am Drunk. You can follow him on Twitter at @BryanDRoth.
Bryan joined the show to discuss his recent post about canning and the media coverage canning receives.
It was a wide ranging conversation about everything from “Why canning is important or overrated? to “Are brewers using canning distribution to accelerate towards selling out?” In fact, the only thing about canning we did not discuss was this banned commercial from Bud Light Lime.
I hope you enjoy listening to this episode as much as we did making it.
You can listen by clicking above or find it on iTunes. If you use iTunes please consider subscribing. If you enjoyed this podcast please consider leaving a review or sharing it with a friend.
Playing to your strengths is generally good advice. It lets you play the game or do the work with the greatest chance of success. During a recent visit to Moo-Duck Brewery in Elizabethtown, PA that concept of “playing to one’s strengths” came to mind.
I had ordered a glass of Moo-Duck’s 291 Experimental IPA. This slightly hazy, light bodied, 5.8% IPA was unusual. It had a bit of citrus in the nose along with sweet smelling flowers. I was expecting it to be a mosaic hopped beer as I took my first sip but this was herbal and earthy. While it had floral notes, as the beer warmed up in the glass the floral quelled and herbal notes took complete control by adding a slight spiciness to the front and a long finish of faint eucalyptus and mild mint. I liked it.
The name of this beer is in reference to the hops that give it the distinct flavors, Experimental Hop 291, or LORAL as it has been branded. Moo-Duck’s newest small batch IPA beautifully showcases this relatively new hop variety.
You would be hard pressed to find a guy more down to Earth than Mike or his wife Kristen. So it makes sense that their beers should also reflect this. 291 Experimental IPA plays to their strengths and in the little I know them, their personalities. Easy drinking but earthy, it is a unique IPA that nicely showcases a new hop profile you probably have yet to meet.
Cheers!
Post Script:
Moo-Duck currently has The Remedy on tap as well. If you are looking for an herbal and flowery beer, brewed locally, you will be unlikely to find one more daring or interesting one. This wheat beer is brewed with local honey and an insane amount of Chamomile.
There are times where certain styles just work for a brewery. A great example of this is Victory Brewing Co. and pilsner. It a style of beer they work with well. They make many other fine beers but if its a pilsner, you can take it to the bank that it will be a world beater.
I have dropped some hints to it on Twitter, but tomorrow night I am recording Ep. 4 of The Operation Shutdown Podcast… and I really think this one will be gangbusters. Expect it to post sometime over the weekend. If I am lucky, it will be done by Friday night.
I am joined once again by friend of the show Ed Grohl for the latest episode of The Operation Shutdown Podcast. This time we discuss our most hated and favorite “crap beers.”
If you want to complain directly to Ed about his terrible opinions you can find him on Twitter @EdGrohl.
You can listen by clicking above or find it on iTunes. If you use iTunes please consider subscribing. If you enjoyed this podcast please consider leaving a review or sharing it with a friend.
This post is not about a beer. It is decidedly not about Troegs Independent Brewing’s Wild Elf which was a absolutely phenomenal beer that subtlety played with various and transcendent flavors developed over years.
No. This post is about a beer glass.
This glass.
The Troegs Splinter Glass. It is a very tall tulip and it is one of the finest vessels for enjoying a beer.
You see… generally I don’t give a damn about glassware. It is generally unimportant. In the grand scheme of craft beer culture the discussion of “proper glassware” is as pointless a discussion as debating if Yuengling is considered “craft” based just on volume. (They are not and that is an arbitrary measure.)
When I first started this blog, a friend wanted to read a post with recommendations for what beer glasses to buy for his newly built home bar. I dismissed the request and said it doesn’t matter that much. Buy a bunch of standard pint glasses, a couple tulips and a few of the beer can shaped glasses and you are covered for everything.
I still think that is good advice. Glassware is way overrated. Just get a couple glasses that you like.
I drink so many beers directly from the can. If they are in a bottle I grab either a standard pint or a tulip and be done with it. I spend zero time worrying about whether or not I am maximizing the flavor profile.
Yes. I acknowledge that various glasses can heighten certain flavors and aromas but I have enjoyed most beer exactly 0% less then other people that spend far too much time ruminating about the vessel endlessly.
But in this case… it matters.
A lot.
This Troegs Splinter Glass is a delicate long stemmed tulip that holds exactly 0.375 liters of beer. The glass has a pleasant feel in the hand and holds the beer deep enough to allow the drinker to bring the libation to their lips while getting their nose deep into the glass to inhale all the volatiles brought forth by effervescence. With Wild Elf this was a sweet whiff of cherries and earthy wood.
The tall tulip holds the beer more like a cordial or congac, allowing you to explore the depth of flavor built over six years of cellaring in barrels. Giving you time to swirl the beer gently and behold the mahogany color. To sip and consider the brett, lactobacillus and wild yeast’s work in adding easy sour and undemanding funky flavors.
I spent an hour leisurely enjoying this beer. I figured that if John and Chris Tronger could wait six years to age and blend this beer I could take a long time to sip and enjoy it. The time I invested let the flavors bloom over the course of an hour. During that time I would swirl the glass and slowly sip. I was letting the beer rest until the almond flavors become pithy.
Even in the last sip, the 11% ABV never appeared either in flavor or with the nose deep in the glass meant to hold all those aromas close.
The brett and wild yeast characters are mild and inviting. The lacto soothing. This beer plays with the subtle end of flavors, seeking for you to sip and find them instead of clubbing you over the head. This is a beer offering you the chance to find earthy wood and nut flavors with a tart cherry, sour brett and slight wild funk in the finish. The rich mouth feel lingers and lets the flavors last. The tulip glassware brings this all forth and is the stage for a great beer to hold the limelight.
In short, take the time to share a bottle of Wild Elf and do it in proper glassware; for with this one, it matters.
Post Script:
Beer can shaped glasses are vastly underrated.
The glass pictured above is specifically a TeKu glass. (Thank you friend of the blog and guest on Episode 2 of Operation Shutdown, Easy Pretzel, for pointing this out.)
Yes… This is another Troegs Independent Brewing beer post. I make no apologies. Homerism is just one of my biases.
Hell… I wrote this while drinking my way throught the majority of a four pack of Nible Giant.
Mad Elf over the years has been one of those beers where interest for me has waned. This iteration renews the lease. Its a damn good beer.
I feel like Troegs has not done enough to play up all the work that went into this beer. The “mother sauce” for this beer was put into barrels six years ago and was blended with other interrelations to give us the beer just released. I feel like this should be more prominently referenced when charging $12 a bottle.
Bearcat On Beer 