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Showing posts with label Breakside. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Breakside. Show all posts

Monday, October 10, 2016

Why Locals Say Breakside is Portland's Best

Over the past couple years, I've welcomed a number of national and foreign beer dignitaries who've made the trek to far Portland. Rarely do they visit long enough to sample from the full range of good breweries we have in Portland (nevermind Oregon). So of course they want to see our best. But best is a funny thing. Two stops on just about every visitor's agenda are Cascade and Hair of the Dog. No one is going to argue that these aren't excellent breweries, but they make very particular kinds of beers--boozy, super intense, and not particularly sessionable. Special occasion beers. (I even met Brewery History editor Tim Holt at Cascade, and The Kernel's Toby Munn at Hair of the Dog.)

Photo by Ezra Johnson-Greenough, who has a great
report on the GABF at the New School
.














When you live in a town and spend most of your time drinking in sessions, you appreciate different things. You appreciate those breweries that can deliver the goods no matter what the beer is-- do a top shelf kölsch, IPA, barrel-aged wild ale, kettle-soured German ale, saison, and a stout, and you have achieved something rare. A good metric for this is that moment when you're standing in front of a barroom taplist and see an unfamiliar beer from a familiar brewery. Do you order it immediately or wonder if it's actually in the brewery's wheelhouse?

If you asked a dozen beer geeks in Portland to name city's the best brewery, I'd be surprised if half didn't say Breakside, and if you gave them top five, probably 11 would include Dekum Street's finest. It rewards the repeated visits locals give it, when, over the course of a year as their mood passes through all these different styles, they sample broadly. That's when beers like kölsches pop--when you're really craving one. If you go to a city looking to be wowed by the best breweries and the most sublime beers, a kölsch is going to be a hard style to make the case.

I bring all of this up because over the weekend Breakside picked up three more medals at the GABF, and the distribution of their nine medals is pretty representative of why we admire them (asterisks equal 2016) :
  • Rye beer*
  • English pale* (two different years)
  • "Australian-Style or International-Style Pale Ale" (Their session IPA)*
  • German-style sour ale
  • Dry stout
  • American-style IPA
  • English-style mild ale
  • American-style strong pale ale
Breakside is that extremely rare brewery that continues to be on the leading edge of palate evolution but one that can brew absolutely any style very well (in Oregon, the only other brewery that achieves it is Block 15). If you are an out-of-towner planning a trip to Portland and you've seen all the hype this brewery gets, you may well leave with a more vivid memory of the visit to Cascade and wonder what all the Breakside fuss was about. It's not the kind of brewery that specializes in the show-stopping special-occasion beers tourists love; it makes beer locals learn to appreciate over the months and years they spend drinking Breakside's uniformly accomplished beers. Now you know.

______________

Oregon took home 21 medals this year, and congrats to everyone who scored some bling. Special kudos to Matt Van Wyk, who picked up a gold in brett beer category with his brand-new project, Alesong.

Tuesday, July 19, 2016

On the IPA Cutting Edge...

No brewery is doing more to push the evolution of IPAs forward than Breakside. (See here, here, and here for recent discussions.) Well, the evolution continues apace. In a recent blog post, head brewer Ben Edmunds writes about some of the things they've been working on recently:
Back to the Future IPA (aka BTTF) is the third release in our series of rotating draft-only IPAs for the year. BTTF is a departure from the previous two releases in the series: Tall Guy IPA and Rainbows & Unicorns. Those two are beers we’ve brewed a number of times and have more or less “set” recipes. By contrast, Back to the Future is a beer that always changes, both each year and– in this year’s incarnations– each batch.
Since I am a Serious Journalist (TM), I felt that just quoting extensively from that blog post was inadequate. For true value-added content, you need Ben to elaborate on some of the things he mentions in that post--and I'm just the journalist to cut-and-paste the replies he sent to me via email. All kidding aside, this is cool stuff and worth your attention. Even a beer so dominated by a single ingredient can be inflected by other ingredients and techniques. Ben discusses the way flaked grains, water treatments, new hop varieties, and yeast strains can transform an IPA. Read on...













Ben started by noting what the last iteration of Back to the Future experimented with:
Specifically, we used BTTF 2015 to explore some questions we had about the use of flaked grains in IPAs. We also trialed a much softer water profile than we normally use with our IPAs. As with any trial, there were parts of the 2015 version that we liked and learned from, and elements that we didn’t. The things that we liked are now incorporated into many of our other hoppy beers. Both Lunch Break and Tall Guy use a good portion of flaked barley in the malt bill, for example. The hops that we used BTTF 2015– Ella and Azacca– have both found a home in our hop schedules for several other beers, including Hop Delivery Mechanism and Imperial Red.
To which I asked about both the flaked grains and soft water.  Ben comments:
I think there is a lot of emphasis amongst brewers these days, especially East Coast brewers, on flaked grains. They tend to use a lot of wheat and oats. We'll use all three (as well as flaked corn and flaked rice, in other beers) in hoppy beers, but I think we tend to use flaked barley more than the other flaked grains because of its more neutral character. Flaked wheat and flaked oats are great but tend to be very characterful; flaked corn (which we use in our Coconut IPA) and flaked rice (Rainbows & Unicorns) are also great. They all help round out body with some light grain character that allows hops to shine.  

Softer water is still a subject of debate within Breakside. Generally, we have come to favor a slightly Burtonized water profile for most of our hoppy beers. When we first opened, I used a classic Burton ratio (10:1 sulfate-to-chloride) on most hoppy beers. Over time, we've backed off on that in an effort to allow the finish to come off a little softer and let the hop flavor linger into the aftertaste. Most of our core beers are still 5:1 sulfate-to-chloride or higher (Wanderlust, Breakside IPA, and IGA are all pretty Burtonized at 8:1), but many of the new recipes we've worked on go down to the 3:1 range. We have tried a few pub beers with a very soft water profile (no Burtonizing or a chloride-heavy profile), and that gets a little flabby for our own preferences. BTTF uses the 3:1 profile, which, in my mind, optimizes hop flavor and a refreshingly snappy finish.
Water is something I need to address seriously at some point. When I was speaking with Nick Arzner on Friday, he mentioned this issue as well. He'd just done a collaboration with Great Notion. He also mentioned that they go for heavy chloride in their water to soften the palates of their "New England" IPAs. This, Nick suggested, was one of the most important ways these beers were distinguished from West Coast IPAs. 

Ben continued in his blog post discussing the newer hops they've been using.
This year, we’ve revived BTTF in the same spirit, brewing it with combinations of hops that we think have a lot of promise and using this beer as an opportunity for us to explore some “new directions” in making IPAs. Distilling it down to 3 key areas, this year’s Back to the Future IPAs are exploring the following territory: Pairing a new and interesting hop (Topaz, Lemondrop, Idaho 7) with hops that are already beloved (Mosaic, Citra, and Ella). Each batch of this beer focuses on a different combination of those hops. The first batch, which is currently on the market, is heavy on Topaz and Mosaic. The second round of brews will be mainly Citra and Lemondrop. The final batches– the ones that will be hitting the market in August– will use Ella and Idaho 7.
I know that the brewers at Breakside have novel hopping regimes based on whether they think a hop is "punchy" (spiky, sharp flavors) or "soft." I asked him how these new hops behaved.
Topaz is a lot like Galaxy but without the intense stone fruit character; it comes off as a little waxy/petrol the way many Southern Hemisphere hops do, but it has some nice underlying tropical notes. Lemondrop is very citric, as advertised-- kind of like a super Cascade. And Idaho 7 is reminiscent of a softer Centennial-- lots of lemongrass and Fruity Pebbles for me. Culmination uses it a lot in their Urizen Session IPA. I'd say that Topaz is very punchy, Idaho 7 pretty punchy, and Lemondrop soft. 
Finally, Ben talked about the interplay between yeast strains and hop expression. He writes that Breakside is "using a different yeast strain with this beer this year, and it seems to respond to American hops differently than our normal house ale strain." This is not just a matter of the way different flavors inflect each other, like blending colors. There's an actual biochemical process that happens in which hop compounds are transformed during fermentation--an issue I've written about recently. Ben expanded:
I think that the most interesting part of this whole experiment might be the use of a non-traditional "West Coast" yeast, much in the same way that the East Coast guys are favoring English yeasts for their IPAs. There's some real digging to be done about yeast selection and the future of American IPA.
So

Tuesday, June 21, 2016

Engineering an IPA That Lasts

Source















This has been in the inbox for far too long, so let's have a look at it now. Grant Golden sent me this question, and it is the key that opens a box of fascinating information.

"I was wondering if there is any chance you might be interested in writing about or even just shedding some light on what about Breakside's IPA woos judges in almost every major beer competition in the states. I think it is a solid built-to-style American IPA, however, I just can't see how it continues to shine through and dominate when there is a plethora of other very, very well-constructed IPAs out there."

As it happens, I've discussed this with Breakside's brewer, Ben Edmunds. In the months before Breakside won GABF gold for its flagship IPA, the brewers had set about re-engineering that beer so it was more shelf-stable. What people love about the best IPAs are their fresh hoppiness, which is that combination of aromatics, flavor, and bitterness and how those elements play off the malt bill and (in some cases) fermentation characteristics. One of my favorite quote comes from a technical paper on aging beer, and the writers put it this way: "However, the constituents of freshly bottled beer are not in chemical equilibrium. Thermodynamically, a bottle of beer is a closed system and will thus strive to reach a status of minimal energy and maximal entropy." 

The entropy happens faster in IPAs, and the qualities that make the best ones so good are also the qualities that dissipate the quickest. When you put an IPA in a bottle, you have a very narrow window in which it will still taste as it does on tap at the brewery, and then it begins to go through a change. If you haven't prepared the beer for how it's going to taste at 30, 45, and 60 days as it goes through those changes you're left with an empty, hollow space where the flavor and aroma used to be. Here's Ben on that process:
“You have 20 days of brewery freshness and then it begins to degrade. If you bottle condition, you might buy yourself a week. But by day 30 you’re dealing with a fundamentally different beer than you had at day one. When you’re building these beers you should know what that beer will taste like at day 30. You can lament that ‘oh, it doesn’t taste like it used to.’ But knowing what that oxidative curve is and what those flavors will be is really important. Some hop aroma and flavors that oxidize are more pleasant than others.” 
There's no research into the process Ben describes, and they've been approaching it through trial and error. One of the reasons Breakside's various IPAs do well in contests is because they taste better when flights are finally poured out for judges, weeks after brewing, than other beers. That's because the brewery isn't just trying to make the best IPA at day 15, but one that is still toothsome at day 90--which requires an entirely different recipe. Other breweries that ignore the changes their beers go through may be disappointed in contest results, but they're essentially being graded on different beers than they sent.

As we spoke, Ben described the sensory change their Wanderlust IPA goes through (it's not their flagship, which is just called "IPA") by way of description.
“If you take Wanderlust as an example, the first fifteen days is all Mosaic and then it goes through this adolescence and between day 15 and 30 and what’s happening is this weird interference with Mosaic dropping out, but around day 30 the Amarillo starts to come forward and it becomes this new beer around day 30. When you have that beer from day 30 to 45, it has a little bit of tropical dankness, but essentially all that Mosaic character is gone and it becomes more bright, citrus peel, marmalade. I like to think how a hoppy beer is going to last on a shelf, and I don’t mind it going through this evolution.” 
He added that in their experience, some hops have "more legs" than others. Not surprisingly, they're some of the classics--Cascade and especially Centennial. Amarillo are good as well. 

So there you go. Commercial breweries have different sets of challenges depending on when and how they sell beer. If you're a brewpub that can move a flagship IPA through the pub in a month, you don't have to think about this stuff. If you're sending it out in bottles, particularly if you're sending it throughout the country, you have to consider what violence age and oxidation will wreak. Or, I suppose, if you're sending it to Denver to win a medal in the IPA category.

Tuesday, June 07, 2016

Beer Sherpa Recommends: Breakside Rainbows and Unicorns

The city of Portland has been sweltering in a record-breaking heat over the past few days. Our records never impress anyone, but consider that the average Portlander is like a salamander. We require soft, downy clouds, moderate temperatures, and lots of liquid to stay alive. So a 100-degree June day is, to the Portlander, an existential threat. We hiss at the devil sun when it delivers these blows.



















On such days, the Portland salamander must watch what he drinks, lest he worsen matters. Beers light in body and alcohol are a must; bonus points go to those limned with acid or fruit, and those that deliver a restorative snap. There are many possible choices out there, but I'd like to direct your attention to Northeast Dekum. One of the finest such beers was on offer at last year's Oregon Brewers Fest, and by delightful serendipity, started pouring again minutes before I arrived at Breakside last Friday. Its return was perfectly timed. What an ideal sunny-day beer.

Rainbows and Unicorns could serve as a perfect argument that the term "IPA" has really come to mean everything and nothing at all. It is just 5.1% and 30 IBUs, both way out of range for an American IPA. On the other hand, it is quintessentially American in its hopping, and in this way makes perfect sense as an IPA.  It is lusciously juicy (El Dorado, Galaxy, and Comet hops) and does seem to have a little bittering fizz to it despite the low BUs, and yet it is light as air, springy, and winning. (The curious malt bill includes Maris Otter and flaked rice.) It's way too intensely hoppy (not bitter, but hoppy) to qualify as a pale ale, too juicy/citrusy to be anything but American. If it's not an IPA, what else is it?

Most importantly, it's the beer the IPA lover wants on scorching days when a 7.5% beer means certain death. It delivers all the flavor you want in a spritely little package. I don't know if it's pouring anywhere but the pub on Dekum yet, but what better excuse to go lounge there, al fresco, in the late-afternoon shade?

_______________________

"Beer Sherpa Recommends" is an irregular feature.  In this fallen world, when the number of beers outnumber your woeful stomach capacity by several orders of magnitude, you risk exposing yourself to substandard beer.  Worse, you risk selecting substandard beer when there are tasty alternatives at hand.  In this terrible jungle of overabundance, wouldn't it be nice to have a neon sign pointing to the few beers among the crowd that really stand out?  A beer sherpa, if you will, to guide you to the beery mountaintop.  I don't profess to drink all the beers out there, but from time to time I stumble across a winner and when I do, I'll pass it along to you.

Tuesday, February 17, 2015

Portland's Favorite IPA

The Oregon Hophouse has recently been running a little experiment.  They invited patrons to try a flight of twelve IPAs and vote on their favorites.  In a certain sense, the free market functions as a way of determining patrons' favorite beers, too.  But in that case, people may be influenced by price, ad campaigns, the image of a brewery, peer pressure, or proximity.  Here it was just twelve unmarked beers and the palates of the tasters.  The flight contained:
  • Barley Brown’s Pallet Jack
  • Boneyard RPM
  • Breakside IPA
  • Crux Outcast
  • Double Mountain Hop Lava
  • Fort George Vortex
  • Gigantic IPA
  • Goodlife Descender
  • Hop Valley Alphadelic
  • Laurelwood Workhorse
  • Migration Luscious Lupulin
  • Ninkasi Total Domination
Care to guess which one came out on top?  Before I tell you, last year the champeen was Boneyard--but the beers weren't served blind.  This year, 864 people cast a ballot and the results looked like this: 
Barley Brown Pallet Jack: 160 (18.5%)*
Breakside IPA:132 (15.2%)
Boneyard RPM: 123 (14.2%)
I'm interested in this experiment because I think it tracks the momentary preferences of Oregonians.  Boneyard has definitely been the most recent example of the Oregon palate, with its thick body and saturated late-addition flavors and aromas.  Pallet Jack is lighter and sharper and more dank--to me it seems a bit more Californian. (A characterization I suspect would make a good Baker Citian cringe.) Breakside is a more classic interpretation, with tons of citrus and a hint of pine.  So does this suggest a move away from the Boneyard mode to something a little more universal?  Probably that's going too far--Boneyard did hang in at a respectable third.  But still, it's at least suggestive.

Interesting side-note.  In an email, the Hophouse's Kirsten Seitz added this bit of detail: "Breakside was in fourth/fifth place until the third week, when both locations saw a drastic increase in votes for Breakside.  It even earned the most votes during a week at each location in total votes, but it still wasn't enough to surpass Pallet Jack's monthly totals.  It was incredibly interesting to witness the change, and the staff felt certain that it was a new batch of Breakside."  I offer that without a lot of commentary--though I'd love it if someone from Breakside would care to weigh in with theories.

________________
*Does this prove Pallet Jack is definitively Portland's fave IPA?  No.  It was not a scientific study and there are any number of variables that were not controlled for.  But it was a blind tasting, and so I'd be leery to dismiss it outright, either. 

Wednesday, March 12, 2014

Hop Bursting (Part 2, How the Brewers Do It)

This is a follow up post.  To read the first part go here.

Yesterday we discussed the newly en vogue technique dubbed "hop bursting," wherein a brewer uses very few early-addition hops (or none).  Instead, she dumps in loads and loads of late-addition hops, partly to eke out a few IBUs, and partly to saturate the beer in juicy aromas and flavors.  All well and good, but as a practical matter, how does one do it?

First Wort and Mash Hopping
I turned first to Ben Edmunds, who made three different versions this winter (including possibly the first titular "hop burst" beer).  He and the Breakside brewers approached it in a quasi-scientific way, keeping several of the variables constant (malts and hops differed, but the water, IBUs, and ABV were identical).  I would expect nothing less of them.  In all cases, they used either a first wort hop or mash hop addition.  (Ben observed, correctly, that "I imagine there are some folks who think that First Wort or Mash hopping would knock these out of the 'hop bursted' category."  No doubt they will--but as I think we'll see, that is almost certain to become standard at the commercial level.)  In mash hopping, you put the hops in with the mash where they don't get to boiling temperatures and don't go on to the kettle.  In first-wort hopping, you throw the hops in while the beer is coming over from the lauter and then heating up to a boil--it's standard in the Czech Republic.  In both cases, breweries believe the hopping is gentler and milder.

Here are the three different hop schedules they tried:

1) First wort Hop, 15 min addtn, 5 min addtn, whirlpool addtn, 2 x Dry Hop
2) Mash hop, whirlpool addtn, 2 x dry hop
3) Mash Hop, 20 min addtn, whirlpool addtn, fermenter hop, dry hop
Their conclusions?
  1. Two dry hops (or a fermenter hop and a dry hop) create aromas that are almost never achieved with a single dry hop, even if the single dry hop quantity is doubled.
  2.  Mash hops seem to provide more residual hop flavor than first wort hops; hop utilization (and bitterness) from first wort hopping is significantly higher than from mash hopping.
  3. Varietal and quantity of hops still seem to be more important than any particular sequence of late kettle addition hops.
  4. All of these beers had a danker, "fresher hop" flavor than beers where we used more classic "flavor additions" at 30 mins.

"Different" Bitterness
As you can see, Ben was finding different qualities in the flavors and aromas depending on how the hops were used.  One of the theories about hop bursting is that it provides a "softer" bitterness.  There are so many different elements that go into our perception of hoppiness that I'm skeptical of this claim.  Zach Beckwith at Three Creeks in Bend Sisters is, too.  His comment:
At Three Creeks we have been playing with hop bursting in a number of beers over the last 5-6 months.  In my experience the notion that eliminating the bittering charge creates a "softer" bitterness is unfounded; more accurately I would call it a "different" bitterness, more of a late hitting, lingering bitterness.  I attribute that to the use of massive quantities of the new school hop varieties that more often than not have alpha acid values at 10%+.  My two cents is that at least with our beers we've had the best results with our Hodag CDA where a maltier backbone seems to minimize that "different" bitterness.  I have incorporated a "modified" hop bursting in our Raptor Rye IPA with great results, simply reducing the bittering charge.  I would also like to mention that Stone may not have invented hop bursting but Mitch Steele has popularized it recently with his IPA book and a recent Zymurgy article on the subject.  A key component Steele points to is using a great number of varieties as well as quantities of late hops.
If you didn't read that whole paragraph carefully, let me draw your eye to the last sentence, which echoes Ben's final point about varieties.


Foam Stability
Finally, I'd like to give the last word to Mitch Steele, Stone's brewmaster.  In comments on the original Facebook post, he acknowledged Stone's inspiration for Go To IPA. 
Hop Bursting is a term and process that homebrewers developed a few years ago. We take much inspiration from homebrewing, many of us at Stone are/have been homebrewers. And lots of commercial brewers use this technique--though they may not call it that. I think for certain beers, it really works.
We had a further private exchange, and I asked whether there were any bittering hops in Go To and he mentioned a small amount of first wort hops.  These aren't used so much for bittering, though, as to keep foam down in the kettle.  As I was doing my Googling, I found this reference several times.  It may well be that homebrewers can get away with no early hops, but on a commercial scale, this may be a problem.  Since the definition is still forming, I'd suggest being a little loose about whether or not mash, first-wort, or even standard bittering hops disqualify a beer from being called "hop burst."  The goal should be to produce a sensory effect, not adhere to an arbitrary standard.  In other words, the proof is in the mouth, not the recipe.

(And if you'll forgive me one parenthetical indulgence, I'll add my own two cents.  Based on my own experience with my pale, mash hopping seems to accentuate that saturated quality of flavor the most, but it's pretty easy to overshoot it and end up with a beer that tastes like orange juice.  I do like a little touch of bittering stiffness in there to round things out.  My preference is mash hop plus a dash of bittering hops, then come in strong at 20 minutes.  I will try Ben's dual dry-hop this year.  Please feel free to share your own experiences in comments.)

Thanks all--I don't know about you, but I am a smarter man today than when I started the week.

Tuesday, December 10, 2013

The Century Mark: Breakside's Unsettling Milestone

The folks at Guinness no longer record alcohol-related feats (an irony, given that the man who founded  them, Hugh Beaver--real name--was a brewer), but I wonder if Breakside might not qualify for "Most Industrious Brewery."  In the course of one calendar year, the busy little brewery managed to produce one hundred different kinds of beer.  That's not a hundred batches--a hundred beers.  (The mad scientists continued to prepare Breakside's regular line all the while.)  Sometime this weekend, I believe, the centurion will be identified and released.

Source: The Rian Group
It's a harmless enough milestone.  Many of those beers were like the spray of distant stars in the forest sky--too many to count or consider, and always secondary to the familiar figures of Orion and the Bears.  I sampled a few of them, but I was drawn back to the brewery throughout the warm months for the pilsner and Dortmund lager that glowed so brightly all summer long.  Broad experimentation didn't come at the expense of my faves.

But I am for other reasons unsettled by this development.

Let's rewind the tape.  Back in the dark days before craft brewing, there was effectively one style of beer available in the US.  Beer drinkers therefore distinguished themselves by selecting one brand and sticking with it for years--or a lifetime.  As there were Ford and GM men, there were Bud and High Life men.  Craft brewing came as a corrective to this sorry state, offering--joy!--some variety.  Breweries in the 1980s and 1990s had a flagship, a regular line, and perhaps a seasonal or three.  Any brewery that made ten different beers in a year would be considered flighty and unfocused.  Half that was more like it.

Breweries in the aughts discovered the delights (and lucre) of specialty beers, and enjoyed buzz and press when they managed to attract beer geek attention with an Abyss, Dark Lord, Heady Topper or Hopslam.  Which of course begat more specialty beers.  And then flagships and regular lines began to sag.  I was gobstruck this year to see the Widmer Brothers replace Drifter with Alchemy--pale for pale--just four years after Drifter's release.  Drifter was one of the best-selling new beers nationally in 2009 (and that includes the big breweries), but it wasn't enough to keep the attention of novelty-seeking beer fans.  I was so struck by it that I met with Rob Widmer to discuss the changes in the brewing biz.  "Young drinkers now are so promiscuous,” he told me.  "Whatever it is and however good it is, no matter what product it is, once they’ve had it, the shelf life is incredibly limited.  All their lives it’s been ‘that was great: what’s new, what’s next?’”

As good as Float (the Dortmund) was--easily on the short list of my faves of the year--the best beer I had at Breakside in 2013 was a tmavé, a Czech-style dark lager.  It actually began life as an Irish stout, but through some happy accident or another ended up getting lagered.  It was a dead ringer for some of the tmavés I had in the Czech Republic last year.  (When I visited Budvar, brewer Adam Broz agreed that his tmavé had a malt bill that looked a great deal like an Irish stout.)  Of course, that beer was one of those little, distant stars, already long extinct by the time you see it.  There wasn't much of that lager left, and the brewers had no intention of making it again.  Pity the drinker who fell in love with one of the more obscure of the 100.

This is the dilemma for the modern beer drinker.  Choice is again the problem--though now we have too much of it.  We have neither the stomach space nor time to be sampling from the dozens of beers made by dozens of breweries ever year.  And to that limited stomach space, we now have to decide to commit old reliables or role the dice on a new frolic that may be a gem or a dud.  (Praise be to breweries that offer linear pricing and half pints.)  God forbid you should fall in love with a beer--in the current churn, who knows how long before it gets dumped for something new.

I realize we have much more serious problems to consider with things like global warming, congressional gridlock, and twerking scandals.  Still, this seems like at the least a minor issue to consider.  And what are blogs for except considering minor issues?

Your thoughts?  Is the beer bounty unalloyed good or does it throw a long, dark shadow across your beer drinking sessions?


Update: Weirdly related headline of the day: Boulder Beer ends distribution of Planet Porter, the oldest craft brew in Colorado (the U.S.?)