So it must be time to announce the topic for The Session #44 on Oct. 1.
Ashley Routson of Drink With The Wench titles it “Frankenstein Beers,” and offers some explanation.

Many craft brewers are like Frankenstein. They have become mad scientists obsessed with defying the laws of brewing and creating beers that transcend style guidelines. These “Frankenstein Beers” challenge the way people perceive beer. They are freaks of nature — big, bold and intense. The ingredients resemble those of a beer and the brewing process might appear to be normal, but some aspects of the entire experience are experimental, unorthodox and insane.

So . . .

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to write a blog post on “Frankenstein Beers.” There are no rules about how to write about this topic — feel free to highlight a Frankenstein brewer, brewery, beer tasting notes . . . or just your opinions on the concept.

To take it to the next level perhaps a “Frankenstein beer” created on a “Frankenbrew system.”

I’m posting this and hitting the road, but I look forward to reading everybody’s essays thoughts (reworded in deference to JayZeis) when we return.

A lot of driving between now and Monday evening, perhaps a photo or two to Posterous (because it’s easy), and a tweet or three.

Have a good weekend, and remember why Monday is called Labor Day. Definitely one for us beer drinkin’ folks.

One particular paragraph got me thinking.

In fact, Pachorek was amazed at how quickly craft brewers had been able to make beers that were as good at or better than what the Belgians have been doing for generations.

Given that each year at GABF I end up with less time for blogging than I expect a “question of the day” might be a bit much, but I’ll aim for that . . . and maybe settle for a “question of the festival.”

Wish me luck, since question No. 1 for brewers will be: Do you brew beers that are as good at or better than what the Belgians have been doing for generations? Make that: Do you brew beers that are as good at or better than the Europeans have for generations?

Miller serves as a proxy for those of us in the twenty-first century who are astonished at the amount of alcohol consumed during working hours on Madison Avenue in the 1960s. But why would we be? After all, as Daniel Okrent explains in Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition president James Madison drank an entire pint of whiskey daily. America and booze have always been on a first name basis, even during Prohibition.

Prohibition books come along quite regularly, but Okrent combines the sense of a historian with a great eye for detail and and ability to to entertain. For instance, one story about a sequence of events in the remote upper Michigan mining town of Iron River ultimately makes it clear why many hard working, middle class Americans would never obey the laws of Prohibition. It’s a little long to recount in detail here, so one paragraph from page 123:

Mostly, though, the press contingent got indoor pictures of Dalrymple staring down the thrity-four-year-old Mcdonough in the lobby of the Iron Inn or exterior shots of him out in the frigid February weather, sledgehammer in hand, smashing open the barrels of wine his men had managed to intercept. As vivid gouts of Dago Red saturated a nhearby snowbank, turning it a deep, grapy purple, a camerman from Pathé News gave a local man called “Necktie” Sensiba fifty cents to drop to his knees and eat the snow. The high school kids who joined him didn’t have to be paid.

His is a tale of politics — every beginning political science class should study how a collection of minorities managed to get a congressional amendment (nothing as simple as a law) passed that a clear majority clearly opposed — and thus politicians and other bigger than life characters. Grade schoolers today may not learn about Anti-Saloon League honcho Wayne B. Wheeler but Philip Seymour Hoffman would be mighty fine playing the part in a movie.

(The cover of the book says, “To be featured in a forthcoming Ken Burns documentary on PBS,” and that Okrent uses these characters to advance the plot surely appeals to Burns.)

Last Call is all encompassing — though it’s greatest strength is the chapters describing what happened during Prohibition itself — with plenty of before, during and after.

This seems almost like an aside, but although there’s plenty of beer inside it’s not really a beer book. Yet it fits quite neatly on the shelf next to Maureen Ogle’s Ambitious Brew. Okrent doesn’t detail how beer changed because of Prohibition, since, as Ogle explained, it didn’t. The road toward consolidation and a beer monoculture (dramatically reversed in the 1970s and ’80s) was paved before Prohibition.

You also know that Blue Moon Belgian White Ale from MillerCoors and AB InBev’s Shock Top Belgian White grew 27 percent and 34 percent respectively (Shock Top off a much smaller base). But because the numbers fly by rather fast during a 55-slide, one-hour presentation some things take a while to sink in. Like that Stella Artois outsells Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, but not Blue Moon Belgian White.

Since I seem to be in numbers mode these days I assembled a chart that mashes up the top 15 selling craft (IRI does not include Blue Moon in that group, but does include beers from the Craft Brewers Alliance although those aren’t craft beers according to the BA definition), super premium and imported beers. These are all beers consumers pay more for.

The IRI figures are based on scans at grocery stores, drug stores, convenience stores, some liquor stores and a few other locations. Signature IRI does not capture every sale, or include draft sales, but more than enough to paint an accurate picture. They are for the first six months of 2010, and — just for fun — compared to the first six months of 2006. Sales are in millions of dollars.

*** Bud Light Lime did not exist in 2006. Stella Artois was not among the top 15 selling imports (No. 15 on the list sold $12 million).

A couple of other notes: New Belgium Fat Tire sales are up more than 14 percent to $18.2 million (compared to $11.4 million for the first six months of 2006. Michelob Amber Bock outsold Blue Moon White in 2006 ($15 million to $14.1), and now it outsells Shock Top ($9.9 million to $8.5 million).

Last week I dug up a bunch of figures about the number of breweries and how much beer they made more than 100 years ago. Mike asked for a little perspective. So this chart starts in 1870 (the number of breweries peaked in 1873) and includes how much beer each brewery produced, on average, as well as per capita consumption by a growing population.

It tracks until 1920, the year Prohibition went into effect and picks up in 1935, a couple of years after repeal. The number of breweries steadily declined after 1935, while per capita consumption eventually surpassed 1910, peaking at 23.8 gallons a head in 1981. By 2000, of course, the three largest breweries produced more than 80 percent of American beer.

Data from the History of the Brewing Industry and Brewing Science in America and the U.S. Brewers Association.

How does their beer compare to the craft beer scene in your area? Are they doing anything in a new/exciting way? What advice, as a beer consumer, would you give to these new breweries?

Take this opportunity to say hello to the new neighbors in your area. Maybe its a nanobrewery that came to a festival for the first time that you vowed to “check out” later. Maybe it’s a new local beer on a shelf on the corner store that you hadn’t seen before. Dig deeper and tell us a story about the “new kids on the block.” I look forward to welcoming them to the neighborhood!

All bloggers are welcome to participate. Just leave a link below The Beer Babe’s announcement.

I understand the concept of nano brewery (or nanobrewery). But if we are going to have a rule about when a brewery is too big to be called micro shouldn’t there be one for nano?

I ask because the Green Dragon in Portland, Ore., is sponsoring its second Nano Beer Festival next week — “25+ nano breweries and food from Portland’s food cart scene.” Referred to as Nano Food Carts (a nice touch) on this poster.

If you give the poster a good look you’ll notice Upright among the breweries. We visited Upright last year and there’s a 10-barrel brewhouse at the heart of that system. The guys at Berkshire Brewing in Massachusetts cranked out 6,000 barrels one year on their seven-barrel system. Granted, they had to be crazy, and microbrewery has been defined on the basis of production rather than size of each batch, but nano generally refers to something very, or even extremely, small.

A nanosecond is a billionth of a second. Feel free to check my math (because it is probably wrong), but the amounts get too small if we try this with billionths. Start with a 700-barrel brewhouse — mega breweries make even bigger batches but consider of the Anheuser-Busch plant outside of Fort Collins, Colo., which is gigantic. Divide 700 by 1,000,000, then multiply by 31 (that’s how many gallons are in a barrel). Multiply that by 128 (ounces in gallon) and we’re at a batch size of less than 3 ounces. That’s a millionth of 700 barrels. Divide that by 1,000 for a billionth.

Screw it. Let’s just call them craft breweries. Much more concise.

In 2004, The Potosi Brewery Complex restoration project received a $449,574 grant from the Federal Highway Administration’s National Scenic Byways Program to help renovate the building in order to attract tourism. Straddling the Mississippi River in Wisconsin, the renovated brewery became home to the National Brewery Museum, the Potosi Brewing Company Transportation Museum, a Great River Road Interpretive Center, and a micro brewery.

I don’t understand why this is a bad thing. As far as government projects go a half million dollars isn’t much. Efforts to create a national museum have failed elsewhere. Beyond the fact the museum houses rotating exhibits of items on loan from members of the American Breweriana Association there’s the Research Library. What could be more important?

A few photos from when we visited a couple of years ago:

Is this different than what America’s megabreweries breweries tried in the mid 1990s? On the surface, but maybe not that different. Will Tenth & Blake prove more successful? We’d be guessing, wouldn’t we? Before you do, consider a bit of history.

1995. “We are behind the curve, no question about it. We need to learn about specialty beer,” Scott Barnum, then general manager of Miller American Specialty Craft Beer Co., told All About Beer magazine. That’s the year that Miller bought a stake in the Celis Brewery and Shipyard Brewing. Leinenkugel and Miller Reserve were the other key brands in the ASCBC portfolio. “We have people in here helping us train our palates and our noses, working with our sensory development. We listen to guys tell us how they built their microbrewing businesses, about investment, capital. We talk to entrepreneurs. We are immersing ourselves in this world.”

Anheuser-Busch formed what it called the Specialty Group of Anheuser-Busch. “We are trying to think differently,” said Jeff Jones, who was senior product manager for the group. “That’s the whole thought process of the specialty beer business. I do have a passion for beer. We have to think differently from a large brewer, and that was the purpose for separating out our group.”

Coors established its own specialty group, Unibev, much earlier than the others, and in 1995 its star was Killian’s. The year before bock, Oktoberfest and wheat beers all flunked various trials. However, Unibev managing director Tex McCarthy said that a new brand, Blue Moon, wouldn’t carry the Coors name. “We want them to be disassociated from the Coors family. . . . If people see a major brewer’s name on a micro it loses some of the cachet that makes the beer interesting to begin with.”

You know the rest. It didn’t happen over night and it didn’t happen because Coors threw a bunch of advertising money behind the brand but Blue Moon Belgian White became the best selling wheat beer in America ever.

1997. Miller remained focused on working with regional partners rather than brewing specialty beers (the Reserve line had been axed by then). “We’ve said before that this is a regional business,” Barnum said. “More and more, you will see people contracting, narrowing their focus.”

That didn’t exactly work out. Miller ended up buying out Pierre Celis and his family and by 2000 had closed the Celis Brewery. Miller sold its stake in Shipyard back to Alan Pugsley and Fred Forsley and that company has thrived.

Forsley explained what happened a few years after he and Pugsley regained full control of their brewery: “I think initially the plan was well conceived, where Miller was focusing on portfolio selling. The whole Miller network was designed so their sales force could come in and sell their whole portfolio of beer. American Specialty Craft Beer had a relationship on the sales side with Molson, the imports, Asahi, and so on. That way a salesman was responsible not only for Shipyard but Molson. They had a variety of resources to pull from. When it changed from being a portfolio sale to a priority sale, as acknowledged by everybody in the organization, the goal became to make Miller’s main brands their focus. That really caused major problems for us. Up until then the sales efforts were working very well.”

A press release from MillerCoors indicates Tenth & Blake “will own the strategic business drivers — marketing, trade marketing and an independent sales organization dedicated to the craft and imports business.” That’s the something different. But it’s not all it takes.

“We didn’t really fit into the Coors distribution system until about five years ago,” Keith Villa, who wrote the recipe for Blue Moon White, said last year when I visited Coors while doing the research for Brewing with Wheat. A sales force is not what made that beer. Many readers here feel obliged to beat up on Blue Moon White, and yes it has became hip, a badge even. But Villa put a beer in the glass that drinkers who are willing to pay more want to drink.

Fifteen years, and more, after the people working at the nation’s largest breweries said they were ready to think like smaller breweries how many successes similar to Blue Moon can you point to? Maybe it’s not a matter of training. Maybe it’s company DNA.