Now we begin Year Six of The Session in Indiana. (Year Six, meaning we started five years ago. Pretty amazing. “What Goes Around… Comes Around” was atop the music charts.)

Hoosier Beer Geek Matt Robinson asks we consider this question over beer: What makes local beer better?

Of course I think this is a good idea. www.drinklocalbeer.com is one of those stray URLs I’ve given a home (don’t bother with the link, it brings you to the Appellation Beer front page). So to Matt’s marching orders:

We are hosting the March edition of the session. The topic I’ve been thinking about is local beer. The term is being used by just about every craft brewer in the country. What does it really mean though? Is it more of a marketing term or is there substance behind the moniker? This month I want to think about what makes local beer better? I’m not just talking about the beer itself, although it’s the focal point, but what makes local beer better? My connection to local beer is far from thinking that my beer is actually “local.” Maybe you don’t agree with me, and you can write about that. Bonus points for writing about your favorite local beer and the settings around it being local to you.

I just realized that last year for the March Session we visited Urban Chestnut Brewing in St. Louis. It wasn’t local then. We were still paying property taxes in New Mexico. Perhaps I should hum “What Goes Around… Comes Around.” If I only knew the tune. The fact is, though, there are two breweries closer to our house than UCB, and in addition three breweries opened in the months after UCB. Local has taken on new meaning in St. Louis.

Anyway, opening Ale Street News today I sure was surprised to see a full page advertisement for take home beer cartons.

Nothing much at the Crafty Carton website right now (don’t bother with the “how it works” link; I tried), but apparently there will be March 20.

Ale Street has partnered with British ex-pat Luke Dolby to create Crafty Carton, so there is a story in the brewspaper. “The take-home disposable carton has been part of the British pub for over 20 years and I always feel proud when I see one of our cartons on sale there,” Dolby says for the story.

So think of it as a cardboard growler that holds 32 ounces.

Oh, and the advertisement indicates it is bio-degradable and recycalable.

Did every local television station get the same marching orders this past weekend? Super Bowl: Go find a beer story.

In Cleveland it was about Mickie Reinhart, who has come up with seven flavors of “hops drops,” liquid additives intended to be used in light lagers. The varieties include chocolate and coffee, as opposed to ones, say “tangerine” or “lychee fruit,” that have drinkers and brewers talking about new “flavor” hops.

Reinhart’s not trying to fool anybody that the drops will turn cheap beer into something it’s not. “These are really good for thin, watery tasting beer,” she said.

Anyway, a few Monday morning links, all from England, nothing about Super Bowl commercials.

* Will Hawkes profiles Eddie Gadds of Gadds’ brewery, who sounds like a poet describing his favorite hop, which happens to be his local hop, East Kent Golding: “When you smell them, you know there is a class about them. They’re not particularly pungent, mores the pity – they’re pretty bloody shy. It’s very difficult to find really good ones and it’s even harder to get the flavour out of them. But if you can do it, it’s great.”

* Simon Johnson has assembled his Craft Beer Manifesto in one spot, after first “releasing” it one Tweet at a time. Use only barley that’s been warmed by the breath of kindly owls. Brilliant.

* Zak Avery poses a question for the ages: “What is a brewer?”

Remember those hilarious videos from Breckenridge Brewing a while back? My favorite was “Gravity Activated Pouring.”

They’ve released two more. Probably as good as at least half of those that will be on display Sunday during the Super Bowl.

More than 20 years later, Wall Street Journal reporter Sarah Ellison described a scene where Busch and Doug Muhleman, then A-B’s vice president for brewing and technology, had cans from 1982, 1988, 1993, 1998 and 2003 thawed and set before them in the corporate tasting room. She wrote, “Muhleman . . . says the company didn’t set out to make the beers less bitter. He calls the change ‘creep,’ the result of endlessly modifying the beer to allow for change in ingredients, weather and consumer taste. ‘Through continues feedback, listening to consumers, this is a change over 20, 30, 40 years,’ says Mr. Muhleman, gesturing toward the row of Budweiser cans. ‘Over time there is a drift.’

“The sample cans demonstrate how ‘creep’ works. The difference in taste between two beers brewed five years apart is indistinguishable. Yet, the difference between the 1982 beer and the 2003 beer is distinct. ‘The bones are the same. The same structure,’ says Mr. Muhleman. Overall, however, ‘the beers have gotten a little less bitter.’”

In Why Beer Matters Evan Rail suggests we consider “beer’s unstuck relationship to time.”

Which is why I find myself thinking about beer’s bones. Why when I drink a crappy bottle of Pilsner Urquell it pains me to think about how good it can still taste in the caves underneath the brewery. Why if I didn’t have a cold that disconnected by olfactory system from my brain yesterday — when temperatures here in St. Louis were flat out balmy — I would have been sitting in front of Urban Chestnut Brewing drinking Zwickel, a beer most definitely unstuck in place as well as time.

Beer Matters is first of about Rail’s own relationship with beer.

I can’t explain what beer means for everyone: as a subject, beer is too broad and deep, too varied and multiform, just like the wide public for whom it has clearly come to mean so much. But I can tell you a few things about beer that I like most myself, why beer has come to matter to me, and what I tell people when they ask why I have chosen to write about it.

An allusion to Billy Pilgrim aside, this relationship is an act of free will. He writes, “If the unexamined life has less merit than one which has borne deep investigation, clearly there is some value in caring about what you eat and drink.”

He gives 937 words to his personal obsession with the Polish smoked-wheat beer known as Grodziskie, and part of the story is about how quickly a single beer can disappear.

Despite its recent fall from grace Budweiser hardly seems in such danger. And I don’t really care what a can from 1982 might taste like. But I do appreciate that August Busch III understood why it matters, why beer matters.

*****

Now the full disclosure. Evan Rail and I have been drinking together. He bought rounds. I bought rounds. He emailed me a copy of Why Beer Matters for review. In fact, I bought it from Amazon, in part because we are sort of friends and in part because of curiosity about how the whole “download it to Kindle” would work even though our family does not yet don’t own a Kindle. (We go to the library a lot, plus I read it on my phone.)

The essay runs about 6,500 words, a chapter in some books. You’d like to read it in a beer publication, but find me one that will print something of such length. I have no idea what Beer Matters might lead to from Evan — notice he was “Rail” in the review part, very professional, but this is the personal part — or others. But I hope it’s more.

Ray Daniels predicts that his Cicerone program will 10,000th certification in a matter of weeks. And it seems like only yesterday, as opposed to 79 AD in Pompeii (which is where this photo was taken; in 2008 rather than before Mount Vesuvius erupted). Here are the basics from a little press release:

It may seem like just yesterday that you first heard of the Cicerone Certification Program–the sommelier-like sequence for beer that tests and certifies knowledge among those who sell and serve suds for a living. But the program is now more than four years old and the number of certifications issued at the first level has skyrocketed in the past two years.

We’re writing to tell you that we’ll soon award our 10,000th certification at that first level. That’s a big event for us and for everyone involved with the program. So to celebrate, we’ll offer a unique opportunity for people to sign-up for the program at a great price — but only for a single day.

The best way to track updates is to follow Ray Daniels on Twitter.

* But perhaps we can all agree we like cicerones better than laywers. And, yes, I know passing the first level test doesn’t make a person a “cicerone.” There are Certified Beer Servers, Certified Cicerones and Master Cicerones, but don’t begrudge me Tom Paxton reference.

Go. Comment.

Otherwise, a few links I’ve collected in recent weeks and haven’t managed to passing along.

* Alaskan Brewing has finalized its biofuels project. Soon it will be three years since I wrote about Alaskan getting its mash filter press online. There’s a bottom line here beyond the financial bottom line. This is good for the Alaskan environment.

* Best of the rest, I guess. The explanation Livability came up with for how it picked its “Top 10 Beer Cities” could be more illuminating. “Most beer lovers already know about the big beer cities. The keg has been tapped on places like Portland, Asheville, Fort Collins, NYC, and Chicago. What we’ve been brewing is a list of places beer nuts might miss. These are cities where great beer is being made and more importantly it’s being enjoyed, even celebrated.” No. 1 on this list of Albuquerque. For the record, I’d rather be drinking beer right now in Albuquerque than Asheville, but that’s my personal bias. However, Asheville has a population of 83,393 and Albquerque’s is 448,607, so I am struggling with the concept of “big.”

* Tableside whole-hop infusions. “Here’s how it works: Order any Bull & Bush (a Denver brewpub) beer on tap and then pick one of five hops varietals grown by Jack Rabbit Hill Hops in the Western Slope town of Hotchkiss. The beer will be served in a French press with the crumbled hops cones added. The customer can then choose how long to wait before pouring the beer and tasting the effect.”

This is going to result in a lot of crappy beer experiences. But I predict the idea has legs.

Bring on the vestal virgins.

The White IPAs are upon us. This is not a bad idea, marrying Belgian White beers with New World hops, at least until somebody starts writing new style guidelines. Last year’s collaboration beers from Deschutes Brewery and Boulevard Brewing proved that. Boulevard’s version even won a medal at the Great American Beer Festival (in the American-Belgo-Style Ale category).

The skinny:

* Deschutes Chainbreaker White I.P.A. It will released be in the Northwest in March. Not the same recipe as in the collaboration with Boulevard (no sage, for one thing). 5.6% ABV, 60 IBUs.

* Samuel Adams Whitewater IPA. Available now in the Brewer’s Choice Variety 12-Pack and soon in six-packs. Hops from the American Northwest and Australia. 5.8% ABV.

* Saranac White IPA. “We’ve taken a delicious American IPA bursting with Citra hops, and given it a whole new direction by adding the refreshing fruitiness of orange peel & coriander and the softening characters of wheat malt and oats.” 6% ABV.

And, yes, there’s every chance I posted this only so I could add still more links to different versions of “Whiter Shade of Pale” . . .
- A version with strings (tent included).
- Joe Cocker. I apologize if you get an obnoxious ad.
- Gov’t Mule.
- Percy Sledge. Not at his best, but comes with lyrics you can read.
- Annie Lennox. Honest to goodness, you have different Annie Lennox versions to choose from. I went with artsy.
- Willie Nelson. Yes, there’s every chance I’ve spent too much time fully vetting these videos.

Having once accidentally driven a car into a large pedestrian-only square in Brugge I can assure you this is a city best enjoyed on foot. You can just stop and stare at the architecture. That the streets are narrow and winding becomes charming instead of exasperating. And there are the chocolate shops.

We are partial to Chocolatier Dumon. I cannot guarantee the chocolate there is any better, although I know it’s pretty good. First of all, I’m a sucker for molded chocolate “art,” even if everything we tried to bring back from our first trip didn’t make it in one piece. Second, the variety is spectacular. It’s a great place to just stand and inhale.

And that was the first thing I thought of when I worked the cork free of a bottle of Boulevard’s Smokestack Chocolate Ale. Cocoa dusted truffles. Rich dark fruits. Caramel and rum. A rush of aromas that themselves must be fattening.

Plus, on a personal note, there’s the Brugge (or Bruges) factor. In the movie “In Bruges” Colin Farrell’s character (Ray) mutters, “Maybe that’s what hell is, the entire rest of eternity spent in f*cking Bruges.” He’s nuts. You want to spend New Year’s Eve here; you hope your niece marries somebody Flemish and the reception is here on a bright June day. No doubt that Chocolatier Dumon and the city of Brugge itself provide a halo effect for Chocolate Ale.

Last year seemingly every beer drinking soul in Kansas City went nutso over this beer brewed in collaboration with local chocolate hero chef Christopher Elbow. There were stories about people following delivery trucks and trying to bribe drivers into selling them a bottle directly. Some liquor stores were asking $25 a bottle (instead of the standard $9-$12) and we won’t even mention eBay. The beer disappeared fast.

I can’t tell you how fast it went here in St. Louis, because Sierra and I were still in New Mexico. However a month after the madness had subsided in Kansas City we visited St. Louis and drank it at Pi Pizzeria on Delmar. It was even brighter on tap.

Last year Boulevard produced 1,600 cases of Chocolate Ale, a standard run for a Smokestack seasonal. This year they brewed two-and-a-half times that, more than any of its limited releases ever. It’s on the shelves. I’m not predicting how long it will last.

I’m pretty sure they won’t have to advertise every bottle comes with a chocolate memory of Brugge. But they could.

It was nearly one hundred years between the time philosopher Henry Finck proposed humans literally have a “second way of smelling” and University of Pennsylvania Paul Rozin established the role of retronasal smell in perception of flavor.

In 1886, Finck suggested that smell was responsible for at least two-thirds of gastronomic enjoyment. In an essay titled “The Gastronomic Value of Odours” he began: “Amusing experiments may be made showing that without this sense (smell) it is commonly quite impossible to distinguish between different articles of food and drink. Blindfold a person and make him clasp his nose tightly, then put into his mouth successively small pieces of beef, mutton, veal, and pork, and it is safe to predict that he will not be able to tell one morsel from another. The same results will be obtained with chicken, turkey, and duck; with pieces of almond, walnut, hazelnut . . .”

This parlor trick may also be attempted with beer. Much of what we call the flavor of beer — particularly hop flavor — seems to be happening in the mouth, but really our olfactory system is responsible.

Further in his essay Finck turns to the topic of beer. Perhaps it will help you in studying for the Cicerone exam.

Tea and coffee might be called feminine beverages, inasmuch as the fair sex seem on the whole to be more addicted to their use than men. But for the drink next on our list the female population of most countries does not show such a decided appreciation. The reason commonly given by ladies why they do not like beer is that it is “so bitter;” but the real reason is that women are rarely enabled to drink beer under favourable circumstance. The essense of beer lies in its aromatic gas. If that is allowed to escape the beer tastes stale, flat, and bitter, and gives rise to headaches and indigestion; whereas, with the gas, it is palatable, wholesome, and an aid to digestion. To get it in this state it must be taken from a keg freshly tapped and runk on the spot without much delay; and since women of the higher classes in this country (the United States) do not frequent localities where beer is kept on tap, they never have an opportunity to find out how good beer really “tastes,” for bottled beer consumed at home is always vastly inferior to keg beer. In Munich, however, which is the paradise of beer-drinkers, women are fond of beer as the men, because it is considered perfectly proper for the best families to visit the festively illuminated beer-gardens in the evening.

In Munich, too, every mug and glass has a lid to prevent the gas from escaping too rapidly. This gas must not be confounded with the artificial foam which dishonest bar tenders produce in a glass by holding it far below the faucet, a practice which not only compels the gues to pay for half a glass of empty foam, but which allows the real gas to escape prematurely. Every beer glass in Munich has a mark up to which the liquid must reach by a legal enactment, consequently little or no foam is dished up with beer, and the brewers admit that the best beer has no foam on top. Waiters, in pour out bottled beer invariably make the mistake of holding up the bottle as high as possible so as to get a foam.

From wine and most other drinks beer differs in this, that it must be swallowed in large doses to be full appreciated. The most confirmed beer-drinker is overcome with nausea if he attempts to empty a glass with a spoon; and under no circumstances should a glass serve more than three or four swallows. The greatest amount of bliss is apparently vouchsafed to those who can gulp down a whole pint at ounce. Such magicians are as common as blackberries in Germany; and they often give vent to their satisfaction by a sort of gastronomic grunt — a prolonged ääh! A Munich Fliegende Blätter once had a picture of an artist sitting in front of a country tavern drinking beer. The host watches him with a look of dissatisfaction, and finally asks: “Don’t you like my beer” “Certainly, replied the arits; “it is very good.” “Why then,” retorted the host, “don you say ääh! when you finish a glass.”

Drink up.