One of the recent additions I’ve made was to create a mobile version of the blog, so now you can read Blog About Beer from your iPhone, Android, or most mobile devices.  A nice feature is that you don’t need to remember any specific URL, as you just have to go to blogaboutbeer.com and it will automatically detect your device and redirect you to the mobile site.

It is beer fest season in Oregon with the Portland International Beer Festival this weekend and the Oregon Brew Fest next weekend, so I’ll be a busy guy for the next week.

Have a great weekend.

Sunburn is a blond ale that has a relatively strong flavor compared to other blonds I’ve had recently.  It pours a light gold color with a nice white head.  My first thought to the flavor was that it had a pretty prominent citrus flavor, which comes from the dry hopping with Citra hops.  Widmer uses Alchemy hops for bittering.

If you’re not into real bitter summer beers, Sunburn would be for you at about 20 IBUs it is a great blend of bitter and sweet.  On a hot summer day, this is a beer that is easy to drink (be careful, you could drink a 6 pack before realizing it as it pairs well with the sun).

Overall I give Sunburn a B+.

If you haven’t tried it, I’d suggest you grab a 6 pack if you can as I believe it will be out of stores in early August.

Here are the details:

Bitterness: 20 IBU
ABV: 4.3%
Original Gravity: 10.3° PLATO

What are your thoughts on Widmer Sunburn?

By the way, this is my first beer picture with my new SLR camera.  They will get better in time once I learn how the camera works.

When submitting the recipes, please include the following:

• Beer Name
• Category (ex: Pale Ale, ESB, etc..)
• Type (all grain or extract)
• Ingredients separated by fermentables, hops, yeast, and others)
• Procedure

It doesn’t matter if you are an amateur, as long as you like your recipe, I’d love to include it. I might even send you a gift if it looks so good that I decide to brew it myself.

Have a great day!

As for me, it’s my wifes birthday as well so there is two reasons to party.  Happy birthday Renee and America!

Since it’s summer and BBQ time, here is my beer lineup for the weekend.

• Widmer Sunburn
• Buffalo Bill’s Orange Blossom
• Henry Weinhards Summer Ale
• Widmer Drifter
• My Own Northwest Pale Ale (probably the best beer I’ve brewed to date, so delicious)

So what are you drinking this 4th of July weekend?

Who Am I?

Well to start off I’m currently a 28 year old guy, married to a beautiful wife and have a new daughter who was born in April 2010 (you can see I’m a proud dad).  I currently own an Internet marketing company during the day and brew beer, play drums, volunteer with middle schoolers, keep up to date with the Seahawks and Blazers, and spend time with my family on nights and weekends.  Oh yeah, I’m also known for liking extremely spicy foods.  Whats better to wash down some salsa made with ghost chili’s than a nicely paired beer right?  Ok, maybe more than one beer if I’m eating ghost chili’s. Other than that, I love beer.  I’m not a beer snob, just a fanatic.

I also live in a suburb of Portland, Oregon…

Portland, Oregon? I thought This Was a Portland, Maine Blog?

Yes, I live in Portland, Oregon, one of the greatest craft beer cities in the US.  Why do we have so many breweries in the northwest?  Well, we have great water and excellent climate for growing hops.  I understand that this blog has had a focus on Maine in the past, but I have some big ideas.  Since I’m from the west coast, most of my beer experience comes from the west coast breweries.  However in the future I’d love to get consistent guest posts focusing on different areas of the country to make this a blog featuring beer from Portland to Portland (coast to coast).

What’s To Come?

Over the next few weeks you will start seeing new features on the blog such as the following:

• Multiple city beer guides (such as the one currently on the site for Portland, Maine).
• A mobile version of Blog About Beer for your phones.
• More beer reviews.
• Videos and interviews with brewers.
• Lots of new blog posts.
• Improvements to the blog design.
• and a whole lot more…

If you have any questions or suggestions, please contact me as I’d love to hear them.  If you’re ever in the Portland, Oregon area and want to grab a beer I’d love to meet up.  Thanks for the support!

Logan Thompson
Author, BlogAboutBeer.com – July 2010

Rather, I wanted to take a minute and say goodbye and, more importantly, say thank you. Thank you to everyone who has read and followed the site since its inception. After nearly 3 years, it’s absolutely difficult for me to see the site go, but I’m confident that I’m leaving it in good, very capable hands. Thanks to all the readers, thanks to everyone who has commented on a post, everyone who has emailed me, everyone who has come up to me at an event to introduce themselves; thanks to all the breweries and companies who have sent me products to review or given me tickets to their events; thanks to BlueHost.com for being a kick-ass web hosting company with virtually zero downtime and great customer service; thanks to the thousands of you who have visited the site and the hundreds who have subscribed to the RSS feed, despite my often embarrassingly dismal coverage of the craft beer world, over the years; thanks to my friends, family and my girlfriend for putting up with my often obsessive blogging habits; and thanks to everyone for your well-wishes in my next endevor, Baxter Brewing Co. (here’s the announcement I made on the site a few weeks ago, in case you missed it).

If you enjoyed what I had to say and want to continue to follow my progress and updates, I’ll definitely be blogging about Baxter’s progress on BaxterBrewing.com from time-to-time, so check it out. And hopefully I can come back to BlogAboutBeer.com for a guest post or two, every once-in-awhile, too.

The site will be in a state of flux over the next few days as the domain and database transfers happen, but please stick around and please give the new author the same level of attention and respect you always showed me. I have no doubt he’ll continue to show you a good time.

And I guess that’s all I have to say about that. So long, and thanks for all the beers!

la’heim,
Luke Livingston
Author, BlogAboutBeer.com – Aug 2007-June 2010

The choices are:

1. Fly me to the beer contest
2. The great american beer contest
3. The imperial craft beer contest
4. Destination brewery getaway contest
5. Hopped up on beer contest
6. Brewery trip of a lifetime contest

To vote on your favorite one – go here: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/GYZHCV8

The contest is awesome too. They are going to fly a person and a guest to any brewery in the U.S. for a VIP tour and tasting. Hotel and flight completely paid for and the brewery will roll out the red carpet. More details coming soon after they choose a name!

Homebrewing beer has been legal in the eyes of the federal government since 1979. Little did I know, however, thatthere are still a few states which consider homebrewing to be illegal. I know — weird, right? But as of this week, the states which outlaw homebrewing is down by one (now only two states remain; Alabama and Mississippi). House Bill 2348, sponsored by Representative Colby Schwartz and Senator Mike Schulz, officially legalized the home production of beer for personal use in Oklahoma. Home production of wine and cider for personal use was already legal in Oklahoma. Below is the rest of the press release which was distributed Monday by the Brewers Association/The American Homebrewers Association. Congratulations, citizens and brewers of Oklahoma!

The passage of HB 2348 leaves Alabama and Mississippi as the only remaining states where the homebrewing hobby is not yet legal. The U.S. government made homebrewing legal on a federal level in 1979.

“I’m excited to see Oklahoma finally bring homebrewing into parity with wine and cider, and it was an honor to author the legislation,” said Representative Schwartz. “The success of this measure would not have been possible without the overwhelming support of the active homebrewing community in Oklahoma.”

The American Homebrewers Association (AHA) estimates that there are approximately 750,000 homebrewers in the United States, including 7,000 homebrewers residing in Oklahoma. Oklahoma and Utah are the only states to have legalized homebrewing in the last 10 years.

Gary Shellman, AHA member and editor for Oklahoma City’s homebrew club, the High Plains Draughters, initiated the legalization process and worked tirelessly to ensure the bill’s passage. Shellman spent months lining up a sponsor for a homebrew bill. He kept up with the bill throughout the process, advising the bill’s sponsors and reporting on the bill’s progress to the American Homebrewers Association staff and Oklahoma homebrew club members.

“Our theme from the very beginning was to get support from all sectors of the brewing community to bring parity for homebrewed beer with that already long enjoyed by home wine and cider makers,” said Shellman. “We are proud to say that we finally got the job done, but none of this would have been possible without the diligent efforts of Rep. Colby Schwartz.”

The American Homebrewers Association assisted the legalization effort by providing advice and by mobilizing Oklahoma AHA members and Brewers Association member breweries in support of HB 2348.

“Gary Shellman’s dedication to homebrew legalization and the response of Oklahoma’s homebrewers has been truly inspiring,” said Gary Glass, director of the American Homebrewers Association. “I’m glad that the AHA was there to help with the process, as I believe that legalizing homebrewing for all U.S. citizens is one of the most important issues that the AHA addresses.”

The AHA is currently working with homebrewers in Alabama and Mississippi on efforts to legalize homebrewing in those states.

First, a the first of May heralded the long-awaited arrival of Southern Tier Brewing Co. Southern Tier (out of Lakewood, NY) began distributing four of their beers, I believe, across southern Maine a few weeks ago, including their Unearthly Double IPA – a personal favorite beer of mine. I just hope that if these four are successful, they’ll ship their Jah*va Coffee and Imperial Oatmeal stouts as well. Southern Tier is being distributed by Central Distributors in Lewiston.

Next, on May 10th, Morrisville, VT’s Rock Art Brewing Co. announced via their Facebook Fan Page that they were about to begin shipping beer to Maine via Portland-based distributor Mariner Beverage. I’m not sure how many Rock Art varieties have arrived, but according to one Facebook comment, at least the Vermonster and a Belvidere Big IPA are now available at RSVP in here in Portland. You may remember the Rock Art name from the little legal battle they had with beverage giant Monster Energy Drinks in October of 2009.

Lastly, I just discovered this one this morning: New Orleans’ Abita Brewing Co. (which is actually located in Abita Springs, Louisiana, 30 miles north of New Orleans) have sneaked their way into the state. While I haven’t yet seen their beer on any store shelves and Maine isn’t listed on the “beer finder” page of their website yet, according to the below screenshot of an official Abita Tweet, it certainly looks like their beers should be in state by now.

This is all very exciting news as Maine finally begins to catch up with the rest of the country as far as beer availability and diversity. The summer beer drinking is definitely looking up!

Jonathon Lunardi here from BreweryFans.com. Luke is letting me write a guest post in honor of several milestones reached and new features available now on BreweryFans.com. Thanks Luke!

The site has been launched for about two months and it has been quite a ride. We attended the Craft Brewers Conference in Chicago and even had a booth at the conference meeting and greeting brewers from around the world. In addition to gaining traffic and brewery clients (www.breweryfans.com/why_use_breweryfans is our new brewery sales page) we of course have been hard at work building several features to announce that were ideas given to us by our users. So, the below post will include a couple stories from the last few months and will end with the new features all craft beer enthusiasts will be excited about.

Story numero uno: Getting people to the site.

Once we launched the site in March, we were fortunate enough to have beer bloggers like Luke and Ginger of WomenEnjoyingBeer.com post the announcement. We immediately started seeing traffic from their readers and Google started recognizing us as a viable beer site. We were averaging close to 1,000 users per day, which was an amazing start. I didn’t plan to do much from a marketing perspective at this point as I felt we should hunker down and focus on adding new functionality and selling our backend reporting tools to breweries. By some sort of miracle I was approached by the national editor of Thrillist.com who wanted to showcase our site to their 75,000 + daily readership. Our entire team was shocked at the opportunity and even more shocked to see close to 35,000 visits to our site per day! With that traffic spike we now have a strong registered user base. In addition to Thrillist, we have now been approached by Brewing Newspaper and Ale Street News to do an article about our site and our story. I hope they how different and revolutionary our website is and they highlight the story front and center, one can hope anyway right!?

Story numero due: The Craft Brewers Conference (CBC) is Unreal!

In order for us to actually make some cash so we can keep adding new features and innovation, we need to convince breweries that our online reporting backend will help them sell more beer by tapping into their fan bases on BreweryFans.com. The brewing community is very close knit, which is awesome to be apart of, but sometimes it is hard to break into the approved brewery vendor circles. One of the best ways is to go to the Craft Brewers Conference, set up a booth, and attend one of the hundreds of nightly craft beer drinking events. It was not work at all, it was a blast! I brought my entire team, Brandon, Clint, Gosselin, Mitch, even my dad and sister. We must have met close to 100 different brewers or brewery owners and gave them the pitch on why they should invest in our tools. We made several sales during the day and then partied hard while sampling a diverse beer selection throughout the evenings. I think I had a little too much to drink one night and actually took off my shoes and left them in the hotel room when walking across the street to a bar. Oooops. The CBC was a spectacular time and I look forward to our adventures in San Francisco next year.

Story numero tre: New Features for all who love craft beer…

There are a ton of new features on the site, but here are a few that we really want to highlight in this blog post.

The Beer Requester function. You can go to any of the bars or beer stores on our site and request what beers they should consider carrying. How awesome is that?! These bars and beer stores get a weekly email with a summary of the most recent beer requests. When a bar or beer store manager logs in he or she can activate a request, which emails everyone that requested a specific beer letting them know to they now serve that specific beer brand. Here is an example:

The Beer List Widget. Now, a bar, beer store, blogger, or anyone can grab the entire beer list of a specific bar or beer store and put it on their webpage. For example, Swingbridge Wine & Spirits updates their beer list on BreweryFans.com and has close to 180 beers listed. Swingbridge doesn’t want to do this work again for their webpage, so they can just embed their widget on their webpage. Here is what it looks like on their website – http://www.swingbridgebeerandwine.com/beer.html. Users can also request a beer from their webpage now as well. We hope to see thousands of bars and beer stores managing their beer lists on our site and then embedding these lists on their websites. I am curious to see if bloggers embed these widgets into their blogs when they are writing around a specific bar or location. Who knows.

We have a lot in store in the future. Please tell others to register on the site and join their favorite fan pages. Our breweries use data on who is joining their fan pages to make critical business decisions. Join fan pages, a lot of them! Check out BreweryFans.com here and stay tuned for the next installment of the BreweryFans introduction series, only at BlogAboutBeer.com!