LIQUID DIET - the blog

Peripatetic Carl checks in from the road with a photo sure to give O’Reilly nightmares:

This BA thread about Iron Hill’s growler policies is a sad case-study underlining why many brewers are leery of getting involved in online discussions where their input could present useful information and insight. After seeing his answer to the question posed misrepresented and misunderstood despite several efforts by the more enlightened to stem the tide of outrage with clarifications (poor old Lew, who has shown great restraint by avoiding these periodic kerfuffles of late, just couldn’t help himself  this time around), I doubt that Mark Edelson will be inclined to try and be responsive again any time soon.

On the other hand, this thread about Philly beer bars is surprisingly solid and amazingly absent of the usual negatives. Where-oh-where have all the Monk’s-bashers gone? It’s sad enough that the name Yards can now appear in posts and Kenzo Freddie doesn’t do the Pavlov thing, but if we can’t count on horror stories about poor, innocent Beer Advocates being beaten, having their heads shaved and then being tossed out into the street by a hoard of unfriendly and inattentively snotty servers whenever Monk’s is mentioned, what’s left to help us while away the Dog Days?

1. When talking to William Reed of Standard Tap at Sly Fox Phoenixville on Monday I discovered that I missed a very important beer-centric Best of Philly Award from Philadelphia Magazine in this earlier post. Ron Johnson, the Wednesday, Thursday and Friday night bartender at The Tap was voted Best Bartender 2008. Hey, you can win the award on a three-day a week gig, you’re Good. Apologies to Ron.

2. In this post on Sunday, the part wherein I call attention to the story in Mid-Atlantic Brewing News about Maia!, I meant to note that among all the good stuff sommelier and cicerone (I decided in the last 24 hours that I am embracing that term from this point forward because the folks who help turn the world onto good beer deserve their own title, dammit) Melissa Molonoff had to say about beer was giving some credit where credit is due and citing The Beer Yard’s Matt Guyer as her guru in planning the beer list. Matt does a lot of this sort of thing behind the scenes (you’d be surprised by the people who call him for guidance, not all of them bar and restaurant owners) and it’s nice that he gets some love now and them. No apologies to him, though, ’cause….well, just ’cause.

And not quite a P.S.–more of a public service for the preverted: For those of you wondering whatever became of my pal Carl in his wanderings and who also caught old John McCain offering up his wife to a bunch of bikers for a topless/sometime bottomless beauty contest in South Dakota on last night’s evening news, word arrived this morning via email that he is right on top of things:

Saw the Straight Talk express rolling down the highway early this morning as I left Wall, SD (Where the hell is Wall Drug?) on my way to Sturgis and the big Bike Rally (World’s Largest).

I suspect that some of you will take that as reason to check out his photographic record of his travels for the first time in the hopes that it’s about to become no longer family friendly.  It’s here. Knock yourselves out.

I was enticed over to Sly Fox Royersford late yesterday afternoon with the promise of beer. All I needed and off I went as soon as I hung up the phone.

Let this be a lesson to the rest of you. I can be had.

As promised, I got to enjoy a pint of the brand-new Schwarzbier (superb), another of Rauchbier (a personal favorite) and a smaller glass of the just-released Oktoberfest 2008.

You might think all that would be the story of the afternoon. But it to laugh. That motorcycling guy William Reed (Standard Tap, Johnny Brenda’s) was also in the house. Always good to see William, of course.

But that wasn’t the bestest of the best yesterday either.

What William said was.

As I was on my second pint at the bar, William leaned across me and said to reigning brewmaster-to-the-stars Brian O’Reilly:

“Okay, let’s brew Standard Ale again.”

YES!

As you might imagine, I will be all over the two of them to get this done as soon as is practical. I do it all for you…and because Standard Ale is the best beer I’ve had this year and I want more.

Lots more.

(For those who came in late, Standard Ale is a collaborative brew between Brian and William, a cask-conditioned ale created especially for Philly Beer Week last March. It is Not To Be Missed.)

All three of the bimonthly brewspapers are now out at your favorite retailer, tavern or brewpub: Celebrator Beer News, Ale Street News and Mid-Atlantic Brewing News.

As usual, I have columns and/or stories in all three. I’ll get some or all of those up at www.jackcurtin.com over the next week or so (or link to them on the publication’s site for those which are available there) but thought I’d point out what to look for if you’re looking for, well, me.

In Celebrator this month, my “Atlantic Ale Trail” column focuses on Flying Fish and River Horse breweries as I join the nationwide excitement over the release of this invaluable tome; my feature story is about Mondial de la Biere, and I also wrote a brief obituary for Jay Misson (which was unfortunately truncated in the production process).

In Ale Street, I have a feature piece on the official opening day for the Boston Beer Brewery in Fogelsville. This was an important enough event that it is also covered in my columns for the other two papers but this is the main story with all the neat stuff in it that you need to read to have all the flavor of the day.

My “Eastern Pennsylvania” column in Mid-Atlantic talks about the Boston Beer opening and two other putative (and I stress that word advisedly) new breweries in the Western ‘burbs, along with brewery notes about Legacy, Spring House, Weyerbacher, Sly Fox, Victory and the beer dinner scene at Iron Hill, General Lafayette, The Farmhouse and Union Barrel Works.

There’s also  short feature, slightly mangled in editing by my beloved editor, on the newly named Ron’s Original Bar & Grille and a long one called “Oh Maia!” to which I call particular attention because Melissa Monosoff, sommelier for both beer and wine at the spectacular new Maia bi-level restaurant/bistro/coffee bar and more in Villanova, says some things that craft beer folks have been longing to hear coming from a wine person for a long, long time.

Missing from the issue, a victim of space restrictions, is another long story about Dan & Suzanne Weirback’s new hops farm, which I’ll have to update for the next issue (maybe combining it with notes and photos from the annual International (Human) Foosball Game & Pig Roast on the Weirback farm later this month.

And you people wonder what I do all day.

I’ve just added this September 6 event to the Beer Yard Calendar and, to answer some questions which are being raised, yes, all these beers will be on draught that afternoon.

Intrepid Tom Steigelman emailed Tomme Arthur a few weeks back to set it all up and, UPS willing, all 10 kegs will be racing across the country to the local distributor in plenty of time. I talked to Tom within the hour to verify.

Get psyched, beer geeks.

Not only does Memphis Taproom get a very favorable review in this morning’s Philadelphia Inquirer, the review gets flagged atop the paper’s front page along with a photo featuring several familiar tap handles.

Aside from his evaluation of the food and drink, Craig LaBan strikes all the right notes about how places like Memphis are helping transform older neighborhoods as they embed the craft beer revolution into the city’s culinary gestalt.

Everybody done left town and ran off to Belgium Comes to Cooperstown. I feel like the kid whose family decided they couldn’t afford a vacation this summer left to forlornly wander the neighborhood and playgrounds while all his pals are down the shore.

Or maybe like Big Dan Monday through Fridays when everybody else is at work.

Either way, it’s a barren existence.

Late this afternoon, I was driving along Boot Road, one of the great connector roads which stretch across the western Philadelphia suburbs so that you can get from place to place without hitting all the major, traffic heavy roads that the mundane people use, when it struck me (since I was between West Chester and Downingtown) that I could see if all the stories I’d been told that Chesnut Street, the road off of which lies Victory Brewing Company on tiny little Acorn Avenue, intersects with Boot just short of where the bridge had been out for a goodly portion of my lifetime. If it did, I could take a quick sidetrip from my day’s activities and have me a beer.

It did and I did, a Dark Lager and a Braumeister Pils, to be exact.

Normally reports of this sort are accompanied by at least one photograph of the Inevitable Ruch, whose presence at Victory is what we use as proof that we actually were there. This time, however, the absence of said photo, counter to the norm, actually marks an historic moment.

Roughly 4:30 in the afternoon of a Wednesday afternoon and nary a sign of Richard.

As I sipped my first beer, I asked the bartender, new to me, “where’s that elderly man who is usually at the bar?” He paused for a second and then responded, “Gee, I dunno. He’s late. But he was here for a long, long time on Monday and Tuesday. Maybe he’s staying home to rest.”

Long silence, then we both broke out in uproarious laughter and I ordered my second beer.

How to explain Victory sans Ruch? Well, you know how it is when you walk into a bar which has (finally!) decided to ban smoking? How clean and fresh and new the place seems?

It was like that.

I left a happy man, not to mention one who felt he’d been a part of history….

Wait. No.

The above is how I pictured my posting about today’s adventure in my mind as I sat happily at the bar.

I shoulda just gotten up and run away as quickly as I could.

Suddenly I felt a dark cloud sweep across my shoulder and there he was. Our Richard, all haircutted and clipped and shaven so he looked like a pal of Beaver’s dad back in the old TV show, with some silly story about his battery being dead and it was all his wife’s fault. Something like that.

Story ruined. Afternoon turned into the same old, same old.

It wasn’t a total loss as it turned out. Steve German, who apparently is still employed by Victory, appeared not long after and bought us both a beer (another Braumeister for me) and Richard told me lots of things about Earth, Bread & Brewery that I did not know.

But still…

I spent a lot of time on the telephone with brewers from around the country last week, talking about several topics for stories to be written as fast as I could turn them out and just for my own research purposes, and one of the more interesting interviews was with Jeff Winn who, with partner Chris Swedin, began selling beer from the new Yakima Craft Brewing Company in early June.

The coolness factor is three-fold. For one thing, they’ve returned brewing to a town which absolutely needs must have a brewery in the Grand Scheme of Things (heart of the Yakima Valley, center of US hops-growing, the town where Bert Grant founded the first modern day American brewpub, all that good stuff).

Second, they are working with a 3.5bbl brewhouse and are a production brewery, not a brewpub. That’s  gotta earn them the title of  the smallest production brewery in the nation (probably the world), I’d think.

But coolest of all: that 3.5bbl brewhouse is Bert Grant’s original one from 1982. Winn and Swedin also are using an all-copper kettle that Grant had made especially for him, the old dairy tanks and other original equipment.

Says Winn, a seven-year homebrewer from Portland who was looking to move on from his 20-year career in the high-tech industry  last year:

“My wife’s family lives in Yakima and when I realized there was no brewery here, I thought what most people would think, ‘how can a place like Yakima be without a brewery?’ So we just went went with the idea, moved up here. I hooked up with Chris, who had brewed for Bert back in the golden years, because he wanted to brew again. He was instrumental in our getting the old equipment at auction.”

During the week, I also talked with a Mayor-Brewer not name John Hickenlooper and another brewer in Texas who was called before City Council to pop a beer from an East Coast brewery and tell them all about it.

But those are stories for another day.