Beer in the new era

Modern Times is a good place that does many styles of beer very well.

A guy at my local liquor shop told me Russian River Brewing expanded their distribution this year. I saw a bunch of their beers including Pliny at a popular local (east bay area) grocery store the other day. It's nice to see it around. It's surprisingly inexpensive for the reputation it has and it is a pretty delicious beer imho.

If you ever get up to Windsor (Sonoma County), you can see why/how they've been able to increase their distribution. Good food and great location as well.

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2019-12-12/ballast-point-rise-fall-constellation-kings-convicts

90%+ loss of valuation in 4 years pretty much tells you all you need to know. Insane.

re: San Diego, have been wanting to pilgrimage for Stone and Black Plague, so might check the latter. Always curious re: the most known versus the lesser hidden gems in each region. Like for Seattle, would recommend Holy Mountain, Reubens, Dirty Couch, Urban Family, Cloudburst in addition to the more obvious ones.

i'm very interested in what happens to ballast point from here. the guys who bought it do not seem like idiots but this industry makes smart people dumb and every common-sense bone in my body says this is not the time to try to figure out a national craft beer brand with a fading reputation.

Thread of gold

Stay tuned for this up and coming brewery pic.twitter.com/Pt3x6XKGzG

— Worst Beer Blog (@WorstBeerBlog) December 15, 2019

The logo of this place is perfectly awful

Don't need to click on that to realize that finally, we're get an aggressively right wing, overtly racist brewery. 'Bout time, right? Make beer great again!

So Founders is adjusting their PR take?

Big flight delay --> stuck in SF --> beers at Toronado

I've heard about that place, any good?

Mikkeller in SF is great. So is Cellarmaker if you like IPAs.

Xp yes, cool place with plenty of stuff to try including a crazy rare beer list. Cash only though.

That’s the place I walked miles to get a Pliny at

re Pliny, better distro makes sense, my local pub has it on tap rn and I was initially surprised

'sometimes when i'm drinking narragansett, I feel like it has a little too much flavor'
WHAT DAT?

Someone who'd really rather be drinking Bud?

Toronado was great. Went there when I was in SF specifically to get Pliny on tap since a trip to Russian River wasn't going to be in the cards. Tons of other great stuff to be had and the vibe was nowhere near as tech-broey as some of the other bars we hit up.

Someone who'd really rather be drinking Bud?

"Bud"? Is that one of those new THC infused IPAs?

Is CBS the fastest "white whale" to "clearance aisle at Target" beer we've seen? What a world we live in.

Just back from two-ish weeks in New Zealand (see flight delays post above). Pretty vibrant craft scene there, favorites were Emerson's, Good George and Panhead.

Seeing months old Founders and Lagunitas IPAs on the store shelves there was pretty lol.

i knew a woman who literally followed a delivery truck around cambridge mass c. 2013 so she could buy as much as possible of the annual release of KBS (not even CBS!), a beer that is now available year-round in my whole foods.

Wasn't (and isn't) KBS rarer than CBS?

never was around here....we got KBS once a year (in march iirc) and went years in between seeing CBS outside of a few draft accounts.

Hmm, I thought CBS was just a coffee stout, googling shows it's Canadian whiskey/maple syrup barrel aged. Seems like I've been seeing CBS on the shelves in large quantities for a few years now.

I think they must have upped KBS and CBS production significantly, because they linger. There's also a coffee KBS now, I saw.

Anyone else feel like bourbon barrel stouts do uniquely bad things to them? I drank a sixpoint master blend the other night and felt like shit for two days.

i barely fuck with em anymore, same for a lot of guys i know. not only are they very likely to wreck you, but the flavor profile has become unappealing. there are old bottles of bourbon county in my basement that i look at w/dread.

I like them, but I think the key is to split one with someone and drink them like you might drink, I dunno, bourbon. Share them, and smaller pours, and you (and they) are good.

Just had my first beer with cryo hops. Tasted like beer.

Xp yeah it wrecked me in this unique way that a similar amount of some other 13% alcohol beverage would not. It also does taste a little odd to me, syrupy and sort of somewhere in between cola/dr pepper/very sweet coffee.

https://media.giphy.com/media/JRsY1oIVA7IetTkKVO/giphy.gif

My daughter said "hmm what if" and made a rhubarb shandy yesterday with a gose she didn't care for as-is, and it is the best thing ever drunk.

https://chicago.eater.com/2020/5/19/21264134/jeppsons-malort-revolution-brewing-anti-hero-collaboration-chicago

Surprised it took this long for something like this tbh

rhubarb shandy sounds great

It is Oberon season again, thank god for some liquid sunshine in the age of covid

I’ve also been making beermosas on the weekends as supplies permit. So healthy and refreshing

To avoid this thread turning into a thread about beer for people who don't like beer...

Chicagolanders: Hearing rumblings that Three Floyds is in trouble and may be closing their brewpub?

Friend of mine says it has something to do with Indiana reopening and the ownership not being comfortable with putting people back to work. This way they can get unemployment and the plan is to reopen the pub in a year or two. Apparently their distributor sales are fine and they're still doing beer-to-go from that location.

Yeah, that's what I've been hearing as well. It's the eat-in brewpub that is essentially being put on mothballs for awhile, my understanding is that distribution, brewing and to-go beer sales aren't going anywhere.

In fact I've seen the new(er) Zombie Dust cans popping up more and more frequently, at least around where I live.

Every story I've heard of the brewpub has been one of bad attitude and terrible service, that couldn't possibly have helped.

I'm a big fan of Hop Butcher's NEIPA variants, but they seem to release 2-3 totally new ones a week, and given they can be hard to come by in the best of circumstances I've been beset by a combo of FOMO and sheer acquisitive exhaustion.

My local bar was selling mystery boxes for 12 bottles/$160 so I went in with a buddy...

Among the treasures:
1993 Thomas Hardy
2000 Scaldis Noel
2007 Sierra Nevada Bigfoot

Those old vintages were very unexpected! The rest of the box was pretty intense, but more recent vintages of local hyped stuff.

(also thanks dan, jon & Josh for the Three Floyds info)

Speaking of Three Floyds, apparently they did a "virtual Dark Lord Day" by selling bundles of "vintage" Dark Lord in boxes to be delivered and, perhaps unsurprisingly for every time they try something new, it was a complete shitshow. I didn't try myself, but apparently sold out in less than a minute and I'm seeing dozens of complaints of people absolutely baffled by how the ordering system worked. Multiple people complaining that they got to the point of where they were entering their credit card info and the contents of their virtual carts were cleared out beneath them.

Sounds like a mess all around.

Sorry, the box is to be picked up at the brewery, not delivered.

it's 2020 and no one has developed a decent ordering system for high-demand items.

Fair. Not sure this is all Three Floyd's fault. Biggest complaint seems to be that there was no countdown clock (like for concert tickets) that gave people time to complete the transaction.

Also more than one person saying the order triggered fraud protection from their banks and by the time they were able to confirm the automated checks, their orders had been released and sold out.

Dark Lord isn't even that good imo.

Meanwhile several vintages of Surly Darkness in both regular and BA variants sit on the shelves collecting dust at my local store. Nice to be able to pick some up now and then at a whim.