2007-08-31

Strange rules breaking up!

A Swedish blogger (Ofiltrerat) today wrote a great short article (in Swedish) about the result of the new EG-regulations, that means it is now legal for me as a private person ordering my own beer on internet and get it home to my door, but only if the distributor or the store I buy from is located outside the country.

That simply means that I can now order my favorite beers directly, instead of going to the Systembolaget and trying to convince them to get home what I want, also great because I can buy a bottle or two of each beer instead of buying a whole package of beers (12, 24 etc), which is the rules if you want to import through Systembolaget.

Now about the unlogic result due to the new legislations.

Swedish micros have it very hard to sell beers in their own home country to a private person and with that increase the sales, simply because it is almost impossible for a small brewery to meet the demands from Systembolaget regarding amount of beers and in what speed it should be delivered, plus that you have to compete with the rest of the crappy Euro lagers we normally drink, with only one chance to be kept. Consequences based on these rules means that the brewery often has to concentrate on a single beer for a very long time, simply because of their brewing capacity and needs to concentrate on a beer style that they believe many will like. So instead of getting more beer styles from the micro brewery we get a single beer for a while at the Systembolaget and can not get it at all through your pub during that time.

But through the new legislations it is very likely and easy for a small brewer instead exporting the beer to a beer shop or similar, and then I can order it from there legally, but I can not buy it at home, except at a good pub, which is normally located in the 3 or 4 big cities in the country. So we in Stockholm or Gothenburg can have the beer at a few pubs, but the rest of the country has to live with the beer sold at the Systembolaget if the want something better than lager beers from the giants. Is that not discrimination, or what?

This is stupid and something that can not continue, what is the logic that a small brewery has to export the beer and then sell it back to the country through a legal internet site?, just because they want to expand the sales and not be dependant on a few good pubs throughout the country, but mainly to the big cities, and through that trying to survive.

I am wondering how long this will last and how long it will take the government in Sweden to understand that it is too late to stop us to buy the beers back home in a local store instead of having a monopoly selling beers.

This does not only concerns micro beers, it will be even larger when our big breweries realizes that they can export the beers and then people can buy them online, they have the resources that the small ones do not have, so I do not see how this can be stopped.

And this is great!, but it seems that it will take a while longer before things will change and Sweden will realize the stupidity (in the time of environment concerns) that a micro brewery is exporting beer with trucks to Denmark and then sold to be driven back with trucks to the beer geeks in Sweden.

I know that all countries has strange rules about selling beers (like the US, where each state seems to have their own rules), but this must be one of the most stupid rules that you can invent, and simply the result of an old system that does not work anymore.

2007-08-30

Sad news about Michael Jackson

Just read at the Stonch Beer Blog that Michael Jackson, the Beer Hunter, has very sadly passed away, link to the article.

Feels very sad, and just remembered that it was just a couple of weeks ago during the GBBF that one of our beer friends met him during the pre tasting at the White Horse. Our friend was a bit excited that he had met him, and thought it was fun that it seemed that Michael had recognized him for earlier encounters.

He will be sadly missed by all beer and whiskey geeks, for me he was the first introduction to great beers, when I started to read some of his great books. One of the books that I have used very much is the "Great Beer Guide" which is fun to open up and get information about some new beer that you have to try. And also the amazing book about belgium beers (The Great Beers of Belgium) that has learnt me a lot about liking the beers from belgium.

Thanks for everything.

UPDATED: Seems that the whole beer blog world has a very sad day today, here is a short list of blogs informing about the todays sad news;

Brookston Beer Bulletin
Appellation Beer
The Barley Blog
Seen Through A Glass
BellaOnline
The Brew Lounge
Brew Dad
All About Beer
KevBrews
Stonch
The Brew Site
The Potable Curmudgeon
MNBeer
Bruisin’ Ales
Beer Bulletin
The All-Grain Evangelist
Nate
Jack Curtin
Bob Skilnik
Inside Bay Area Beer Blog
Trouble Brewing

UPDATED 2007-09-05
Regarding that our beer friend B met Michael during the White Horse happening before this years GBBF I found a picture that he took of Michael. Strange feeling that he was attending this years GBBF but never got the opportunity to attend this years GABF that we are planning to do. So when I read that he was planning for this years GABF you thought that maybe you could have the opportunity to at least see him. But that will never happen, so instead we have to raise a extra pint of beer to honor his name.

Popular beer blogs?

A little experiment has been conducted over at the "My Beer Pix" blog, where they have calculated the most popular beer blogs, with a combination of technorati, bloglines and google page ranking and a few other tweaks.

Do not have any intention to be on this list, simply because my list is about my own experiences mostly for myself.

Anyway, here is a full link to the list; The Top Beer Bloggers Revealed.

Its quite fun to see that there is really a very big mix of blogs and many of the ones that I tend to read myself.

And here is the top 5;

1. A Good Beer Blog
Technorati Authority: 144 | Bloglines 104 | Google Page Rank: 6

2. Brookston Beer Bulletin
Technorati Authority: 121 | Bloglines: 15 | Google Page Rank: 5

3. The Beer Mapping Project
Technorati Authority: 98 | Bloglines: 10 | Google Page Rank: 6

4. The Brew Site: It’s all about the beer
Technorati Authority: 73 | Bloglines: 47 | Google Page Rank: 5

5. Hop Talk
Technorati Authority: 82 | Bloglines: 8 | Google Page Rank: 4

2007-08-26

How about an IPA and a Leatherlips?

If I have to choose a particular style of beer, it must be an IPA, and almost always from the US. Do not remember all of them, but my current list of great favorite IPAs looks like below;

1. Pliny The Elder
2. Blind Pig IPA
3. Leatherlips IPA (The Tap)
4. Two Hearted Ale
5. Bell's HopSlam
6. Stone IPA (India Pale Ale)

There are certainly other options, but I have to choose those available for me, and types that I sampled several off.

To mention a very special beer for me and my beer experience and one on the list it must be the Leatherlips IPA from The Tap / Haverhill Brewery.

You could wonder by the choice, the rest of the list is high on sites like beeradvocate and ratebeer, where did then the Leatherlips come from? Well simply because of the experience. Here we found ourselves (me and my girl friend) in a very cold Boston in feb-07 (visiting the extreme beer fest held by beeradvocate), when we find this very tiny pub called Bukowski's Tavern and found a new beer to love.

The great thing with this beer is actually not the taste in first place, a great example of a IPA that you can drink a lot of. No the most important thing about this beer is the alcohol, simply coming with only 5.00% ABV!.

The rest of the great IPAs I have ever tasted and liked has been something like 6.5 and above, for example Stone is 6.90%, blind pig comes with 6 and pliny is even up to 8%. So thats why it is so great, here we have a great example of a US-IPA, with a very big fresh, dry hop aroma and very balanced regarding bitterness.

But drinking it you can not imagine that it is only 5%, it be much more!, its sort of fills your mouth with a very dry finish of hop forever, and it just simply tell you to; drink me, take an other one!

It was surely the winner for us during the weekend, not even the extreme beer fest could out win our experience at Bukowski's, when we returned to have a Leatherlips.

A fun thing is that when we first sampled the beer, we thought Leatherlips IPA from Tap, simply meant that it was on draught, we later understod that the name had to do with the brewery.

Hopefully we will have our new england beer tour next year (or at least in a couple of years) and then The Tap in Haverhill, Massachusetts will be on the short list.

An other fun thing was after we returned from the night of the barrels at the extreme fest we were so filled up with oak flavours and vanilla that we could not distinguish between the leatherlips and a Hercules Double IPA for a couple of minutes (the color help us after a while), that also says a lot about how great the beer is, Hercules IPA comes with 9.1%, but here we could not actually feel the difference at first, just that something was wrong.

So thanks to the brewmaster Mike Labbe at The Tap providing such a great IPA, with the very nice feature, that you can drink a lot of it. Hopefully we will drink "on the tap", next year.

"UPDATED 080806:"

And yes we did! On July 15th 2008 we arrived to Haverhill and could enjoy the place and of course the Leatherlips IPA + a six pack that we brought home almost intact.

QUICK TAKE: Dark Star Hophead Extra

First sampled at the last GBBF in London. But it did not say so much to me that time, not bad, Dark Star do not do bad beers, but simply it disappeared caused by the amount of the beers that was sampled.

Now it was sampled at the real ale bar at Oliver Twist in Stockholm, so it was of course served with the best possible environments, comparing to the GBBF where it seems that the beers do not get the time to settle as it should.

I like the normal Hophead and has been the number one real beer during this summer in Stockholm.

So how about the extra version? It comes with a very bright yellow color and with a thin white head. It has very citric hop taste, balanced (very balanced compared to people tasting it at the GBBF where people mentioned US-IPA to describe the taste), a very long palate, and surely a winner.

I like the hophead, but this was such much better, but not like if a US-brewer would call it extra (double the hop, or similar), just a bit more hoppy, but kept balanced at the same time.

Thanks to Dark Star for saving the great real ale experiences during the summer in Stockholm, now when Harvieston was taken over by belhaven and the brewer quit, surely missed.

QUICK TAKE: Blue Dot Imperial IPA

Yesterday it felt like opening up one of the big ones from my beer stash, it is always impossible to find the correct moment when you actually opens up the beers that you have worked a lot with to get home (somewhere in oregon this time, If I remember correctly), but you have to let them go, strange but it seems that I want to keep them for ever, instead of simply drinking them.

So it was time to open up the first ever genuin IPA (Blue Dot Imperial IPA) produced by the great brewery of Hair of the Dog, and one of my 5 best breweries in the US.

In short words you can say that this is a very complex beer (O.G. 1074, 100 IBUs) and it took the evening to finish it off. It comes with a very strong hoppy taste of grapefruit with a low malt taste present.

Gives you citrus tastes on the palate, that continues to maintain during the evening. A great hoppy taste, simply at great hop bomb. As usual with many of the bombs you have to like them hoppy, but it is not the most balanced beers you can drink, but what the heck I like them hoppy and you can have other beers if you want them clean and balanced, it is simply not the idea here.

I think it was one of the most interesting IPAs I have had for the last couple of months, and with the strong citrus and grapefruit taste it created its own little special kind of IPA, and in some strange way you could imagine that this was a Hair of the Dog and nothing else.

Not world class, but it is surely a great IPA and it would be interesting to test it on draught, if available?

Thanks to the brewery for giving me a great beer experience at home. For points I would give it a 4/5.

How about my champion IPA, well that is still the amazing; Russian River Pliny the Elder.

Wow, my first blog reaction...

I am quite new with this kind of beer blogging, and my blog is mostly for my own personal use, and I do not have any intention that anyone would actually bother reading it.

But now I have my first blog reaction over at the very nice blog of maeib's Beerblog. Thanks to maeib, it has been fun reading your reactions on GBBF, and the fact that you went there with the goal not to drink english beers.

For myself I actually tried to test as much of the english stuff that was possible, but it was very hard not to go over to the international beer and get lost with all of the great beers from the USA and the rest of the world.

At least I had a english winner, if you remove some of the beers from Sweden and the USA that was sort of not directly connected with the GBBF.

And the winner that I have mentioned before was the Crouch Vale Amarillo, mostly because of the clear taste and the balanced amount of hops, and I can certainly understand that Grouch Vale as a brewery is my personal favorite, together with Dark Star and Harvieston (before belhaven, destroyed everything).

Kaggen conquers the world...


I have mentioned it before but the Kaggen Stormakts Porter was a huge hit at the last GBBF, and it seems that there are many that bought the stuff with them.

Here is a great example of a beer stash from the latest GBBF found through the blog of; maeib's Beerblog.

What I can see there will be a good party for him in the future and his friends, with 8! Kaggen (so now I know where all the bottles went, :), I only got one bottle before the fridge was suddenly empty again regarding kaggen), and also a couple of other great beers from Sweden in the form of Nils Oscars barley and imperial stout, and even a beer from Slottskällans (located at my old home town of Uppsala).

It is always fun to see someone sharing the same passion for good beers, like 3 fon, Nogne and Olfabrikken, etc, etc.

And it is quite fun to see that no english beer can be spotted on picture, at least what I can see, thats fun when the festival is mostly about english beers.

2007-08-25

US-Beer pioneers documentary released in 2008

A documentary of the american craft brewing history will finally be released during the first part of 2008.

The background of this documentary is that a filmmaker called Jay Sheveck interviewed the early pioneers of the american craft beer revolution (95-02). This was captured on 60 hours of footage with rare interviews, including brewers and other key persons like; Fritz Maytag, Jack McAuliffe, William Newman, Bert Grant, Ken Grossman, David Geary, Charlie Papazian, Jim Koch, Charles Finkle, Michael Jackson, Fred Eckhardt, James Robertson, etc.

The title of the film is "Beer Pioneers, The Craft Brewing Revolution."

The producer of this film is the Beer Guppy of Burbank, California, which has recently also produced a book about beers in southern california, called "The Beer Guppy's Guide to Southern California".

The guide is part of a new series of beer guides, focused on the west coast, so the plan is to create additional guides to San Francisco Bay (January 2009), Portland, Oregon (June 2009), Alaskan Beer Trek (June 2009) and Pacific Alehouses (TBD).

I found a good article about the new guide at the Pacific Brew News Blog, where you can read about the new guide that seems very interesting if you ever happens to travel to southern california and wants to have a great beer experience.



The book can be bought here; link.

2007-08-24

Beer geeks at GBBF


I actually also found a nice lite group photo of the gang at the GBBF. Seems that the perry bar has caused us to be a bit dizzy.

Just checking if anyone is reading my little blog, except myself, :). I have a question.

WHAT WAS THE NUMBER ONE BEER AT THE GBBF? Please add you comments, my own winner is;

1. Crouch Vale Amarillo ****

Group photo from the beeraction 2007

When you are out travelling it is not so often that you have a nice little group photo. But with the help of BK I found a nice picture at a our favorite kick-off pub in London, namely Victoria in Bayswater.

Seems we are enjoying our beers and is preparing for our first ever GBBF the day after.

2007-08-23

The Finnish Beer Portal

More about Finnish pubs. Here is a very good site where you can search for great pubs.

Good Pub Guide to Finland

And there is even a book published! (ISSN 1457-4896).

Lyke 2 Drink blog will host the Session in September

The Lyke 2 Drink blog will host the Session in September.

The Session is the Beer Blogging Friday event held the first Friday of every month, so The Session #7 is slated for Sept. 7th.

This time it will simply be about animals and the assignment is to stock a "Brew Zoo" with animals large and small, all connected to different kind of beers.

Beeraction: A visit to the GBBF, Day II

Based on what we had learned the day before we started out in a very slow phase and went through the catalog for some great english beers.

Tasted beers through out the country and managed not to get to the other bars (Cider or international) for at least a few hours. During that time I got some new greate favorites;

1. Crouch Vales Amarillo (The English winner according to me)
2. Ringwood Old Thumper
3. Tryst Carronade IPA
4. Hanby Rainbow Chaser

Very good to be able to taste a lot beers from different areas in GB. But I at least (some of the other continued with the british isles the rest of the evening) could not hold myself and went back to sample some of the last american brews I could find, and it was great to step up again with a Stone Ruination, seems I was home again.

During the 2 days we also met some wonderful people with the interest of beers, like the deaf guy from the US that was serving beer at the international bar and got help from his friend during our conversations, thanks for that and all of the great brews that I got to taste. Or how about the american gentlemen that had a summer house in england but lived his normal life outside Newport, Oregan and was a regular at the Rogue pub at the bayside (lucky for him), great man and it seems that we might find him on some of the future bottles from Rogue (at least you never know), say Hi to the regulars at Rogue if you happened to read this.

The place is huge at earls coart but in the same time it is really needed and make the place quite pleasant, simply because there is always enough place and you can actually sit down at a table and sample your beers. This is very good and very different compared to Stockholm Beer where the place is overcrowded from day one and all time.

So in this way this is the best way to drink beers, fix a table and drink in a slow phase and in a organized way. Plus I have to mention the food, simply great, from cheese platters to great indian stuff. That is simply something else if you compare it to smaller festival in England where the offer is sausages, sausages and mash.

So with Maria and her new very nice cap from Camra we say good bye to GBBF, see you again in a couple of years!

Ps, so how about the winner?, the Hobson Mild, well I really like my Milds, and this was no exception, it was simply great, but I guess that has already been mentioned by everyone else being at the GBBF.

For those who missed it, the winner list looked like below;


Supreme Champion

Gold Hobsons Mild

Silver Mighty Oak Maldon Gold
Bronze Green Jack Ripper

Beeraction: A visit to the GBBF

A few weeks back we attended the 30th Great British Festival for the very first time.

We had decided to get there early so the decision was to attend the festival on Tuesday and Wednesday only. And I think that this was definately enough and how long you can appreciate a enormous building, with an ridiculas amount of beer and loads of beer geeks at the same place.

The 2 days very fast got very different approaches.

Day 1 started out with us being stunned by the amount of beers and the size of the festival, we could not compare that to any of our earlier experiences with festival like in Copenhagen, Stockholm or Boston, simply it was huge.

So what could be the result except that we simply started to drink what ever you seemed to like in what ever order you found them.

To add that to the fact that we very early came to the "Cider and Perry" and found out that it was not simply the fact that you could decide on a particular perry and then buy it, NO you of course had to sample "a few" of them first, before you could decide, at least according to the bar staff.

This simply resulted in a few of us sampling 2,3,4,5,... perrys before they actually bought one for 90p!. Great to have the possibility to sample (thanks to the man in big glasses), but the heavy part is that perrys are quite strong and with the result that it was spinning a lot afterwards :).


A Cider Bar Virgin?

After that experience I tried to have same english real ales, but could not find anything interesting, problably not the beers fault. So the only way of continuing was to get over to "Bieres Sans Frontieres", meaning the International Beer Bar at the Great British Beer Festival, and then taste through my favorite brews from the US. This resulted in a few new beers and breweries that I have not tasted out before. Some of the found favorites included;

1. Gritty McDuff's IPA
2. Three Floyds Romulus
3. Gardner Ale House Facelift IPA

And the winner, that must be the Gardner, a brewery from Gardner, Massachusetts USA. A IPA with a leafy hop aroma and some taste of grapefruit, not so balanced, but good enough for my hop head. Otherwise except the new ones for me, the winner was of course the Stone IPA!

Ending up with heavy beers from Sweden (like Kaggen Stormakts Porter) and something from Finland it was time to finish of the night and the first day of GBBF.



To be continued with day II.

Just for internal fun: "The return of the Wheel of Beers"

Just for some close friends!

Do you remember the Wheel of Beers? Yes it is still existing. And here is where I found it (russian), you lucky bastard.

Scandinavian Beer are enjoyed all over the place!

Just saw a new beer blog for me, which seems very interesting, that our Scandivian brews are not only liked over here, which always fun.

At the last GBBF several of the most powerful brews that we can achieve in Scandinavia was liked by many (it seems) and it was not the case that all Kaggen from Närkes was bought by a bunch of Swedes. Check out the article over here; My GBBF Stash.

And here is the blog; maeib's Beerblog.

Good beers in Helsinki?

The blog of Knut Albert, which is most often very informative read, has found a good URL regarding an article about good beer places in Helsinki, Finland.

Reading the article you can see that Helsinki is not just a vodka place. There is also a good map to bring with you if you ever get the chance to go over to the capitol of Finland.

It might be a idea to actually get there soon myself, because you have heard a lot that Helsinki is not so bad anymore (meaning about beer, :).

2007-08-21

QUICK TAKE: Crouch Vale Amarillo

I have enjoyed the beers from Crouch Vale since I first tested out the amazing Crouch Vale Brewers Gold at the great little pub in London called Pride of Spitalfields in the area of Shoreditch in 2006. The Brewers Gold is quite a famous beer, after being voted best beer at the GBBF for 2 straight years, if I remember correctly.

And this new season beer from Crouch is in my taste even better, mostly because of its clean taste and the high volume of hops. To be honest I am in my heart a hops junky so it is not so often that a english beer would touch me. But this one does, it is definately not a hop bomb, but it has the clearness and balance in such away that it in many ways outruns american competitors, but in the same time only 5%.

I guess it could only be Crouch Vale in England (together with Harvieston and Dark Star) who can do a hoppy aroma this good and balanced.

Simply a masterclass of what this style should be. The things I like is simply those wonderful hops in a perfect balande. I could drink this all day, and even decided to go for a whole pint as the last beer at the GBBF 2007.

Simply this is my winner at GBBF 2007!, together with the Cascade Pale Ale from Saltaire at the "Bar Nouveau"

2007-08-20

My own Lambic basket part II

Time for some more geeky beer stuff. A few weeks back (link) I got a hold of my own Lambic basket for personal usage from Akkurat (many thanks to Rille at Akkurat) and for the offer to borrow it until 2015, :).

So now it has been tested out at home with a nice bottle from my Lambic collection. I decided to go with a kriek and decided to test out a nice bottle of 2005 years Girardin Kriek 1882. A very nice beer and it got much better now with my own basket to have it in. Dont you think!, :).

2007-08-19

Ever in Stockholm...

then here is a url to start with, where you can find the essential stops for a great beer tour. Sorry no english here, but you can at least see where they are located and get a bunch of URLs to continue the exploration.

Stockholm beer map

Also regarding great brews...

I also got the possibility to get hold of my own example of the greatest beer from Sweden, namely the "Närke Kaggen! Stormaktsporter 2006" when we attended the GBBF festival in London (more about the festival in later entries, hopefully, :)).


For the bargain of £6 you could buy your own example for drink or go. That is pretty amazing if you compare that you can get to drink the beer at Akkurat in Stockholm for the small amount of 280 SEK (£20)!.

So now I have my own example that I think I will store for a while. Why I did not get more of them, was simply that the 80 delivered bottles, very strangely disappeared from the fridges every day they where released (very strange, :)). I guess more Swedes got the news and they where sold from the fridges as soon as they were discovered.

If you have not tasted the beer it is a baltic porter (I could also say Imperial Stout) stored on oak barrels for 2.5 month together with heather honey. So in some short words it taste like; Vanilla, barral, cigar (smokey), coffee and sweet. It was for a short while voted the number one beer at RateBeer and is currently on the number 2 spot. And om my own list it is also on the number 2 spot, just after Pliny.

Simply a great beer inspired by US-variants like; Stone Imperial Russian Stout and Victory Storm King Stout, at least according to my taste.

My own Vertical...


A few weeks back (link) I wrote some news about the new Stone Vertical Epic being out for sales in the US. I could not imagine that I would be sitting with my own example at my local pub in Stockholm. But as a small beer miracle it was for sales during the latest US-micro batch at Oliver Twist, a bit expensive, but not to bad if you think of the long transport, Swedish taxes and how rare the beer is.

I know, it should be kept for a while, but you can not get the bottle home, so simply it had do be tasted.

Well, how was it?, I would say a very potent belgian style beer that reminded me of christmas (a lot of ginger, really, very much of ginger). So in the end was worth the cost,

So we the beer geeks in Stockholm are already awaiting the new years example (hopefully).

Great US-micros on draught at Oliver Twist


Currently Oliver Twist has a new batch of US-micros for sale (actually since a couple of weeks) and has this time around also succeeded in getting a bunch of them on draught. Simply it is a small miracle that you can now drink your favorite US-micro or even better a new favorite on draught in the capital of Sweden (thanks to Jugge at OT). They are not provided as a single batch, so you have to wait for them, one by one, when one has been finished.

On the picture you can see the line up, which is pretty amazing, when you actually check what kind of beer it is. Mostly it is strong beers, which I imagine is caused by the long travel, so that kind of beers is better for travels on kegs, but I do not know the actual cause.

How about favorites so far, well that needs to be the Double Daddy IPA from Speakeasy. The Jah*va stout from Southern Tier is impressive, but to me it was simply to much to drink, at least with the amount you got, more fun then world class.

I will come back about this, when I have succeeded in testing at least some more of the draught beers (work is starting on Monday, so you can not be there every day from now on, :))

2007-08-18

If ever in SF...

If you ever have the possibility and time to get over to San Francisco and is looking for any good brews, here is then a great link if you like to use the public transports (metro = BART) at the same time; Beer By Bart

Simply it will show you one of the best places to drink good micros in the city and the bay area, and with using the BART-system to find your way. You can see that through going with the train you can in couple of minutes get to quite far out places, and do not need to drive get here.

For some personal favorites, here is a short list;
1. Jupiter
2. Toronado
3. Speakeasy Brewery (not directly with BART, but it is accessible through BART + MUNI)


And in the same time if you want any good reading before you get there, I can really recommend the following blog regarding news about beers around the bay area; "http://beernewsletter.zacharywalter.com/blog/"

Back again

I am back writing some new stuff after being out of the country for a while (summer vacation).

It is not easy to get to a computer and have the time to write some new things when your are out traveling.