The Session #7 so far

And here is the collection of all the animals that have been collected so far over at Lykes;

The Session #7 so far

The Session #7 (Brew Zoo)

My contribution is a Swedish IPA from the small brewery of Dugges Ale- & Porterbryggeri on the west coast of the country. The beer is called Holy Cow!, and I do not know so many more beers that has a cow on it, but you out there might know about any other?

Dugges produces different series of beer and this one is part of the so called "The express yourself series", which represents special beers with an attitude. Dugge himself (yes that is name of the brewer himself) says the following about his beer;

"A "India Pale Ale" with load of malt and hops. The quite high alcohol level is hidden behind a fruity and quite sweet caramel malty body. The sweetnes is balanced by 5 different hops (US-ones) that has created a large but in the same soft bitternes with a long taste."

For myself it is a American IPA with a amber colour and a firm beige head. Aroma is a bit peppar and caramel, with a very hoppy flavour. And at last a very long dry aftertaste. Alcohol is not felt, it just adds the extra flavor. Simply a great IPA that I drink at my favorite pubs in Stockholm like Oliver Twist and Glenfiddich Warehouse.

Just for fun and one more type of animal (well not type, simply a bit younger), the beer was also inspired to brew a test variant, that simply could have been a Holy Cow, but only became a calf. Called in Swedish; Dugges Provbrygd 1-2007 (Kalven)


Dugges is quite new as a brewery, and the beers have been available for a year or so. Very inspired by US-breweries, so you can expect a lot of IPAs and different types of hops like cascade, amarillo and chinook.

They also produces great types of stouts and ports (part of the brewery name) and is very keen on testing out different types of beer with the test brews sold to the pubs for sampling and is then decided to be produced or not by the people who drink them.

The have four different series;
The Gothenburg series - Old Swedish beer tradition combined with English stubbornness and American new thinking.

Express Yourself! - More of everything (where Holy Cow is located)

The country series - Different countries - Different Characters? (like Britannia & California)

Seasons - Christmas etc (here we have an additional animal in the form of Rudolph the reindeer!)


Thats it, my first test for the "Session", I am quite new with this, so bare we me, and see this as a little contribution from a beer geek in Sweden.

UPDATED 2007-09-07 13:50
And here is the collection of all the animals that have been collected so far over at Lykes;

The Session #7 so far

Google maps, so how about London?

I got a comment and question from bark over at ofiltrerat about about if there is a similar google map over central London or Camden. And YES there is, I recently saw that beermapping had added a map for London. Here is the link;

London Google Beer Map

And when I still is talking about beermapping, you can also be aware that they have updated the site to include the following new cities with added pub/brewery maps through google maps;

Asheville, Bluegrass (Louisville, Lexington, Cincinnati), Indianapolis, Las Vegas, Montreal, Nashville, New Orleans, Portland Maine, Reno/Tahoe, Sacramento, St. Louis, Toronto

Such a great site, thanks very much for that.

Nice collection of Google beer maps in GB

Today I discovered a new site that it not blogging, no they are simply "beer scooping". With scooping in their meaning means;

"Basically, it is the drinking - and more importantly the writing down - of all "new" beers drunk; all beers thus "scooped" are put onto a master list (either paper based or, more commonly in these technological days, onto a PDA or suchlike) which can be well over 10,000 different beers in total, and the scooper carries this around with him to ascertain if any beers he encounters on his travels are "required" by him"

Here is the url to this very informative site based in England; LINK

In here I also found some great new Google beer maps to use if you ever get over to GB and wants to drink some good brews. Here is a short sample;

(Bath Cardiff Chester Edinburgh Glasgow Manchester and Salford Preston Sheffield St Albans)

With the definition of beer scooping, I would say that I also is scooping, but maybe in a slightly different way (very geek I know), because I simply take a photo on my cell at each beer I drink and then writes down the name!. It is a bit strange but it seems to be the only way I can hold track on the beers and the phone is always something I bring with me. You often get some strange looks when the first thing you ever do before you drink your beer is to bring up the camera and take a quick photo at the beer (and often the suroundings). And sometimes you have to do it several times due the bad result. So quite often I get the comment from my girl friend; "are you ready soon??", yes soon just one more I often reply.

So here is some of the strange collections so far;

1. My Beer I
2. My Beer II
3. US Micro Beer Sample Selection
4. Beer List US-tour 2006

Sorry for not having all of the names yet, I am working on that, so now it is mostly hundreds of pint glasses with some kind of beer in it, very interesting, :).

Getting close to the Session.

It is now only 2 days left until we have the Session. I am just reminding myself and that I will try to come up with some animals connected with beers.

Earlier post about the session.

Humour for Real Ale geeks

As a real ale beer lover and seen by other people as a genuin beer geek this strip found at the Stonch beer blog and with the help of Gazza Prescott, is really funny.

It is a bit scary to see that such strips actually shows how geeky we can be sometimes and that the things you read affects how you think of a beer.

A bit extreme, but it pin points at least how we are and that beers are much better if you have been informed that this is a "amazing" beer.

QUICKTAKE: The Saturday beer result

We had a nice little beer crawl this weekend at the normal places we visit in Stockholm. So we just wanted some great beers in a slow phase and then get home quite early. As you probably know yourselves it is always better to drink beer early during the day, at least what I like, its calmer, you can sit down, talk with the bartenders and do not have to struggle with the euro lager crowd that fills up all our pubs during the evenings.

Started out at the favorite place of Oliver Twist and tested some of the available US-draught beers that they currently have on tap (the list if getting to the end, US draught list, so now we are only waiting for a "bastard");

1. Lost Coast Indica India Pale Ale (draught)
I tasted this on draught last year in Eureka when we had our west-coast brew crawl. And I simply have to say that it as great example of an american india pale ale, to me one of the best. And regarding the brewery I think this is the best they can do, world class, and much better than the rest of the offer they have. I do not think that it is such a great brewery, but at least they have one great beer. A very balanced brew with a great hoppy flavor. I believer it is Columbus, Willamette and Centennial hops they use.

2. Anchor Liberty Ale (draught)
Old favorite which is much better than the bottled version. Quite a normal beer in Stockholm so you sort of skip it because of other new brews you always have to taste. But it is simply a "classic" american ale, and so much fun to see that it is even better as a draught version. Can not pin point the difference, but it seems so much "rounder". One of the best APAs (means monkey in Swedish!) you can have on draught, at least if you only have the "normal" beers to choose from.

Left the american shelf and continued with some great example of Swedish micros.

3. Dugges High Five
Used to be a favorite when it was first released earlier this year as a experiment.

It is still a very potent american IPA, but something is lost. Earlier it was a favorite, because in short words it was a very high alpha hop monster that throw you away, and reminded me of the hop monster I like from the US. Nothing to do with a balanced brews, just a bunch of alpha hops (Amarillo, Centennial, Chinook, Simcoe and Tomahawk). Now when it was made a regular beer and Dugges switched the tomahawk to something else, it sort of misses the extra touch that I liked so much. But that is one of the problem when you are a small brewery, you get something that works and then have to do it once more and in larger quanties, at that is not so easy.

Hopefully it will come back and hopefully Dugges can get hold of a bunch of tomahawk again. Anyway it is drinkable and still quite a good IPA, but not world class anymore, which is a bit of a pitty. Hopefully it will turn better, otherwise we can alwasy drink a "Bollox" or a "Holy Cow", they are still great beers.

Left Oliver Twist and a few blocks away over to Akkurat (the number 1 pub in Sweden!) where we finished of with a new "classic" micro.

4. Ölands Amarillo Golden Ale
Here is a beer for my taste. A single hop beer with a great hop taste, but also in the same time very balanced. It is fun to see that such a new brewery (no more than 6 months) is learning and getting better for each beer they produce.

It started out a bit bad and with some awful samplings at the beginning, at least for me, so it seemed to be based on the daily quality and what batch you could get hold of.

It seems that Ölands is getting to be one of the best US-inspired breweries in Sweden, together with Dugges.

If you like US IPAs and APAs it is always fun to see these little breweries being inspired and many times are creating new existing brews that beats the "originals".

So here we have a beer with Amarillo hops with a toffee malt and very hoppy and dry finish, this is the best so far for them, and might be a future Swedish micro classic.

It was very sad news, but...

its always fun to see that some people are actually noticing my little blog; article.

Something fun on a Sunday

Regarding the famous coke & mentos experiment!

Regarding internet shops selling beers...

I wrote earlier about the new rules that makes it possible for us here in Sweden to buy beers directly through internet, as long as the beers are sold outside the country!

And now it seems that the shops in Denmark is getting started for selling the beers, at least some purchases have been done with a succesful result. Recently other bloggers (in Swedish only) in Sweden got their first beers from the following reseller in Denmark;

ØlKonsortiet

They currently do not have a webshop, but they are planning it, and right now it is simply possible to contact them directly for getting a beer list and buy directly from them. They have Danish, US and Canadian beers for sales, so you can get beer from Skovlyst, Brøckhouse, Mikkeller, Avery, Rogue, Great Divide, Unibroue etc.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 ****