Even though there was some turmoil surrounding the North American Organic Beer Festival last weekend, I'm sure I would have made it over to check it out at some point, if I had been in town. But instead of enjoying the onset of Portland's brief season of beautiful weather, we have landed in the middle of Austin's siege against the upper end of the thermometer. It's not the right timing for a trip to Texas, but we had a wedding to attend, so off we went.
But aha! there was a beer festival in Austin that weekend also -- the GABF. Oh, sorry, not the GABF, just a GABF: the Great Austin Beer Festival. I suppose I would have gone to that as a replacement for the NAOBF, except that Brady and Sarah's wedding was scheduled at the exact same time. Truth be told, the GAusBF didn't sound very appealing. As far as I can tell from looking at the list of breweries, it was a distributor-driven juggernaut with a couple of local breweries thrown in at the end as something of an afterthought. Here's an example of how lackadaisical the festival was: they never contacted my buddy Lee who is the beer writer at the Austin Chronicle to tell him about the festival. [Note to Portlanders: the Chronicle plays an even more important part in peoples' entertainment planning than the Portland weeklies do.] Lee found out in a roundabout way, and wasn't offered any kind of media access to the fest.
There are a couple of reviews that give the festival a thumbs-up, but if you read between the lines, neither review is very enthusiastic, and commenters had some complaints. Sounds like not too bad of a festival to miss.
So that's how you can miss two dodgy beer festivals. First, leave your hometown on a festival weekend; second, have your friends' wedding scheduled at the same time as the beer festival in their town.
Showing posts with label 24-hour beer cycle. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 24-hour beer cycle. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Thursday, April 8, 2010
Your Thoughts on Beer Publications
Here you are reading a beer blog. It's unlikely that It's Pub Night is your only Internet source for beer information, so I assume you read other blogs, maybe online forums, or maybe you even subscribe to an antiquated email discussion group.
But what about printed media? Do you find any of these worth your time:
I'm sure I left off some important publications. There, I've admitted my own ignorance, you don't have to bring it up again in the comments, but please do fill in the blanks if there's another magazine or tabloid out there that you enjoy reading.
What got me thinking about this question was a comment on my San Francisco vs. Portland post. The Bay Area correspondent for the Northwest Brewing News recommended the February/March 2010 issue of the paper, which had a cover story called Bay Area Alehouses. As it happens, I had indeed read that article before my trip to San Francisco, but had not found it useful or memorable. Why not? For starters, it only mentioned a handful of places in downtown San Francisco, and I had no plans for going further afield. Moreover, as I read the article, I noticed that it didn't mention any specific beers served at any of the bars, but it did mention the name of the owner or manager of every single place. That must be fascinating information for a local insider, but for a tourist or dabbler it was useless and actually quite annoying to read such a tour de force of name-dropping. So annoying that I put down the article and never gave it another thought until Mario brought it up.
It put me in the mood to write a blog post lambasting the NWBN for being such a lame publication. Scanning the Feb/Mar edition I found another annoyance: an article on beer pricing with a section headed "Let there be Honest Pints!", which didn't mention Jeff Alworth's Honest Pint Project. But even though I was in a nasty mood, I couldn't find much else to complain about in that issue or the subsequent April/May issue (well, the Beer Bitch column is a joke that stopped being funny a long time ago). Instead, I'm going to make a point of picking up the NWBN whenever I see a new issue; there's plenty of good information in there, especially about other areas I'm less up-to-date on.
This train of though also got me thinking that I need to put my money where my mouth is and subscribe to Beer Advocate. The magazine itself never knocks me off my feet, but the BA website is an invaluable part of the community and I want to pitch my dollar into their tip jar.
So I ask you, gentle readers. What are your thoughts on dead-tree beer publications?
But what about printed media? Do you find any of these worth your time:
I'm sure I left off some important publications. There, I've admitted my own ignorance, you don't have to bring it up again in the comments, but please do fill in the blanks if there's another magazine or tabloid out there that you enjoy reading.
What got me thinking about this question was a comment on my San Francisco vs. Portland post. The Bay Area correspondent for the Northwest Brewing News recommended the February/March 2010 issue of the paper, which had a cover story called Bay Area Alehouses. As it happens, I had indeed read that article before my trip to San Francisco, but had not found it useful or memorable. Why not? For starters, it only mentioned a handful of places in downtown San Francisco, and I had no plans for going further afield. Moreover, as I read the article, I noticed that it didn't mention any specific beers served at any of the bars, but it did mention the name of the owner or manager of every single place. That must be fascinating information for a local insider, but for a tourist or dabbler it was useless and actually quite annoying to read such a tour de force of name-dropping. So annoying that I put down the article and never gave it another thought until Mario brought it up.
It put me in the mood to write a blog post lambasting the NWBN for being such a lame publication. Scanning the Feb/Mar edition I found another annoyance: an article on beer pricing with a section headed "Let there be Honest Pints!", which didn't mention Jeff Alworth's Honest Pint Project. But even though I was in a nasty mood, I couldn't find much else to complain about in that issue or the subsequent April/May issue (well, the Beer Bitch column is a joke that stopped being funny a long time ago). Instead, I'm going to make a point of picking up the NWBN whenever I see a new issue; there's plenty of good information in there, especially about other areas I'm less up-to-date on.
This train of though also got me thinking that I need to put my money where my mouth is and subscribe to Beer Advocate. The magazine itself never knocks me off my feet, but the BA website is an invaluable part of the community and I want to pitch my dollar into their tip jar.
So I ask you, gentle readers. What are your thoughts on dead-tree beer publications?
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
The 24-Hour Beer Cycle
Politicians and pundits decry the 24-hour news cycle: modern communications drive an unquenchable thirst for information, as media outlets strive to keep new content in front of their audience. When I appointed myself as a beer blogger, I put myself into the whirlwind of the 24-hour beer cycle -- the internet deluge of blogs, tweets, emails, and Facebook updates about beer. It's exhausting.
Here in Portland alone, there's at least one beer event happening every single day. Even if there were no special events, there are so many new or interesting beers a short bike ride away that it's sometimes hard to think about anything else. When Bob Noxious and his family were visiting us last summer, Bob shook his head as we settled in at the third stop of some pub crawl and said, "How could you keep from becoming an alcoholic in this town?" Fair question. As much as it hurts, you have to let some events pass you by, sometimes even cherished traditions like the Lucky Lab Barleywine Festival that I missed this last weekend.
In beer as in everything, the internet amplifies the amount of information, and keeps it coming throughout the day. To keep up with local news and to avoid duplicating someone else's rant, I read about a dozen active Portland beer blogs, and a few others from around the country or other English-speaking nations. But Twitter is the real killer. The first tweets I read in the morning might be about @thebeernut's evening libations in Ireland, followed a few hours later by live reports of beer drinking in Boston, then Chicago and Austin. Then when the dozens of nightly tweets from around Portland start rolling in about various bottles opened and pints drained, how can it not make you thirsty? Not just after a hard day's work, but morning, noon, and night. It's the 24-hour beer cycle.
For all of that information, there's some that I don't get around to: the excellent Northwest forums at Beer Advocate, the beer radio shows, beer podcasts, and beer videos are too much for me. I have a day job, a family, some exercise routines, and a dwindling number of outside interests. I have to let a lot of beer info -- and a lot of beer -- get away from me. Which means that sometimes the blog just gets fed a filler post like this one, instead of the substantive, hard-hitting beer analysis you expect from It's Pub Night. Hey, not so different from the effect of the 24-hour news cycle on the news media.
Here in Portland alone, there's at least one beer event happening every single day. Even if there were no special events, there are so many new or interesting beers a short bike ride away that it's sometimes hard to think about anything else. When Bob Noxious and his family were visiting us last summer, Bob shook his head as we settled in at the third stop of some pub crawl and said, "How could you keep from becoming an alcoholic in this town?" Fair question. As much as it hurts, you have to let some events pass you by, sometimes even cherished traditions like the Lucky Lab Barleywine Festival that I missed this last weekend.In beer as in everything, the internet amplifies the amount of information, and keeps it coming throughout the day. To keep up with local news and to avoid duplicating someone else's rant, I read about a dozen active Portland beer blogs, and a few others from around the country or other English-speaking nations. But Twitter is the real killer. The first tweets I read in the morning might be about @thebeernut's evening libations in Ireland, followed a few hours later by live reports of beer drinking in Boston, then Chicago and Austin. Then when the dozens of nightly tweets from around Portland start rolling in about various bottles opened and pints drained, how can it not make you thirsty? Not just after a hard day's work, but morning, noon, and night. It's the 24-hour beer cycle.
For all of that information, there's some that I don't get around to: the excellent Northwest forums at Beer Advocate, the beer radio shows, beer podcasts, and beer videos are too much for me. I have a day job, a family, some exercise routines, and a dwindling number of outside interests. I have to let a lot of beer info -- and a lot of beer -- get away from me. Which means that sometimes the blog just gets fed a filler post like this one, instead of the substantive, hard-hitting beer analysis you expect from It's Pub Night. Hey, not so different from the effect of the 24-hour news cycle on the news media.
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