World Beer Cup Champion Brewery Port Brewing / The Lost Abbey will be celebrating its second anniversary next weekend with a big party, music, food, and (of course) lost of Port / Lost Abbey beers.

Additionally, they’ll be putting out three new releases including Port 2nd Anniversary (a huge double IPA), Inferno (one hell of a golden strong ale) and Cuvee de Tomme (GABF and WBC Gold medal winner).

There’s only going to be 150 cases of CdT released, with a 6 bottle max per person, so if you want some, I recommend you get there early.

All the details on the party and special releases are on the Lost Abbey website right here.

We’d just like to wish everyone a happy 75th anniversary of the return of legal beer to the U.S.

And now let’s all hoist a glass and sing along with us to Weird Al’s Beer Song:

Oh… what is the malt and liquor?
What gets you drunken quicker?
What comes in bottles or in cans? (Beer)
Can’t get enough of it (Beer)
How we really love it (Beer)
Makes me think I’m a man (Beer)
I could kiss and hug it (Beer)
But I’d rather chug it (Beer)
Got my belly up to here (Beer)
I could not refuse a (Beer)
I could really use a beer, beer, beer

What is the malt and liquor?
What gets you drunken quicker?
What comes in bottles or in cans? (Beer)
Can’t get enough of it (Beer)
How we really love it (Beer)
Makes me think I’m a man (Beer)
I could kiss and hug it (Beer)
But I’d rather chug it (Beer)
Got my belly up to here (Beer)
Golly, I adore it! (Beer)
Come on dammit, pour it!
Do it for me, brew it for me
Feed it to me, speed it to me (Beer)
The most wonderful drink in the world
HOORAY!!! (BURP)

Prost!

This weekend is Labor Day weekend – the traditional end of summer for those of us here in the States. Being who we are, we naturally like to celebrate the end of the season with (what else) Beer and pictures!

But this time around we thought we’d do something really special and invite you to share your own beer photos with us via mybeerpix.com’s live photo blogging feature.

Here’s the details:

From Friday, August 31 through Monday September 3, you’ll be able to post your photos and comments directly to our website simply by emailing them to:

pix ( at ) mybeerpix.com (Just replace the ( at ) with an “@”)

Make sure to include a subject (i.e., “Beer photo from Moosedrool, Wisconsin”) that gives viewers a little info about the photo.

If you’d like to include text (beyond the subject) along with your photo you’ll need to enclose it in the “#” sign like this:

#Hello mybeerpix readers! I’m Larry and this is my buddy Moe. We are enjoying a pint of Moosedrool IPA at the pub. Cheers!#

(If you don’t use the “#” sign to enclose the message, the server will strip out the text.)

That’s it! You can post from any email program, or if you’re one of the cool kids like me and have a cameraphone, you can post directly from your mobile phone. Every 15 minutes or so our web server will check for new photos, automatically resize them and post. (So if you don’t see your photo right away, wait a few minutes, the server is probably between check cycles.)

Caveats and (not very limiting) limitations:

1) Please keep the photos beer-related. They can be of just beer, people with beer, at beer places, events, beer signage, etc. — it simply needs to somehow relate to beer. This is after all “my beer pix” not “my day at the zoo pix”.

2) Please keep your photos (and language) to PG-13. A little racy is fine and fun, but our 14 year-old daughter sees this and we don’t want to have to explain anything. (If you’ve got anything beyond PG-13, feel free to email them to us privately. )

3) Make sure they’re your photos. Posting other’s pictures can be a big legal mess that we don’t want to deal with.

4) If you’re reading this before midnight GMT on Friday the 31st or after 11:59pm on September 3rd, you can’t send photos. The email address only works for the time limits above. Any email outside of that will bounce.

Ok, that’s it! Now go out there and show us what you and your beer are doing this weekend!

“Where the hell are you and why the hell aren’t you posting?”

That’s the reader email that greeted me this morning –- 14 or so days since our last post to our beer and sun-soaked corner of the Internet.

A two week hiatus isn’t so long in the grand scheme of things, but apparently its more than some (obviously entertainment-starved) people can deal with. Fortunately for them — and the other six people who read this — Molly and I are back and we’ve got a big backlog of sudsy stuff to talk about.

So without further ado, I’d like to call this My Beer Pix post to order, and get on with it.

Love from the Beaver State

First off, we’d like to extend a long overdue word of thanks to Jon at the Brew Site for a big box full of love from Oregon. Jon sent us treats from Cascade Lakes Brewing, McMenamins, and, of course, Deschutes (including the 19th Anniversary Golden Ale and The Abyss!)

We’re thinking of waiting for a cloudy day and then sitting under the sprinklers and having a beer tasting with some friends in the proper “Oregon atmosphere”. (Then again, we be greedy and just drink them by ourselves.)

Thanks again Jon. We owe you!

Long Promised Clam Flavor Beer Update

Okay, about a month ago I wrote a post titled The Good, The Bad and The Clam Flavored about a beer tasting we had over at Port / Lost Abbey Brewing that included a 10 year-old bottle of Old English 800 (”the bad”), a bottle of 1990 Thomas Hardy (”the good”), and Bud Chelada (aka “the Clam Flavored”).

At the time the Bud Chelada was in its test-marketing phase in Texas, so it was something of interest here in San Diego. Unfortunately, stuff happened and I forgot to write about our reactions to the beer that night. So here they are.

Bud Chelada is essentially Bud Light mixed with Clamato — aka: tomato and clam juice. (Down in Texas, there’s something called a “Texas Bloody Mary” which is a drink that calls for fouling a perfectly good beer with tomato juice, so maybe test marketing Bud Chelada down there made sense.) Delivered in a 24 ounce tall boy can, it pours a murky orange to red with Lightrally no head whatsoever (several of the women there that night described the color as similar to the tail-end of a certain biological act they endure monthly).

The flavor? Uh… it’s Bud Light, tomato and CLAM JUICE… You figure it out. No wait, here’s a picture Eric, of one of our intrepid tasters, sampling it.

It think the look on his face pretty much says it all. (So does “foul”, “gross”, “fish beer”, and “drinking beer and tomato juice from a dirty aquarium”.)

Of course, this was merely the consensus at Lost Abbey. Your opinion may vary. And in the Clam Beer’s defense, all of the words on the can (with the exception of the Surgeon General’s warning) were in Spanish, so we might not be the intended market for Bud Light Chelada.

UPDATE: Since our tasting, Bud’s Chelada (both Budweiser and Bud Light variants) has gone general release and is now available nationwide. A friend of mine told me the other day that he was in line at a gas station and the guy in front of him had two cans of the stuff and was asking the cashier if there was anymore in the back. (Two thoughts here: could be an A-B plant, or just the questionable taste of a guy who shops for beer at the gas station.)

Upcoming San Diego Beer Events

Several events coming up here in the next few weeks.

July 28: Matt Dolman’s Unofficial Vertical Epic Ale Release Party — Long-time Stone Brewing denizen Matt Dolman hosts his annual party to do a vertical tasting of Stone’s Vertical Epic ales (the latest being the 07.07.07). This year the crowd will be doing the run from 03.03.03 through 07.07.07, plus a whole bunch more. If you’re not already invited, forget getting in. (Don’t worry, we’ll post pix.)

August 25: Lost Abbey First Annual Barrel Tasting — Word’s come down from the mountain that Lost Abbey will be hosting their first barrel tasting in a little under a month. Attendees will be tapping one of the largest barrel collections in the country to sample LA’s En Garde (barrel-aged Avante Garde), Older Viscocity, the much anticipated Red Poppy, a new Bourbon barrel-aged Angel’s Share, and the nearly impossible to get Cuvee de Tomme. According to Lost Abbey’s Tomme Arthur, there’ll also beer a specially blended beer just for attendees. The tasting will be limited to 100 people and tickets will be $50, but there’ll be food and good drink included. Information and ticket purchases should be on the Lost Abbey Website soon.

September 8: Stone Brewing 11th Anniversary Celebration — If you’ve never attended a Stone Anniversary Celebration, you are missing a great event. It’s a huge party at Stone’s Brewery attended Lightrally by every craft brewery on the west coast. The people are great; the beer is great; the food is great; and the weather is great. If there’s only one beer event you do, this is the one. Tickets aren’t on sale yet, but you can get more information on the when and where right here. (By the way — 100% of the ticket price goes to local boys and girls clubs, so you’re not just drinking beer because you want to — you’re doing it for the children.)

PS: Port Brewing / Lost Abbey, holds an open brunch right before the first session at the Stone Celebration. They’re only 5 minutes or so from Stone, so it’s a great place to have breakfast, do a little “pre-drinking” and then wander over Stone for the party. Best of all, I believe it’s free! (Although they do appreciate it if you buy a beer or two — and maybe a T-shirt.)

I’m late to the party on this one because I was out of town (and I’ve been drinking Olde English 800). Over at Seen Through a Glass Lew Bryson is mulling the meaning of the term “craft beer” and whether it applies Anheuser-Busch’s Beach Bum Blonde Ale.

There’s a lot of back and forth in the comments as to the definition (including my own), but it’s not all that difficult as long as one remembers the meaning of the word “craft”. And I’m not talking some marketing hack’s spin on the word “craft” — marketers play fast and loose with words (I know, I am one) — I’m talking the real meaning.

From my handy-dandy Websters New International Dictionary of English:

Craft: \’kraft\ 1: Dexterity, Skill 2: an occupation requiring dexterity or artistic skill.

By extension, a “craftsman” is one who exercises his artistic skill, and one who is “crafty” is clever or skilled.

So then, what is a “craft beer”?

Obviously, it’s one that is produced by dexterity or artistic skill (and perhaps with a little cleverness).

Is AB’s Beach Bum Blonde good beer? Perhaps. (I’ve never tasted it.) But is it “craft beer”? No. Because anyone who’s ever taken a tour of an AB brewing plant knows that the system is highly automated and controlled. Malt is boiled, wort is pumped, hops are added, wort is chilled and fermented, and beer is eventually bottled all via computer control according to a pre-programmed recipe. Human involvement is usually limited to people in bunny suits pushing buttons and looking at display screens. (And maybe a QA person taking some weights and measures to see if the system is on track.)

Now go to your favorite local small brewery and take a look at its system. Do you see technicians in bunny suits behind big glass windows monitoring computer controlled hoppers and automated heating, transfer and chilling systems? I doubt it. Most likely you see guys in rubber boots running around the brewery checking gauges, running pumps and double-checking their notes.

AB is “technology”, your local brewery is “craft”.

I think people are getting muddled in their thinking because they are making “craft brew” synonymous with “micro brewery” and “good beer”, but that’s simply not the case.

“Technology breweries” and “craft breweries” can be any size. If you’ve got the money you can build a totally automated brewery that produces only 30 barrels. And if you’ve got the manpower, you can have a non-automated brewery that produces 3 million barrels. Each is equally capable of making good beers as well as bad ones. (I’d even go as far as to say that craft brewers produce more bad beer because the lack of automation allows for more human error.) Both would probably even employ true craftsmen as brewers. (Someone has to design the beer.)

It’s how they go about producing their product that separates the two. If you rely on technology and systems to produce your beer, you’re one kind — a technology brewery — and you’re usually large. If you rely on your skill, artistry and manual dexterity to make your beer, then you’re a craft brewer — and you’re usually small.

It’s that simple. One is not better than the other. (In fact, one often starts as the other — every big American brewery was a craft brewer at one point.) Don’t fall into the marketing hacks’ trap and let them make “craft brew” a code phrase for “microbrew is better than macrobrew”. It’s the beer that makes the difference, not how it’s produced.

So I was wandering around the Internet late last night looking for some inspiration on for a big BBQ we’re having this weekend and I found an obscure little blog called Uptown Flavor with what looks to be a great Cajun Bourbon chicken recipe.

Coincidentally, it also had a fresh post titled The History of Beer Part 2, with a quick summary of beer in Europe essentially from the Reinheitsgebot in 1516 to the end of the 19th Century.

Yeah, I know, there’s lots of these “History of Beer” things all over the place, but I like this one because it boils events down to one sentence — nice bite-sized nuggets of beer trivia that you can use as a conversation starter at, oh, I don’t know–a barbecue. For example:

ME: “Were you aware that in 1602 Dr Alexander Nowell discovered that ale can be stored longer in cork sealed, glass bottles?

YOU: “Why, no, I wasn’t. That’s very interesting.”

Add some meat, fire and a fresh pint of good beer and we’ve got an instant good time.

There are a couple of problems with the guy’s history. For example,

AD 1589: Hofbrauhaus built by Duke Wilhelm V is the focal point of the famous annual Oktoberfest in Belgium.

Last time I checked the Hofbrauhaus was in Munich in Saxony, Germany–not Belgium–but who know, it’s Europe, stuff moves around. Plus this is the history “part 2″, but I can’t find part 1 on the site.

Whatever. It’s still a quick read and chocked full of useful beer tidbits.

» The History of Beer Part 2 Via Uptown Flavor.

And if you’re looking for a good grilled chicken recipe, check out the Cajun Bourbon Chicken.

Last Friday I wrote about a little experiment I did in an attempt to determine the most popular beer blog on the web.

Basically I wrote a script that does a little triangulation between ranking systems on a blog aggregator (Technorati), a search engine (Google) and a blog reader (Bloglines), and tosses back the results. (For a full explanation, read the first post.)

Alas, I spent so much time in that first post explaining how I did what I did that I didn’t have a chance to list my full results. So here they are (along with a few notes):

Beer Blog Popularity as of 25 May, 2007

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

   Notes: Mentioned in my first post. As of this morning their Technorati Authority had risen to 150.

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

   Notes: The Authority of 121 reflects a combined 107 for the old URL and a 14 for the new one. (People need to update their links). Bloglines and Page Rank numbers reflect the old URL as well.

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

   Notes: The Beer Mapping Project’s Page Rank of 6 equals that of Beer Advocate. That’s pretty impressive given the amount of content generated on Beer Advocate each day. A Google number that high indicates that while not as many people may subscribe to the RSS feed, lots of people are clicking through to the site based on search results.

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

   Notes: Even though The Brew Site has a lower Authority rank, it’s larger subscriber base and higher Page Rank kicked it to number four on the list. This is the highest ranking beer blog run entirely by one guy who is not directly affiliated with the beer business.

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

   Notes: More blogs cite articles on Hop Talk than on The Beer Site giving it a higher Authority rank. However, the lower Page Rank and Bloglines subscriber base placed it number five. (Could change quickly though.)

6. Beer Haiku Daily
   Technorati Authority: 66 | Bloglines: 9 | Google Page Rank: 4

   Notes: Who knew so many beer lovers were weird Japanese poetry fans? Number six on the list is a great showing. Who sez we isn’t cultured peoples?

7. Appellation Beer: Beer From a Good Home
   Technorati Authority: 67 | Bloglines: 7 | Google Page Rank: 4

   Notes: I was a little surprised by these results. I had assumed that any of Stan Hieronymus’ sites would easily clock in in the top three. Spidering this site though, I can see that the site’s rank may be artificially low due to a lower number of inbound citations (links) from other sites as compared to the top three beer blogs.

8. Realbeer.com Beer Therapy
   Technorati Authority: 48 | Bloglines: 28 | Google Page Rank: 5

   Notes: The RealBeer main website is huge in comparison to the blog. Were the whole site RSS-capable (rather than just one section), I believe it’d rank at least four positions higher.

9. Beer Me!
   Technorati Authority: 51 | Bloglines: 2 | Google Page Rank: 5

   Notes: Syndication of headlines only as opposed to full articles or abstracts probably keeps its subscriber numbers lower than the could be because that sort of thing tends to appeal to industry insiders (e.g., people in the beer biz) rather than regular folks. Authority and Page Rank are still quite respectable. This site could easily move up in the next few weeks.

10. Stonch’s Beer Blog
    Technorati Authority: 43 | Bloglines: 2 | Google Page Rank: 4

    Notes: Stonch is a prolific writer, so I have to assume that his Authority rank is artificially low because he tends to write a lot about local pubs and what he’s up to rather than what everyone is writing about. (Recall that ‘Authority’ gets its ranking from the number of other blogs citing your posts or vice versa.) Still a very respectable showing for a guy who makes beer in a plastic bin and shares it with friends (and the homeless) in a park.

Up and Comers
While not in the top ten, each of the blogs below is on an upward trend and could easily pop into the top ten over the next few months.

• Brew Like A Monk
  Technorati Authority: 29 | Bloglines: 15 | Google Page Rank: 5
• Speaking of Beer
  Technorati Authority: 33 | Bloglines: 5 | Google Page Rank: 4
• CURE FOR WHAT ALES YOU | Microbrew Craft Beer Blog
  Technorati Authority: 33 | Bloglines: 1 | Google Page Rank: 3
• The Brew Lounge : Beer Tasting Brewing and Culture
  Technorati Authority: 26 | Bloglines: 11 | Google Page Rank: 5
• Big Foamy Head
  Technorati Authority: 27 | Bloglines: 7 | Google Page Rank: 4
• Hedonist Beer Jive
  Technorati Authority: 26 | Bloglines: 13 | Google Page Rank: 4
• A Roughneck’s Take On Beer
  Technorati Authority: 17 | Bloglines: 4 | Google Page Rank: 4
• Monday Night Brewery : Atlanta, GA
  Technorati Authority: 17 | Bloglines: 0 | Google Page Rank: 2
• Flossmoor Beer Blog
  Technorati Authority: 16 | Bloglines: 1 | Google Page Rank: 4

Some closing notes, thoughts, etc.

• This is an attempt to measure popularity, not actual readership
  None of the metrics I used counts actual site traffic or readership. All it does is make an assumtion that a blog with more links to/from it, higher search engine results, and more RSS subscribers is more “popular” than one with lower numbers.
• It’s already inaccurate
  All of these measures are snapshots. The moment I took them they were obsolete. Because they’re based on rolling figures (like the number of links over the past six months), they’re changing all the time. (For example, A Good Beer Blog has risen six points in Authority ranking in just the past five days.) If you see two blogs within a couple of points of one another, they can easily flip flop simply based on frequency of posts, whether other people added or dropped links to them, and so on.
• We’re not that big of a community
  If you take a look at the Authority rankings of some other areas of interest like restaurants, wine, tech gadgets, tv shows, and so on, you find hundreds of blogs with numbers well into the thousands. When the top Beer Blog is only 150 it tells you that this is a pretty small world (since ‘Authority’ is based on unique links in posts, the more unique links, the higher the ‘Authority’). Search “beer” you come back with thousands of sites. Limit that with “craft brewing”, “micro brewing” and so on, and you get down into the low hundreds. (This probably has something to do with the fact that we don’t have a lot of techno-weenies in our midst, so not a lot of us are blogging.) Chances are, if you’re a regular beer blog reader, it’s quite likely that you know most — or maybe even all — of the beer bloggers out there. A micro community for micro brews… pretty cool.
• I’ll do better next time
  In goofing around I found a whole bunch of other tools and metrics from places like FeedBurner that’ll help me measure popularity more accurately. Gimme another month and I’ll even be able to do little charts and stuff. (Oooooh, shiny objects).

If you’ve got any ideas, comments or suggestions, you know I want to hear them. Just use the comment form or drop me a note at beerbuddy (at) mybeerpix.com.

Cheers!

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the most popular beer blogger of them all?

Yeah, okay, dorky intro, but it’s an interesting question because all the beer blog readers I know seem to have different lists of blogs they read. What’s more each claims that his (or her) blogroll contains “the most popular and widely read” beer blogs — a claim that seems doubtful because the lists (some as large 60 blogs) rarely have more than a handful of sites that overlap.

So the other day I sat down and wrote a quick little program that uses a handful of terms including “beer”, “brewing”, “brewery”, “micro-brew”, “craft-brew”, and “brewpub”, to identify the top results for beer related blogs on the Internet. Since blogs are differnet than traditional websites (both in the way they’re read and cataloged), I used three different sources to determine popularity:

• Technorati “Authority” Ranks — Technorati is the probably the most comprehensive catalog of blogs and user-created content on the web. It’s “Authority” ranking is an attempt to determine the popularity of a blog by counting the number of links to/from a blog post over a rolling six month period. Special weight is given to specific “posts or articles” (as opposed to the general links to other websites that appear in the sidebar of a blog). The theory is the more links from other blogs, the more discussion there is on the post (or posts), and thus, the more “Authoritative” a blog is. The most “Authoritative” on Technorati is Engadget with a rating of 28,203. The average among 82 million blogs is around 8.
• Google Page Rank & Blog Search Results — Google’s rankings are based on a complex (and changing) combination of inbound/outbound links, keyword frequency, clickthrough, website age and, in the case of blogs, frequency of updates. Google’s analysis is more well-rounded than the blog-specific approach of Technorati’s and its search results tend to be more relevant to specific queries (e.g., “Portland micro-brews”). However, its search results include considerably more “non-blog” and “blog-spam” (aka, “junk” sites that scrape content from others) sites, so “true” popularity can skew widely.
• Bloglines Subscriber Rankings — Since a great many blogs aren’t read by visiting the blog, but via a “blog reader”, I decided to include Blogline’s Subscriber Rankings as a measure of popularity. While Bloglines isn’t the largest blog reader (Yahoo is), it is a powerful second, and handles a large number of blog subscriptions (around 31 million). Bloglines will suggest other blogs to you by analysing your current subscriptions and comparing those to similar blogs. The more subscibers a blog has, the more “popular” it is considered to be.

For this exercise I didn’t include “page views” or “unique visitors” (measures of traffic on traditional websites), because blog readers and aggregators like Technorati, Google. Yahoo, Bloglines, etc. skew those numbers by visiting a blog once and serving the results to all it’s subscribers. (So a blog with 500 readers might only see 50 visits because many of those readers read the content through a blog reader rather than visiting the site.)

Additionally, community discussion, bulletin board and blog aggregation-type sites such as RateBeer, Beer Advocate, Beerinator Beer Feeds, etc. were excluded from rankings as I wanted this to be a measure of “true” blogs where the content is created by a single person or small group.

So what is the most popular Beer Blog of them all? (Drumroll please…)

A Good Beer Blog

With a Technorati Authority of 144, Google search rank of 3 (on average), and a Bloglines subscriber base of 104, it was the hands down winner. No other blog ranked nearly as high in all three results.

I guess this isn’t much of a surprise. With multiple writers, plenty of updates, and great subject matter, A Good Beer Blog has all the ingredients for a top-rated blog. What was more surprising was who ranked number two and the number of other blogs that I thought for sure would be strong contenders that weren’t. I’ll share those with you in the next part of this post.

[End part 1]