Believe it or not kiddies, there’s a heck of a lot more to the internet than just beer stuff. Among the more dumbfounding online phenomena in existence today are image macros- odd pictures captioned with superimposed 48 pt impact text, often to humorous effect. Some images are so evocative or fun to caption that they spread virally across the web, and become a meme. These macros are often used to express emotion in online conversations. I thought I’d take a crack at some beer-themed examples using the most popular macros on the Meme Generator.
“Y U NO” Guy (also known as “Y U No [X]?”) juxtaposes text messaging shorthand and awkward grammar with an enraged character as a way of bringing to attention a particular issue:
It is nearly impossible to keep up with all the brewery openings and prospective breweries within Chicago city limits these days, but damnit, I do the best I can.
I became aware of 5 Rabbit Brewery/Cerveceria during the recent Chicago Craft Beer Week, a wonderful time to be a craft beer fan in the city. They had purchased some advertising space in the CCBW Passport, and I was immediately interested in the concept they were laying out: an all Latin-American themed brewery, located in Chicago. As they put it, “We hope to bring the energy, passion, and amazing richness of Latin culture and cuisine to the delicious world of craft-brewed beer.”
Fine by me! I personally love eating and cooking Mexican and southwestern food, and many of the dishes cry out for beer, and not that watery, lagery stuff, either. Latin America in general is not exactly known by Aleheads for their great craft brews, partially because of the ever-present heat and glut of light lagers, but there are exceptions, and the Mexican craft beer scene has been on the rise in recent years. In Chicago, 5 Rabbit plans to offer five beers once it gets going, three of which have already been developed. They’re themed after five Aztec gods*, and are as follows:
Our dearly beloved Slouch Sixpack sent me a link the other day that he suggested would make an interesting Conundrum topic. I hope that, by now, you can imagine my surprise when it turned out to actually be a tenable idea.
In this day and age, it seems like new beer styles are being invented almost daily. New ingredients, new technology, and the incessant demand for novelty from Aleheads the world over have created an unprecedented culture of innovation in the brewing world.
But, of course, not all roads have been traveled as of yet. There are still uncharted waters and unexplored frontiers when it comes to beer styles. So I ask the Aleheads…if you owned your own ale factory and had no restrictions:
While my shopping cart at the bottle shop is most often filled to the brim with the standard IPAs and Stouts (Imperial and otherwise) that Aleheads love, it’s also enjoyable to peruse BA and RB to learn about lesser-known styles that give our hobby such breadth; styles with peculiar names and origins like Oud Bruin (Flemish Sour), Sahti (Finnish Farmhouse Ale), and Altbier (German Brown Ale). Each year Weyerbacher Brewing of Easton, PA brews a one-off anniversary beer to celebrate their founding, often choosing unusual styles with which to express their brewing prowess. Previous incarnation have included a Smoked Imperial Stout (Fifteen) Wheat Wine (Fourteen) and a Rye Barleywine (Twelve). This year, I was pleased to see that they chose to brew a Braggot to commemorate the occasion.
Braggot is a marrying of beer and mead. It is made either by adding malted barley to standard mead during production or by mixing separate batches of beer and mead together… the result is a style whose potential is limited only by the imaginations of brewers. Braggots can be made with any style of honey, and with any base beer. As we’ve seen with the proliferation of barrel-aging, Imperialization, and hybridization of popular beer styles, perhaps the naturally sweetening and balancing properties of honey and Mead will become a more popular tool for creative brewers going forward. Read the rest of this entry »
I mean…seriously. Does anyone “really” get anything out of reading another person’s breathless description of their own, private, personal sensory experiences regarding a beer? If someone tells me that an IPA is “hop-forward” with a good “malt backbone” and a “medium body”, have I really learned anything? Doesn’t it just skew my perception? Aren’t I better off tasting a beer with no preconceived notions other than my own experiences with beer (and, perhaps, some limited information like what style it is and what the ABV is)? Read the rest of this entry »
I love mixed packs. I just love them. Take a good, respected brewer, have them pick out a smattering of styles that somehow fit together, and serve em’ up to the general public. What’s not to like? My favorite mixed 12 packs are those that coincide with a certain season and allow a brewer to put a few regular offerings together and maybe a one-off that they’ll do just for that particular season. Say they’ll add in 3 bottles each of their flagship IPA, Brown Ale, and Stout, but for the winter they’ll brew up a special Scotch Ale or for the Fall maybe a Pumpkin beer. You get to see what a brewer is made of without having to buy slew of six packs. Mixed 12 packs are especially great when you’re travelling and want to try something local. You can get a good introduction to a brewery without breaking the bank. Sometimes though, you just want to see what an old stalwart has been up to and grab a 12 pack that appeals to a wide audience. If that’s the case, no one does it better than Sam Adams. Read the rest of this entry »
Here we are again, just on the other side of a fresh new season. While most folks are wandering through their yards pondering whether they should buy the fertilizer that kills the weeds or the fertilizer that grows new grass*, we Aleheads of course are thinking of far greater dilemmas. As we’re drifting along into another Summer season, what beer should we be drinking? Now that may not seem like much of a dilemma since the answer is naturally “Every damn beer we can get our filthy little hands on”, but I suppose the right thing to do is to act like we do with every other season and put up a reader poll. Come on, you know you want to click on the link to answer the poll question. How often do you get to tell people what they should be drinking? Click, click, click! Read the rest of this entry »
Definitely one of the coolest brewpubs you'll ever visit, and 45 minutes from my hometown!
I thought I was going to be able to end this series with three parts, but they kept getting longer and longer. Day I was good, Day II was better, and Day III was the single most thrilling collection of sentences and visual evidence that have ever been strung together in one place. Thus, we’re left with a little bit of extra spillover, as I detail:
– The return voyage
– The beer event of the day that followed.
When we last left off, I was spending the night in Kalamazoo, having just left the awesome Kalamazoo Beer Exchange, home of fluctuating brew prices. I crashed at yet another fleabag motel just off the interstate, awoke as fresh as one could reasonably expect to be after three days of drinking, and started the trip back to Chicago. I briefly considered making a detour and heading south once I got into Indiana to visit LaPorte’s Backwoods Brewery, but was repulsed by one of the uglier websites in the business. I mean yikes, folks. Do you blame me? That thing is bad.*
*Note to self: future Aleheads post–best and worst official brewery websites. I love this idea.
I continued on, then, making good time until I was nearly back in Illinois, at which point it was a no-brainer that I had to make a final stop at Three Floyds. Read the rest of this entry »
As avid environmentalists, we Aleheads believe in recycling content. We are also aware of the fact that some of our readers aren’t too keen on, well, reading. Thus, for your viewing pleasure, I present our popular Sexiest Beer Labels post in video format. Probably NSFW, unless your boss is cool like that.
This, my friends, is how you celebrate a victory! The Bruins go out in style with an epic night at Foxwoods, photo courtesy of Barstool Sports. I’m sure we can forgive them for skimping on the craft beer – They must have been pretty bloated after that 30 liter bottle of Champagne. Amazing what $100k will buy you in the wine world.
The Dark Horse Brewing mug club is not fucking around. They're serious about their mugs.
I’m sitting here at home right now with a tulip glass full of robust porter in my hand. It’s the very first bottle of a new batch of homebrew, and I’m very pleased with the results. I’ve been brewing for several years now, and it really pleases me to note the technical improvements I’ve made along the way, yielding beers that have gotten almost continually better.
I’m not kidding myself, though. I know that, good as my beers may be, they’ll probably never be quite as good as the very best of what professional brewers are able to produce. And that’s okay. After all–it gives me an excuse for a beer roadtrip, right?
Not that I needed an excuse, but roadtrip I did. I travelled through southwestern Michigan for three nights and four days, and have chronicled both Day I and Day II of the trip on this site (complete with photos and maps) earlier this week. What follows is the story of my journey on Day III, and maybe even a bonus telling of the Day IV voyage home and the subsequent day’s beer trip to Chicago.
But that’s later. To recap: I awoke in a daze, legs dangling off a Super 8 motel bed, hungry for some hilariously named “continental breakfast,” which at a Super 8 apparently means “a handful of dry cereal and an empty coffee machine”. All I can say is that I feel sorry for the residents of whatever “continent” on which such a breakfast is considered traditional. I began my drive, heading south from Grand Rapids.
Like a number of the Aleheads, I’m a Boston sports fan through and through. Born in Beantown and raised just outside the city, my heart belongs to the Sox, Pats, C’s and B’s. We’ve been exceedingly fortunate over the past few years to watch the Sox end their championship drought, the Patriots establish a ridiculous dynasty, and the Celtics regain their championship form. But the black sheep in the room has always been the Bruins…a team that hadn’t won a Stanley Cup since the Nixon Administration. Until last night, that is. Read the rest of this entry »
This place is the bomb. I usually write jokes in these photo captions, but not in this one. This place is the bomb.
I awake with a start, matted in cold sweat, unsure of my surroundings. Around me–a dirty, no doubt fluid-soaked motel room, filled with cobwebs and garish multicolored furniture, relics of the 1970s. “Who am I, and where am I?” I wonder dully, craning my head to take in the room, which appears to have been trashed by a passing vagrant, who in his haste, has done a sub-par job. ”Why am I here? Am I on the run from the law?”
“…have I killed again?”
And then it all comes flooding back. I’m sprawled in a dingy Super 8 motel bed because I’m travelling through Michigan. Federal marshals, as far as I’m aware, are not in pursuit. I’m on a craft beer roadtrip. This is Day II. Read the rest of this entry »
Blue Pants Brewery began as a reaction to the limited local craft beer options in Alabama. Mike Spratley and his wife Allison became enamored with craft beer after a brief stint in Seattle and were frustrated at the minimal local selection after moving back to Mike’s home-town of Huntsville, Alabama. Unlike most folks, Mike and Allison decided to actually do something about the problem and they began developing plans to open their own nanobrewery. Read the rest of this entry »
Shaped like a mitten, all the better for beer clutching.
So, I went on a little beer trip recently.
Three nights, to be specific. Four days. All spent tooling around southwestern Michigan, sampling as many beers as it was biologically possible to sample and still continue driving to the next brewery. All in all, it wasn’t quite as intense as the similar four-night trip I took to Wisconsin back in August, but it was pretty close.
I’m going to break up this detailed synopsis of the trip, replete with photos from along the way, into three posts, one for each day/night cycle. Along the way I’ll be sure to punish you with reminiscences and impressions of all the brews I was lucky enough to come across. It will be extremely long, and I fully expect you to suffer greatly before all is said and done.
So come with me, won’t you, as I plunge into the brews of the Mitten State.*
I mean, like a LOT. I believe I’ve referred to it at some point as “the best use anybody has come up with so far for applying the internet,” which is pretty damn high praise. ‘Cause there’s a lot of stuff on them there internets.
If you have no idea what I’m talking about, though, it’s quite simple: Pandora is powered by the Music Genome Project, which basically collects all the music that’s out there and breaks it into component factors. It then asks you to rate which sorts of songs and artists you like, and, using those previously mentioned component factors, determines what else you’re likely to enjoy. It’s safe to say that maybe half the music I listen to today is a direct result of fooling around with Pandora. Read the rest of this entry »
Let’s face it…most brewers are men. While there are some highly-regarded female brewmasters working today (like Carol Stoudt of Stoudt’s Brewing), the industry is still unfortunately dominated by the unfairer sex. On the plus side, the preponderance of male brewers has led to some pretty sweet beer labels over the years.
Let’s take a look at 10 of the most titillating labels out there. As always, please let us know which ones we missed in the comments (please?!):
A bit later this month I am making a trip to the East Coast that will involve at least incidental contact with a few of the Aleheads. I thought it would be fun to bring along a few West Coast beers to the occasion (read: if you don’t greet the Aleheads with beer they’re more likely to bite), but realized I had utterly no clue whether it’s even legal to take beer along with me on a commercial flight. After the internet being utterly unhelpful, primarily due to my entering poorly-thought-out search terms, I finally thought to go directly to the TSA website, and quickly discovered the answer. As an added benefit of slogging through our delightful blog I thought I’d pass what I discovered along to all you faithful readers. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Slouch Sixpack 
