A very good read is this obituary for the landlord of a pub:

Mrs Martin continued: "I'm a Londoner and he was a country man. The green trees of the Heath suited him. He wouldn't have gone anywhere else in London.

"Once you were barred you stayed barred. One barred customer went to Spain and walked back in after seven years. Henry told him straight away: 'You're still barred.' Henry couldn't work out why pubs nowadays are run so badly."

Just a quick post to remind you guys to join in. Join the beer blog nation if you like - 60 already have. There are no dues, not benefits and no responsibilities. What else is that easy in life?

Plus, please do send posting information. I received great news about a bar in Beijing this morning and I am hoping to coax the author of the email into a visit and description. Our news is your news when it isn't about me drinking a new beer...again.

Also, do you want stuff? I am considering a range of things that might be available for a fee. Not to make money as I just don't see that really panning out and me getting out from behind the desk. But would you want a t-shirt or glass that said something like I am a citizen of A Good Beer Blog nation? Lame or brilliance? I can never tell.

Let me know by leaving a comment.

Directions to C's Farm Market

The neat blue building

Good news for me. I found a new store in my general region. Oswego is a small city directly south across Lake Ontario from Kingston...ok, maybe SSW by S from us. We like to go there for the fort and the seafood in summer. In winter we go to see snow...in winters like this one at least.

Well, today we stopped by C's Farm Market. Owners Dave and Maria Johnson were off on vacation but after having had an email exchange a few weeks ago I thought there was a chance this would be a small business with some beer nerds behind it. I was right. Like the Galeville Grocery with its general grocery trade, CFM adds beer to another on-going line of business - wholesale fruit and vegetable. When I walked into the place I was presented with a good select line of great micros in addition to the macrobrews that were advertised on the outside walls of the neat blue building.

I was shown around by knowledgeable and keen staff and started spotting some surprising products - like Wachusett IPA which I have not seen outside Massachusetts. Even though the store is quite modest in size, I also saw old pals like Middles Ages, Brooklyn and Southern Tier from New York, Victory from Pennsylvania, Unibroue from Quebec, Smuttynose from New Hampshire and Allagash from Maine. Then I noticed the Dogfish Head and Rogue selections from Delaware and Oregon...and then Old Horizontal Barleywine from Victory...and then Old Chubb neither of which I had seen in New York. I asked "where'd you get the Old Chubb?" It's a Scots 8% wee heavy in a can from the Oskars Blues Brewery in Colorado. I was told Dave likes to go hunting for interesting stock at various wholesalers. Good hobby, Dave. Keep it up, Dave.

So I loaded up and had a great old chat about the shop, how they were moving more and more into the beer trade and that next time I could call ahead with an special orders. This is good day trip material. Rudy's on a summer Saturday afternoon with a stop at C's before a drive home listening to Prairie Home Companion before hitting the little ferry for Canada at Cape Vincent. If you make it there, stop in at King Arthur's for either a steak in the restaurant or maybe a growler to go from the pub.

A somewhat odd story on WCBS's website this morning on skunked beer:

It flows from taps, is poured from bottles and it's can's can be found in many a fridge. But when you crack a cold one and a funky smell hits you like a ton of bricks, the taste isn't going to be any better. You've been skunked! "A skunked beer is a bad beer. It's a beer that has been sitting around too long, it's been exposed to say oxygen or light and it's turned bad, it tastes bad,” explained, Don Russell.

Beer is sensitive to light, especially in the 350–500 nm range. Light of this wavelength can penetrate clear and green glass and cause nauseous off-flavors in beers bottled in such glass containers and drinking glasses. The beer is said to be “sunstruck” and the aroma and taste referred to as “skunky”. Light instability in beer results from hop components. Hops in brewing have a number of roles: they impart bitterness to beer; provide characteristic hop aromas; suppress growth of ertain microorganisms, particularly gram-positive bacteria; assist in beer foam stability; and contribute polyphenols to the protein–polyphenol complex during wort boiling.

So while it is true to say that most macro ales suffer over time and will go off, that is not necessarily skunkiness. Lower alcohol beers simply are not built to last as the preservative qualities of the hop acids and alcohol are not present in sufficient quantity to stop the degradation of other organic components. The funniest thing arises, though, when the "best before" attitude is encountered with strong ales. Nothing like finding a shop selling off its bad stock of two-year old Belgian dubbels and tripples. Pure infanticide. You know who your friends are when you get a call to tell you what is happening.

Another new guest author from the south of the border has joined the team, Scott Gordon of Evanston, Illinois near Chicago. He sent me some information about Reconstruction Ale by the Abita Brewing Company from near New Orleans and I thought it would be a good intro to a review of some of the brews of Abita that I got a while back in New York.

Let's see what we had to say...

The Abita Party Pack

Here is what Scott had to say:

After Hurricane Katrina spared its Louisiana brewery, Abita Beer launched a fundraiser featuring hats, t-shirts, commemorative pins, and, of course, a special new brew for the occasion. It's called fleur-de-lis Restoration Ale, and in terms of flavor, it's more FEMA than Category 5.

Abita debuted Reconstruction Ale in October and is donating $1 from the sale of each six-pack to the Louisiana Disaster Recovery Fund. It says the beer is made with a mix of English Pale, Lager, Crystal and Cara Pills malted barley. That doesn't surprise me, because this isn't a beer that really hits you with any one flavor. If Reconstruction wasn't called an ale, I wouldn't necessarily know what it was. Sure, it's got strong hints of pale ale. There are also strong hints of a near-tasteless light lager. I started out enjoying it, but for some reason it tasted more and more watery as I went along. In fact, it's hard to describe the flavor in any detail, because it just doesn't assert itself. Maybe it's just ever-so-subtle, but what's subtlety without a little boldness?

Appropriately, I encountered this at Dixie Kitchen, a Cajun restaurant in Evanston, Illinois (just north of Chicago). I sipped it down before a meal of fried chicken and mashed potatoes. Two things about that: First, unlike every other beer I've had just before eating, it didn't really increase my appetite (and no, I wasn't filling up on the free corn cakes). Second, this beer doesn't really seem to complement Cajun food, though I can't think of a beer that would—maybe a rich dark ale like Negra Modelo.

I wouldn't actively avoid Reconstruction, though. It's a good introduction for people who aren't into ales yet. The first few times I had Sierra Nevada and Red Hook, they left this aftertaste, kind of like a big disgusting belch after a Mexican meal. That turned me off of ale for a while. And drinking Goose Island's India Pale Ale, though I like it, gets pretty overwhelming, building up a weird, faintly vomit-like odor as I go along. It gives me the feeling of running up a steep hill while someone at the top sprays tear gas at me. Reconstruction Ale, though, is as inoffensive as a Bill Cosby album - just not necessarily as amusing.

In the end, you have to be frank. This is an old style regional brewery like the good folks at breweries like High Falls in Rochester NY that make Genesee Cream and other good if plainer brews. There is nothing wrong with a simple brew made pretty well. And their work to help the reconstruction of New Orleans is a fine way to use what they can do for the common good. I would imagine the hard salty aspect would work well with seafood. Who knows? Maybe that is the plan.

Heritage Brewing Limited in Ottawa is a small eastern Ontario brewery which has yet to get a review from me. Why? My brother buys it. So what! Well, its just one of those things. I visit from time to time and he has Heritage dark in the fridge. And probably Hoegaarden if its summer. Once he had a growler of porter twice no longer extant Taylor and Bate Brewery from St. Catherines. That was a one-off 4,000 litre run from 2000 or so. That was good.

Anyway, this is not a review of what is in big brother's fridge but comment on these two beers from Heritage. What I like about them is that they are in fact one off-runs that appear to be planned on a quarterly basis. Readers in the good old U.S. of A. will think "what's the big deal?" For Canadians, however, this is a radical step into the unknown. I wish more brewers here would take a chace like this.

The beer to the right is Blackcurrent Rye Beer. I might have liked to know whether it is ale or lager rye but no nevermind. The five reviewers amongst the thousands of BAers were less than enthusiastic - especially the two who did not have it from a cask at one particular bar, Volo in Toronto. I had a bottle a few months ago and what I really liked about it was how it did mimic blackcurrent well even though I was pretty sure the "black current concentrate" on the label was more syrup than mash. The trick was the clever use of rye and that twangy old twiggy feel it adds to a beer. Years ago there was a brewery in Pictou, Nova Scotia that produced a straight rye ale. Ta-wang. It was a bit heavy. Chewing on bark heavy. Here, the twang is tempered by the current but not bombastically - it is a relatively light touch accentuated by the similarly light body. Again, I used to pick 20 or 30 pounds on the old bushes at the farmhouse and blackcurrent is quite a dry fruit, more apt for a savory fruit sauce for wild game rather than pies. This beer captures that well so even though it is a fruity brew it is balanced and true to the two named ingredients. The rye, blackcurrent and twiggy hop all conspire to form a nice dry finish with some lingering berry. 4.5% in a 650 ml bomb. The beer pours a nice amber that has a purpley note from the fruit, the foamy head resolving to a white rim. Don't bother going to look for it unless they make it a repeat a few years from now. Worthwhile but hard to imagine being an everyday sort of thing. Exactly the sort of thing to try with a seasonal brew.

Heritage's February 6 release Passion Brew is on the left. It pours yellow straw and the head respoves to a white rim. It is hard for me to say whether this is the true taste of passionfruit as I have only ever had it in a juice box or maybe in a sauce. My feeling, based on the Belgian approach, is that a fruit beer ought to be as close to the flavour of the fruit from the branch as possible. The logic is that in the mid-winter you can pull out a bottle and have a real sip of summer's bounty. This is, however, a good tasting fruit brew and just might make me want to go out and try a passionfruit. The fruit is round like a lollipop but not sickly sweet. There is a good edge which could be graininess but is more likely a roughish hop. It does not entirely cut through the fruit making the beer a bit cloying and certainly more than the blackcurrent rye. For me, this is less of a success and I bet if passionfruit had actually kept its original name, Bert Farmbley's apple, this beer would never have been made and put out for the Valentine's Day market. No BAers have rated it but four at RateBeer are less than enthusiastic. Sort of a nasty finish, though not the worse I have ever had. I would think a lighter touch with the fruit and a bit of wheat in the mash might be an adjustment the brewer might consider.

But in the end, this is an experiment and that's what seasonals are all about. Good for Heritage for trying it in the Ontario market. Now if they could introduce a program more like Smuttynose's Big Bittle Series and we'd be getting somewhere swell.

Good news for those scribes behind The Bar Towel, a group trying to wring what good ale there is from a blink-and-you-will-miss-it hamlet at the western end of Lake Ontario, tied as they are to a few good bars and the whims of the LCBO. Well, none of that seems to matter to the Toronto Star which has published a great big fancy article about them to the complete and utter exception of any reference to the sheer dominance of this here web engine of beery knowledge as an Ontario-based organ.

Nevermind the unslight slight, however, as Greg Clow, news editor of TBT is both gracious and, more importantly, purposeful in his response:

We might be a bit biased, but we think it's a great article, and hopefully it'll bring more attention to the site - and more importantly, the great beer that we all love.