We have a ten day stretch coming up hanging out with family at Cape Cod. This means snack shacks, maybe a brewpub or two and definitely beer shopping. But this is largely unknown territory for us. We are northern New England travelers. A few years ago we tried to find Connecticut for a few days and had a horrible time of it, finding little accessible to the visitor. Surely, it was us and not the entire state. So, I need your help - where to go in Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut that is:

• family friendly,
• includes great fried clams or hot dogs or ice cream,
• offers me a decent chance at a great craft beer, and / or
• will fill my trunk full of good beer to fill the stash for a long Canadian winter's sipping?

This is vital information so please do feel free to go on and on and on. I am not sure Google maps understands my needs but I am hoping you do.

You all should be jealous.

If I haven't told you all recently, I am eternally grateful to my former employers and clients at silverorange for letting me use and play with their technology and, I hope, act as a testing platform. Who zat? Well, I am proud to have been their lawyer over a decade ago now when they were in high school. Among many other things, they are part of that group that supports Mozilla and played a big role in the creation of the iconic Firefox logo... which I suppose is another way of saying icon.

One of those other things they have done is create the greatest blogging system ever, the same system that this blog runs on. And I just discovered the moderate all comments button. As well as the top banner ad function. Anyone want to pay for a top banner ad? [I think if I click on this function over here my computer servers ice tea.]

Anyway, comments are now being set as moderated for the default because I have attracted the attention of 3 smelly loser 23 year olds in Romania who are spamming the site with manually placed Viagra links. The system automatically stopped 69 comments today but two did get through. As soon as they pack it in, comments will go back to the free for all that you have come to expect.

It had to happen, right? You have 42 themes and there has to be overlap. At least it's overlap and not those non-beer related subjects of a couple of years ago. So, session 4 was about a special place for me - even if for most it was about a local brew. Session 21 was about that special beer in which I came to this cunning conclusion:

Favorites? I don't have time for no stinking favorites. There's too much out there to worry about favorites.

Add in Session 20's beer and a special memory and you may be seeing my point.

So what to make of this question? Try Session 9 for a start. Then Session 5. Then, well, try the others.

I like the style of this brewery's labels and brew branding. They all have a folk arty drawing off of a local character from the past. My French is so poor that I can't tell the tale of Joe - but I do note "Houblonée a Froid" in that green circle, cold hopped. You can't really see it in the picture provided care of my dying camera. It's starting to look like art, isn't it? It's not another dead digital camera to join the pile. It's the art camera.

This DIPA pours a deep orange amber with slow moving carbonation hinting at thickness. The head is rich creamy foam and froth. Heat, sweet herb and bready malt on the nose. In the mouth a bit of a surprise. Big but not huge. Sweet creamy with heat, grapefruit pith sweet malt and some very singular herbal notes. A bit burn at the end. Quite nutty with star anise as well. More of a semi-sub-DIPA than an IIPA. You know know what I mean?

It gets some curious looks from RateBeerians perhaps from its sub-imperial reality but great respect from the BAers. Its a seasonal special for autumn but I am not sure that it's the autumn of 2009 or 2010. If it is a year old, it has held up very well even if that hint of star anise is not going to be everyone's favorite thing.

...now that the heat wave's in full bloom:

I walked outside this morning to find a gang of bare-chested fellows, with shaved heads, sweaty snouts, and stretchmarked potbellies, sitting on the guardrail near our doorway, guzzling beer and smoking, and for good measure, belching and swearing about the heat. Any walk around town reveals similar scenes: men have at times dispensed with much of their clothing, and carrying a beer (plus lit cigarette) is now de rigueur. This is legal: there's no law banning open containers of alcohol in Russia. Except that in Russia, beer hardly qualifies as alcohol. (Unless possibly it's that 12-proof brew marked krepkoye.) Beer is more like a training beverage. But vodka is considered alcohol, and thus possesses, many would point out, curative properties for whatever ails you. So fighting noxious heat with medicinal doses of vodka makes perfect sense. And I don't mean some dainty cocktail, like, say, a vodka collins. The idea of mixing vodka with anything except more vodka is an abomination. Why dilute the healing fun?

I don't have any real point to saving the quotation from Jeffrey Tayler's article in The Atlantic other than to note what an excellent piece of drinks writing the article represents, including its harsh observation of the stupid waste that can accompany empty boozing. In Moscow - now.

A discontinued beer. Great. It's not even listed by the brewery. Never made their blog...oh, yes it did. Still, its departed. Yet there it is, cooling is the cistern. I picked this up in Ithaca because I had never seen on of their brews this far east and was please to see the price below ten bucks. No soak.

Well, that might explain it. Fountain! Lips clamped over the 750 ml bottle mouth, we do a dance until more toweling and the glass is found. Yet spurting into my gob, there is a very pleasant dry cocoa note. Once the glass is found, it pours a very deep dark black with only a thin off white rim. Not a lot of aroma - burnt cream spice. In the mouth, a little sour, cocoa, burnt toast and, as the BAers note, orange juice. Light and watery fresh orange juice. Not thin. A bit of an odd combination as it is like the end of breakfast - juice and toast scrapings. What schwarzbier is to a certain type of lager maybe this is to a Belgian wit. That might be it.

So, something of an experiment but not one without its charms and uses.

This has to be up there with the "open source beer" clap trap... or maybe the "women better tasters" silliness. It seems the more people need to make a buck the greater the need to foist a 90% rubbishy idea on people. And this one is pure fool's gold:

CAMRA, the Campaign for Real Ale, and the Beer Academy, have today come together to highlight to UK consumers that beer, when drunk in moderation, can help you lose weight, cut alcohol consumption, and more generally, help supplement a healthy lifestyle. New research released during CAMRA's Great British Beer Festival at Earls Court, London (August 3-7) where over 500 British real ales are currently being showcased, shows that 34% of men and 29% of women incorrectly believe that beer contains more calories than other alcoholic drinks.

There is a huge concern with the effect of beer on health. The most read post on this blog is about the calories in big bomb beers. Drinking a bomber of high alcohol beer is like chugging a mug of cake icing. Yet CAMRA knows better. It takes the lowest level of alcohol content it could suggest with a straight face (3.8%) and places it in the half pint serving so loved by Enid Sharples. Who else in their right mind stops at one half pint of a 3.8% beer? No one.

Let's be clear. This is up there with a Bud Lite Lime Draft commercial as far as truth in advertising goes. One just has to consider the heft of those lined up at the opening of the Great British Beer Festival this morning. Curved yet not swerved. If I were to give up beer and, you know, do something with my life I would likely drop 10% of my body weight without a thought. And that would stay off diabetes, relieve stress on the joints and do any number of other good things. Same for many a beer writer and many a beer nerd. As a great mind once sang, my hips don't lie. Those thin people you see drinking a lot of beer? They do insane things like smoke or jog extra to make up for it.

Beer is many good things but it is not all good things. Making up hooey-kablooey dingbattery like this serves no one that matters. Not the drinkers, some of whom may take the wooden nickel and put off the visit to the weight scale for another month. Or the brewers who have to fight off the stigma of being associated with transparency. Or the health professionals trying to prove that a moderate amount of drink is not a sign of the Devil. Like all such foolishness, it will make for a few passing columns in trade papers (and a few thin pay packets for the columnists) but that's about it.

The backyard BBQ. It has to be. Likely because of Pete's daydreaming about his English garden, I got the urge to have a smoky BBQ yesterday. Well, it was the day before really as I had to put the ribs into an overnight soak of Sierra Nevada pale ale, a bunch of ends of BBQ sauce bottles from Dinosaur and Beale Street, onions, lemons and grapefruit juice.

The blue box tells the tale. I picked up the Sierra Nevada when we were over in upstate NY Saturday - after sticking my nose in Maggies on the River, a newish Watertown NY beer bar with 32 taps.¹ The Sierra Nevada went for 18 bucks a 12 pack at the grocery.² Also picked up some Hennepin as well as a six of Goose Island 312. All well made, good value but approachable craft beers. Throw in some other odds and ends from the stash like travel beer from Ithaca and Quebec, samples of Granville Island's excellent Robson Street Hefeweizen and before you know it, people are sucking on ribs, chowing down on pulled pork coleslaw sandwiches, dipping everything in mop sauce and washing everything down with tasty ales. At the end when everyone is in a good frame of mind, break out some big bombs as sippers. Last night we had Southern Tier Oat, an 11% wall of dark malty goodness. All was very well.

Lesson? You want the people you know to like craft beer? Give it away with a plate of BBQ. They'll get the point every time.

¹ [Ed.: Pretty respectable beer list.]
²[Ed.: The same beer I once saw in a Canadian beer bar for $7.99 a bottle!]

I know I should have gone to the brewery. I know. I know I know. But I was on holiday and sick and I needed to save it up for the Baseball Hall of Fame because it's the year another sweet Expo enters and, well, I liked the Expos. I got the hat, OK? Let it go. Jeesh.

Zurr doesn't even seem listed on the site for Ommegang anymore. 6% Flemish Oud Brown Ale with cherries added. The cherries do seem a wee bit of a cheat as this all seems a little tiny (tiny) bit easy yet to have a competent Goudenband clone on the loose in North America is, you know, really good. It pours active lightly reddened light chestnut with a well held beige head. Cherry vinegar on the nose. With the cherry there is balsamic, drying oak and nod to vanilla in all there in a bright acidic sip.

Solid BAer respect.