Lew shall sing. After all, it is Easter. I may drag myself out the door in the morning. You never know about these things. It's been a challenge since my teens. My father used to throw a chocolate egg at my head each Easter before he went off to give the sermon at church service and I continue my sloth even as I am now titular head o' household. Perhaps I need to find a community like this one:

A fledging Arkansas church will see if distilled spirits can mix with the Holy Spirit this Easter weekend. A new church called The River will hold both of its Easter services at The Rev Room — a bar and nightclub in Little Rock, Arkansas’ River Market... bar employees say it’s not yet clear if their liquor licence will allow them to serve beer and booze during a Sunday morning service.

Interesting yet a bit damning, no? I am not quite clear on the distinction between a bar and a nightclub but it is somewhat comforting at this deep yet joyful season to appreciate the dual nature of the chosen venue.

Cool - the Veronicas are playing next month.

So far I have created, with a certain underwhelming success, The Pub Game Project to note the things people like to do when they get together for beer, The Society for Ales of Antiquity to celebrate those brewers who are brewing beers like those brewers who used to brew the beers as well as CAMWA or The Campaign For Watery Ale, to encourage movers and shakers to consider the thing that makes 87% to 96% of what is in the bottle.

The response has been, well, insignificant if I want to brag it up out of all proportions. But we cannot stop there. Now we need CAMNA, the Campaign for Nipped Ales, to demand that the higher the strength the smaller the beer. Look at that bottle of Anchor Old Foghorn. Look at the dime. That is a small bottle. Seven small ounces. A nip. And it is only an 8.8% brew. I am getting really timed of opening 22 ounce or even 750 ml bottles of 8% to 13% beer. It is too much. It costs too much, it is too much booze and it is an invitation to excess. You will say they are to be shared or saved for special occasions but I want the option to sip a little one alone on a Tuesday. Why can't I except with a handful of beers from a few forward thinking brewers? How much would it really cost most moderately sized micros to put out a line of nips of their stronger offerings? Would it not make them more accessible, allow more people to have a try?

These are the questions asked by CAMNA - the only international organization of its stature which dares take on this cause and those lined up against it. Some may think the utter irrelevance of CAMNA to the discourse is a challenge but I say it is an opportunity - an opportunity to be the mouse that roared... in the forest where trees fall when no one in around... in a land far far away.

Punnery! I can't say that I like punning much but I have been driven to it by this great beerware opportunity that I learned about today from Troy and Stephen. Best of all, it is entirely crap... or rather CRAP: aka "Craftbrewers Recycled Art Project." It is great that George Eagleson, head brewer of Guelph, Ontario's F+M Brewing that I visited a year and a half ago thought this up and even better that the designs actually look so good. I love it and, as this is something for the world, I am going to give CRAP a free ad over there to the left linking to their site whether they like it or not. That bag up there is fantastic. Buy one. Buy twelve.

Extreme. Experimental. Weird. Weirdo. That is my new sliding scale to express a facet of the craft brewing world, like the crap-snob continuum. Granted it is only half the scale, missing the BFW¹ - X3M portion to the left. But it is a good scale and Odd Notion Spring 2009 inspired it.

One problem with "extreme" is that right now it's the centre of the pack. This beer points out that there is plenty of room beyond extreme, including places you will likely not visit again. Because this beer and those like it are weird. Last spring's peaty brown ale called Odd Notion helped generate a lot of heat over diacetyl that I don't expect to be repeated with this one's poppy seed and agave flavours. Will not one defend the honour of the agave? Who stands for the poppy? None.

It pours an attractive orange amber with a nice sheeting white head. But the smell is like a fresh and well-crafted beer trying to replicate the smell of an old, off skunky one. In the mouth, it's a bit like fancy hotel soap, the stuff you put on a bad sunburn made from cactus as well as that hard astringent poppiness. There is other stuff in there like a little orange marmalade and maybe a bilious note. It is hard to explain but for all that, this is not entirely off-putting given that (1) it is generated in large part by the poppy seed, a taste I took to when I worked in Poland and (2) I have been sunburned a lot and support the post sun burn lotion industry. But it is weird. Yet not quite a weirdo. Good BAer support.

¹Beer Flavoured Water

I was quite ready to scoff at today's article in the London Free Press on InBev... or is it AmBev... or maybe now just BevBev's... Canadian operations and their version of a beer school but the point on the economics of properly handling your kegs is interesting:

"In a typical bar, five to 10 pitchers of beer are spilled during each (bar server's) shift because of poor pouring practice. We eliminate that. We also teach bar staff how to hook up new kegs without a lot of unnecessary spillage," MacGillivary adds. He explains that pressure within the draft-beer line and the new keg have to be properly balanced "or beer spews out," not only making a mess, but subtracting from profit. "Between $50 and $100 a shift can be going down the drain," he says.

Of course this is keg and not cask but the idea that even a keg of beer has physical properties which must be understood is worth noting - even if the properties involved are mainly artificial. Cask is a different thing again as Stonch has been explaining in his irregular posts about running a pub including this one on monitoring the state of the living ale in the cellar. I don't know if a keg can require a sparkler but they don't really need a spring-loaded still, wouldn't come with a wooden keystone or ever really need a a cellarmen, spile or shive.

Which leads me to the inevitable question of value. Spillage - when entered on to the expense side of the ledger - gets placed into the scales and balanced off against revenue. Which makes the craft of the cellar person, whether laird or lassie, or even the C02 line jockey worth respecting as it, like so many other things around but not in your beer glass, helps set the price you pay.

I had a busy Friday. It was international, multi-media, for a great cause and included about six hours of driving. So, at the end of a drive that bought about 36 US craft beer in the house, I really didn't want a smoked beer - or at least not the smoked beer that I had set aside. I did have Ithaca Gorges Porter, a lovely lightly smoked brew included in the winter variety pack, but that is not really a smokin' smoked brew. I also have an Alaska Smoked Porter but I am holding that in reserve and wanted some lighter ales after the drive.

But today, after a well earned nap, I had four sides of ribs in the oven that had soaked overnight in the Oaked Nut Brown Ale that Lew noted as perhaps the brewery's problem child. Thankfully the questions in the glass are resolved by the pan filled with the brew, green onions and pork ribs. Now that the porcine flesh has been consumed, nothing speaks to me more than Spezial Rauchbier, which Lew, our host for this edition of the Session, also reviewed. I do not have the smoked salmon of my Nova Scotian homeland but give big props for the dreaming of that pairing by Lew. Smoked beers go very well with fatty cold ocean fish like salmon or mackerel.

But I am not going there. I am looking at this as a digestif after a hearty bout with pig meat. My Spezial rauchbier lager pours a deep orange amber like Youngs Special London Ale. It has a rich off white head that resolves to froth and rim. On the nose it has far less uncious greasy smoke than the Schlenkerla rauchbier that comes thourgh the LCBO that I also use as a ribeye marinade sorta like I described in Session 8. In the mouth, it is lovely - round caramel malt and cream yeast meets measured smokiness. The smoke is most pronounced in the second before you sip and in the long finish. DOn't get me wrong - this is smoky. It is just not like licking an ashtray. Lew explains that this is because Spezial uses less than 25% of the smoked malt than Schlenkerla even though the support the same local Bamburgian fitba team and both smoke their own malt. This is the beer I want to drink as I eat meats soaked overnight in the much stronger Schlenkerla - though I might prefer Schlenkerla with smoked salmon. It is like a rich Vienna lager with smoke. Lovely and earns BAer respect.

I know I am supposed to post about smoked beer tonight - and I may yet - but I may have discovered a Burton, perhaps unintentional, in upstate New York. Here is the scene. This afternoon, I am over at North Country Public Radio, answering phones, hanging out with my radio pals like a cheese eating fanboy... and, you know, eating cheese and other volunteer focused snacks brought by cheese people (and other people of the craft snacks) for we the phone people. After all, I was one of the people of the phone if only for an afternoon. And then, out of nowhere, Radio Bob, the only other man I know who likes first wave ska, says he has a growler that I could and really should try a splash from. This was turning out to be quite good.

Well, it is a fresh jug of Davidson Brothers fourth-generation Adirondacker Duncan Kincaid's Authentic Adirondack Ale, a 6.2% pale ale. I didn't twig to the possibility that this was potentially a Burton until the beer poured thick out of the growler giving me the yips that I was facing something like an 11% when I think I am facing something around 4%. Been there, been told I done that. But we check it out on line and it is 6.2%, plenty of rich sweet pale malt, not a lot of crystal, plenty of residual unfermentables with a got twiggy hop that is nudging rather than cutting the cloy with a nice touch of pale ale husky graininess. It is lighter in colour than the Ontario's candidate for the title of Burtoncy, 666 Devil's Pale Ale but in the ball park that is set out in Martyn Cornell's definitive statement on the much ignored style. Loved it. Big BAer respect.

I am getting a wee bit tired of "tasting" beer. It is getting all too twee. This article in a Toronto rag of some sort or another displays everything that is wrong with the media's new relationship with beer and the concurrent looming over-preciousness of beer appreciation... or the over-wrought appreciation of anything for that matter:

Though it’s hard to imagine diners sniffing and swirling a pint of amber at Canoe, Duizer assures us that these steps are essential to developing the full experience required for successful pairing. When considering a taste combination, Duizer urges judiciousness. “Be analytical,” she says. “We don’t care if you like it or not.” She encourages drinkers to exhale after sipping in order to pick up the scent of complex flavours. For a glass just poured, listen for carbonation to learn about effervescence levels. When pairing, pay attention to temperature and timing, because both affect taste.

Do me a favour, then. Next time you make a ham sandwich, listen to your mustard. Sense its silence. Its quiet passion. The mustard's pain and joy. Feel stupid? You should.

“We don’t care if you like it or not”?!? As if beer can be separated form its consumption, its very destruction by you. The "don’t care if you like it" theory removes you from the equation. It is, in fact, un-you and really anti-you. The beer is objectified and you are negated to make this useful. This is a lie. The beer needs you. It wants you to create the one-seat two or twenty minute theater of taste. It wants you to love it. You should. Don't taste it. Love it.

As you might imagine, this fund raising campaign starting today in Australia strikes the right chord with me:

Australians are being asked to buy a beer in honor of soldiers and sailors deployed to overseas troublespots in a new remembrance campaign designed to raise money for veteran support groups. The "Raise a Glass" appeal, which starts on Wednesday, aims to raise A$1 million ($679,000) to help the families of servicemen and women killed in war. Former Australian military commander Peter Cosgrove said the new appeal was designed around the military tradition of leaving an empty glass to honor absent friends.

Foster’s Australia Ltd is working with two charities in the effort. The absent friends and friends departed toast is one of the most honourable there is, certainly ahead in my books of those acknowledging authority and rank. I wish we Canadians were better at this sort of thing.