Freelance update, spring 2012

Most writers, beer writers and otherwise, are really good at keeping their websites and blogs up to date on their published stories. Not me. So while I've done this a couple times before here and here, here's the latest:

Starting with All About Beer, one of my favorite stories I've written to date was on hop breeders, the people responsible for creating tomorrow's hops today. When you think about how much research goes into a story and that only the tip of the iceberg makes its way into print, I loved learning all this stuff myself. And, living in Portland, rather than call these botanists and farmers on the phone, I visited several of them in Washington's Yakima Valley and Oregon's Willamette Valley, sometimes in or next to the test fields. It also marks one of the rare times that a title I came up with was actually used. "Hop Forward." Get it? (Yeah, I know, of course you did.) There's also the book review for my BFF (Beer Friend Forever) Lisa Morrison's Craft Beers of the Pacific Northwest. It's not online yet, but I review the new book from Stone Brew'ers in the current issue, and am working on a brand new one for a future issue that's deliciously entertaining.

For the Beer Traveler column, recent themes have included Burger'n'Beer towns (ie: LA and KC), River Rafting destinations (Bozeman, MT; Santa Fe, NM, and the Chatooga River between Athens, GA & Greenville, SC), beer-proximate National Parks (FL's Biscayne Bay, KY's Mammoth Cave, and OR's Crater Lake), and island hopping or, rather, hoppy islands (US Virgin Islands; Sydney, Aus; Victoria, BC).

I said it before and it warrants repeating, but for AAB's website blog Beer Soup (where I've been joined, delightedly, by Win Bassett) far from being a Beer Soup Nazi, I'd like to think of myself as a Beer Soup Fuzzy Squirrel, offering adorable little nuts and nuggets of my quantum thoughts about anything beery. I'm generally good about FB-sharing & Twitter RT'ing them. Some favorites since last update include a snarky look at #IPA Day & hop-induced brewer's droop, what it'd be like to have a keg on my coffin, wondering how much more black beer can get, and most recently, perhaps a glimpse at the next quasi-healthy beer trend: low-purine beer.

Back to beer traveling, how much fun did I have "researching" this story on the Bend Ale Trail for Real Food Traveler? Four days and we didn't even get to every brewery in the area! We did, however, find ourselves looking at the calendar to figure out how soon we can go back to Bend.

The story I did for Beer West also wound up as the cover. Beer in La-La Land was a rare personal story (in part). I don't hide my love-hate relationship with my birthplace of LA. As far as being a "beer town," let's just say it'll never be in danger of winning Papazian's Beer Town USA poll. Having said that, next time I'm down, I have more to look forward to visiting than just my nieces.

In the pages of DRAFT, I reported on what, or really who, is driving the Danish craft beer scene. My favorite thing about this piece? I get to see for myself, seeing as there'll be a Yaeger family trip to Scandinavia this summer. First stop: Copenhagen.

There's a new drinks-oriented magazine called Sip Northwest and I wrote a couple stories, neither of which seem to be online. For one of them, they sent me and my buddy The Greek to Victoria, BC for the Great Canadian Beer Fest and a dude's beercation where we hit something like 6 breweries (all by foot). I also spotlighted several of the PacNW's nanobreweries.

Speaking of nanobreweries, that was the subject for Drink Me's "craft" issue. For the "legal" issue, I wrote about strong beer (I'm guessing they pirated the accompanying image, just like I'm doing.) I'm blanking, but I think it was the "elements" issue for which I observed that, "The human body is almost 62% water, and we can all agree that people are pretty important. The Earth’s surface is 75% water, and clearly, the planet is very important. Beer is roughly 93% water, so clearly it must be the most important thing in the world." (Oh, and I was asked to do something on cans.)

Finally, for Willamette Week, I contribute the Oregon Beer News online column (I give up on trying to break stories when there are more top-notch beer bloggers here than you can shake a Stickebier at. I also get to do the errant beer review, like this one on my new style obsession: ISA (India Session Ales, which are low-alcohol IPAs for lightweights like myself).

A limp reception to IPA Day. Hoppy beers make you flaccid

Rise up gruit drinkers, oh ye fans of unhopped ales. Lay down your swords IPA guzzlers, ye of the limpdicks. For you see, IPA producers, unlike The Church, don't want you to know about a medical condition known as "brewers droop."In my post today for All About Beer's Beer Soup blog, I examine this rarely discussed phenomenon that is particularly relevant as we celebrate IPA Day. It's one that Stephen Harrod Buhner saw fit to discuss quite often. Since I'm only alloted a limited word count for Beer Soup, I wanted to offer up some extra background from our friend Buhner not just on WHY hoppy beers produce brewers droop, but where such beers came from and why the Church actually had good reason--besides their own financial gain which is always the case behind any large entity's action--to oppose the implementation of hops. Excerpted from the full article found here.

To understand the radical change that is involved in the shift from gruit to the hopped beer we now drink, it is important keep in mind the properties of gruit ale: it is highly intoxicating - narcotic, aphrodisiacal, and psychotropic when consumed in sufficient quantity. The hopped ale that took its place is quite different. Its effects are sedating and anaphrodesiacal. In other words it puts the drinker to sleep and dulls sexual desire. Hops is extremely high in estrogenic and soporific compounds. The phytoestrogens make it great for women in menopause but never good for men. (In fact there is a well-known condition among inn keepers and brewers in England called "brewer's droop.")

When Hops began to be suggested for use as a primary additive in ale, the opposition was tremendous. Those who held a monopoly on gruit production in Germany (the Catholic Church) and on pure ale in England fought hop introduction through the legislatures, proclamations of the royalty, writings of the day's medical practitioners, and through church edict. Hops, until this time, was merely one of the plants used all along in the production of beer - the earliest mention of its use probably being in Hildegard of Bingen's (1098-1179) Physica, though she insisted that other than its preservative qualities "It is not much use for a human being, since it causes his melancholy to increase, gives him a sad mind, and makes his intestines heavy."

Perhaps the organizers ought to promote craft beer next year with another style of ale the macros don't produce: the historical gruit.
(And thanks to Motifake.com where I "lifted" the artwork from their Demotivational poster.)

Freelance update summer 2011

I think I meant to do these freelance updates more frequently. Oh well. But happily there's a lot of my stories out there.

Technophobe though I am, let's start with the online stuff. I always know it's my birthday when people start talking about it being the longest day of the year (OK, I was born 25 hours after summer solstice). That also marks the opening of Summer Beer Fest Season. Craftbeer.com now has my tips for a successful season. I hope you'll LIKE that.

Far from being a Beer Soup Nazi, I'd like to think of myself as a Beer Soup Fuzzy Squirrel, offering adorable little nuts and nuggets of my quantum thoughts about anything beery that get posted on All About Beer's Beer Soup. I'm pretty good about sharing these on the ol' Facebook and Twitter. It started in early May with my pitch for brewpubs building brand disloyalty, and thrice weekly there has been, and will be, something new. Some of the more fun (dare I say popular) ones have been on pairing beer with exes, whether or not consistency matters, beers with fruit, veggies, and carrot cake, and my current kick: bringing back 7 oz. nip bottles (pt 1 & 2 with 3 on Fri.)

All About Beer the magazine primarily has me on Beer Travelers duty with the most recent column inspired by Robert Frost's The Road Not Taken. Covering beer roads less traveled, it's a guide to beer tripping through California's Lost Coast and North Carolina's Outer Banks (OBX). Being the over-writer than I am, there wasn't room to publish a third section on Michigan's Upper Peninsula (U.P.), so look for me to sneak that into a future column. They also let me do other fun stuff, most recently entailing a look at how breweries give birth to new beers.Beer West also has me on a beer travel kick penning tips for a beercation through NorCal, L.A., and San Diego (who'd rather be called TJ North than LA South, so I gathered at the recent Nat'l Homebrewers Conference down there last week).

Drink Me's story on the Oregon Ale Trail may sound travel-related, but it's really more of a fun, albeit truncated, spin through Oregon's contribution to the history of the brewing industry. Yes, of course I worked in a shout to the Oregon Trail brewery in Corvalis that I just happened to have popped into.

Draft has a feature called Beer Me on the last page wherein someone in the beer biz waxes and mashes poetic about what the industry offers them (or vice versa). Sometimes these are written by third parties. Like me. Following up a rather incendiary one about Yuri Green's new Cherry Voodoo in the San Francisco Bay Area, fans of "wild" beers should be keen to try Chad Yakobson's Crooked Stave in the Denver/Boulder area. Also in the new issue, drinking craft beer in Death Valley. Even crazier, when I stayed at Panamint Springs Resort (they use the word resort loosely), I visited the Indian Wells brewery just outside the park in the Mojave Desert. Here's a picture facing toward the brewery......and standing in the same spot looking in the other direction.