Seriously...

And that's as political as we're gonna get here.
(It's a joke, BTW.)

Boy, it's dusty in here. 

Hard to believe I used to post every day, for four years. That passed, and then I tried to start it up again in 2016, but blessedly, I got busy, and the blog came in dead last in my priorities.

Things change. I have a book to support, and free rein to do that, so I'm starting up the Inferno again...no, sorry, wrong reference. I'm going to start blogging again.

It's going to be a bit more whiskey-focused this time, since there's that book I'll be flogging. But there's still going to be beer, and food, and travel, and probably pictures of my dog. And I'll be sticking to the original principles of the blog, explained in full here; briefly, though, I'll be writing criticism, not snark, and recognizing that none of us know everything. So whiskey reviews, and industry overviews, and personal profiles will be written with care, with charity. That doesn't mean "I love everything" reviews, it just means that the negative reviews will try to understand what happened, and I probably won't review the real train wrecks. If you want to revel in deliciously cruel reviews of the whiskeys you love to hate...look elsewhere.

There are going to be regular whiskey reviews, and some other spirits, and beers, but mostly whiskey. Part of that's the book support, but some of it is that I found that I missed writing the reviews I was doing for Whisky Advocate. (Yeah, no link. It's the least I can do). And since no one else is really paying for whiskey reviews, I'll do them for myself.

The first new post -- after this one, natch -- is going to be a chat with Beam Suntory's Freddie Noe and a review of all three of his Little Book chapters, the blended whiskeys from Beam that shook things up a bit. The idea that Beam had some aged malt whiskey*, that Beam was going to admit that they had stocks of Canadian whisky, or that there was 12 year old Baker's...well, I found that all pretty exciting. So when the Beam people asked me if I'd like to talk to Freddie about it, I thought, 'Hey! That would be a great first post for the revived blog.' So that's what I did. That's going to be coming soon, couple of days.

All I can show you for now. Note: no ice in the glass. Fought hard for that, because I know you care. 

Anyway, about the book. It's titled Whiskey Master Class, and it's about the creation of aroma and flavor in whisk/ey. (I promise, I'm not going to make a habit of that 'whisk/ey' construction.) From traditional formulations and the grains in them through malting, milling, mashing, fermentation, distillation, barrel construction and selection, aging, blending, proofing, filtering, bottling, and all the intangible stuff that's so hard to measure...I've tried really hard to cover everything that makes whiskey what it is.

The book was inspired by something that renowned blender and Scotch whisky innovator Dr. Bill Lumsden said to me one time. “If the barrel gives a whisky 50% of its flavor...that just means that the other 50% doesn't come from the barrel.” To really understand a whiskey then, you have to know where every bit of that 100% comes from, and how it's different from another whiskey. That's what the book is all about. I'm very pleased to say that Dr. Bill agreed to write the foreword.

Pippin's only 10 months old...
but his ears are full-grown!

It's due out on February 18 but you can pre-order now: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, your local independent bookstore (assuming someone asked them to order it...I'm looking at you). You can be sure the blog will run at least that long, and probably up through the 2020 Christmas book-buying season. And I'll probably be fully in the habit by then, and we'll just keep going. My publicist tells me that the blog's good, but I'm going to have to back it up with Instagram (and Twitter, and Facebook), so I'll be there as well, hashtagging like a champ.

I've made a fair number of promises here. I intend to keep them. This stuff is fun. And...pictures of my dog. Promise that, too. Here, take a look at Pippin. 

Little Book is coming soon. And then it's off to the races.






*I have a really annoying habit of mistyping "whiskey" as "shiskey," so if you see that...I was typing so fast I missed it. I almost did here. Just letting you know. 

A Little Housekeeping

I've had complaints recently about the "Captcha" verification for comments, so I've turned it off. If I get a ton of spam to deal with...I may have to turn it back on. Just letting you know.

Too much work, not enough blog

I've been missing, largely due to family stuff, but now I'm going to be missing largely due to work. We just had a huge project blow up at Malt Advocate that I'm ramrodding (more on that later, probably), and I've got another possible big project I'm discussing with an editor today, and there's all the usual small stuff, so...I'll be checking in here when I can. I'm going to the Kentucky Bourbon Festival this weekend, and I've got three events the following week, and the week after that I'm judging at GABF, and the week after that is San Francisco WhiskyFest...so while I should have some cool stuff to write about, jeez, where to find the time?

Just wanted to warn you. In the meantime, check out these numbers and tell me if it doesn't look like the craft beer revolution is going right over the top. The guys in St. Louis (and Brussels) and London must be crapping their pantaloons. (Though they keep raising their prices, so profits stay up...but that inevitably erodes the price divide between the categories, making crafts even more attractive...)

See you, gotta go write a piece on why the shaker pint is not a sign of the End Times.

Experimenting with Book Updates

Blogger has added the option to create pages...which will enable me to get most of the useful day-to-day stuff off my largely moribund website and put it up here. I'm fiddling with it (because I want to make sure I can point to it in the new edition of Pennsylvania Breweries), and it's working. So...if you see some kind of thing pop up on the blog and then disappear...that's what's going on. Thought you'd like to know. Back to work.

By the way...

If any of you are looking for the same flurry of blogging I did the last two Januarys to get to my self-imposed goal of an average of a post a day -- and I'm pretty sure none of you are, because I have more respect for you than that, but still -- it ain't happening this year. I'm already well over the average with 387 posts since last January 31, so I can just blog normally at this point. What a relief!

Back to work...

Does this look right?

Just a housekeeping post... Does the blog look right? It looks to me like Google/Blogger changed the line spacing and maybe tweaked things up on the fonts, too.

Or maybe I'm just losing it.

Comment Spam Explodes

I've had comment moderation on for years, thanks to a couple real jerkwads who insisted on polluting the blog. But I've never had much problem with "blogspam," comments full of advertising and links to crapsites, and I just rejected them. I got maybe one every other week.

Yesterday, all of a sudden, I got twelve, and it's continuing today. So I'm considering adding CAPTCHA tech to the comment field; that thing where you have to type in the 'word' you see in a window before your comment will post. I don't want to do this -- it's a pain in your neck -- but neither do I want to have my time sucked up by rejecting a bunch of "Miley Cyrus NUD!" spam, you know?

So...will having to do that one extra step be a real pain in all your butts? Or is it no big deal? Let me know, and I'll factor that in before I decide. And who knows, this may just be temporary.

How'd I get anything done?

Just realized that last month was the busiest month ever for blog posting for me. I posted a rather ridiculous 60 times in August, beating January's 58, when I was pushing hard on purpose to make my post a day average goal. No idea why I posted so much last month.

Well, gotta get back to work.

Iron Hill Triple Bock, and Two Years of STAG at a Post a Day

This post means that once again I've made my average of a post a day. This is 731 published posts (there are about seven more in there that are not seeing the light of day for various reasons; don't bother asking) since I started STAG on January 31 in 2007. That's one a day, including the extra day for leap year. Once again, I did way too much blogging in January. Hope you all appreciate it (more than my editors did, at least).

Still, it was a good year for my blogging. I started two new blogs -- Why the PLCB Should Be Abolished and the brand-new Session Beer Project -- even though I dropped the ball on the PLCB blog for three months. I have high hopes for the Session Beer Project blog; I think we've really got things rolling there, and this might be a little extra push. My whole theory on session vs. extreme beers is that the extreme beers get all the press, mostly from folks like me. The Session Beer Project is my way of trying to change that balance; on my side, and encouraging others to do the same. It's already working: there have been more articles on session beers in the past year than I ever remember seeing before. So we'll see where that goes.

Anyway... I made my average (or will, if I get this done by midnight!), so I'm celebrating with a bottle of Iron Hill Triple Bock, a small, strong, special bottle. It's very dark, it's very fruity, and rich. It's got a lot happening: overripe cherry, prune, some brighter notes of peach and nectarine, and chocolate and just the barest hint of anise. And of course, it's quite sweet, but they manage to keep it fairly clean at the end. Really, it's just a damned luscious dessert beer.

Here's to my third year.

Milestone

Huh. Blogger tells me I passed 500 published posts with that last Website update post. Whoopee. Yay me.

Happy Blogday to me

Cheers!

So after all the excitement of making the post-a-day average, and all the reflection, what do you actually get on my Blog Anniversary? Me, back to work. I'm headed up to Berwick, finally, to check out One Guy Brewing, I'm going to stop in to visit my dad on the way (he's been in the hospital, better now, no worries), and then get to work on rewrites when I get home. Just another day, really. Hey, it's a working blog, okay? I'll show you some One Guy pix later.

Two More Philly Beer Week Events...and My Dance Card is About Full

Before anything else, let me repeat: The Main Line Beer Tour, Great Beer Stops Along the Main Line, whatever, is not happening. Next year, we hope, and it's gonna be great, we hope, but not this year. Talk about the rumor that would not die...

That said, I do have two new Philly Beer Week events to tell you about.

Monday, March 10th, I'll be hosting an event we're calling "That's Not Belgian!" at the delightful Chick's Cafe. As alert readers know, I only discovered Chick's recently, and loved it. I was there doing recon for this event idea. Chick's has built a beer list different from any in this beer-happy city, and a central feature of it is a core of French, Italian, and Spanish beers, from breweries that are quite Belgianesque in their disregard for traditional brewing...but are not exactly Belgian, either. We're going to pair an array of these non-Belgian beers with food from their respective homelands for a beer dinner that should be like few Philly or anywhere else has ever seen. 6:30 PM, Price TBD.

Wednesday, March 12th will see me headed west, putting the "it's not just Philly" aspect of Philly Beer Week into action: "Philly Area Beer: Yeah, We've Got That. Join nationally-known beer writer Lew Bryson and local beer scene guru, BrewLounge.com's Bryan Kolesar, at one of the hottest new beer bars in the area, TJ's Everyday in Paoli, for a wild waltz through the breadth of beer produced by local brewers. Want Belgian? Got it. German? Jawohl! British? Certainly, dear boy. American craft innovation? Yo,we're all over that. Bryson and Kolesar will lead you through the local harvest with details, suggestions, and brewery stories, while TJ's kitchen supports it all with a grand presentation of their famed cuisine a la biere. 6:30 PM, pay as you go beer and a $25 six-course tasting menu."

(That's what's going up on the PBW website: TJ's Jeff Miller released the beerlist: General Lafayette Red Velvet, General Lafayette Churchill's Mild, Victory Hop Wallop, Victory Prima Pils, Riverhorse Double Wit, Troegs Mad Elf, Stoudt’s Smooth Hoperator, Stoudt's Brewer's Reserve (TBA), Yard’s Love Stout, Flying Fish Love Fish, Legacy Fantasy Ale, Sly Fox Gang Aft Agley Scotch Ale, Sly Fox IPA Project (TBA), Weyerbacher Merry Monks, Dogfish Head Raison D’Etre, Monk’s Café Flemish Sour, Lancaster Brewing (TBA), Erie Misery Bay IPA. Not bad...)

And Uncle Jack has confirmed what Triumph brewer Jay Misson hinted at in a comment here: that the Philly Beer Week Real Ale Fest is taking place, but due to site problems, Yards and Triumph will be hosting it together at Triumph Old city, on Sunday March 16th, from 1 to 4 PM. Just in time for you to stroll over there from my PA Beer Brunch at Fork, about a block and a half away.

Incidentally, that Beer Yard calendar UJ's put together is pretty slick; slicker than the PBW site's. Check it out.

For those of you keeping score at home...yes, this is Post Number 365, which means I have achieved my goal of averaging a post a day over my first year of blogging. Wahoo!

Okay, back to work...

Blog Birthday Coming Up...

Seen Through A Glass will celebrate its one year anniversary on Thursday, January 31st. One year ago I opened with this post, and with very little thought beforehand -- I thought up the name of the blog while I was writing the post, having suddenly realized it should have a name -- laid out these goals:

I'll be using this for quick stuff. Mostly, to start with, STAG is going to be a place to start up my Session Beer Project (more on that shortly). So I'll be doing a lot more quick tasting notes and short rants, as that hits me. It's going to be as informal as "The Latest" is...okay, was on my site, when I was keeping up with it. The idea for the blog is short, sharp, and frequent writing. I want to keep up on local stuff, too: local to southeast PA and the adjoining states. I dropped the ball on local news last year, and I want to get back up to speed; here's where it's happening.

How'd I do? Pretty well, so far.

Session Beer Project: currently a bit low, but the SBP was definitely a success, with mentions in several publications (notably the recent Imbibe article on session beers and in Eric Asimov's New York Times blog, The Pour) and great response from brewers and drinkers. I've committed to revving that back up, and you'll see that.

Tasting Notes: Over 50 beer and whiskey and cider notes posted so far, and I'm falling into a new format for them -- I call it "The New York Review of Beers style -- that I like. I'm going to get the "tasting note" tag on all of them, too, so you can -- if you want... -- find them easier. (Did that, and there turns out to be 71, counting the ones embedded in other posts.)

Short rants: could do better on this one. I'm happy with the ranting I've done, but I could do more.

"The Latest": Probably the most successful part of the blog, I've posted a lot of bar and brewery reports. Probably the most annoying part of the blog: I've been bad about completing multi-day trips and visits. I'll work on that.

Local news: Better, but I'm still working on that.

What I would like to do, and it's a bit quixotic, is get 365 posts on the board before January 30 is over, to bring my average up to a post a day. This is post #349, so I've got 16 posts to do in four days, while keeping up with a fair amount of scheduled, paying work. Certainly doable...the hard part is making them worthwhile! Expect some long-delayed tasting notes, the completion of the Colum Egan interview, and -- with luck -- some site reports.

Buckle up.

The Session Beer Project: 1st Entry

I've been wrestling over an issue that people keep telling me is my fault: big beers get all the glory, while "session beers" get ignored. I complain to brewers that they put too much emphasis on their big beers, their "extreme beers," and they respond that I (and other beer writers) do the same thing.

As I explain in the February Buzz on my website, for a variety of reasons, they're right. We do always talk about the big beers, the crazy beers, that beers that grab us. They're interesting, they stick out, and even the failures are fun to talk about. Session beers get forgotten. (Except when you drink them in Düsseldorf with Guy Hagner, Tom Baker, and Nick Bruels.)

Not to smack, but sites like ratebeer.com and BeerAdvocate.com are, if anything, even worse. Their "best of" lists of the beers that their thousands of members have rated as "Da Best!" reads like a beer geek's wet dream: 7+% ABV, 90+ IBU, 20+P OG, reeking and funky as a chili-shack outhouse. (If none of that jargon makes sense to you, sorry: it's alcohol, bitterness, and -- essentially -- heaviness.) Yeah, there are a couple exceptions, but you can't help thinking that if these guys had their way, they'd be lying around in a swollen-tongued stupor every weekend.

Time to right that balance: The Session Beer Project. I'm going to try to post notes on session beers at least four times a week: tasting notes, style notes, food pairings, critiques, rants, praise, despair, news, whatever. I'm just one voice among many, but it's time to start. I know there are people out there who feel the same way I do: feel free to piggy-back, copy, emulate, link, get inspired, or just comment.

What's a session Beer?

Fair question, especially since my definition doesn't necessarily jibe with the standard one of beers under 4.5% ABV (that's Alcohol By Volume; Budweiser is 5.0%, for comparison). For me, session beer has a number of subjective qualities.

1. Alcohol under 4.5%. Once you get above 5%, things change, in my long experience with beer. Below that, you can drink at a moderate pace and not get heavily flummoxed. Try knocking back 6% beers at a session pace, and you'll be making an ass of yourself in short order. Believe me: or just ask my brother-in-law about the night at his place with the sixtel of Stegmaier Brewhouse Bock. I always say that session beer is beer you can drink while you're playing cards, without worrying about gambling away your house. An update: upon reflection, and more research, and a lot of drinking, I revised this number downwards from the original 5.5%. For purposes of the Session Beer Project, I'm calling it session beer at 4.5% and under.

2. Flavor in balance. A session beer can't be insanely hopped, syrupy with residual sugar, or funkier than hell. The whole idea of a session beer is that you can drink them smoothly glass after glass without anything cramping your palate. Plenty of flavor is fine, but nothing overpowering.

3. The beer doesn't overpower the conversation. Session beers shouldn't make you interrupt the conversation and start geeking about how marvelous the beer is. Session beer is more about backup than topic, it's something you drink while you're talking, not something to talk about. Er...this blog is an obvious exception.

4. Reasonably priced. There are some very quaffable beers out there that are, for some reason, wicked expensive. If you can afford to do sessions with them, God bless you. The rest of us? Reasonable is the keyword.

Examples: dry stout (Guinness, O'Reilly's), porter (Geary's London Porter, Boulevard Bully Porter). helles (Augustiner Edelstoff (Damn. Stan tells me Edelstoff is 5.6%!), Victory Lager), Belgian pale ale (De Koninck), hefeweizen (Paulaner, Schneider, Penn), most pilsner (Stoudt's, Pilsner Urquell), brown ale (Newcastle, BridgePort Beertown Brown), cream ale, steam beer (Anchor Steam), dunkel (Sly Fox Dunkel, Victory Dark Lager, Warsteiner Dark), witbier (Allagash White, Blue Moon Belgian White), kölsch (Cap City Kölsch, Gaffel), and bitter, when you can find it here in America... Not a comprehensive list, but you get the idea.

That's what we're talking about. The first tasting note follows.

Seen Through a Glass, Darkly...and Lightly

Welcome to my blog: Seen Through A Glass.

Why a blog? I mean, I have a straight-up website, isn't that enough? Blogs are things amateurs do, right? Blogs are the mimeographs and office copiers of the 21st Century, sloppy newsletters from sloppy people.

Well...I did one of those sloppy newsletters, back twenty years ago. I called it Horseshit Times and then (when I got a bit more mature (and married)) Downwind. That's where I first practiced writing for the public: humor, beer rants, silly crap.

If I want to do that now, a blog seems perfect. Even better, actually, because the problem with Downwind was that it was a pain to produce. I was pushing the software to the limits, collating and stapling, mailing and passing it out by hand... But thanks to Blogger and Google, not only is this free, better-looking, and disseminated immediately to the entire world (thanks, Google), I can write in it, produce it, publish it, from anywhere with a 'Net linkup. I LIKE that.

More to the point, I have a real reason for doing this kind of thing now. I'm a freelance drinks writer by trade, and this blog (and the website) are part of my promotional activities. It's advertising, it's promotion, it's communication with my readers, it's support for my books. I do all that on the website, but the website, while more capable, takes more time. I need a more rapid response medium.

So I'll be using this for quick stuff. Mostly, to start with, STAG is going to be a place to start up my Session Beer Project (more on that shortly). So I'll be doing a lot more quick tasting notes and short rants, as that hits me. It's going to be as informal as "The Latest" is...okay, was on my site, when I was keeping up with it. The idea for the blog is short, sharp, and frequent writing.

I want to keep up on local stuff, too: local to southeast PA and the adjoining states. I dropped the ball on local news last year, and I want to get back up to speed; here's where it's happening.

That's all for now. Welcome.