Brew Indy, brew!

Since there’s a stronger “Hoosier brewer” element to this story, I’ll blog this here rather than my normal blog home (Central State Asylum).

Jay Brooks of the Brookston Beer Bulletin mentions today that Rock Bottom Breweries and Gordon Biersch are merging (along with Old Chicago) to form CraftWorks Restaurants and Breweries (He also reprints the full press release so I won’t. Click through to read it.)

I like Rock Bottom, so put me, along with Beernomics blogger Patrick Emerson, as going on record as thinking this is a “good thing.”

As a consumer and a fan of local foods, I generally consider restaurant consolidation a “bad thing” but here I feel divided. Like Emerson, I think Rock Bottom is a gateway brewer. Their ambiance, plate price, and Applebee’s+ menu fare make the place a desirable dining destination for a lot of people who would not head anywhere specifically for craft beer. And then, when they arrive, there’s a decent selection of well-crafted beers, most of which are accessible and (presumably) tuned to local palates. If they acquire a taste for craft beer, or at least temper their sense of risk, they may become someone who seeks craft beer in the future.

I talked with the Dave Chichura at Oskar Blues when I was in Boulder for the Beer Bloggers Conference. He had spent some time as a brewer at Rock Bottom and spoke well of his time there (along with local beerman Clay Robinson). Both Chichura and the guys at Sun King (Robinson and Dave Colt) are brewing magnificent beer. They’re innovative brewers and solid brewery managers. I’m not saying that Rock Bottom taught them those things. How could I know? But Rock Bottom at this point seems to be serving as the farm league for tomorrow’s future in beer.

Of course, if this merger triggers a change in policy that encourages more mediocrity and less integrity batches, I reserve the right to change my mind about this.

Hopefully the Rock Bottom part of the merger will continue to acknowledge that their future success in the craft beer world will, in part, rely on their ability to compete against truly local and regional brewers who will continue to design beers for audiences they know well and respond to quickly. CraftWorks can only do this by continuing their current federalist(?) approach to brewing.

At least, I don’t think a more centralized approach will work out for them.

Which is the argument for why I think this is “not a bad thing.” The argument for why it might be a good thing is that, if economies of scale and the merging of redundant operations allows CraftWorks to open new locations, more people will be introduced to craft beer in an environment they are culturally familiar with. And there you have it. This is CraftWork’s game to lose at this point.

Related articles

• Rock Bottom Restaurant & Brewery Takes Home Seven Medals from 2010 Great American Beer Festival (eon.businesswire.com)
• Rock Bottom Restaurant & Brewery Taps ‘American Dream Ale’ (eon.businesswire.com)

As a person who has never smoked a cigarette in his life and who spent his youth coughing out the smoke inhaled from his parents’ Salems (Mom) and Camels (Dad), I have often remained silent on the issue of the smoking bans in bars and restaurants, even though my Liberaltarian political position makes me uneasy in regard to the government telling business owners how to run their own businesses when there is less than ample proof that society would break down without said intervention.

In my perfect world, all smokers and smoking establishments would just wake up tomorrow and say “Enough! Let’s make that one guy in Indianapolis really happy and make Smoke Free America a reality.”

I, of course, have no illusions that this will ever happen. However, every so often there is good news on the “people freely choosing to go Smoke Free” front. Earlier this week New Albanian Brewing Company decided to make their Pizzeria and Public House 100 per cent smoke free. From the Potable Curmudgeon blog:

This is our choice, and not one mandated by local government, although I concede it’s only a matter of time until the decree is issued. Although I smoke cigars, and not being able to smoke a cigar in my own bar will take some getting used to, it is my belief that the time has come to acquiesce to changing attitudes and societal norms…

The argument from workplace safety is a compelling and well nigh irrefutable one. The case aesthetically is equally convincing. The simple fact of the matter from management’s perspective is that trying to balance smoking and non-smoking needs in the context of the configuration of an establishment like ours has become maddening.

OK, so they didn’t wake up and decide to make me happy. I can live with the fact that they had other reasons. But I’m also happy they are making this choice freely, without government interference, and because they think it will improve their ability to run their business in the most efficient way they can.  It also makes me happy that a shift in societal norms regarding smoking is one of the factors here.

As a student of political science I can tell you that I have read research that suggests that legislation has very little sway over the choices we make, but, if it is promulgated at a time when public sentiment seems to be shifting anyway, it can have an exponential impact on behavior. That seems to be the case in regard to smoking bans. It isn’t that the legislation alone has caused a significant drop in smoking, but it likely has sped the transition we are living through.

But that’s a conversation for a different day and probably on a different blog.

In regard to Jimmy’s post yesterday I have a few more comments.

Save My Sunday, my new whipping post, has a lot to say regarding whether Walgreens should be granted the retailer liquor license they have applied for which would allow them to sell liquor in most of their 53 central Indiana stores and 200 statewide. As a group that nominally opposes liquor sales on Sunday but clearly wishes to abolish liquor sales altogether, they are of the mind that Walgreens’s application should be denied.

Their logic is that an increase in liquor outlets, by making alcohol more easily obtainable, will increase drunkeness and the problems associated with it. They have been saying this for awhile now, but earlier this week two Indiana University professors helped them out by putting some science behind the theory.

According to Criminal Justice professor William Alex Pridemore and Department of Geography professor Tony Grubesic, in a briefing presented as part of the Feb. 18-22 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Diego, California and in a press briefing on February 22, an additional off-premise liquor outlet in a square mile block is associated with an additional 2.3 simple assaults per year. An additional restaurant is associated with 1.15 additional simple assaults and a bar with 1.35 additional assaults.

Now statistics are statistics, and I’m not here to deny that these two professors are fine collectors and analysts of data. I’m sure they are. But statistics don’t show or prove causation. Causation must be theorized from the available data and then tested. All this study can prove is that there is a relationship between crime and liquor outlet density. That relationship does not have to be causal. But Pridemore and Grubesic, according to this summary of the paper, seem to believe that the liquor stores do more than serve as a marker of high crime areas and in fact claim,

We could expect a reduction of about one-quarter in simple assaults and nearly one-third in aggravated assaults in our sample of Cincinnati block groups were alcohol outlets removed entirely.

The causative mechanism according to the authors is

A higher density of alcohol sales outlets in an area means closer proximity and easier availability to an intoxicating substance for residents,” Pridemore said. “Perhaps just as importantly, alcohol outlets provide a greater number of potentially deviant places. Convenience stores licensed to sell alcohol may be especially troublesome in this regard, as they often serve not only as sources of alcohol but also as local gathering places with little formal social control. [emphasis mine]

This seems pretty flimsy to me from an economic standpoint. Even on the Saturday night before the Super Bowl, package liquor stores are always well stocked. So in terms of available liquor, we live in a world where our physical supply routinely outpaces our consumption. If you added a liquor store across the street from another outlet, you have not made booze any more convenient or cheap and you have barely altered the landscape in regard to proximity of sale. It is true, as the author’s suggest, that you do create an additional space where people that desire alcohol will run into each other, “potential deviant places” which is something I will come back to. And keep in mind, the professors were talking about blocks of one square mile, a perimeter so vast it can be walked in an hour.

It seems to me that a higher density of liquor stores are not the cause of higher incidents of assaults, but rather architectural signals of, well, not to put too fine a point on it, worse sides of town. That is, retail outlets don’t spring up haphazardly; they go where the demand is. Put another way, a high liquor store density tells you that you are in a high crime area, not that liquor is the cause of that crime, which renders the authors’ supposed reduction in crime from reducing the amount of granted liquor licenses absurd. No one remembers Prohibition as being a low crime moment in America’s history. That experiment has already been run.

Without seeing the presentation myself I can’t know for sure if the authors accounted for the notion that an additional liquor store in a bad neighborhood was also an additional target of a robbery. That is, 2.3 additional assaults per yer isn’t that big of an increase. It wouldn’t surprise me at all to find that if we were to obtain the raw data and remove from the population all burglaries/robberies of liquor stores that the effect would be reduced to near zero. (Note: the summary of the paper linked here doesn’t say “per year.” It just says 2.3 additional assaults. Without a time paramter that statement doesn’t make any sense. I could be drastically underestimating the increase in assaults here and will correct it when and if I find a reason to.)

But for the sake of argument, let’s assume the authors are correct, that by reducing the amount of licenses one can actually reduce crime, does it follow that the correct course of action is to deny Walgreens their license?

I would argue that it does not. As Jimmy pointed out yesterday, this would be a governmental action that is discriminatory against Walgreens specifically and cannot be supported by law. CVS, Kroger, Meijer, and several other outlets all already sell liquor and Walgreens is at least as responsible as any of them, probably more so given CVS’s ethical problems of the last decade. And why would you want to keep Walgreens out of the game? All this will do will transfer some of CVS’s, Kroger’s, and Meijer’s profits over to Walgreens. That’s why they’re so up in arms over Walgreen’s return to the liquor game.

Rather the proper response, if the authors are correct, would be to simply reduce the amount of licenses allowed and let Walgreens obtain a license wherever one was available. Which presumably is what John Livengood would agree to since, by his reading of current Indiana law, there are already too many licenses issued and so Walgreens would be SOL. I don’t know if he’s right or not, but as Jimmy mentioned yesterday and as the Star reported, at least one judge thinks he’s wrong.

And speaking of Mr. Livengood, he cracks me up. If you were to read this line from him, “A corporation that once said it would never sell alcohol is now essentially turning its once family-friendly drugstores into liquor stores,” [emphasis mine]wouldn’t you suppose he was one of Save My Sunday’s bloggers? Wouldn’t you think he was a neo-Prohibitionist of some sort, full of loathing for those despicable outlets that profiteer off man’s vices?

Well guess what! He’s the CEO of the Indiana Association of Beverage Retailers, and by “beverage” they mean alcoholic beverages. He has his dog in the fight, sure, but trying to appeal to our emotional sense to convince us that the only acceptable place to buy liquor is a liquor store, just seems in bad form. I quickly add, though, that I do think the best place to buy liquor is a liquor store. People who follow liquor trends and talk directly to liquor consumers can impart a wealth of knowledge to the curious shopper. CVS employees, as nice as they are often are, just aren’t very helpful when you need to know which box wine goes best with chicken breast baked in cream of mushroom soup. (Pssst, I’d go with the Target brand Wine Cube California Chardonnay.)

This may not come as a shock to you if you follow Indiana beer news, but Indiana has it’s own group of honest to goodness neo-Prohibitionists.

Before I proceed, as this term is likely to pop up often, I want to explain what I mean by it. I am an alcohol fan. I like beer enough to make road trips to breweries so I can try their beer at its freshest; I make my own beer; and spend my free time reading about beer culture and history.

I like whiskey. If I could legally make my own and if I could afford my own still (or had the technical skill to make one) I would do that too. As it is, I have spent my hard earned money to buy and sample a variety of different types and brands of whiskey. I often go to bookstores so I can read reviews of whiskeys I can’t afford or haven’t heard of before.

I know the histories and major varieties of nearly all spirits and many bitters.

I like wine. I know the basics and I wouldn’t embarrass myself at a fancy dinner if the waiter shoved a cork in my face.

This isn’t bragging. This is me explaining where I’m coming from when I start to use a term that many might think of as derogatory.

With that said, I know there are some problems associated with immoderate drinking, problems of the mind, problems of the body, problems in our families, problems with our friends and problems with which our expanded communities wrestle. I have friends that are or have been alcoholics and I have seen them arrested for DUIs, lose their jobs, break their marriages. I have even seen friends use alcohol as a replacement for much harder drugs and eventually return to them when alcohol stopped filling that void for them. More of my family members are alcoholics than I would like to admit.

With all that said, alcohol is not the problem. Alcoholism comes from a dark place born in pain, loss, anxiety, or despair.

But more importantly I am also aware of some facts. Binge drinkers, when that term is defined fairly and usefully, make up the margins of all drinkers, the vast majority of which partake moderately in what is one of Earth’s great luxuries. And alcoholics make up the margins of all binge drinkers. Alcoholics are the margin of the margins. They are extreme and rare.

So when I talk about neo-Prohibitionists I want to make very clear that I am not talking about every individual or group that recognizes that alcohol should be regulated by a healthy society because there are known harms associated with its immoderate and unsafe use.

Who I am talking about when I am talking about neo-Prohibitionist are groups and individuals whose ultimate goal is to ban entirely all alcohol sales and use. Some of these groups are very clear that they see no good in alcohol and want it banned completely or regulated slowly away. Many of these groups are not so upfront. Their stated purpose  is to “regulate” alcohol. Or to “limit” its availability. They only want to curb the use of “excessive” drinking. They may say they merely want to “postpone” the introduction of alcohol to young people. These are goals, that, if they truly worked toward them would be goals I could support. They hide their extremism behind a mask of reasonableness.

Hardly any American with a basic elementary school-level education doesn’t know that we tried Prohibition once and rather than cure the nation of the scourge of liquor, it actually exacerbated the problem and elevated the wealth and power of organized criminal associations. That means the arguments of neo-Prohibitionists of the first type above are easy to dismiss.

Those of the second type, however are more insidious. Alcohol has been effectively demonized which makes it hard for politicians to set their emotions aside and pass helpful legislation. These craftier neo-Prohibitionists prey on this fear and confusion, routinely using rhetorical techniques, fallacious arguments, and statistical tricks to undermine even modest drinking by legal, responsible adults to slowly work toward their goals under the guise of “responsible regulation.” They have to use these underhanded tactics because they know their ultimate goal flies in the face of judicious restraint, logic, and, frankly, reality.

Let me introduce you to one such group that I plan on spending a lot of time on in the next few weeks. Save My Sunday.

Save My Sunday describes themselves this way:

Save My Sunday is a blog devoted to the joys of reserving one day a week for rest, rejuvenation and family.

This sounds limited enough. I don’t agree with their premise, I see very little joy in depriving others of their freedoms, but here we could just agree to disagree, and besides, maybe they have some good evidence of why I might think twice about legalizing Sunday sales.

They continue:

We decided to start it when we heard about a push in Indiana to legalize the sale of alcohol on Sundays.

As a marketer and a writer who has helped several organizations create strong mission statements I have nothing but good things to say about Save My Sunday providing their audience the impetus of the group. In debate we would call this “the threat.” As Save My Sunday is in the role of the affirmative here, that is making the argument in the affirmative, “Yes, Indiana should continue to keep Sunday sales of liquor illegal,” the burden is on them to prove that Sunday sales constitutes a threat. We will see how they attempt to do this through analysis of the site.

They continue.

Convenience is great in the 24-7 world we live in, but we believe Sunday is the one day we should spend quality time with family and friends, worship when and where we can, and generally focus on what is good and healthy. In this fast-paced world, our lives are complicated enough. Let’s leave Sunday alone.

This is where their argument flies off the rails and will leave them no choice but to resort to the worst of kind argument from emotion, specious analogies, ad hominem attacks, false equivalencies and more. You see, legalizing Sunday sales would not prevent them from “spend[ing] quality time with family friends, worship[ing] when and were [they] can, and generally focus[ing] on what is good and healthy” and yet they act like they couldn’t enjoy last Sunday because I had a beer. As H.L. Mencken might have said, a neo-Prohibitionist “is a person who lives in the fear that someone, somewhere, may be having a good time.”

Buried in their claim is that time spent drinking, even responsibly with friends and family, is not quality time. That, drinking itself, even in moderate doses, is not healthy. That somehow, drinking, speeds up our fast-paced world.

So many false claims. So many opinions based on deliberately ignoring the way most of the world, who are often found relaxing with delicious, healthy alcoholic beverages with friends enjoy their Sundays or even their Mondays through their Saturdays.

But most importantly, because they do not relax with alcohol, because they do not think it is healthy (besides a mountain of evidence to the contrary), they think it is their right to keep others from living differently, as if the fact that I bought a six pack on Sunday would somehow affect them.

This is just the beginning. I had planned on criticizing just one of their blog posts but as I scanned their site for the name of the author of the posts, I became more and more incensed at the manipulation and dishonesty I found there. Save my Sunday and I are going to spend a lot of time together. I hope you stay tuned.

^{This article x-posted from Central State Asylum}

Anat Baron crammed two movies into her excellent documentary Beer Wars. One is the advertised David vs. Goliath story of the craft brew industry battling for survival against the Big Three brewers, Budweiser, Miller and Coors. The other, more interesting story is the one that Baron herself seems nearly unaware of: The David vs. David story, craft brewers against craft brewers.

Looking back at the first decade of the 21st Century from the vantage point of 2040 or 2050, we may decide that this was the real watershed moment for craft beer. America’s three dominant brewers suffer slow, flat or declining sales as the country limps through the worst economic downturn of the last 30 years. Beer drinkers split their purchases between sub-premium brands like Pabst and artisanal products from small time craft breweries and local brewpubs. In 2009 Pabst increased sales 30 per cent. The entire beer industry was up only 1 per cent while craft brews increased their sales over 12 per cent. All three of America’s largest breweries are down with SABMiller down nearly 11 per cent and AB InBev down almost 7 per cent.

No doubt when Baron was running Mike’s Hard Lemonade and suddenly had to compete with dozens of Zima clones put out by big brewers and distillers she had a much harder time than small brewers do today.

Indeed, brewers today practically have success heaped upon them with legal victories and commercial expansions piling on top of each other faster than the press can report them.

Not that business isn’t hard. It is. It always is. Running a business, especially a small business, requires dedication, hard work, and not a little bit of luck. And the big brewers, as Baron documents, really seem to go out of their way to shut down small-time, craftsman upstarts.

Baron shows through the course of her film the daily frustrations put upon small time brewers including roadblocks to entry like the Category Captain system used by most supermarket chains and the frustrations of the three-tier system as well as the potentially more problematic challenges of lawsuits and Cease-and-Desist orders initiated by well-moneyed and well-lawyered big brewers. While these are certainly real concerns of small brewers, even in today’s craft-focused market, most of them will not be surprising revelations for the craft beer fan that watches Beer Wars.

The film’s 89 minutes is divided between four major themes

1. Scenes of the craft beer world at large: shots of the Great American Beer Festival, interviews with Jim Koch (Boston Beer Co), Greg Koch (Stone), Charlie Papazian (HBA), and Maureen Ogle (author of Ambitious Brew).
2. Obstacles craft brewers have to deal with: competition from the Big Three, the three-tier System, and special interest groups.
3. The story of Rhonda Kallman (founder of New Century Brewing).
4. And the story of Sam Calagione (founder of Dogfish Head).

It is in the last two where Baron’s documentary really works. Baron effectively weaves between Rhonda and Sam’s challenges, failures and successes and uses them as jumping off points to detail how the Big Three and the industry lobbyist conspire to maintain the status quo to the detriment of craft brewers. But most importantly she shows how, in the trenches of the beer wars, business is business even between similarly minded craft brewers and even between the big three. Beneath the bouncy music and Baron’s upbeat narration is a true Hobbesian world of all against all.

Baron’s feelings of the Big Three will shock no one. She makes it clear that AB InBev et. al. are unashamed of their flat, flavorless, barely beers, that they are profit-focused, that they are mortally aggressive against their competitors. In several archive clips Baron shows Big Three executives addressing the camera like George C. Scott’s Patton inspiring his troops to wade into the killing fields with a cold code of no remorse, all’s fair in the beer biz.

In juxtaposition, the craft brewers are small, flexible, consumer-focused lovers of a historic and important art. Craft brewers are down to earth, smiling family men and women. They are passionate artists. They are interesting and colorful. Each craft brewer it seems is just a lover of craft beer whether it’s their’s or another’s.

Indeed, following many craft brewers, pub owners, and distributors on Twitter^*, I can attest that there is a great deal of camaraderie in the craft beer world. Just last night I was at Barley Island-Broad Ripple, a Noblesville, Indiana-based brewpub in the state’s capitol city. I was there to taste beers from (Lafayette, Indiana-based) Lafayette Brewing Company. The brewer/owner of LBC was there and he was wearing a shirt from Greenwood, Indiana-based Oaken Barrel Brewing Co. Astounding. really.

Baron shows Rhonda Kallman fighting for shelf space at a small package liquor store and through edits and narration implies that the real difficulty is grabbing shelf space from the big brewers who maximize their visibility from offering multiple package sizes. But it becomes increasingly clear that if Rhonda succeeds in getting Moon Shot on the shelf, the person who loses out will be a smaller brewer. We actually hear her say, “I don’t know what’s going on with Tiger Beer, but maybe we can squeeze right in there.” It’s not a microbrew she’s trying to displace, but it isn’t Budweiser either.

Later in the film, while looking for investors, she approaches her ex-partner Jim Koch with whom she co-founded Samuel Adams. Koch denies her, saying that he considers her a competitor and his investment a potential ethical dilemma.

Indeed, shelf space, truck space, and the dollars American shoppers are willing to spend on beer are all finite. And while there’s still a lot of room out there for hundreds, even thousands, of breweries to succeed, the immediate success of one brewer will come as an immediate setback to another. The big brewers are collectively losing ground to the craft brew industry but along the way the big three are forcing hundreds of individual craft brewers out of business. And, lurking in the subtext of the film is the story of small brewers putting other small brewers out of business too.

In highlighting Rhonda, who struggles to make a name and find a place for her caffeine-infused brew and Sam, who during the filming was doubling the capacity of his brewery, it becomes tragically clear that the beer wars is not just the asymmetric warfare of the beer hegemon against a rising tide of create insurgents but is all out civil war: Budweiser versus the recently allied MillerCoors, the tree of them versus all the craft brewers and each of the craft brewers, even if unwillingly, against each other.

Baron does a great job profiling Kallman and Calagione. We want to root for them not just because of the overt Manichaean struggle she sets up but because they seem like good people that we think deserve our sympathies. Here’s Kallman consoling her crying child. Here’s Calagione answering phone calls from people dialing the 1-800 number on the bottles! These people aren’t just creating new kinds of beers, they seem to be creating a new way of doing business.

Even if Baron seems to gloss over the David vs David part of her story Beer Wars has more going for it than against it and I would recommend it to anyone who wants to know how tough life can be for upstart producers in an established industry and who want to hear that story told with humor, sympathy, and a superb sense of story-telling.

Beer Wars, additional to its purposeful or accident narrative complexity, is highly entertaining and well filmed. The documentary photography and its use of archival material is excellent. A lot of documentaries are good ideas with little in the way of art direction. Beer Wars does not suffer from that particular ailment. Unique graphics, thoughtful cuts, interesting camera angles, all go toward making the film a visually entertaining package and that’s worth keeping in mind. Future beer industry documentaries are going to have to live up to the standard that Baron sets or risk unfavorable comparisons.

My Netflix rating. Did I mention you can stream it right now? You should.

^{Follow me: @csasylum}

Several months ago, while traveling through Lafayette on the way to see a play with a friend, I tried to swing by the Lafayette Brewing Company. Unfortunately we were in a hurry and stopped for tacos instead at a place on the highway but promised ourselves to hit LBC on the way back.

The way back was on a Sunday and LBC had the stools and chairs upside down on the table tops, lights off, no luck.

A second trip for a wedding ended up on a more circuitous round and never quite made it into Lafayette. And the way back was  Sunday.

But this past Tuesday night LBC was the guest beer at Barley Island-Broad Ripple and so even though my failed attempts to get there myself placed me firmly in the ranks of the world’s worst and therefore most forgotten explorers I was not totally to be denied. The LBC came to me.

We arrived before the official tapping and so ordered from the regular menu. I ordered the Two Brothers Cane and Ebel Red Rye. A rich and gorgeous mahogany color, the beer arrived with very moderate off-white head, about one finger with fine lacing all the way down.

Although hoppy with distinct and powerful citrus streak in both the aroma and the mouth, its most striking feature is the creaminess. I had figured the hops for Cascade but according to the Two Brothers website it’s Summit. Apparently I still need some practice with my varietals.

The beer has a medium body with a soft texture that, despite its 7% ABV holds well in the mouth. It leaves with a slight note of alcohol and a prolonged sweetness that dissipates to an tenacious bitterness.

I’ve been ordering rye beers as often as I can lately to teach the palate how to recognize the flavor and I think Cane and Ebel finally did the trick. This accessible beer offered little in the way of mystery which is not intended as a criticism. The hops were distinct and their purpose clear, the moderate ABV was well balanced with a low key malt flavor and that meant that the flavor and bitterness I could not recognize was the rye. A grainy, full mouth, flavor that left a lingering bitterness on the back of the tongue. That is the rye, and I like it.

I was nearly done with the rye when the LBC beers were tapped. On the suggestion of our waiter (wearing a kick ass New Albanian “These Machines Kill Fascists” T-shirt I ordered the Pipers Pride Scottish ale first. It was…magnificent once I had gone through the three LBC selections this was the beer I would order again and again throughout the night (much to the detriment of my Wednesday).

It arrived a rich, red not unlike the dark mahogany of the rye but magically and perfectly clear. Unfortunately there was no head on the beer although later iterations had a perfect tight, off white head. The beer honestly seemed to shine. The first wash in the mouth was a perfect, medium bodied beer with a light malt and a generous amount of smoke. I want to be careful here. The smoke was not overpowering, but it was the main flavor. Mixing well with the malt and hops, the smoke imparted an almost peat-like effect. Not precisely the earthy herbaciousness of real peat, but a close enough approximation that kept this beer perfectly accessible to a novice craft brew drinker but challenging to a veteran looking for something different.

It finished softly with a touch of toffee that faded away to a prominent pleasant woodiness.

This beer had a presence about it that seemed yanked from the fireside of a primitive gathering house. I felt like I was a viking. I felt like was drinking BEER.

Next up was the Tippecanoe Common Ale. This beer poured a luscious orangish copper, again with no head, but I blame the car ride from Lafayette and the early tapping. The nose was mostly citrusy and floral hops (Amarillo according to the LBC website). The body was light medium with a crisp bite of hops and very light malt flavors. A slight alcohol in the nose upon swallowing followed by a quick hint of bitterness on the way out.

Definitely a good session beer at 5.8% ABV. The beer is imminently quaffable. This beer is a natural sobriety predator when served cold on a hot summer day. Reviewers at BeerAdvocate call this an IPA. I disagree. I found it much hoppier than most IPA’s and not nearly as malty or dark bodied. I place this a classic American Pale Ale perfectly comparable to Sierra Nevada Pale.

Last up was the Black Angus Oatmeal Stout. I have to confess here, as I often do at some point in beer reviews that my palate, by this time was shot, not just because the Black Angus was my fourth full pint of the evening (and I’d eaten) but also because the three beers I had were all very intensely flavored and leaned hop heavy. The soft, black, subtlety of the Angus deserved a better taster than I was at this point.

Nevertheless, this matte black beast arrived with a tannish gold ring around the top of the glass almost like the corona of an espresso but less golden and less of it. Very little aroma but what was there was malty, with a slight hint of something sharp, maybe hard water(?) maybe coffee(?). I notice that some reviewers mentioned a lactic note in the nose, maybe that was it.

The body was much lighter and less creamy than expected although it was both creamy and not light, just that it defied expectations. It still left a little to chew on despite its lightness. I noted some coffee notes. The beer finished wet and sweet. Not a challenging beer. At this point in the evening I normally would have probably stuck with the Angus, it was cold outside, the beer was easy to drink. But I had to have another go at Piper’s Pride. And another one. And another.

Drink responsibly, y’all.

This self-promotion stuff is really my partner’s bag but he’s working for dollar bills and I’ve been twittering all morning so I’m in the mood. Let’s do this

We’re really just ramping this stuff right now here at BrewIndy and I want to do it correctly from the start. If you are interested in beer generally and if you’re specifically interested in beer in Indiana and even more specifically in beer in Indianapolis, you should subscribe to the ol’ RSS feed. You should also follow us on Twitter. See that cute little bird to the right? That’s how you do it. Or, just go to your Twitter account and search for us (@BrewIndy).

Speaking of teh twitterz, if you are out there tweeting about the beers you’re enjoying, don’t be shy, let us know you want us to follow you too. Put your Twitter handle down there in the comment box, @message us, email us, whatever. This is the new internet and it’s a two-way street, yo.

So, are you a homebrewer, own a brewpub, distribute or sell the stuff, maybe you just drink a lot…got your own blog, whatever. Beer world, meet Brew Indy.

For that matter, the BrewIndy Twitter is publicly accessible, scan the list of who we’re following and let us know who we’re missing. Who gives you the beer reporting, beer reviews, and beer commentary you actually use?

And, like I said in my opening post, if you’re in to more than just beer, pop on over to Central State Asylum and read me there as well. Nothing there yet (really)  but there will be soon. And follow @CSAsylum too! Most everything that appears here will also appear there, but things that appear there, will not necessarily appear here, given that CSA has broader mission than BrewIndy both thematically and geographically.