Headlines from November 2017 on THE BEER BEAT.

Previously, I've explained why this blog has gone on hiatus, adding that my thoughts about beer will be posted alongside my utterances about everything else, over yonder at NA Confidential.

You'll find them there via the helpful all-purpose tag, The Beer Beat.

However, whenever the urge strikes -- I seem to have settled on monthly -- I'll collect a few of these links right here. Following are November's ruminations, with the oldest listed first.

Some of these posts are more topical than others. On occasion, there'll be references to beer in posts using "The Beer Beat" as a label, though not a title. I hope this isn't overly confusing.

Thanks for reading, if belatedly.

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THE BEER BEAT: A pint of bitter, please, because it's The Dubliners at the The Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club, 1977.

It's the mid-1970s lineup of the Irish folk band The Dubliners, performing on a throwback British television show called The Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club, depicting a fictional working men's club -- a form of private pub with ale and stronger drink, in addition to indoor recreation (snooker, darts), or a haven for what Americans would refer to as blue collar workers.

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THE BEER BEAT: Martin Luther, gruit, hops, brewer's droop and Industrial Disease.

Whether it's Buhner's or Bostwick's research, I've no idea whether any of this is entirely reputable. I always thought it was the alcohol itself that contributes to erectile dysfunction, but strict veracity isn't my point.

Rather, it's the phrase "brewer's droop" itself, and joyfully recalling how it was used by Dire Straits in the song.

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ON THE AVENUES: When it comes to beer, less might yet be more.

I remember being in Prague in the mid-1990s. We’d wander through downtown neighborhoods hunting beer – sometimes hopping trams, other times the subway, but most often on foot. The objective was to find drafts from as many of the Czech Republic’s breweries as possible, and having identified these beers, to drink them straight down.

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THE BEER BEAT: It's a cornucopia of ephemera, from Quaff On to Lazlo Toth.

"I used to occasionally drink your BUDWEISER Brand, that's how I know the name of your company, and all the fine products you make, light as well as Dark. I have a marketing idea that goes with your name since you have the same name as our new President, George Bush. Since he wants a 'kinder, gentler nation', I thought up the idea for you to sell a new beer, -- BUSH BEER -- A KINDER, GENTLER BEER."

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THE BEER BEAT: Your brain on coursework, or expanding the mind one pint at a time.

At one point in the oral history interview, I paused for breath following a rambling recollection of perhaps ten minutes' duration, all of it spent detailing fake IDs, Mario's Pizza, the family room at Steinert's, 4-for-1 Thursday nights at the Troubadour -- though omitting the famous case of Wiedemann smuggled into (and out of) the fraternity office via a trumpet case during the campus chemical cloud lockdown -- suddenly aware of my inability to remember anything substantive about any of my classes.

Or what happened to the trumpet.

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THE BEER BEAT: Beer news overview, featuring our Bamberg correspondent; Pearl Street Taphouse's anniversary; and a Dauntless beer dinner at La Chasse.

Kim Andersen is an evil man, taunting the terminally New Albany-bound (that's me) with this photo of delicious, freshly-poured Spezial Rauchbier, as snapped from his current vantage point in Bamberg, Germany.

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THE BEER BEAT: I brought my passport for beers at J-town's 3rd Turn Brewery.

As a final indicator of my regrettable sloth in getting around to visiting this two-year-old "new" brewery, 3rd Turn already has expanded to Crestwood, 13 miles away from J-town -- this time outside the Gene Snyder Freeway (i.e., I-265) perimeter of Louisville KY locality demarcation.

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THE BEER BEAT: Sierra Nevada Celebration Ale and a stray recipe for Eastern European Sauerkraut, Bean and Mushroom Soup.

At some point in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I'd pre-order as many kegs of Sierra Nevada Celebration Ale as North Vernon Beverage could acquire via hook or crook, and we'd pour them at the Public House for weeks on end.

Probably a keg each year was deposited directly into my own stomach. It's a wonder we ever made any money. Holiday sentimentality is utterly lacking in my interior world, and yet this annual arrival of Celebration Ale truly came to define the Thanksgiving and Christmas seasons.

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THE BEER BEAT: One excellent afternoon spent pub crawling with beer on the periphery of the wine walk.

It's entirely possible to begin a Saturday afternoon at Floyd County Brewing Company with a couple of locally brewed beers and a burger, then stroll over to Big Four Burgers + Beer for another local beer, before walking eastbound to Hull & High Water and having ... one more "craft" beer, prior to an end-of-pub-crawl night(afternoon)cap -- well, two -- at Gospel Bird, with the added bonus of a restorative dose of Fernet Angelico.

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Catching up with Sierra Nevada Celebration Ale.

Photo credit: Its own page.

The single most hellish aspect of aging are the times when you think something happened last month, and it turns out to have been five years ago. Consequently, most readers already know the point of today's digression.

First, some personal history.

At some point in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I'd pre-order as many kegs of Sierra Nevada Celebration Ale as North Vernon Beverage could acquire via hook or crook, and we'd pour them at the Public House for weeks on end.

Probably a keg each year was deposited directly into my stomach. It's a wonder we ever made any money. Holiday sentimentality is utterly lacking in my interior world, and yet this annual arrival of Celebration Ale truly came to define the Thanksgiving and Christmas seasons.

In later years, the world evolved; NABC began its own brewing operation in 2002, and in 2005 came the first Saturnalia festival, as explicitly devoted to "celebrating" winter and holiday seasonal draft beers.

In the years since, I've had my ups and downs with Sierra Nevada itself. To this very day, it still seems to me that an aspect of the company's crucial foundational California mythology was lost forever when it began brewing in North Carolina. However, this is not the point of my digression.

A couple of weeks back we were out shopping for groceries. I needed beer for sauerkraut, bean and mushroom soup, and Bridge Liquors was just around the corner, so we stopped there for a couple of bottles of Paulaner Salvator.

Remember: Never, ever use water in soup.

While browsing Bridge's packed aisles, I saw six-packs of Celebration Ale and couldn't resist the temptation. Having paid very little attention in recent years, what threw me at first glance was the changed label designer, which is gorgeous, and the words "Fresh Hop IPA."

The simple fact is that while we always knew Celebration Ale was a hophead's delight, I can't recall many barroom discussions centering on whether it was or wasn't an IPA. We simply accepted it was what it was, and remains: Celebration Ale. It's the same way I feel about NABC's Elector; not this or that, but merely Elector, itself.

Concurrently ... those various annual "Harvest" releases were designered to be Sierra Nevada's showcase for "fresh" hops, weren't they?

Hence, this belated effort to rectify my grasp of semantics, and now it makes sense to me, because ...

The word "IPA" wasn't on the label in 2013, and appeared for the first time in 2014.

The Harvest series is about "wet" or unprocessed hops, while the significance of "fresh" in Celebration Ale, according to wording first deployed in 2010, is that the finishing hops (Cascade and Centennial) are selected, dried and used immediately. These distinctions are explained in detail by Heather Vandenengel at All About Beer:

A FRESH CELEBRATION: THE ORIGINS OF CELEBRATION ALE

Celebration Ale, which has been in production since 1981 and in its current form since 1983, is an enigma of a beer. It’s a holiday beer, so consumers might expect it to have the standard spices—nutmeg, cinnamon—but instead will find hop aromas and bitterness akin to an IPA. Since 2010, Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. has labeled it as a fresh hop ale, garnering confusion with wet hop ales, which are also often referred to as fresh hop ales.

Finally, at the risk of waxing curmudgeonly, I will never in my life consider Celebration Ale to be an IPA. To me, the attempted specificity mars the legend. It's a one-off, and should remain that way.