Our host this month, who will also aggregate and link all the other blog posts, is The Beer Babe, Carla Companion. The theme she has chosen for September is “Welcoming the New Kids“:

With the astounding growth of the number of craft breweries this year, chances are there’s a new one in development, or has just started out in your area. My challenge to you is to seek out a new brewery and think about ways in which they could be welcomed into the existing beer community. How does their beer compare to the craft beer scene in your area? Are they doing anything in a new/exciting way? What advice, as a beer consumer, would you give to these new breweries?

Take this opportunity to say hello to the new neighbors in your area. Maybe its a nanobrewery that came to a festival for the first time that you vowed to “check out” later. Maybe it’s a new local beer on a shelf on the corner store that you hadn’t seen before. Dig deeper and tell us a story about the “new kids on the block.” I look forward to welcoming them to the neighborhood!

Of course Bend, Oregon has one of these “new kids” that just started up this year: Boneyard Beer. Central Oregon’s eighth brewery, Boneyard has been welcomed easily and with open arms into the beer community. But hey—this is Oregon; frankly, anything less here is almost unheard of. They have already amassed something of a cult-like following, and are active and available at all the local festivals.

Of the two beers I’ve tried so far, the Black 13 and the Girl Beer (a Porterlike Brown Ale, and a Cherry Wheat, respectively), are competently-brewed ales but I’d be hard-pressed to say they’re doing anything new or outstanding with them. (Although this weekend’s Little Woody barrel-aged beer festival in Bend is featuring these two beers aged on wood which could be something really nice.)

I haven’t yet had a chance to visit their brewhouse in person, but I will sometime soon. In the meantime, the only advice I could think to give would be to brew the best beers they possibly can—the way to stand out in Oregon is to have great beer.

I’ve had beer from very young breweries that went in the wrong direction; so far, Boneyard is doing it right, and I suspect they’ll be a fixture in Bend for the longer term. And they’ll only be the “new kids” until the next brewery comes along…

With the astounding growth of the number of craft breweries this year, chances are there’s a new one in development, or has just started out in your area. My challenge to you is to seek out a new brewery and think about ways in which they could be welcomed into the existing beer community. How does their beer compare to the craft beer scene in your area? Are they doing anything in a new/exciting way? What advice, as a beer consumer, would you give to these new breweries?

Take this opportunity to say hello to the new neighbors in your area. Maybe its a nanobrewery that came to a festival for the first time that you vowed to “check out” later. Maybe it’s a new local beer on a shelf on the corner store that you hadn’t seen before. Dig deeper and tell us a story about the “new kids on the block.” I look forward to welcoming them to the neighborhood!

Hopefully we’ll get a few more participants than in the last couple of months. I want to read about these new breweries!

This month is the 42nd edition of The Session, and hosting honors belong to Derrick at Ramblings of a Beer Runner: the theme is all about location in A Special Place, A Special Beer.

Two of the best ways I’ve found to explore a new place are to run around in it, and to sample the beer from it. And like many in the craft beer community, I constantly exhort anyone who will listen to support their local brewery, while simultaneously seeking out beers from distant lands that are new, novel, and exotically foreign. The Session provides a unique opportunity to explore this connection between the beer in our glasses and the place it comes from with perspectives from all over the world

So I ask for this 42nd Session that you write about a special place in your life, and a beer or brewery that connects you to that place. It can be the beer from your childhood home, a place you once lived, your current hometown, a memorable vacation you once took, or a place you’ve always wanted to go to but never had the chance. Please take a few moments to think about the how the beer connects you to this place, and share this with us. Of course, the definition of “place” is rather open ended, and in some cases, highly debatable, so it will be interesting to see the responses on what constitutes a place.

This month’s topic is perfect because it gives me an opportunity to write about a brewery that I’ve been wanting to cover for a while: the defunct Birkebeiner Brewing Company from Spokane, Washington. (There are a couple of reasons for this. One is nostalgia. The other is in the spirit of trying to document a bit of the history of these breweries that are no longer around, combined with a bit of web archaeology.)

Back through the mid-90s I spent four years in Spokane, Washington, generally going to school and discovering my affinity for craft beer and homebrewing (which I’ve written about before). These were formative beer years for me, and while Spokane wasn’t the beer town that Portland was (or is), there were still several microbreweries, the best of which (in my opinion) was the Birkebeiner Brewery.

It was in fact one of my semi-regular beer haunts, in large part because Tuesday nights they had their $1 pint specials (I would get off work in the evening—I worked late hours while going to school—and enjoy two or three pints for cheap along with something to eat). They also had a tremendous number of beers on tap for a brewpub, a dozen or so, and were always rotating and experimenting with new beers: I remember when they first brewed a chili beer, and one night we were there and a woman at the table next to us had ordered a pint of it. She had barely a sip and didn’t like it, and offered it to me instead (she felt bad about sending it back). Always game to try a new beer (not to mention a free one!), I accepted.

It was awful. I couldn’t drink it either, but I had to give the brewery credit for attempting it.

I drank a lot of their beer, and two that stand out in memory are the Apricot Ale and the Oatmeal Stout. In fact, I even have an old T-shirt for that stout:

The Stout was a great beer, and the Apricot was well-brewed and tasted like an Apricot Ale should (not something I will say about a lot of versions).

The Birkebeiner was located in a (then) sketchy part of town, on 35 West Main, and they lasted from 1994 until 2000 (a few years after I moved away). Despite the fact that the brewpub has been closed for 10 years, there are still a surprising number of regional guide websites that have it listed—it even shows up on Google Maps! But real information online about the brewery is scarce; so far all I’ve found of substance is this article from 1999 that talks about the overall Spokane beer scene:

Just a few blocks away from Fort Spokane at 35 West Main Street is the Birkebeiner Brewing Co. Founded by owner/brewer James Gimurtu in 1994, it is located in an old dry goods warehouse and textile factory. The building has been extensively remodeled inside, with large storefront windows, a handsome bar and marble-topped tables. The surrounding area is sadly in need of refurbishing, however, consisting mostly of a row of crumbling warehouses. Just down the block is the House of Charity, a local mission for the homeless. It is reminiscent of Pioneer Square or the Market Area is Seattle twenty years ago, before its massive renovation.

But Birkebeiner is a bright spot in this somewhat seedy location. Gimurtu, an avid cross-country skier, named it for a legendary group of hardy Norwegian skiers who rescued the infant King Haakon V (birkebeiner means “birch binding”) Originally from Minnesota, James has lived in Seattle and Portland, where he went to hotel/restaurant school in 1992. Afterward, he moved to Spokane to open a coffee bar. James decided to open a brewery after taking brewing classes at UC Davis in California, and getting hands-on experience at a couple of western Washington brewpubs. Gimutrtu opened Birkebeiner in May of 1994.

He has worked hard to make a go of it in an admittedly difficult spot for business. The brewery has a comfortable restaurant, managed by Joe Kaler. It is handsomely decorated with vintage beer posters from old Spokane breweries, advertising Bohemian Club from Bohemia Breweries and Goetz Beer from the Spokane Brewing Co. (with its certificate of excellence from Siebel Institute in Chicago, no less.)

The menu is more adventurous than most pub fare, with choices like Buffalo Burgers and several Cajun items, including andouille sausage and jambalaya. Prices are very reasonable as well. The restaurant is open from 11:30 a.m. to midnight weekdays, until 2 a.m. on Friday and Saturday nights.

James brews with a 12 barrel brewhouse (the kettle size) from Century Manufacturing in Ohio, with two 22-barrel fermentation tanks. There are up to 12 beers on tap at any given time, including an American-style Hefeweizen; a somewhat fruity blonde ale; Alien Amber ale ( poured from a twisted rebar-hand tap handle), a nut brown ale, a roasty Scottish ale, a strongly bitter IPA, a seasonal winter dark, a hoppy, dark amber ale, and a roasty but smooth Oatmeal Stout. There are several fruit-flavored brews, including the blueberryish Tough Guy, a golden, aromatic but somewhat thin Belgian Raspberry, and an apricot ale, a cloudy pale ale which seemed to have the best fruit taste. Also available when I visited was a malty chili beer, with a good peppery aroma and not too much heat in the finish.

Good times. The Birkebeiner’s Apricot Ale inspired me to try brewing my own version (with fresh apricots a friend brought back from Moses Lake, Washington)—which turned out just okay as I recall, not great—which I hope gives you an idea of the impact the brewery had on me. It was a great place, and in some ways I wish I could revisit it. But then again, this month’s Session has helped me do just that.

Two of the best ways I’ve found to explore a new place are to run around in it, and to sample the beer from it. And like many in the craft beer community, I constantly exhort anyone who will listen to support their local brewery, while simultaneously seeking out beers from distant lands that are new, novel, and exotically foreign. The Session provides a unique opportunity to explore this connection between the beer in our glasses and the place it comes from with perspectives from all over the world

So I ask for this 42nd Session that you write about a special place in your life, and a beer or brewery that connects you to that place. It can be the beer from your childhood home, a place you once lived, your current hometown, a memorable vacation you once took, or a place you’ve always wanted to go to but never had the chance. Please take a few moments to think about the how the beer connects you to this place, and share this with us. Of course, the definition of “place” is rather open ended, and in some cases, highly debatable, so it will be interesting to see the responses on what constitutes a place.

Friday, August 6th is the day.

Appropriately, homebrew is the topic of this month’s Session, as selected by our host, Lug Wrench Brewing Company: Craft Beers Inspired by Homebrewing:

How has homebrewing had an affect on the commercial beer we have all come to love?  Feel free to take the topic in any direction your imagination leads you.

Write about a beer that has its roots in homebrewing.  Write about a commercial beer that originated from a homebrew.

Write about a professional brewer you admire who got their start in homebrewing before they went pro. Write about a professional brewer who still homebrews in their free time.

Write about a Pro-Am beer tasted either at a festival or a brewpub. Write about an Amateur / Professional Co-op you’ve had the pleasure of experiencing (such as The Green Dragon Project).

Write about commercial brewers using “Homebrewing” as part of the marketing. Write about the Sam Adams LongShot beers, whether good or bad.

Write in the first person. Write in the third person. Have someone else write it for you.

Just write about it.

I don’t have a particular beer in mind as I write this, but what strikes me about the topic is that Oregon is a state whose craft beer industry was largely built on homebrewing. Off the top of my head I can think of two prominent examples:

• John Maier, the longtime brewmaster of Rogue (since 1989), got his start in homebrewing: he won the American Homebrewer Association’s Homebrewer of the Year Award in 1986, and I remember reading accounts of his early homebrewing efforts where (die-hard brewers will appreciate this) he was doing all-grain decoction mashes simply because he didn’t have the kitchen space otherwise (for large pots, presumably).
• Shawn Kelso, the (relatively new, compared to Maier’s tenure) brewer of Barley Brown’s Brewpub in Baker City: he was an avid homebrewer before starting at Barley Brown’s, and by his own account (read his interview on The Daily Pull) he more-or-less fell into the job. Lately he’s been collecting a good number of awards for his beers.

Let’s not forget Widmer, either: their Collaborator project partners them with the Oregon Brew Crew (one of the state’s premier homebrew organizations) to hold periodic brewing competitions, with the winning beer being brewed by Widmer. Their best known example is the Snow Plow Milk Stout, which started as a Collaborator beer.

Oregon, craft beer, and homebrewing are inextricably linked, and the beer industry is benefiting enormously from it.

Now, I’m off to the Brew Shop shortly to pick up ingredients for a batch of beer I plan to brew…

How has homebrewing had an affect on the commercial beer we have all come to love?  Feel free to take the topic in any direction your imagination leads you.

Write about a beer that has its roots in homebrewing.  Write about a commercial beer that originated from a homebrew.

Write about a professional brewer you admire who got their start in homebrewing before they went pro. Write about a professional brewer who still homebrews in their free time.

Write about a Pro-Am beer tasted either at a festival or a brewpub. Write about an Amateur / Professional Co-op you’ve had the pleasure of experiencing (such as The Green Dragon Project).

Write about commercial brewers using “Homebrewing” as part of the marketing. Write about the Sam Adams LongShot beers, whether good or bad.

Write in the first person. Write in the third person. Have someone else write it for you.

Just write about it.

July 2nd—mark your calendars.

This month’s Session is being hosted by Erik over at the blog Top Fermented, and is, self-referentially enough, Session Beers:

What is your definition of a session beer? Is it, as Dr. Lewis suggested at the Craft Brewers Conference this year, “a pint of British wallop” or is your idea of a session beer a crisp Eastern European lager, a light smoky porter, a dry witbier, or even a dry Flemish sour?

Is it merely enough for a beer to be low alcohol to be considered a session beer, or is there some other ineffable quality that a beer must hold in order to merit the term? And if so, what is that quality? Is it “drinkability”? Or something else?

What about the place of session beer in the craft beer industry? Does session beer risk being washed away in the deluge of extreme beers, special releases, and country-wide collaborations? Or is it the future of the industry, the inevitable palate-saving backlash against a shelf full of Imperial Imperials?

For me, defining “session beer” is easy: I subscribe to Lew Bryson’s definition (or manifesto, or whatever you want to call it) over at his Session Beer Project blog:

• 4.5% alcohol by volume or less
• flavorful enough to be interesting
• balanced enough for multiple pints
• conducive to conversation
• reasonably priced

…although I tend to bump up the alcohol level to define “session” as 5% or less.

I don’t care what style of beer it is—if it’s 5% or less and interesting, for me that’s a “session” beer. Hell, there are even times when PBR is interesting and that qualifies.

Of course, the session beers that really interest me are the ones being embraced by the craft beer industry, and fortunately, I do believe that session beers are on the rise. Will they be the next “extreme beer”? I honestly don’t know, though I suspect that while they will get their due, I doubt they will inspire the same kind of slathering admiration that extreme beers receive.

For this month’s Session on sessions, I wanted to get back to an actual tasting and review, something I haven’t done lately for these monthly outings. And fortunately, I recently found an Oregon-brewed beer that fit the bill exactly: Gone Fishin Mild Ale, from Beer Valley Brewing over on the eastern border of Oregon in the town of Ontario. It’s 4% alcohol by volume, and I’m absolutely amazed to find this for a number of reasons:

• How many American craft brewers produce Mild Ales commercially?
• How many of those spend the time and effort to bottle them?
• Beer Valley made its reputation by launching an Imperial Stout as their flagship beer. To now also brew and bottle a 4% Mild is somewhat mind-boggling in that light.

Here’s their description of the beer:

Gone Fishin Mild Ale is a 4% ABV, low hop beer. Brewed with 5 different malts, this beer is high in malt character and low in hop bitterness and flavor. The perfect session beer for reeling in a few at the secret fishing hole.

I found it at Whole Foods for $3.49 for a 22-ounce bottle, which is a pretty good deal. So it fits nicely into the session beer criteria: less than 5%, it’s flavorful and balanced (as you’ll see when you read my tasting notes), it’s very affordable. It doesn’t get much more “session” than this.

Appearance: Copper colored to a brown, fairly clear, with a nice two fingers of head on the pour (though my camera’s batteries died, so my picture is after the head had reduced substantially).

Smell: Toasty, bready, and caramelly—actually really nice and aromatic and presents with a mouth-watering appeal.

Taste: Husky grainy flavors with dark-toasted bread; fairly flavorful for what I was expecting (which was—?). A bit of fruity ale character, hops are light but clean; perhaps a light touch of butterscotch, but I’m not sure. I’m enjoying the flavors.

Mouthfeel: Light-to-medium-bodied, fairly clean, goes down easy—very well-balanced.

Overall: Quite enjoyable and very nicely flavorful and aromatic—I’m pretty impressed with this and I could see drinking several pints of this in a sitting—and going back for more.

On BeerAdvocate, five reviews have graded it an overall B+. On RateBeer, it scores 3.29 out of 5, and is in their 71st overall percentile.

What is your definition of a session beer? Is it, as Dr. Lewis suggested at the Craft Brewers Conference this year, “a pint of British wallop” or is your idea of a session beer a crisp Eastern European lager, a light smoky porter, a dry witbier, or even a dry Flemish sour?

Is it merely enough for a beer to be low alcohol to be considered a session beer, or is there some other ineffable quality that a beer must hold in order to merit the term? And if so, what is that quality? Is it “drinkability”? Or something else?

What about the place of session beer in the craft beer industry? Does session beer risk being washed away in the deluge of extreme beers, special releases, and country-wide collaborations? Or is it the future of the industry, the inevitable palate-saving backlash against a shelf full of Imperial Imperials?

Be here Friday, June 4th for that one.

And, Mario has the roundup for this month’s Session posted over on Hop Press.

Appropriately enough, this month’s collaborative blogging efforts is on the topic of Collaborations, and is being hosted by my fellow Hop Press writer and editor Mario Rubio:

The Hop Press is a collaboration of writers from around the world working on a common site. As host of The Session for May, I thought it was only appropriate for the Hop Press to be a place for a gathering of posts about collaborations.

Feel free to have fun with the topic. Drink a collaborative beer. Who’s brewed some of your favorite collaborations? Who have been some of your favorite collaborators? Who would you like to see in a future collaboration?

Confession: I don’t have a good collaboration story. I’ve reviewed some collaborative beers over time, notably:

• Stone/Maui/Schmidt Kona Coffee Macadamia Nut Porter
• Bend Brewing Company and Sean Paxton’s Desert Rose
• Sierra Nevada and Dogfish Head Life & Limb
• Bend Brewing and Lost Abbey’s Hot Rocks Lager and Rocksy

And this week I blogged about the impending (and first) collaboration between Deschutes Brewery and Hair of the Dog, news which has me all a-twitter.

But a specific story or review? No—or rather, nothing that probably won’t already be covered by other Session posts today.

Rather, how about thinking of collaborations in more “out of the box” ways? For instance, last weekend saw the “Cheers to Belgian Beers” festival in Portland, a unique event which has an interesting spin on brewery collaboration:

Portland’s Cheers to Belgian Beers started three years ago to help introduce Oregonians to the breadth of style and flavors of beers brewed in Belgium. Portland’s Cheers to Belgian Beers is much like your standard beer festival, but all the beers are brewed by Oregon breweries in a Belgian inspired manner… One yeast strain.

During the past two years, almost all brewers have used the same Wyeast yeast strain, to emphasize the educational opportunities for the consumer.

The People’s Choice Award Winner gets a number of benefits:

• Hosting the next years Portland’s Cheers to Belgian Beers.
• Picking next year’s yeast strain.
• Picking the benefiting charity for next years event.

Each participating brewery gets to come together and showcase their own particular take on a beer made with the same strain of yeast, with the proceeds from the resulting event going to charity—that’s the kind of “different” collaboration I’d like to see explored more often.

Of course, if one of my local Bend breweries called me up and wanted to do a “blogger” collaboration brew—you know I’d be all over that.

The Hop Press is a collaboration of writers from around the world working on a common site. As host of The Session for May, I thought it was only appropriate for the Hop Press to be a place for a gathering of posts about collaborations.

Feel free to have fun with the topic. Drink a collaborative beer. Who’s brewed some of your favorite collaborations? Who have been some of your favorite collaborators? Who would you like to see in a future collaboration?

As the topic is collaborations, working with each other is encouraged.

I like the idea of blogging collaboration for The Session. Any takers?

This month’s Session is being hosted by Sean Inman over at Beer Search Party:

With Kate the Great Day a recent memory and the day of the Dark Lord fast approaching, I started thinking about what beer or beers that I would get up at 4:00 in the morning, drive across state lines, stand in a long unmoving line in the cold and rain for the chance to taste with a crowd the size of Woodstock.

There’s more to it than that: Sean presents several questions in this vein of “cult beer” and I thought I’d mix it up a bit from my usual style of writing for the Session and answer them as if it were an interview. Off we go!

What beers have you tasted recently (say, the last six months or so) that is worthy of their own day in the media sun?

That’s a tough question because a) there have been a lot of good beers and b) it’s hard to get past the notion that for a beer to get its “day in the media sun” it needs to be a big boisterous beer like a Dark Lord or an Abyss. But the reality is that those big beers are more expensive and time-consuming to make and by necessity are released on a limited basis, and this lends to the cachet of these cult beers. I’d love to see more lighter, session beers get this kind of attention, but if those beers are available year-round and easy to acquire, it’s not a story.

In the past six months, some beers I’d pick as “worthy” would be Pelican Brewery’s Kiwanda Cream Ale, Coronado Brewing’s Orange Ave Wit, and Sierra Nevada’s Bigfoot Barleywine. Yes, I know I threw a big beer in that list, but Bigfoot is one of the best American Barleywines around (in fact, I’m drinking one as I write this), and I think it deserves much more attention.

In general, I’d love to see my local Bend Brewing Company get a ton of cult beer attention—they are producing some fantastic beers (yes, HopHead, but more importantly, Desert Rose) that should absolutely be sought out by beer geeks.

And to add a little extra to it, how does “great” expectations affect your beer drinking enjoyment?

That’s a loaded question; if I have great expectations for a beer and it doesn’t deliver, then the disappointment is bigger. I know I’ll catch some heat for this one, but I recently had The Bruery‘s Two Turtle Doves, which beer geeks online have uniformly been raving about, and I really wasn’t too impressed (I haven’t posted a review yet, but will soon). I suspect a build-up of expectations played a part in that.

On the other hand, approaching a beer with little or no expectations and having it turn out great is a better experience, I think. I’ll (once again) point to Widmer’s Cherry Oak Doppelbock as a prime example of this. I had no real expectations, and it was a fantastic beer. I think not expecting that definitely added to my enjoyment.

Would my expectations be high if I attended a big beer release, like Dark Lord Day or this year’s Pliny the Younger release? Damn straight, and as such the beer had better be absolutely fabulous to match. Or the experience itself (regardless of the beer) had better be worth it. Or both.

AND If you have attended one of these release parties, stories and anecdotes of your experience will be welcomed too.

I really haven’t attended anything like that; the closest I’ve come is attending a Deschutes Brewery release from time to time, and those are always low-key events: a release party at their downtown Bend pub, where the only line you’ll have to wait in is to get a seat in the restaurant. Oh, and I’ve waited in line for the Deschutes Brewery annual garage sale—but never for very long.

Of course, if someone offered me airline tickets to Indiana to attend Dark Lord Day, I sure wouldn’t turn them down.

With Kate the Great Day a recent memory and the day of the Dark Lord fast approaching, I started thinking about what beer or beers that I would get up at 4:00 in the morning, drive across state lines, stand in a long unmoving line in the cold and rain for the chance to taste with a crowd the size of Woodstock.

So here is my question to you (with a couple addendums).

What beer have you tasted recently (say, the last six months or so) that is worthy of their own day in the media sun?

And to add a little extra to it, how does “great” expectations affect your beer drinking enjoyment?

AND If you have attended one of these release parties, stories and anecdotes of your experience will be welcomed too.

The host for April is Beer Search Party. The usual rules apply: publish your Session blog post on Friday, April 2nd, and shoot an email or leave a comment on the host blog. And be sure to read all the others posts that day, too—putting the “group” in “group blogging” you know.

Finding a drinking occasion that lives up to the reputation of the bottle and the story of its acquisition is not a dreadful struggle to have, but it is a struggle nonetheless. When my good friends are over and we have had a few other beverages, will we still be able to enjoy my cave aged Hennepin that I bought after my tour of the brewery and have cellared for ten years? Will I miss it like I miss that four year old Golden Monkey?

In March, The Ferm has the honor of hosting The Session, a monthly assemblage of beer bloggers to opine on a shared topic. The March 2010 topic is “The Display Shelf: When to Drink the Good Stuff.” The topic is open ended and the rules of The Session are close to nil. You can use your post to be persuasive or therapeutic. You may choose to tell a story of a great bottle you once opened or boast of your own beer collection.

As I write this post up, I’m enjoying a 2007 vintage bottle of The Abyss—partly in appreciation of this month’s topic, partly to celebrate The Session’s anniversary (enjoying an Imperial Stout in a nice symmetry with that first month of stouts), partly “just because.”

All of which leads into the best answer I can give of “when to drink the good stuff”: I don’t know—it’s entirely up to you.

What? Too anticlimactic? Well, there’s no way around it—beer can be such a subjective topic and everyone has their own tastes and preferences. The only one who can tell you when to drink that prized beer is you.

But if you can hold on to that beer for ten or more years? My hat’s off to you.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I believe I’m going to enjoy the last of this ’07 Abyss…