KD: I meant any random bar a person might step into in your city. A sports bar, a restaurant bar, a happy hour bar, and pretty much any regular neighborhood bar where you might meet a friend for a drink after work or maybe watch a football game or something. Absolutely not just a craft beer place. By "any bar you go to" I meant "any bar one could go to."

KB: interesting, can't recall ever seeing harpoon IPA out here. That's what I'm really curious about - what are decent beers in your local area that are really dominant in terms of availability.

I feel like there are sneaky like 6-8 Boston/New England regulars ITT or maybe Harpoon is just a lot more prevalent than I'd expect. It's basically everywhere in Boston though.

I'd second harpoon as most ubiquitous, solid option in the greater Boston area. I do a lot of my social drinking in the Marlboro area and that's usually available. Otherwise Guiness or Sam.

Seems like Wachusett stuff is fairly available but I never have really even tried it I don't think.

just about every bar in Minneapolis will have at least one Surly beer in it, usually Furious which is their flagship IPA.

At the risk of nitting it up, I don't think there's any beer, or collection of three, I'd be surprised by a Portland bar not having. I guess I'd be surprised if a place had none of Ranier, PBR and Bud Light.

I'd say Deschutes, Ninkasi and Widmer are widely available, but wouldn't be surprisingly absent, at sports bars and wider-audience type places and breweries like Upright, Gigantic, the Commons, Pelican and Occidental tend to be on tap at the places catering to the beer or hipster crowd.

I would guess the beers I get the most often at bars are Upright #4, Commons Urban Farmhouse and Deschutes Mirror Pond Pale Ale with honorable mention to Double Mountain IRA.

Fat Tire at most bars here in Denver, and really anywhere in CO that I've been to. Personally not a huge fan. Dale's Pale Ale and SN pretty widespread too. Like it.

Most interested to find out beer selection at the places you do your angry loner drinking

Jared,

My buddy from portland says "Ninkasi, Deschutes, Full Sail, Widmer Hefeweizen."

Yeah, at sports bars I'd be more surprised if they had none of those four than all of them but places like the White Owl, Bye and Bye/Sweet Hereafter and Old Gold are more likely than not to have none of those on tap. I suppose they could have them in bottles, particularly Widmer Hef, but I would be far from shocked if I went to a bar like those on a random day and they didn't have anything from those breweries.

ETA: to make up for being a nit, I'll give my three for a grocery store: Deschutes Mirror Pond, Pelican Kiwanda Cream Ale, Double Mountain IRA.

Portland/Seattle bars almost always have something that's surprising and delicious.

Goof: agreed. Portland bars I've been to generally have great taps.

Jared: you seem to be a real authority on beers found at vegan places!

Heineken

ED,

Who doesn't love a soy curl buffalo sub or a TVP Frito pie?

Sam Adams has a few world class beers in their lineup. Black Lager, Double Bock and Cream Stout are better than most of those styles that I have from any sized breweries east coast to west.

Koch seems like a baby to me. He insulted IPAs terribly too in a well circulated interview or story in recent years. I don't to misquote, but he was terribly wrong that IPAs can't have a ton of flavor depth. Just because the floor is higher on them (easy to cover up mistakes), doesn't mean the ceiling isn't high as well. Hop combinations, how you want to build your malt backbone (and to what extent it is present) are just a few of the obvious ways IPAs distinguish themselves from one another.

But he has a small point in the article. I mean, there's no excuse for his behavior (if what is reported is true), but he's likely frustrated with the hipster drinkers that don't appreciate a good beer for what it is.

In my perfect beer bar, Sam Adams might occupy 1-3 taps, depending if we had 30-100 taps available. But if you're a more trendy bar with 20 taps, I can totally see why there'd be no Sam Adam's there. I'm sure the brewers of super good, small breweries are also frustrated that they can't get their stuff in some stores, or they can't expand fast enough and keep quality up to be in nearly as many markets as a Sam Adams. Your brand can't have it all, though Sam Adams basically has it all... Koch is a billionaire and all levels of beer drinker drink Sam Adams.

Also a bit LOL that the maker of Utopius is bitching about trendy consumers not buying his beers, or trendy bars not serving it.

The guy has the buying power to reach as much of the trendy market as he wants. His brand name isn't negative, and the trendier crowd is not exactly going to turn their backs on a brand like Sam Adams if they try to reach them (see Sierra Nevada collaboration beers, or Wet Hop beers, or New Belgium's Lips of Faith beers). In many ways, it's easier to reach trendier customers if you're a huge company, you have the resources to build a "sour program" or a "barrel aging program" and to do it in a high quality way, then pick and choose the most valuable of your larger distribution network to get it into many of the hipper, trendier bars.

AC Golden might be the best example of all. Coors has a bad reputation amongst high quality beer drinkers, and for good reason (most of their stuff just doesn't taste good). But they own AC Golden, which gets quite high review for "trendier" and bolder styles of beer, such as their wild beers. If a brand like Coors can do that, Sam Adams can do it far more easily if they want to.

Yeah, I feel bad about it, but some of my favorite beers are made by breweries owned by Macro-breweries. Goose Island makes great sours and their Bourbon County series is my favorite limited release, but possibly attainable stout. AC Golden's barrel aged program is out of this world good. I don't know how they'll fare given that the head of their barrel aging program went to start his own brewery, but I'm always super excited about whenever I find a wild from AC Golden.

Having a Rochefort 10 right now, forgot how good this beer is. Not sure having it after a Thornbridge Jaipur is overly sensible

I don't do my angry loner drinking in public. The archetypal loner at a bar is a poseur.

Upfront disclaimer: Jim K. signs my paychecks.

Considering Sam Adam's has released barrel-aged beers going back to the '90s, I'd say they've got the BA program down. Ditto for sour, considering all the barrel-aged, oaked sours they release. I have no idea when SA first released their Gose, but I'm pretty confident it predates Westbrook's, or Anderson Valley's, or whoever is "rediscovering" this "lost" style. Of all the criticisms to level at SA, not brewing unusual styles or a narrow range of beers is the easiest to dismiss with cursory research. You got a niche, most likely SA has a beer for it. Or did before it got discontinued because it didn't sell.

And just to note, "niche" in that case means, "tiny crevice inside of a small niche," because that's what people searching for barrel-aged sours are. DIPA drinkers are a niche-within-a-niche, much less the sour crowd. Considering the smallest batch it is possible for us to brew at my brewery is larger than the yearly output of some of these brands, there are some niches that it just doesn't make sense to pursue.

I think (and this is just conjecture maybe combined with projection on my part) what is frustrating to Koch is that the flagship that has built his life is so looked down on by the most vocal of minorities. There has started to be a swing away from the giant flavor bombs that were all the rage a short time ago, and towards smaller, subtler beers, but the pendulum is still close to its apex on the bombastic side. Tons of people out there are calling 7% beers pale ales and sessionable, and if it's low ABV, it had damn well better be sour. Or obscure. Or something. Taste is subjective, sure, but that's such a narrow view of beer that it screams to me, "I haven't been drinking beer for very long."

Finally, I'll just leave this link. It's a recent tasting of Boston Lager by some people you may or may not have heard of, and since I can't link directly to the page, it's on page 7 of 8. I would guess most of the tasters in the article hadn't had a Boston Lager in some time, like most people who have been drinking craft for a while, and I would guess their reaction is similar to what lots of others would be. If anybody would like to test it out and you're in the area, let me know, and I'll get you a fresh one.

Also, the new SA DIPA should be hitting shelves nationwide any day. 8.4% ABV, in a 6-pack, and I'd guess it'll be less than $10 on the shelf (though that's a complete guess!). There will probably also be more of it brewed this year by SA than all other DIPAs brewed by American breweries combined. But again, just a guess.

Did I like it? Yes and no. It's a nice IPA with a citrus bitterness. But I didn't really taste the green tea. I suppose the extra bitter finish can be attributed to any green tea they added but I certainly wouldn't be able to tell that if I was drinking this blind.

Unrelated story: My local liquor store stopped keeping Pliny in the keg room because people kept on hiding/stealing the bottles to get around the one per customer limit. Got my first bottle in months!

There is a lot of good stuff in this post. I largely agree that the pendulum you speak of is beginning to swing back (thank god). I also agree that a fresh boston lager is a pretty decent beer....it just happens to be a style that has fallen completely out of fashion, even amongst certain factions of casual beer drinkers. As the pendulum swings back towards less massive, more balanced beer it's a style that may gain a little more respect from the beer geek community. All that being said, all the barrel aged stuff that I have had from Sam Adams has been very "meh" and with the amount of killer barrel aged beers being released domestically I will never buy any until they show me something that wows me, which I anticipate will be never. It also doesn't give him the right to go into a well respected establishment and act like a petulant child......There is absolutey nothing wrong with a place that wants to showcase the "little guys" of the beer world, which is exactly what Row 34 does. There is no reason for him to take it personally.

Rearranged my beer cabinet a couple nights ago as I finally put away all the beers I brought home over the holidays (and had to expand it to occupy the bottom shelf of the cabinet above it to accomodate everything):



It appears I have more of a beer purchasing problem than I have a beer drinking problem. I should become more of an alcoholic. Or make more friends.

Goofy,

Hahahaha jfc dude. Is that 2 rows of 750s deep or more?

If "meh" is a synonym for "middle of the road," then I largely agree. The Tetravis isn't the best barrel-aged sour Belgian quad out there... but it's ok! And it's affordable relative to its peers! And it's everywhere!

What does give someone that right?

I would guess he forgot to take his dry yeast before he went out drinking that night. Personally, I sometimes make the conscious choice to buy some beer instead of Lagunitas solely because I think the owner is such a ****head, so I understand someone who woould read that article and decide to buy less or no Sam Adams.