Pivní Filosof - Beer Philosopher

It'd be a lie to say he welcomed the sound of the alarm at such an ungodly Saturday morning hour with joy, he didn't – unless a hybrid between a long moan and grunt can be considered an expression of joy in some cultures. This is not to say that he minded getting up so early. He had been looking forward to that day for weeks already. He and his mate were finally going to make it to that new craft brewery everybody was raving about. He didn't even mind that it was such a hassle to get to the place: a slow train, then a bus, then a couple of kilometres walking. He reckoned it'd be all part of he fun, part of the experience, part of what made that brewery so special – being in the middle of nowhere, where only the most devoted would bother to go; or so he wanted to believe That tiny craft brewery had opened a couple of months before, without announcing it anywhere. There was only a FB page with just the crude logo of the brewery, an address, the opening hours and noth...

Yes, for all those of you who wanted to read  The Unbearable Nonsense of Craft Beer the old fashioned way. Wait no more. It's available at Lulu.com ! And in a few more weeks you will also be able to order it on Amazon, Barnes&Noble, Ingram and a couple more, I think. Buy it and, it to your favourite pub, read it sipping your favourite pint and be the envy of all your beer geek friends. Na Zdraví! PS: If you want to order 25 or more copies to sell at your store, pub, bar, etc. send me an e-mail and we'll work something out.

The eternal debate of what craft beer is or isn't is something I can't give any more fucks about, I've run out of them, and the bank won't lend me any (it turns out I have a pretty poor fucks-to-give credit record). Unless someone, someday comes up with a definition that will contemplate concrete quality assurance mechanisms, like, for instance, the ones I propose here , “Craft Beer” will be for me just a brand, not very different than “Premium”. And please, do not bother to tell me what this brand means to you or not. I don't care, really. If you are a consumer, and believing in the fairy tale associated to those two words helps you have a better relationship with your favourite drug, who am I to complain? If you are a producer, and having those two words on the label can help you shift a few more bottles, good for you. As far as I'm concerned, the first and foremost thing beer has to be is good. What does interest me, though, are the diverse attempts and ...

At last! It took us longer than we had planned (all those pesky little last details), but  The Unbearable Nonsense of Craft Beer is already available for Amazon Kindle For those still not quite sure what this book is about, the blurb might shed some light: "Max Bahnson and Alan McLeod embark on a swashbuckling romp into the depths of the modern beer discourse. In a perilous journey that takes them through the time-space continuum, where they meet an array of colourful characters, our heroes, never losing their grip on their pints, bravely fight the layers upon layers of bollocks in the realms of Styles, Value, History, Law, Health, Language. PR, Evangelism and Fake Movements. All because they are either very bored, or quite drunk after so much beer." A printed version is in the works, and should be available through Lulu.com in a couple more weeks (provided we sort out the formatting issues that are plaguing us). But wait! There's more! We have set up a Wiki...

OK, let's see what this beer from  Břevnovský Klášterní Pivovar has to tell us. Describing the colour would be a waste of time. All I can add about it is that in a way, it irradiates darkness. Not a Darth Vader sort of darkness, but the darkness of someone who likes scaring the shit out of kids with ghost stories, so it's a fun sort of darkness, if you are into those things. The aroma is also dark. I mean that it reminds you of dark things, tasty dark things, or dark things that aren't tasty, but smell good. I guess you know what I mean, so I won't enumerate. If you close your eyes, the whole aromatic package almost takes you on a spiritual journey into a deep cave where a black man is roasting meat; not because it smells like meet being roasted – that's not so dark, unless you burn it, and that wouldn't be that nice – or because it has a deep cave smell – the two or three deep caves I've been to were actually dark, but smelled by the most part damp...

I won't comment about the manufactured media scandal of the Queen of the Cava toasting to the New Year with a beer brand because I find it as stupid and dull as the beauty pageants of the sort the have crowned this girl. However, there are som 'intellectuals' who, for some reason, feel that this controversy is important enough to make a pronouncement on the matter. For example, Josep Maria Fonalleras i Codony, who, on the pages of El Periódico de Catalunya shares his opinion , making very clear in the second paragraph whose side he's on: Frankly, I agree with the anger of the Cava sector. Beer deserves high respect, and I understand that a toast like this is totally legitimate and often as emotional (or more) than the one we make from the champenoise method, but two friends with two bottles of beer in their hands are rather celebrating a victory in an indoor football championship or an after work with tapas. But not a New Year. How improper! Can you believe that...