Good Evening fellow travelers!

We are all finding our way through the mess we call modern life, with the 5 second partial commercials, the endless drug ads (all with side-effects that scare the hell out of me), the images of perfect models in obscure out of the way places touting fragrances that have nothing to do with how they got together.

Why am I going on about this?

Because from what I see going on in the beer world, we are being led by advertising and I think it’s time we stop and smell the hops.

Beer has been brewed for 5000 plus years, mostly by home brewers. These brews weren’t always good, they didn’t follow our current methods, they weren’t temperature controlled, or aerated to the right degree, they didn’t use the right yeasts, or were they stored at the proper temperature.

The truth about beer is that it is the substance of civilization, the basis of modern culture and it’s been marginalized through the years because of the ease of it’s production. And it wasn’t until the late 1860’s that much of our current controls were applied.

There are around 12 different styles of beer identified at this writing, we all need some way to classify differences, but all the new beers an the market don’t all fit into the styles they claim to be.