Author: Stephen Body

Here’s a story about a man nam…No, no, no, nobody named Brady. Don’t panic. This is a beer tale. A rather twisted beer tale and I’m going to just skim it because it’s really none of my business but…I have a brewer pal named Mark Hood, up here in The Soggy Corner of America, specifically in the small but dynamic beer hotbed of Poulsbo, Washington, who founded and helped build the first Washington state brewery specializing in Belgian-style ales, Sound Brewery. In Sound’s too-short existence, Mark created several rather amazing ales, not all of them Belgian. After initially swearing that he would not just crank out IPA after IPA (in fact, he had originally planned to do NO IPAs), his customers’ repeated requests prompted him to make a few and they became classics of the style, here in the Nanny State. Humulo Nimbus, Humonkulous, Reluctant, and anniversary editions for Town & Country Markets and Seattle’s Chuck’s Hop Shop…all resonated strongly with our PNW HopHeads.

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Over the past going-on fifteen years of The Pour Fool, there is one thing that has never varied, never really waxed or waned at all, and that is people emailing me with complaints, insults, and "corrections" of things I've written. They email me because I refuse to allow nonsense like "You suck! You now NOTHING about beer (wine)(whiskey)(whatever)!!" onto the site and nothing goes on the site unless I approve it. Many people, improbably, have wailed about "censorship!!", as though The Pour Fool is a public utility or the airwaves.

It's not. Continue reading "The Pour Fool: A Brief History of Flaming"

A brewery owner pal of mine in Michigan messaged me this morning, with a link to the page where this message from Larry Bell, founder of Kalamazoo, Michigan’s iconic Bell’s Brewery. You see one of these things and you an feel it coming: Larry Bell is selling his brewery…which many readers of this website take as a definite signal that it’s time to watch Steve Body go ballistic.

And I did…a little.

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Adam, Reuben, Warren, and Grace Robbings/Photo by bizjournals.com

This scene above was the first time I ever heard the phrase, “Stay Frosty“. It probably was for a lot of people. I’m sure the screenwriter for Michael Biehn in “Aliens” probably didn’t dream that up. Dan O’Bannon probably heard it somewhere – being in LA, probably at Venice Beach, as uttered by some surfer dude – but everybody instantly knew what it meant. As a handy alternative to “Be cool!” (“Thirty Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary”, doncha know?) it was dead-bang perfect and it stayed with me ever since. I can’t use it in everyday speech, of course, because I’ve never been Cool a second of my life but Biehn pulled it off with a ton of élan, and so have a few others I’ve heard use it.

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People ask me at least two, three dozen times a month, “What’s your favorite beer?“

I’ve been tasting – as in sip half an ounce, swirl in mouth, linger, and spit. NOBODY can do this job and drink a full beer each tasting. You’d have a liver the size of a Kia Sportage within months – somewhere around 1,500 beers a year for almost fifteen years, now. That’s in addition to the several thousand I drank back before I got full-time serious about doing a beverage blog. How in God’s Name can I possibly choose ONE beer, out of something over 25K, as my “favorite”

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I have to confess that late Spring/Summer ’21 has not been a great time for stuff that I have tasted. I got samples but the deal has always been the same: if I like it enough to rave about it, I write it up. If not, I just don’t mention it because I don’t – EVER – write negative reviews of any independent producer of adult beverages. Why, in this, the Gold Plated Age of Snark? Because A) I think it’s tasteless and crass, B) I like small businesspeople and have no desire to take shots at ’em, and C) I see no reason to even mention mediocrity. So, if I can assign 90 points or better, I write it…but not always. If I give it 90 and it should be higher, that stays out, too

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Just about two years ago, Larry and Cam and the other Merry Cruxters at Bend’s titanic Crux Fermentation Project set out to make a blonde ale – that happiest, friendliest, and most approachable beer of summer – but with a very edgy, Northwesty, slightly confrontational gilding of our region’s signature beer virtue and primary aesthetic: More Hops.

They wanted to inject this lovely, bright, slightly lemony, mellow, Cocker Spaniel of a beer style with some teeth: it should, as most Northwesty ales do, bite back a bit. But, for this style, love bites, nibbles, a friendly nip, with no real pain. It would be quite a balancing act; taking the most crowd pleasin’ of ales and taking it Seriously. Not easy.

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If you’re like me…well, first, my sympathies

Really.

But, second, you might just be a total, hard-core, born ‘n’ bred Stout Freak. And if so, you probably have a fair number of private, mental categorizations that you use to sort out the roiling tsunami of today’s dark beers in general and American-style Stouts, in particular.

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Crux Fermentation Project…Mouthful, right? And that’s just the name, which is why everybody just calls ’em Crux.

I call ’em “one of America’s Best breweries” and I have seen nothing to alter that judgment a millimeter since they opened, back in the summer of 2012. Led by the lone remaining original partner, former Deschutes brewmaster Larry Sidor, they have followed a measured, steady, unfailing curve to what can now only be called greatness and, during my self-imposed health/home hiatus, I abused their generosity and kindness greatly. They kept sending me beers I kept not writing.

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Written by Stephen Body

This is a story happening right down the road from where I live…and that is not a figure of speech. The road is Washington Route 16, connecting the South Puget Sound with the Kitsap Peninsula, and the drive is 21.7 miles, door to door. The destination takes some searching or a good GPS, because the name of the destination is not in a lot of less comprehensive GPS databases…yet. That, I predict, is about to change.

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