Hoppy National Beer Day! Plus the Ultimate IPA Showdown.

You know you're considered a beer lover when your mother, who decidedly isn't much of a hop fiend, sends you an email titled "It's National Beer Day!"

So Happy National Beer Day, the day when beer could be legally sold again in 1933 after 13-odd years of Prohibition. Now if that's not worth celebrating, I don't know what is.

To honor the folks who couldn't openly enjoy their favorite brewskis for longer than I've been drinking (yes, do that math), I'm going to share the results from The Ultimate IPA Showdown.

The ultimate? Yes, we went there - and well, I think it's pretty apt.

Pliny v. Heady v. Brother. I've been dreaming of this hoptastic showdown for the last few years. But it's tough to come by, especially when you're faced with some serious acquisition challenges: Fremont's the Brother is only produced seasonally; Russian River's Pliny the Elder is increasingly challenging to get as its distribution continues to shrink; and well, living anywhere outside of Vermont makes retrieving a can of The Alchemist's famed Heady Topper an odyssey in its on right. But somehow the beer deities helped the hop cosmos to align, and by the end of February, I had at least one can or bottle of each.

The Ultimate IPA Showdown was hosted at J's house, where we received tasters labeled 1, 2, and 3 so we could blindly sample each of these epic IPAs (J's sister, R, kindly offered to be mad scientist unblinded to our shenanigans). R poured and set the tasters in front of us, eager beer lovers brimming with the kind of simultaneous excitement and anxiety a child might have upon trying Pop Rocks for the first time.

We tasted, we swilled, we tasted again. Each of us had our biases - for instance, J and I are huge Brother fans - and despite the beer-blinding, we were convinced that our palates, honed over dozens and dozens of trips to Fremont Brewing's UBG (Urban Beer Garden, for those of you not in the know), could suss out our perceived favorite.

But alas, science, as it often does, prevailed. Heady Topper emerged as the top hop, even though my can of the IPA gold was nearing three months old. Pliny snagged second, followed by our beloved Brother.

J and I sat crestfallen, as if our 30-something joys in life had just - poof - disappeared. O Brother, where art thou, with your citrus-y punch and "about a billion IBUs"? No offense to the other victors, but we just couldn't believe it.

Luckily, I had brought two cans of the Brother over to J's, and being my researcher-self, I popped open the second and compared that one with the Brother used in the showdown. They were totally different - the showdown Brother was skunked! Alas, we actually hadn't wrecked our palates over too many IPAs - the Brother was back! Yahoo!

But wait. We didn't have any more Heady. And the whole blind tasting thing couldn't be resurrected, or at least not that night. Another showdown would be necessary, to truly answer the age-old question of which IPA was the fairest of them all...

...and the saga will continue. And until that happens, enjoy your favorite IPA (coughBrothercough) and Hoppy National Beer Day!

Cheers!
N

An ode to (my first) Pliny

[Conversation with a coworker, which at some point turned into me singing the praises of Stone's Enjoy By 4.20.2014]

Coworker: Well, I'll have to try it. Ha, you seem to know your beer N.
Me:  Ha, well, I guess. Or at least I think I know what I like. I mean, I have a beer blog.
Coworker: You have a beer blog? No way.
Me: Well, it's nothing much. It's just me, well, kind of just trying to remember what I like. And stuff.
Coworker: Ha, what's it called?
Me: It's really nerdy...
Coworker: C'mon...
Me: ...Pursuing Hoppiness.
Coworker: [pause]
Me: I know. So nerdy. Yep, well, that's me.
Coworker: ...so, have you ever tried Pliny the Elder?

Have I tried Pliny the Elder. Oh boy. Beyond the subtle hilarity of this exchange (I know, I know I chose the name and I'm fully ok with how it is slash how nerdy I am, but it still makes me squirm a bit when I actually have to admit that yes, I have a beer blog, and yes, it's called Pursuing Hoppiness), just the mention of the prophetic Pliny makes me smile.

See, to me, Pliny the Elder is not only a phenomenal, phenomenal beer that is spectacularly hoppy yet balanced, but it also represents a snippet of my time in San Francisco. Granted, I didn't live there that long - not long at all. But the time I did have in SF (and then my frequent visiting for several months after I moved) - oh boy. The highs, the lows, the adventure - in many ways, kind of just bucking up and going for it. And you know how it all started? That's right - over a pint of Pliny.

I remember that day (and I suppose night as well) so clearly. In the morning, I hopped on a plane with three suitcases and a backpack (obviously) and moved to San Francisco for a dream job. Nine days earlier I had accepted a position to work for my global health hero, and though it was going to be really hard to leave everything behind, I was excited for the opportunity. Good bye old apartment, so long Seattle rain. Hello holy apartment hunting, hi there Bay Area sun. After arriving at A and A's place next to Dolores Park (!!!!) and tossing my overly warm PNW February garb, I spent the day wandering around my new city in a kind of out-of-body-experience haze. Did I really just do that - pack up and leave? Did I make a mistake? Would I make friends? AHHHH!

But then - THEN. The Ks invited me for beers at Toronado to celebrate my arrival. Toronado's beer list is infamously long, and well, I was warned that I needed to be decisive about ordering (lest the beer czars become - oh no - curt with me). I asked for the hoppiest beer on tap, and 45 seconds later, I had a cold pint in front me and the bartend saying "Here's your Pliny." And that was that - welcome to SF, welcome to the wonderment that's Pliny the Elder.

Sadly (aka the understatement of the year), the month I moved back to Seattle was the same month that Russian River pulled distribution from Washington state. Amidst all of the nuttiness and worry about moving back, some people could interpret this incident as a bad omen - you started the adventure of SF on Pliny, the moment you move back to Seattle Pliny leaves you - but well, I guess it just makes the Pliny-SF connection little more special. Maybe a little nostalgic, maybe with a tinge of sadness, but mostly, Pliny - and San Francisco - makes me feel warmth, a sense of being carefree, and pretty damn lucky that I got to have it while I did.

Cheers,
N