Where's the Beer?

Probably the best example of my geekery is my beer geekery. I take detailed notes with numerical scores for appearance, aroma, taste, and mouthfeel for every new beer I drink (I've reviewed over 2,000 different beers so far), I can pretty much spout the defining characteristics and basic relatives of pretty much every beer style out there with the exception of the little obscure regional styles out there that are no longer commercially produced or at least not produced at a scale that gets them sold in the United States. I brew my own beer and make my own mead and have even won awards for my mastery of the IPA and American wheat beer styles. I actually read books about brewing science and business. Of course if I continued in this strain, this would simply be a braggart's thread, although it'd be bragging that brings ridicule like the sci-fi geek who brags about having seen the original trilogy 2,000 times instead of the bragging that brings resentment like the guy bragging about making $110k plus overtime.

The anecdote that I think best exemplifies my beer geekery is a trip I took with a beer geek friend of mine to Mississippi in search of beer. For the uninitiated, Alabama and Mississippi are beer wastelands, kind of like Georgia outside of the metro Atlanta area. Whereas some states have hundreds of breweries (all three West Coast states) and Alaska, a state with a population of just over 500,000, can support 13 breweries, including a couple with well-renowned beers in the lower 48, Alabama and Mississippi together can't support ten breweries between them. Despite this, I'd heard about Lazy Magnolia Brewing (great name, huh?) had just opened in Kiln, MS, Brett Favre's hometown. Lazy Magnolia was the first production brewery (brewery that sells bottles and/or kegs for sale at stores or restaurants instead of brewpubs that brew beer for sale for on-premise consumption only) since prohibition and perhaps longer than that. Plus, they made a beer brewed with toasted pecans. That was enough to pique my interest, so I planned a road trip with KP, promising him a night in Biloxi in the casinos in exchange for beerhunting in beer no-man's-land.

Now, for a round trip of about 1,100 miles we managed to visit seven breweries and brewpubs. This is frankly ridiculous. For an only slightly longer road trip to DC (with a side trip to Baltimore) we easily hit 14 different breweries and brewpubs, and that wasn't even going out of our way on the trip. We left the majority of the breweries in each of the states we passed through unvisited. For the Mississippi trip we had to make a big loop through the three states we visited. So why did I waste the time and money that I did on this trip? Well, for one, I really like road trips. I also used this trip to start my writing for Southern Brew News. I managed to score four or five paid articles from this one trip, and those earned enough cred that I get regular assignments from the magazine now. But the real reason I did this is that I couldn't stand having seven breweries that close to me that I'd never tasted or had beer from. Of course now, the only remaining brewery in Mississippi is Lazy Magnolia. Hal and Mal's in Jackson was on again, off again and last I heard was off again, and Coast Brewing was in one of the riverboat casinos (which look and feel nothing like boats, by the way) and was completely destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. When Beau Rivage was rebuilt, the brewpub was turned into a regular old nightclub without a brewhouse. It was a shame, the guy brewing there was actually really good. In Alabama, the brewpub in Mobile closed down (although it reopened under new owners and new name recently) and Olde Towne Brewing in Huntsville burned down. They were planning on continuing brewing at a new location but I haven't heard about them reopening yet.

Still the trip was worth it, and I'm actually planning on using a week of my Christmas break to do the same kind of trip in Florida. Florida kind of sucks for beer too despite having a handful of major cities and a population larger than either North Carolina (with many more breweries) and Georgia (with about the same number of breweries). My biggest quandary about this trip is whether or not to include Key West on this trip. I've never been to the Keys, and would like to one day, but the "brewpub" actually has its beer made by another brewery on the mainland and the winter months are the Keys' busiest tourist season.