Greetings, beer lovers! Happy first Friday of 2024, and once (or not) again, even though it’s been an age, ‘tis chingchongchinaman as your semi-friendly guest FNBB blogger tonight, with esquimaux taking a well-deserved Friday evening off from FNBB duties. Usually at year’s end, newspapers feature “Top 10” lists of various sorts, about ‘best new restaurants’, ‘best movies of the year’ and such. Or, if you’re Riverfront Times freelance writer Tony Rehagen, you provide a list with a slightly oddball number of top selections, namely 8 notable craft beers for 2023 rather than 10 (although 8 is the number of good luck in Chinese culture, but 3CM the loser digresses as usual).
Since he is a loser, 3CM is not providing any such “top 10” / “top 8” / “top whatever” craft beers for 2023 list, of course, since he didn’t have the bandwidth to keep such a tally”. To compound 3CM’s loserness big-time, this FNBB is appearing at the start of 2024, rather than the end of 2023. All that aside, instead of any sort of “top (whatever #)” list, I’m going for the next best / slightly less lame option, namely blathering about nice recent discoveries. As it happens, these fall into the same general category of craft beers with a citrus twist:
* On the local side, 4Hands Brewery has their hazy winter IPA “Earmuffs”
* From my last (on multiple levels) trip to NYC, I had a Talea “Sun Up” Hazy IPA.
In both cases, luck played the main role in finding each beer, in that I didn’t actively seek either one out. For the 4Hands “Earmuffs”, I sampled it at the local supermarket, among other flavors from 4Hands. For the Talea “Sun Up”, it was one of two local craft beers on draft at the restaurant, and it happened to sound the more off-the-wall of them. Each was a new beer for me, and fortunately, I greatly enjoyed both.
In a bit of irony, tonight’s featured FNBB beer chez 3CM is neither of these, or even a citrus-flavored beer. Instead, it’s a basic lager, a Louisville Lager, a simple, straightforward, clean lager that hits the spot with dinner. Although, on second thought, there is a bit of a meta-connection with the above two brews, namely that the Louisville Lager was another beer that I didn’t actively search out, or find in the supermarket. This was a gift from a neighbor who was visiting Louisville, and for whom I was house-sitting. The neighbor knows that I’m somewhat into craft beer, and offered to buy a Louisville-based beer as a house-sitting gift. Granted that chance is inescapable when trying out new beers, relying on luck isn’t always the best general strategy, of course, which applies to life in general, even if things went well in all 3 of these instances.
With that, time to turn it over to you folks. What are you imbibing tonight? Any special new discoveries for this year? Inquiring minds, and all that, to close out 2023….