thepourfool

[thepourfool]

Format Change, Texas Hooch, and Aging Badly

Because, much to my shock and dismay, I MAY not actually be immortal, The Pour Fool, which I have LOVED writing for an astonishing 17 years, now, has to make a change, if I’m going to continue at all. Which I am. All those detractors cane have this website gone when my family pries my cold, dead fingers off this laptop. So, for time and energy – in what has turned out to be a stupidly active…

[thepourfool]

The High End Brown Water: A Self-Pampering Guide

Okay, to come clean, here, I wanted this series to be a daily list of good gifting and drinking suggestions for your and your loved ones. This list is based on what I, personally, have tasted and can recommend. So this post is largely taken from past posts in The Pour Fool, from which I have reread tasting notes to make sure I still want to say that same thing. In a few cases, I’ve made changes,…

[thepourfool]

American Sour and Wild Ales: Where's the Niche?

I read this on Instagram, just the other day, from a brewer I really admire and follow closely. As fate blessed me, one of the nation’s best sour/wild ale breweries, E9 Brewing, is the closest maker of beer to my house, here in Tacoma, Washington. 1.77 miles down McKinley Avenue and I pull up to a tiny universe of authentic, rustic, inspired, and blessedly uncontrived sours and wilds and…

[thepourfool]

Consolidation in Brewing: How the Indies Stay Indie

In the recent past, most people debated brewery consolidation from the stand point that it is one of two things: Either a mega-brewer like AB or Duvel bought smaller breweries and basically just ran them as show ponies for their claim to be – in AB’s own words – “a friend to brewers everywhere!“, or some larger and more successful craft Indie snapping up failing smaller operations as a means of…

[thepourfool]

The American Media in 2024: Is Something Afoot?

(Above photo property of Radicalmedia.com and Showtime Networks)As a former writer and reporter for several straight-press outlets, I’ve watched this election cycle with the same bafflement that many of my fellow LibDems have expressed. I am a BIG fan and defender and even, to some degree, an apologist for mass media and I do not doubt for a millisecond that some media outlets ARE run by…

[thepourfool]

OFF TOPIC: Schrodinger's Ballot

I was in Austin Bergstrom Airport, last Thursday, while my wife was making a phone call. I was in one of those stand-up bars, sipping a Garrison Brothers Bourbon, and idly watching the TV. I suddenly and unintentionally tuned into a conversation right next to me, behind me. I didn’t turn to look but I heard the end of a discussion about voting in November:“…just feel like I have to turn out and…

[thepourfool]

Echoes Brewing: A Brewer's Resurrection

Three years on...it's TIME for an Echoes Brewing refresher course.

Echoes Brewing – right now, not someday down the road – is one of the best and most significant breweries in the Pacific Northwest. Echoes Brewmaster J Mark HoodIn looking through past posts in The Pour Fool, I was astonished to find that the last time I did a post about Echoes Brewing, of tiny Poulsbo, Washington, was 2021. December 27th or 2021, in fact. At the time, Echoes was pretty much…

[thepourfool]

Regaining Clarity: In Praise of the West Coast IPAs

Everybody knows the story: 2020, SUDDENLY the entire world changed. Our communal picture, already muddled by the blight of Trumpism, became far more clouded by the kind of global pandemic that NO ONE but a relative handful scientists saw coming and, as millions became sick and even died, that cloudy picture became damned near opaque. Fast forward (there was actually nothing “fast” about it) to…

[thepourfool]

E9 Brewing and Emma Hibbs: Making the Case for Pro-Am Beer

Harpua absolutely slam-hammers every one of my Dark Ale buttons, of which there are many and many of those rarely touched.

This new version of The Pour Fool will be smaller in every dimension and, toward that end, there will be a lot more straight product reviews…WITH, of course, the same caveat as has been from the beginning (in 2007! Holy SMOKES!) that I will NEVER write a negative thing about any producer EXCEPT Anheuser Busch, breweries that sell out to Anheuser Busch, or breweries like that crapbag Midwestern…

[thepourfool]

Drink Local: AGAIN, Why This is What Saves Us.

“Let’s stop seeing the consequences of our continued support of beers like Budweiser and Coors and Miller and Pabst as abstractions. They are NOT…We, the beer-buying American public, get to choose whether our own neighborhood businesses survive and thrive or whether fat cat foreigners just keep gettin’ fatter and fatter. I know which one I choose. There has never been any doubt.” – The Pour Fool,…

[thepourfool]

Engine House 9 Tacoma: The Changing Face of Washington Brewing, Part One

(In the eight+ years since I wrote this post – originally intended to be a a paean to a startling new brewery in a city not known for Drinking Outside the Box – a lot of what was here has changed. I lived, at the time, 45k miles up the road in Bellevue, Washington, and we owned a rental property in Tacoma, which I was 100% responsible for maintaining. I spent a LOT of tine in Tacoma and saw a…

[thepourfool]

Deschutes Brewery "The Dissident": How the Cherry Varies

Dissident x 2: The result is a virtual textbook on aged versus new Flanders ales. I’ve adopted a new writing paradigm for the future. In the past, I’ve taken some pains to over-explain the styles and terminology and other factors which underlie beverages I reviewed. After almost sixteen years of this thing, I have to suppose that enough of the people who routinely read this have enough of a…

[thepourfool]

Barleywine: The Great Misunderstood

What You Need To Know:Barleywine is not made from grapes nor is it fortified ale or a light brandy. It is a Strong beer and must be enjoyed in Moderation…unless you really like jail. You’ve heard/read about Barleywine. I mean, unless you’ve been living on the International Space Station for the past decade and maybe even if you have. I’ve been drinking them and selling them and preaching the…

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Landmark: Double Mountain and Solera and the Fresh Hops

Here’s what you Need To Know:This is a near-perfect fresh-hopped IPA, best one, in fact, since Deschutes immortal “Hop Trip”.It is balanced, complex, fruity, prettily bitter, and damnably easy to drink. Look for it. Get it. Drink it. Love it. Here’s my bottom line on the new “Iowa Bar Fight” Fresh Hop IPA from Double Mountain Brewery and Solera Brewery of Hood River, Oregon… Iowa Bar Fight is…

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Double Mountain & Everybody's: Escapism Done Right

So, I get this package from Double Mountain Brewing of Hood River, Oregon, and I’m having a busy day and toss it in the beer fridge and go about my business…which, these days, involves making hummingbird nectar and pruning honeysuckle, or some other such domestic shite that falls to retired guys. At any rate, I get sidetracked by these crucial, momentous, paradigm-shifting tasks and…forget the…

[thepourfool]

The Ultra-Premiums: Why They Don't Matter

You will never be able to afford them… You MAY never even see them…So why are we so obsessed with them? Anyone who has ever had a good friend who is “into wine” runs the very real risk that this person will be a devout, unapologetic, possibly even over-bearing Francophile; occasionally a Burgundy geek but far more likely a stone, rock-ribbed Bordeaux fanatic. Many of us who have friends who…

[thepourfool]

"Shelf Turds": The Blind Spot on the Wine Shop Rack

“Shelf turds…”That sentence opener gets repeated a lot in wine shops and what follows is rarely ever good. It’s an insider term that occupies that same dyspeptic niche as Score Whores, and Cherry-Pickers, when wine sales tradespeople get together to drink and bitch. Put simply, a shelf turd is any wine that the shop owners buys but then can’t sell. It can literally be ANYTHING. If the shop has…