1 Beer 1 Song

Wherein we drink the very popular and highly regarded Heady Topper from The Alchemist up in Vermont and listen to the very popular and highly regarded Jason Isbell from over in Abbalamma. Heady Topper is currently #1 on Beeradvocate's Top 250 list. Interpret that however you want. Does Heady Topper deserve to be the highest rated beer in all of Beeradvocateland? I have no idea. Give it a listen to hear our PARADIGM-SHIFTING INSIGHT and INCESSANT BABBLING. Props to The Alchemist for resisting the temptation to name their operation the ALEchemist. One day the craft beer industry will mature beyond stupid beer-related puns. One day. This episode is the latest in a long line of episodes where we talk about things we know nothing about. One thing we know nothing about is Jason Isbell, but that doesn't stop us from listening to and discussing a song off his latest album, Southeastern, because we are both CULTURALLY and INTELLECTUALLY CURIOUS. As a special offer for reading this far, I am pleased to announce this episode, like the episode before it, actually includes TWO songs from the artist in question. We are bursting with content. Couple programming notes: Right out of the gate, my face is WAY too close to the mic. Things stabilize eventually, but I apologize that, for the first couple minutes, you are able to hear what I ate for dinner last Halloween. Despite the aforementioned audio snafu, this is a good episode to listen to on headphones, if only for the second Jason Isbell song. Editing this episode was the first time I had heard the songs on headphones, and it is a completely different experience. Really interesting musical nuances. You can do whatever you want. I'm just saying. The Alchemist on Twitter The Alchemist on Facebook The Alchemist - Blog Subscription Jason Isbell on Twitter Jason Isbell on YouTube Jason Isbell on Facebook

Our 50th Episode Extravaganza! To commemorate such a momentous occasion, we drink the venerable Dark Lord Stout from Three Floyds and we listen to the recently released new track from the Pixies, their first new material since 1991, also a fairly momentous occasion if you ask us, which you didn't. We've both had Dark Lord once previously, so this voyage was more about managing expectations relative to our previous experience than anything else. And because a couple years of hops and barley residue have since clouded our memories, who's to say what will happen!?!? I love the Pixies. They produced an amazingly important body of work during the late 80s and early 90s. Before this episode, Russ had never heard the Pixies. I would type something sarcastic like SHOCKER, but I was legitimately surprised that Russ had never, to his knowledge, ever heard a single note from such a seemingly ubiquitous band. So, let's make his first experience be the first new song the band has recorded in 22 years. What could possibly go wrong? We also discovered that we both love(d) Night Court. Russ even "sings" a few bars of the opening credits. Also, the real name of the actor who played Mac is Charles Robinson.

This week, we discuss a beer from a brewery and a song from a band ... neither of which we know anything whatsoever about. What could go wrong? Specifically, we ponder the Hop Session Ale from White Birch Brewing in Hookset, NH. We get a little wrapped around the axle on style specifics, which serves as an excellent reminder that one of the best things about style guidelines is completely disregarding them. On the hi-fi this week is a song called "Invisible" off a new album from Galactic Cannibal called We're Fucked. Listen to hear Russ's musical palate mature right before your very ears. Follow Bill Herlicka, founder of White Birch Brewing, on Twitter here. White Birch Brewing on untappd. White Birch Brewing on Facebook. Galactic Cannibal on bandcamp. Galactic Cannibal on facebook. Galactic Cannibal at punknews.org.

This week the beer and the song are both very high quality and pleasantly inoffensive. Not exciting, per se, but extremely pleasing, if that's a thing. I start things off by announcing that this is episode 47, which we all know would be madness since Episode 47 has already carved out its place in history. Some other things to note from this episode: Unbeknownst to me, Russ was challenging himself with a little word game at the beginning of the episode. Listen to hear if he is able to pull it off. Also, can you can tell where we edit out the dehumidifier? You probably can. This audio production thing is a constant learning curve, people. Listen and learn with us.

This week, we ponder a funky beer from Shmaltz Brewing and a flame thrower of fevered, mathy insanity from Dillinger Escape Plan. The beer, He'brew Funky Jewbelation 2013 (#8 in the Shmaltz Barrel-Aged series), is a massive blend of six different beers and one could quite easily lose an entire weekend taking long contemplative sips and staring of toward the horizon. The song this week is a real barn-burner. One may hypothesize that I pick songs like this just to antagonize Russ, and one would be like 34% correct, because the other 66% of me does actually enjoy Dillinger Escape Plan. Heavy, intense, frenetic, complex, dynamic, there's just so much to try to process, not unlike this week's beer. Russ describes the song as 'schlegma.' Russ has a way with words.

This week, we openly defy the demands of Stone Brewing and drink the 6th edition of their Enjoy By IPA 11 days AFTER the Enjoy By date. Despite being past the Enjoy By date, this beer was still under two months old, which is far fresher than a lot of the beer you normally drink, especially for stuff that comes from the other side of the country (or, say, across oceans). Stone is to be commended for their efforts to spread the gospel of fresh beer. Not only does Stone advocate that craft beer is best when consumed fresh, they put their money where their mouths are and ask customers to Report Expired Beer. Listen to the episode to get our thoughts on the beer. The song is a bit out of left field. Russ expressed an interest in what I thought was the band FEAR, but was actually just a fun fact about FEAR's singer, Lee Ving. (Worth noting: FEAR does not appear to have an official website.) We listen to "I Don't Care About You" off Live ... For The Record. Lots of fond memories from this record and Russ's cultural awareness has again been expanded a couple orders of magnitude. We do good work here, people. Speaking of doing good work, you may have noticed on the last two episodes that we sound FREAKING AWESOME. This sonderful new development is due entirely to the acquisition of a Mackie Onyx Blackjack USB interface. Now we each have our own mic so our voices can be mixed as separate tracks. Honestly, though, I just put all the spoken tracks through a compression meat grinder and all the levels come out the same. Whatever works.

WE ARE BACK. Sorry for the unannounced hiatus (note: Not actually sorry). We needed a break from the weekly pace, and I wanted to make some changes/upgrades to the recording setup. Next thing you know two whole months have snapped by and people start assuming the worst. Which raises an interesting question: Would "the worst" be us quitting this project OR would it be us continuing to foist new episodes upon you? Answer carefully. Now then, we thought we'd ease back into things with a readily available session beer called Westvleteren XII. Ha ha, SARCASM. This beer is quite difficult to obtain, which we discuss, and, for a long time, it sat at the top of BeerAdvocate's Top Beers list, two facts that are probably not unrelated. To compliment the 'hype' theme, we picked a song from the recently resurrected Neutral Milk Hotel, whose Fall, 2013 tour sold out before even going on sale. I'm telling you, mouth-breathing indie rockers actually used time travel to buy Neutral Milk Hotel tickets. Anyway, we played In The Aeroplane Over The Sea from the 1998 NMH album of the same name. Feels good to be back.

We drink Heavenly Feijoa Tripel, which is a Lips of Faith collaboration between New Belgium and Brasserie Dieu du Ciel (Montreal). We were recently made aware that the music selection on this show has been decidedly non-female in nature. This topic could be argued from any number of different angles, but, a quick scan of the EPISODE GUIDE reveals that, indeed, there are only a handful of female musicians involved in the list, and only one who could be considered a "female artist" ... Carly Rae Jepsen. (Aimee Mann doesn't count.) So this week, we decided to [begin to] swing that pendulum the other direction with a song from Kathleen Edwards. Are we going to feature female artists non-stop until we've established some sort of balance in the episode guide? No. Are we going to ensure there is some sort of equitable split between female and non-female artists in our musical selection moving forward? Absolutely not. We are simply acknowledging the disparity and pledging to be more aware of our decision making.

We drink No Apologies Imperial IPA from Blue Point Brewing Company with the one and only Bernie Dawg, the force behind Bernie's Dawg Blog (http://www.berniesdawgblawg.com), and a contributor at Blog on Draft (http://www.blogondraft.com). He is also prolific on the Twitter (@berniedawg). His online efforts generate literally hundreds of millions of pageviews per second. Literally. We have so much in common with him, not having him on the show was creating a tear in the space/time/internet continuum, despite none of us having actually ever met him. Well, the tear has been sutured. You are welcome. We debated the song selection at length. Ultimately, I reached into the archives for a neutral number from Sorta, mostly because I didn't want Russ to have a meltdown in front of guests.

The second of two episodes recorded in "Studio A" at Tall Brown. Dogfish Head 75-Minute IPA is a blend of their 60 Minute and 90 Minute IPAs which is then bottle conditioned with maple syrup. It tastes ... just how it sounds, actually. KEN Mode is a "metallic hardcore-influenced noise rock band" (wikipedia) from Winnipeg, MB, Canada. Russ manages to stay surprisingly zen about the whole thing despite several pokes with a stick.

A funky, spicy beer and a funky, spicy song. It's like a Food Network Special up in here! We drink Sneak Attack from 21st Amendment. We are fans of 21st Amendment, because cans and because art and also because beer. We actually reviewed 21st Amendment's Monks Blood on our VERY FIRST episode, which you would know if you ever bothered to look at the handy dandy Episode Guide. I can't do everything for you. META SIDE NOTE: Speaking of the Episode Guide, during this episode, Russ wondered aloud what sort of traffic the Episode Guide might generate as a result of me mentioning it on every single episode. Well, I will tell you that the Episode Guide is the 3rd most visited page on the site. The most visited page, not surprisingly, is the home page, and the 2nd most visited site is actually ... Episode 28 (Monday Night Brewing and Alt-J). And now you know. The song this week is by Buke & Gase (pronounced Byook and Gayce). I talk a lot about how I shouldn't like this band but I actually like this band. It is a conundrum. We also talk about their use of 3-over-2 polyrhythms (aka hemiola, THANKS RUSS). Russ, mentions that the syncopation sounds 'dirty'. Subsequent listens reveal that yes, it may not be what one would call precise. Also, near the end of the song, there is healthy use of 4-over-3, which is totally different. Oh my god, just listen to it.

READ THIS WHOLE THING. It contains updated, post-recording information about the beer - Barrel-Aged Bigfoot Ale from Sierra Nevada. This is a big episode. Big beer and big music. Sierra Nevada Bigfoot Ale is on a short list of standard bearers for American Barley Wine, and it has been for 30 years. They recently released a barrel-aged version of the beer, and everyone lost their damn minds. Not that we blame them. We were lucky to snag a couple bottles. We found some information Barrel-Aged Bigfoot from SN Product Development Manager, Bill Manley, on beeradvocate.com. We had some additional questions about the beer, so we reached out to Sierra Nevada directly. Manley responded directly, but, unfortunately, his response came in a couple days after we recorded, so we'll have to incorporate the info in this here episode description. At the 5:00 mark, in reference to the fact that regular Bigfoot is 9.6% ABV and Barrel-Aged Bigfoot is 12.2% ABV, I ask, "How is the barrel-aged version bigger?" I asked whether this was a special batch specifically for barrel aging. Manley responded: This was a special batch designed for barrels. The same recipe as our regular Bigfoot release, just brewed with the intention of barrel-aging. It was brewed in Spring, whereas the usual brewing period is in December. It was brewed in Feb-March 2011. There were also rumors that there will be more of this beer released soon, possibly even this year. I asked if more details were available. Manley's response: Definitely not this year. We’re planning to re-vamp and expand our barrel program, and ideally, would like to do several barrel-aged releases per year. Right now, we’re so tight with capacity that we don’t have the opportunity to expand the program much further. As the new North Carolina brewery comes online and we have a little bit of opportunity for expansion, we will build a better infrastructure for beer and barrel handling and will expand the releases after that point. We’re hoping to do another BA Bigfoot release in 2014, but no more for this year. Also, I sarcastically refer to Manley as a dick because of his reference, on beeradvocate, to the existence of a Pappy-barrel-aged Tripel that never made it to market. Upon repeat listens, my sarcasm may or may not be obvious. SARCASM, you guys. As for the music, it is hard for me to begin to capture the sheer magnitude of NOMEANSNO, so I'm not really going to try. They are, quite simply, one of the greatest bands that has ever picked up instruments. I opted for Rags and Bones off the Wrong record. The boys over at slewcast did an all NOMEANSNO episode way back in May, 2011 that does far greater justice to the band than we could ever do. Download the MP3 here.

The Valentimes episode! We drink a sexy beer from Ommegang and listen to a sexy song from Jim James, who you may more familiar with as the front man for My Morning Jacket. Sexy. Here's the official video for the song. Not as sexy. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VI0Ffwt706w

Coffee Stout and the Descendents. I'm actually kind of annoyed it took us this long to think of pairing coffee beer with the Descendents, but I'm more shocked it took us this long to talk about a beer from Lagunitas, a brewery we both think very highly of. This was a fun episode, but going back and listening, all I can think of are all the things we failed to talk about. Take Lagunitas for instance. We love Lagunitas. Yet we completely neglected to mention that they are in the midst of a $9.5 million expansion that includes a shiny new 250-barrel brew house, a brew house that was destroyed in shipping and had to be rebuilt. We also completely whiffed on mentioning that Lagunitas is building a second brewery in Chicago, which will also have a 250-barrel Rolec brew house. Lagunitas has more going on than maybe any other American craft brewery and we failed to mention 100% of it. No, we called the 800-number on the bottle and listened to their outgoing voicemail message. We should be buried in ad revenue any minute, right? And despite what I thought was total worship of the Descendents while we were recording, I somehow failed to begin to capture the significance of their place in my life and my friends' lives growing up. I failed to mention that instead of drinking or drugging, my friends and I would sit at IHOP for hours and hours (and hours) drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, and having conversations that sounded like we were reciting Descendents lyrics. That seeing ALL open for Bad Religion on 7/25/1992 is still one of the greatest days/nights of my entire life, full stop. That I went for coffee (at a different IHOP) with Bill Stevenson, whom I consider a major musical influence, and talked about drums when ALL came thorugh Atlanta in 1995. That, with Davehog on vocals, the members of Avalauncher formed a Descendents cover band called Pretendents and played one awesome show in Vancouver, WA. So, like I said, this is a fun episode and I like it a lot. But it's not what I envisioned coming out on the other end when we pressed record. Oh well, such is the risk with improv and zero ounces of preparation. Onward!

This is an episode dedicated to the Team HIDI campaign. The short version: Atlanta chef Ryan Hidinger was diagnosed with stage IV gall bladder cancer in late December. Team HIDI was formed by Ryan's friends and family to help manage the fight of his life (the long(er) version). The response has been massive. Russ and I care deeply about this cause because we both like Ryan a whole helluva lot, and the world would be a bleaker place without him in it. We recorded this the day after attending a Team HIDI benefit that raised over $160,000. In less than a month, they've raised over $300,000 total. The Atlanta food and beverage scene has coalesced around this [hyper-worthy] cause like nothing I've ever seen. So as not to risk distorting the message or any facts, please go read all of the words, look at all the pictures, and click on all the links at the official Team HIDI website. Amazing stuff. We tried to pick a beer and a song that aligned with the Team HIDI theme. We picked Porcine Unidragon from Clown Shoes and 16 Days by Whiskeytown. Give a listen to hear our thematic justification.