Back with unusual promptness — which is hopefully a good omen — George and I sat down on Friday for a few beers and a somewhat-supersized season opener for another round of the podcast. We try a couple of new-ish releases, and one bottle that’d been sitting around waiting for the right occasion. And, unusually, one of our Beers of the Week turns out to be something of a dud, or at least a disappointment. Conversation turns variously to good and bad advice on glassware and temperature, the wealth of new developments in the local scene, and (inevitably, it seems) the origin-fudging that I complained about last time.

As always, a direct download is available, there’s a podcast-specific RSS feed, and you should be able to get us on iTunes. George and myself can also both be reached on the Twitterthing, or you can leave comments here or on the Bookface. Feedback is always welcome, but doubly so at the beginning of a new ‘season’; is there anything else we can do to help? Multi-part uploads / chapter chunks? Posting on YouTube / anywhere else?

For the record, I’m not planning to transition the blog to podcast-only; there’s plenty to go up here of the familiar rambling and ranting and reminiscing kinds. I am, in fact, drafting a Sydney Travelogue post while this episode uploads…

— Show notes:

• (1.30) Easter Trading Laws. My resort to saying “March or April” reminds of the ludicrous “Computus Problem”, about which I once foot-notedly rambled, while drinking a Taieri George (appropriately enough).
• (2.30) cf Matthew 27:52.
• (3.30) Thanks to TableTop Day, I was also out and about at midnight, and now feel I should add a note to counter my own enthusiasm: the circumstances do conspire a bit to make Easter Friday some kind of Pre-loading Olympics. The crowds shambling to the pub to greet those 12 o’clock openings were awfully munter-ish.
• (3.40) Here, let me find it for you: Harmontown.
• (4.50) While we await the latest Census results, the Wikipedia is — as always — a fine place to start.
• (5.10) Beer of the Week #1: Epic ‘Mosaic’.¹ Which is heaps easier for my lisp to navigate, inherently worthy as an individual beer, and genuinely hilarious as a collection of little references and bits of gentle self-satire.
• (9.00) My bad, the IPA Glass was a project of Dogfish Head and Sierra Nevada, which makes vastly more sense. Adding to the suspicion that this might all just be a load of marketing wank, it seems the design isn’t that new — nor beer-specific (except for the addition of nucleation sites).
• (11.45) ‘Get More From Your Beer’ was great fun at Beervana and at the GKBF. I put a blogified version of the general gist of it online here a little while ago.
• (15.10) Maybe I did guess right; it looks like us English-speakers formed “stein” from the German for “stoneware”.
• (18.20) Beer of the Week #2: Tuatara Tripel. ‘Ardennes’ was something I liked a lot, when I managed to remember that it existed — meanwhile, that Diary entry now gets the bulk of its traffic from searches for “Kegtris”, when they occasionally occur. Neil Miller, on the Malthouse blog, went a little into the background, though he’s oddly coy about not knowing the “real story”; last I heard, he’s still on the brewery payroll. (Edited 30 July 2016 to strike that last part. Apparently Neil, at this point, hadn’t done any work for the brewery for a few years. Perhaps, if more people were better-practiced at telling us who they work for and when, we wouldn’t have to speculate. For what it’s worth, I belatedly apologise.)
• (22.25) My bad, again, Tuataras are reptiles — what they’re aren’t, is lizards.
• (24.10) If anyone needs a primer on Moa’s many sins, start with their recent IPO. (Meanwhile — as at the time of writing this, at least — it’s hardly a rockstar stock.)
• (25.20) There are a few bits of history-ramble in my Trappist Dance Card notes.
• (27.40) George probably means a twisty-wire cage top. Twist-tops aren’t so classy.
• (28.00) Temperature, and surprisingly-ranty advice thereon.
• (33.40) I’m enough of a geek that I want answers and models for how fast the temperature of my glass of beer will change in ambient air (at various pressures and in various glasses), and I want to know how much condensation is going to wind up in my frosted-pint beer. I’m failing to find the right tools, though. Help appreciated.
• (35.35) Drinking from the bottle / can, which again makes me want to do some actual pen-and-paper physics. Maybe I’ll have to hit the books.
• (40.00) Beer of the Week #4: West Coast ‘The Artist’ 2012 a.k.a. Dave Kurth’s Mysterious Barleywine. West Coast Brewery still exists, thanks to some somewhat unsavory company-law juggling. All completely legal and par for the course — which is exactly why it pisses me off; this stuff shouldn’t happen, and it shouldn’t so-readily screw the very people who weren’t at fault. Grumble. Belatedly, I also just spotted that The Artist was Alice Galletly’s penultimate beer, her #364.
• (42.40) Luke Robertson’s piece was at BrewsNews.com.au, and was mostly about insanely-multiply-hopped brews — including Dave’s farewell brew, which will be at MarchFest in Nelson this weekend.
• (42.50) He’s updated his Twitter handle and registered a domain, at least.
• (45.30) Apparently, I deleted my still-full SD card of photos from my Christchurch trip like a complete Muppet. Kicking myself about that on a regular basis.
• (51.30) Origin-fudging, again, inevitably. The American legal system, with depressing predictability, made it even worse. #facepalm.
• (54.20) Tragically, I wanted to praise them for the awesome barcode; it’s a New York skyline, for crying out loud! But white ink on shiny aluminum is hard to photograph.
• (57.40) Panhead also exists, so far, as a parked domain, and a Twitter handle.
• (1.01.00) Forgive us for being on a Wellington-centric run here for a bit, but these are boom times indeed. Craft Beer Capital’s ‘Hopstock’ — expanding on a Tuatara / Fork & Brewer-only event from last year — is next-next weekend, 10-12 April. And I seriously want that artwork on a t-shirt. If you’re keen on an impulsive weekend away, BrewDay & MarchFest — which I think are both set in CamelCase — are mere days away.
• (1.04.55) I mean “chacun à son goût”, though the long-suffering law graduate in me always wishes that the much-more-fun-to-say Latin version — de gustibus non est disputandum — had more currency in modern conversation.
• (1.05.10) The Rising Tide. Warms my cynical heart, it does.
• (1.07.30) On the Beer List: Te Radar, who did great things for the Beer Awards, and a neat little fundraiser / awareness-raiser for Kaibosh (which recently won a rather-big-deal award and is well-worth getting on board with — hint, hint).
• (1.11.30) Recommendations: Townshend’s many beers. I’ve been reminded by the GKBF and the impending third season of Game of Thrones — torrents of the first episode of which are probably cratering the internet as I write these notes. Track down his beers, give him a prod on the Twitters to say Hi / thanks / try to provoke him.
• (1.15.40) Ommegang made an ‘Iron Throne’ Blonde Ale — the style presumably referencing that shitbag Joffrey (which hopefully isn’t a spoiler for anyone).
• (1.16.30) “Lancaster”? I mean Lannister, obviously. It’s been too long.
• (1.17.10) Close. It’s just Hazelnut Brown Nectar.
• (1.19.50) This insight into Rogue came from @MattSNZ, on the Twitters — who I had the pleasure of bumping into in person at the aforementioned Pomeroy’s.
• (1.22.10) Thanks to a generous 2012-vintage bottle shared by my flatmate, I didn’t have to suffer through the whole long weekend without a Taieri George. Phew.
• (1.22.30) Cue the music: ‘Shopping for Explosives’, by The Coconut Monkeyrocket. Audio editing done in Audacity. Habitual thanks to both.

1: In the interests of full disclosure, Epic did send me a bottle as a sample — which I didn’t realise until I’d actually tried it on my own dime, anyhow. But, you know, completeness.