This weekend, I’m off down to Christchurch for the Great Kiwi Beer Festival; my third annual visit for what has proved to be a bloody marvellous day in the park with ten thousand of your closest strangers — with a distinct sideline of embarrassing Bogan Dadmusic. It’s probably too late, now, for me to advocate in favour of you changing your travel plans for it (if you’re not already booked in), but you should get to Christchurch for a visit soon, regardless. In addition to the very-many excellent Beer Things going on there, seeing the City recovering from the 2011 earthquake is, in turn, inspiring, fascinating — and instructively aggravating in its many bureaucratic clusterfucks.

I’ve also been invited to have a little ramble in the ‘Beer Academy’ seminar tent. I had masses of fun there, last year — doing a version of my ‘How To Buy A Beer‘ spiel — and this time around my mandate is to rhapsodise about “session beer”, for which I hardly needed my arm twisted. I have, after all, been harping on about them for yonks: there’s a tag for relevant Beer Diary entries on here, and we devoted an early podcast episode to them,¹ after I’d shoehorned a ‘Midstrength News’ segment into the ones before it. It should be a good lark; there are a lot of excellent examples on the local market, and plenty of interesting stories to tell about the history, the chemistry, the legal context, and how they all come together in quaffable pints of only-gently-intoxicating deliciousness.

The Press, the local Christchurch paper, did a little preview of my seminar in the run-up to the festival, which appeared online today — click through² to see my gormless grinning mug as I sat with a pint of Hallertau Minimus shortly before noon sometime last week. Always a strange experience, interacting with the Actual Media, and I inevitably had a few awkward quibbles while reading what eventuated from our chat: I flinched from “expert”, as an adjective, because I feel like there’s a whole bunch more than I don’t know than what I do;³ I wouldn’t want to litigate what was a ‘true’ beer lover, big believer in subjectivity that I am; and I hope I was more gender-neutral in my line about how midstrength brewing requires your A-game. Also, how strange is the newspaper affectation of referring to people, after a brief introduction, by their last name exclusively? So very Private School (he says, with a shudder). But these are the merest nit-picks of a natural-born pedant; it really was flattering to be asked at all, and — if last year was anything to go by — it’s that sort of coverage that helps drive a really healthy attendance into the seemingly-nerdy seminar tent at a large and wonderfully varied festival.

1: During which I substantially flubbed the history of ABV trends in the last few-hundred years of Anglophone brewing — but was rescued by Kieran “Beer Guru” Haslett-Moore in the comments. ↑
2: I’m loath to re-post the photo because I’m a stickler for properly respecting usage rights and am superannoyed when people boost my own — to the extent that I’ve just sent them invoices, and, on one glorious occasion, collected. ↑
3: Which is why people upset me, as a bartender, when they say things like “I don’t like beer” — how do they know? I’ve been at this for more than a decade, and I haven’t tried much of a fraction of what’s on offer. In my head, I have this as a beery version of the ‘First there is a mountain’ zen koan, but it turns out I’ve morphed that massively into my own thing; I should do a ‘Zen and the Art of Beer-Geekery’ some day and explain myself. Much closer, on reflection, is our friend Socrates’ “I know that I know nothing” — though, as an Ancient Greek, he’d likely have been no fan of beer, the “Barbarian’s Beverage” as a recent book of the same title puts it. ↑