Strong Beer Festival

Strong Beer Festival is always one of the best events of the year. Sponsored by the Arizona Brewers Guild and held at the Mesa Amphitheatre, this is a relaxed afternoon, perfect for true fans of craft beer.

The brewers like to do it up right, many have special beers just for the occasion. In our portfolio alone, we will see Lost Coast Olde Ale, a four year old keg of Wild Dog Weizenbock (still drinking great), Moylan's Double Scotch Ale, Moylan's Hopsickle Triple IPA (on draft), Big Sky Old Bluehair, Big Sky Ivan the Terrible, Lost Abbey Serpent's Stout, Lost Abbey Angel's Share and a whole bunch of others.

Remaining tickets are only available at the door. For more details go to the Brewers Guild web site.

Brabant

I just got an exciting voice mail from Adam Avery. We will be receiving a limited quantity of his new specialty release, Brabant. This is the first in Avery's Barrel Aged Series. Brabant is a province in Belgium which includes the capital city of Brussels and the area slightly north and south. It is divided into the Flemish and Walloon areas, as well as the multi-lingual capital area. It is also a breed of Belgian Draft Horse which appears on the label for the beer.

The beer is a dark ale fermented with two strains of wild yeast and aged in Zinfandel barrels for 8 months. Some of the pilot batches were made using Old Jubilation as a base and I had a chance to try those, and they were spectacular. The dark ale used for this is a new recipe. I am looking forward to, as Avery says, sifting through the vast layers of complexity of this beer.

Pricing should be in line with the Demon series, although availability will be much less. This is a must try beer, and I would suggest buying a couple of bottles to cellar as well. Look for it on the shelves sometime in March...and expect the return of Maharaja around then as well.

Proposed Beer Tax in Arizona

It has just come to my attention that Arizona legislators are considering a substantial increase in the tax on beer... about 2087% of an increase. Somebody in the legislature wants to take the tax on a gallon of beer from 16 cents a gallon to $3.50 for each gallon. That's an increase of $7.85 in tax on each case. Factor in the fact that retail pricing is ultimately based on the actual cost of the item, so a new tax would be factored into a retailer's profit margins and you are looking at a net increase of over $16 per case at checkout. That works out to $4 per six pack or 70 cents per bottle. On draft beer, the increase would end up raising the price of a keg by as much as $75, meaning that a pint of beer at your local watering hole would go up by about a dollar.

And what does this "luxury" tax pay for? Drug and alcohol treatment programs...at least that's what the proposal says for now. This is a misguided effort to tax millions of responsible beer drinkers because of the irresponsibility of a relatively small minority. I find this totally unacceptable.

Nationally, beer is already taxed 68.6% more than other purchases. Increasing these already high taxes another 2087%, can only lead to more downturn. The folks hurt the most will be the small breweries that will see a substantial drop in business as people can no longer afford to drink their products and instead turn to cheaper liquors. There are approximately 25 small breweries in Arizona that will be adversely affected if this bill becomes law. That's 25 breweries, and maybe 250 Arizonans that will be directly impacted by this proposal. Extend that out to distributors, retailers and other related businesses and this bill has the potential to devastate quite a few lives.

This bill, HB 2524 is set for initial discussion by the House Ways and Means Committee at 2:00 on Monday, February 23rd. For more details go read these two articles, one on this particular issue, and the other about the general concept of increasing beer taxes. http://www.examiner.com/x-241-Beer-Examiner~y2009m2d17-Proposed-state-beer-tax-increases-hard-to-swallow--impacting-jobs-and-beer-drinkers and http://www.examiner.com/x-241-Beer-Examiner~y2009m2d20-Arizona-legislators-trying-to-outdo-Oregon-with-a-2087-increase-in-beer-tax . Sorry about the long links, and the fact they may not be clickable (just copy and paste in to your browser), I haven't figured out this whole blog thing yet.

I encourage you to get involved in this matter and pass this on to other beer drinkers. The job you save just might be...mine.

Lost Abbey Brandy Angel's Share

Here is some great news, we just got word from Tomme Arthur that we will get some allocation of this year's Brandy Angel's Share. No specifics yet, but we expect to have enough to get it out to all key accounts throughout the state. For those of you that are unaware of this excellent product, it is essentially a barley wine aged in brandy barrels. It is consistently one of the top ranked beers in the world. Previously this beer has only been offered at the brewery, so we are really excited about it being on the shelves.

Oskar Blues in Town

Marty Ochs from Oskar Blues is in town for the Skirt Chaser 5k to be held at Tempe Beach Lake on February 14th. A fun event from a fun brewery. Any way, it got me thinking about how many breweries are following the lead of Oskar Blues and putting their beer in cans. These guys should get a lot of credit for pioneering canned craft beers. We should see Marty from time to time which means more Oskar Blues events and more Dale's Pale Ale, Old Chub, Gordon and Ten Fidy. Also, Marty tells us to look for a new regular product, Mama's Little Yella Pils. I've had a chance to try it, really good stuff.

Festivals

Okay, thanks for checking us out. It only took me 4 days to figure out how to get back in to this thing and post again. Anyway, we were doing some planning for upcoming festivals and it sounds like we are going to have some fun.

The Strong Beer Festival is at the Mesa Amphitheatre on February 28 (www.azbrewguild) and we will be pouring some great stuff including a strong ale from Lost Coast, probably some Belgians and maybe a couple of other unique things. Besides that, Port/Lost Abbey, Coronado, Breckenridge, SKA, Big Sky and Moylan's will all have their own booths. Denise Jones, Brewster at Moylan's will be here for one of her first official visits and she is bringing some good beer with her. Think extreme hops and a double version of one of their classic beers, not available in AZ.

Little Guy presents Hopapalooza at the Great AZ Festival on March 7 and 8 (www.azbeer.com). We will be pouring virtually all of our IPAs, a couple of Belgian IPAs and maybe some other hoppy favorites. We also had to include Redstone and Wyder's because you folks all love them despite the absence of hops. SKA, Big Sky, Coronado among others will have their own booths as well. Don't know about you, but I am excited.

Welcome to the Little Guy Beer Stuff Blog

Okay great beer fans. Little Guy is moving in to the 21st century. This here will be our beer blog where you can regularly check to see what's happening in our world. Occasionally there will be a nugget of good information, occasionally I will say something clever, most of the time you won't even understand why you bothered to check it out.

This stuff is pretty cool, if I do it right, you will be able to see this on the Little Guy Distributing web site (www.littleguydistributing.com) and you can even subscribe to it on Yahoo, Google and other portals. You can comment back to us (keep it clean) and we can share information on great beer. We may have some guest bloggers, maybe a podcast, a twitter feed and Facebook. I have no idea what any of that means, but my technology advisor told me to say that.

Stay tuned, more to come.