The Pour Fool

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 retirement – this is more or less how it’s gonna be. And THANK YOU for reading it.

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, based on retastings.

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 barrel-aged ales and some jaw-dropping lagers.

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 expansion.

(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 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 speak up.“ “Well, I don’t. What good does it do? I’m shouting into the void.

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 Hood In 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 brand new and brand new breweries, as a rule, take some time to get cranked up.

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 2024 and we’ve regained a measure of clarity…and not just in our daily lives.

“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.

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 knowledge base that I don’t have to do that. Also, y’know…google.