I’m just back from a successful, if not wet and chilly, Kate The Great Day at the Portsmouth Brewery in beautiful Portsmouth, New Hampshire. And what a wild & crazy morning it was. Josh Christie (of BrewsAndBooks.com fame), a few mutual cohorts and I piled into the car this morning around 3:50am and departed from Portland en route to Portsmouth for The Portsmouth Brewery’s Kate the Great Russian Imperial Stout – the beer which is considered by many to be the best beer in America (and is towards the top of just about every list for sure).

The bottle "lines" at about 8:40am

If you’re unfamiliar with the way “Kate Day” (as it’s called) works, there are a total of 900 bottles of the infamous Russian Imperial Stout for sale one morning each year. The first 450 people in line get a single page from a page-a-day calendar (well, calendar and a half). When the pages are all handed out, the beer is essentially gone. Folks then mill around downtown Portsmouth in search of warmth and breakfast until they start letting people in to pick up their bottles (limit 2 per person; $10 a bottle) in order of month beginning at 9:00am.

Our carload arrived right around 4:45am and got December 28-30 of the first year. By 5:25 all of the 450 pages were gone. Reports said that folks began lining up at 1:00am last night when the bar closed and stood in line overnight until they began handing out pages at 4:30 this morning (so all the bottles were spoken for in less than an hour).

If you miss out on a calendar page and aren’t able to pick up a bottle, not all hope is lost. The Portsmouth Brewery opened for lunch at 11:30am and promised to have a couple of kegs of Kate on tap. However, when we left with our bottles at 9:30, the lunch line was already down the street and around the corner, two hours before they opened. Our rough estimate was that if we had gotten in line at that exact moment, we might have been eating by 3 o’clock. And the brewery was sure to kick all of their Kate kegs before the day is out. Pure insanity.

Look at all those bags of Kate The Great!

However, if you’re within striking distance of Portsmouth, Kate Day is a definite don’t-miss, at least once in your drinking career. I do wish they would host the event on a slightly warmer day than March 1st, but I guess standing outside in the cold and the rain adds a bit to the mystique.

Did you make it down this morning? What’d you think? And if not, I’ll see you there next year (BlogAboutBeer.com Kate Day Party Bus anyone?). Oh, and I won’t be trading either bottle so don’t waste your time. Sorry!

In case you missed the BeerAdvocate.com Extreme Beer Fest (EBF) this year — don’t worry, so did I — the folks at FloridaSPL.com shot some video interviews with a few of the brewers on hand discussing the extreme beers their brewed for the festival. Watch them and feel like you were there. Or even more bummed that you missed it. Either way, they’re good for a watch (more related videos linked at the end of this one):

I’m a sucker for lists. The Top 10 This, the Best 5 That. So I had a bit of fun when I got my hands on the latest issue of Beer Advocate magazine (yes, they have a magazine. And it’s actually pretty good. I’d never pay for a subscription, but if you can find one of their free drop spots, pick it up) a few days ago which includes six “top 25″ lists in the “Beer in Review” section. The lists are the “All-Time Top Beers on Planet Earth”; the top 25 “Most-Wanted Beers”; the “Top Beers That Get No Respect” — these are the 25 worst-rated beers on the BeerAdvocate forums and include the likes of Bud Light (1), Natural Ice (15), Icehouse (20) and Crazy Ed’s Cave Creek Chili Beer (7) — the “All-Time Top Brewers” (which should read “breweries” in my opinion and not “brewers”, since they list the breweries themselves and not the names of the people who formulated each recipe, etc.); the top 25 “Places to Have a Pint” (which includes Maine’s own Ebenezer’s Pub (1) in Lovell, and Novare Res Bier Cafe (21) here in Portland); and lastly, the “Alstrom Bros’ Top Beers” which “made us stop, think and drink in 2009″. Six of which were brewed in New England, and two of which here in Maine (Vagabond from Allagash and surprisingly, Local Harvest from Sebago).

Cross-checking the lists with my own drinking experiences, I’ve personally had more than half (14, if my count is right) of the “All-Time Top 24 Beers on Planet Earth” and 8 of the “25 Most-Wanted Beers”, including the top 3. Not bad since probably 80% of the beers and the breweries on all of these lists (except the list of swill) aren’t available in Maine. Here are the All-Time Top 25 and the 25 Most-Wanted (after the jump… just click it). How many have you had?

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The February issue of Maxim Magazine hit the shelves late last week and for once included an article worth reading which wasn’t about hot girls. It was however about beer. The four-page spread was a run down of what Maxim decided are the 25 Best New Beers in America. No real explanation of what “new” means, since some of the beers on the list are decidedly not all together that new but it was a surprisingly good list all the same — especially given the source — and only one of the twenty-five brews is from one of the “big three” breweries. There also doesn’t seem to be any specific order to the list that I can decipher, but here it is:

• Porkslap Pale Ale – Butternuts Beer & Ale
• Drifter Pale Ale – Widmer Bros.
• Hoss (Rye Lager) – Great Divide
• Hoptober Golden Ale – New Belgium
• Haywire (Hefeweizen) – Pyramid
• Helios Ale (Saison) – Victory
• Noble Pils – Sam Adams
• Ten Fidy (Imperial Stout) – Oskar Blues
• Torpedo (Extra IPA) – Sierra Nevada
• MarzHon (Marzen) – Clipper City
• Bud Light Golden Wheat – Anheuser-Busch
• Sexual Chocolate (Imperial Stout) – Foothills Brewing
• Brew Free! Or Die (IPA) – 21st Amendment Brewing
• Green Lakes Organic Ale (Amber) – Deschutes
• Indian Brown – Dogfish Head
• Upslope Pale Ale – Upslope Brewery
• Old Stock – North Coast
• Blue Ball (Porter) – Intercourse Brewing Co.
• Calico (Amber) – Ballast Point
• Union Jack (IPA) – Firestone Walker
• Fat Squirrel (Brown Ale) – New Glarus
• UFO White  – Harpoon (Boston)
• Local 1 (Pale) – Brooklyn
• Tumble Off (Pale Ale) – Barley Brown’s Brew Pub
• Phoenix (Pale Ale) – Sly Fox

I think it’s interesting to note that five of the twenty-five beers on the list (or a full 20%) were canned beers; certainly speaks volumes to the nationwide trend. What do you think of the list? Anything you’d add or subtract if you were a Maxim intern compiling lists of microbrews while the paid folks were off shooting Amanda Bynes for the cover?

The following is a guest post written by Dave, a craft beer drinker and occasional craft beer writer at sevenpack.net. If you would like to write a guest post for BlogAboutBeer.com, please give me a shout.

When I think “beer book” I envision an oversized book found on one’s coffee (or beer) table, filled with glossy pages of beer bottles standing next to their beery contents poured exquisitely into proper, typically brewery and/or beer labeled, glassware (i.e. beer porn photos). Sure the photos are accompanied by tasting notes, and occasionally brief descriptions of the beer’s history, but with so many beers the words seem to mesh together after awhile (though some books do pull off the beer and pictures theme quite well). Well The Naked Pint is nothing like that. Okay, “nothing” is a bit too strong because the book does contain some tasting notes. Besides the few ink sketches however, there are no beer photos to speak of, so you will have to go elsewhere for your beer porn.

What The Naked Pint lacks in pictures, it makes up for in beer knowledge. Do not get me wrong, this book is not the end all be all of beer tomes. It does however give the craft beer beginner a very good start into craft beer culture. It also provides a good reference point for craft drinkers who want to learn a bit more history about the beers they have been drinking, or venture into other aspects of craft beer culture.

The book starts out simply enough with beer’s ingredients, how those ingredients become beer, and what those ingredients add to beer’s taste. The authors also discuss lagers vs ales, IBUs, ABVs, beer bar etiquette, mouth feel and criteria for a great beer. The book then moves onto beer styles. The styles start with the most accessible (Pilsners, Hefes, etc) and culminate with the most adventurous (wild ales,
IIPA, etc). I found this to be the best section of the book, and fortunately it was the longest. The styles were not overly esoteric, with someone being able to bump into them at a good beer store or craft beer bar. The book describes each style’s tasting points and it delves into the style’s history, introducing both sides if there is debate about said history. Then it lists two to five beers (depending on the style’s popularity) representative of the style, with short one to two sentence tasting notes. Though all “representative beers” are probably not available to all readers, I felt obtaining one per style would not be too much of a hassle (though MA has pretty good beer distribution, so people’s experiences will vary). In all, enough information was provided to whet my appetite but not so much as to bog me down with the minutia of style information. I found this kept the book moving and provided a nice jumping off point for further style history investigation if I was so inclined.

With the styles out of the way next came talk of glassware, stocking one’s fridge, and brief points on aging. One thing that irked me was the fact the authors write that only a wine fridge will do for beer storage and not some college dorm fridge. Ahem. Sure it is not as pretty as a wine fridge but it certainly is less expensive, especially if such a fridge was left over from said college years. Anyway, only a minor gripe.

Next the book rolls along into beer and food. The book discusses beer and food “pairings” and though it gives some specific examples of pairings, it gives more general hints then anything else and leaves the topic with a “try it yourself and experiment” vibe. The book also provides a bunch of recipes with beer as an ingredient. The recipes look promising, if not a little daunting, but I have yet to cook any of them.

From cooking, the book moves to home brewing, discussing the tools, vocabulary, and steps of home brewing. The book even includes some home brew recipes. As the book concludes it discusses ideas on how to entertain with beer (tasting parties, beer dinners, etc) and further beer reading resources.

Though the book is written more for the “new to craft beer” person, I still found intriguing little tid-bits of information scattered through out. I also believe the book makes a nice quick reference source due to the book’s general knowledge and extensive index. I do wish the book provided a full list of all the beers mentioned in the styles section, because that list would make a real handy reference too (maybe in a follow up version). The book also got me more interested in beer history, which led me to include The Zythophile and Shut up About Barclay Perkins in my RSS feed. Overall I enjoyed reading the book and found it quite entertaining.