Zach Fowle

The journey began with 7 Wives Saison, a brew featuring pink peppercorns, mesquite syrup, orange, coriander, fennel, and fennel pollen. Our travels then took us to the river for some FFF, where grapefruit, brown sugar, and a grove's worth of basil challenged our taste buds. Following this path, we found Lee's Liquid Dinner, a meal-in-a-glass accented by honey-roasted parsnips, cranberries, orange peel, chestnuts, and hazelnuts. A long, strange trip indeed.

See also:
- Sonoran 7 Wives Saison
- Sonoran FFF
- Sonoran Lee's Liquid Dinner

But now it's over. We've come to the fourth and final course of Sonoran's daring Chef Series, a group of brews crafted in collaboration with local chefs. Long Strange Trip pays homage both to the other beers from the series and to the voyage of Sonoran Brewing Co. itself -- which, actually, just took a surprising turn.

beercanrevolution.wordpress.com

If you people are any part the beer geeks you claim to be, you'll journey outside your homes on Saturday, May 18, into the increasingly balmy summer air and over to the AmeriCAN Canned Craft Beer Festival. You'll get to listen to some quality live music. You might play a few drinking games. And you'll get to try some of the best canned craft beers in America -- many of which have never been seen in our state before.

See also:
- 2013 AmeriCAN Canned Craft Beer Festival in Scottsdale on May 18

But you won't be the first to have tasted them here.

westword.com

As we inch ever closer to the third-annual AmeriCAN Canned Craft Beer Festival, our discussion of aluminum cylinders continues, and it's only right that, at this point, we bring up Oskar Blues.

See also:
- 2013 AmeriCAN Canned Craft Beer Festival in Scottsdale on May 18

Welcome back to Craft Beer OTW, where our discussion of canned craft beer continues. Now, it's come to my attention that despite my very convincing proselytizing on canned craft beer's behalf, there are still plenty of naysayers when it comes to this particular package. I may be vain, but even I recognize that a discussion is not a discussion without a dissenting opinion. So today I've given the anti-can crowd out there a chance to join the debate. Naysayers, what say you?

See also:
- 5 Things You Need to Know About Craft Beer in Arizona

Naysayers: Well, nay, first. But we'd follow that quickly with our strongest point: Beer in cans tastes like metal!

The journey from brew kettle to drinking vessel is long and hard, and not all beer gets there in perfect condition. To taste right, a beer must battle many foes along the way: diacetyl, a yeast compound that tastes like butter; di-methyl sulfide, which can impart flavors of creamed corn; One Million Moms. Beer has many enemies, but the most evil of our favorite drink's foes are also the most abundant: sunlight and oxygen.

See also:
- Ommegang's Game of Thrones Iron Throne Blonde Ale

beerpulse.com

Beer: Class of '88 Barleywine
Brewery: Deschutes Brewery/North Coast Brewing Co./Rogue Ales
Style: American Barleywine
ABV: 10 percent

Hello, out there! Today, we step into the WayBack Machine to take a look at craft beer's past, all the way back to the year 1988. Times were good -- Prozac had just hit the market, John McClane was yippee-ki-yay-ing all over Nakatomi Tower, the first Bush had just landed in office, and everyone was whistling "Don't Worry, Be Happy" (probably thanks to the Prozac). Craft beer, too, was experiencing something of a renaissance. The number of craft breweries had grown exponentially in the previous few years, expanding from a paltry eight in 1980 to a robust 150 eight years later. The year 1988 saw the emergence of quite a few new tiny regional beer-makers, including Great Lakes Brewing Co., Goose Island Brewing Co., Rogue Ales, North Coast Brewing Co., and Deschutes Brewing. You may have heard of them.

Twenty-five years later, these breweries are leaders in the industry, and Deschutes announced in December 2012 that to celebrate this shared history and success, it will collaborate on a series of beers. How it'll work: Brewers will travel to each other's home bases to brew using the same set of stylistic guidelines, then each brewery will package its version. Though the ingredients used in each brew might differ, the respective beers will have a common heritage and flavor.

mustlovebeer.com

Beer: Barrel-Aged Freudian Sip
Brewery: Rough Draft Brewing Co.
Style: American Strong Ale
ABV: 10 percent

Around 1901, Sigmund Freud came out with his book The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. In it, he described a number of verbal "slips" -- errors that seem trivial but may actually reveal repressed subconscious desires. Also called a parapraxis, this reptile-brain mixup later came to be known as the Freudian slip.

See also:
- Now Available in Arizona: Upright Seven
- Ommegang's Game of Thrones Iron Throne Blonde Ale

As is my opinion on most psychoanalysis, I think the Freudian slip is just another made-up term psych majors use to justify their ridiculous degrees. There's no way my subconscious mind would ever cause me to accidentally insert a word where I wouldn't penis it to be.

A Freudian Sip, however, is something I can believe in.

gearpatrol.com

Beer: Game of Thrones Iron Throne Blonde Ale
Brewery: Brewery Ommegang
Style: Belgian Blonde
ABV: 6.5 percent

Winter is coming, my brothers. I've just received a raven from the far-off land of Cooperstown, New York, where the alchemist guild at Brewery Ommegang has been working hard on a series of beers inspired by the HBO drama Game of Thrones. The package the birds left contained the inaugural ale, a Belgian-style blonde released just in time for Sunday night's premiere of season three.

This collaboration between Ommegang and HBO isn't your usual TV-beer mixed marriage, which usually involves product placement or slapped-on advertising on a beer label. The beers Ommegang produces, according to its press releases, will "directly tie into themes and nuances of the medieval-like fantasy realm of Westeros and the surrounding kingdoms, where the competition to sit on the Iron Throne is fierce and deadly."

Beer: Seven
Brewery: Upright Brewing Co.
Style: Saison
ABV: 8 percent

Not sure if you guys have noticed, but craft beer is going all Manifest Destiny right now. With the likes of New Belgium, Oskar Blues, and Green Flash breaking ground on East Coast facilities, big brands are going nationwide. Even the small guys are seeing enough growth that they can expand into new markets -- Grand Canyon just became the first Arizona Brewery to break into the Nevada market (congrats, guys!) and Portland's Upright Brewing Co. has finally made its way into ours.

wynkoop.com

This week's beer is...huuurrrp. Excuse me. Um, this week's beer...HLEEAAHHHurkurkBLLEAAHH!

Sorry, I just threw up in my mouth a little bit. Let's get a little distance between us and that picture, shall we?

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See also:
- Old World Brewery
- Ballast Point Indra Kunindra

That's better. This week's beer comes to us from Denver, Colo., where the rarefied air does things to a person's brain and makes the softball-sized gonads of your average male cow (yup, pictured above) look like a tasty treat. Bull testicles, or Rocky Mountain Oysters, can be found all over the place in Colorado -- at Rockies games, even -- but had stayed out of beer until October 2012, when Wynkoop Brewing Co. decided they would sack up and make a brew using the delicate delicacy. Rocky Mountain Oyster Stout, which Wynkoop spokesman Marty Jones calls "another seminal moment in our 25 years of small-batch liquid art," made its way into cans (sold in two-packs, of course) last week.