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Friday Night Beer Blog: Beer 'Olympics' Edition [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2024-07-26  

Greetings, beer lovers! Happy (-ish) Friday, and once (or not) again, chingchongchinaman is here as your guest FNBB blogger tonight. With the Olympics underway now in Paris, the starting point for tonight’s FNBB was if self the loser could find something comparable in the craft beer world, an “Olympics of craft beer”. Well, there is indeed such a competition, namely the World Beer Cup® (yes, the term is a registered trademark; hence use of “WBC” as an acronym from this point on) competition. The 2024 WBC awards took place this past April 24 in Las Vegas, and you can access the winners list from this link. In fact, to take it one step further, a YT archival livestream video is available thus:

x YouTube Video

Unlike with past diaries about the Canadian Brewing Awards, loser 3CM is not going to list all 329 (!) medal winners, which you can browse through at the HTML link (or the pdf equivalent). Instead, the stats are mainly confined to a “medal count”, so to speak. In other words, here is a breakdown by country of the 329 medal winners:

Argentina: 1

Australia: 2

Brazil: 4

Canada: 17

Chile: 2

China: 2

France: 1

Germany: 12

Italy: 1

Japan: 8

Korea (i.e. South Korea): 3

Mexico: 4

The Netherlands: 2

New Zealand: 2

Norway: 1

Peru: 2

Spain: 1

Taiwan: 1

USA: 263 (i.e. all the rest)

For comparison, I looked at the 2023 WBC country “medal count” (307 medal winners total):

Argentina: 2

Australia: 1

Belgium: 2

Canada: 14

Germany: 5

Italy: 1

Japan: 5

Mexico: 1

New Zealand: 1

Republic of Korea: 1

Thailand: 1

The Netherlands: 4

United Kingdom: 2

USA: 267

Perhaps it isn’t so surprising that US craft beers dominate the WBC “medal count”, since the idea of craft beer seems very much to be an American idea. And just looking at the 2024 WBC stats, one notes that France, the host country for this summer’s Olympics, has just one WBC medal winner. However, since France is so celebrated for its wines, for one, maybe the craft beer thing isn’t all that big a deal for the French :) .

As with the earlier Canadian Brewing Awards roster of this year’s winners, this year’s WBC list is another set of 329 craft beers that self the loser will never sample (and can’t afford to now anyway). Instead, the featured beer chez 3CM tonight is a Monks’ Dubbel Ale, which has a strong dark flavor and packs a wallop for lightweights like me. What I didn’t notice initially about this selection was that this brewery is based at the Benedictine Monastery of Christ in the Desert, Abiquiu, NM. This beer was a gift from a friend, rather than self the loser’s own purchase. There’s an old YT video related to this beer and the monks who brew it:

x YouTube Video

The further irony is that a trip to NM is also another treat that I can’t indulge in now, which I used to do more regularly in past years. So it goes.

Also, if the name “Abiquiu” rings a bell, and you’re into art, Abiquiu is indeed Georgia O’Keeffe country. Another YT video (not quite in line with esquimaux’s preference for music videos), c/o the Georgia O’Keeffe Musuem in Santa Fe, gives an intro about Abiquiu and Georgia O’Keeffe:

x YouTube Video

With that, time to turn it over to you folks. What are you sipping tonight? Anyone brewing their own? Inquiring minds, etc..

PS: Pointless bit of trivia, but this particular FNBB marks my 750th DK diary :) .

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/7/26/2257169/-Friday-Night-Beer-Blog-Beer-Olympics-Edition?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web

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