As our beer journey unfolds, our sense of flavor changes. That can cause our memories to drift as well. Fortunately, we can turn to “calibration” beers to remind us what the past was actually like. 

A couple years back, John Holl and I were drinking beers at The Commons when the topic of "romantic facts" came up. Romantic facts? You know, those (false) stories that have gotten repeated so often they've come to be accepted as truth. Ben Franklin saying "Beer is proof God loves us," or the one about how a monk smuggled yeast into Bohemia from Bavaria to brew the first pilsner--those kinds of things. In journalism there's a concept about a story that's too good to fact check, and the romantic fact is beer's version of that.

We need to talk about a new product from the Anheuser-Busch InBev corporation of São Paulo/Leuven/New York: Bud Light Seltzer Hard Soda. If the string of adjectives and nouns in that title makes sense to you, and it almost certainly does, something weird has happened.

In case you missed it, glittery beer has arrived. You may have seen these strange, wondrous beers on social media and wondered how they're made and what they taste like. I spent a couple hours with two brewers who made recent examples and I have your full report on this truly beguiling new beer style. 

A personal note about my plans for January.