Roadrunner Twice

OK, I have a tip for you. Mi Burrito, on N. Lombard at Albina.

We ran to Royale Brewing up by Farragut on Friday — we did that a bunch last summer, because it’s about 3 miles and there’s a food truck and we can take the 6 bus home from there, and it’s just a great way to end the week. EXCEPT, there is no longer a food truck! (Later, I asked if they were getting another one, and the dude was like “that’s the idea,” and I was like “oh, negotiations?” and he was like “there’s so many you’d think it’d be easy to recruit one, but turns out it’s a uhhhh involved process.”)

Anyway Mi Burrito is a very short walk from there and it was easily in the top five burritos I’ve ever had. I mean, probably top two, but for top five I don’t even have to think about it. So that is definitely the new thing to do if you want to hang out at Royale for a while.

By the way, Royale’s taproom rocks. They bottle some stuff for sale around town, and that’s all firmly in the category that I call “excellent beer-flavored beer” — a real good pils, a real good pale ale, a real good red ale, etc. But the stuff in their taproom is an entirely different show — it’s all weird semi-belgians, weird semi-sours, and weird barrel-aged. Lots of wild tropical flavors. So I guess that’s sort of their passion, but they don’t make enough of that stuff that you’ll ever see it out and about.

Micro-brews.

Okay, so generally, historically, a micro-brew is anything smaller than a mega-brew, right?

With the recognition that mega-brew is itself not a particularly real category and generally isn't even thought of as such, being more often referred to as either simply "brew," "corporate bullcrap," "whatever's cheap," or "that pale American piss," depending on audience, I think we can all agree that we know mega-brew when we see it. (It being, like, Bud, Coors, Miller, Busch, PBR, Hamms, and pretty much anything that tastes like them.) But of course that runs into problems right away: Consider Guinness, which I'm pretty sure is available in the entire English-speaking world. Mega? Maybe more like kilo-brew? (The metric jokes are only getting worse, btw, so I recommend bailing now.)

Okay, so you've got mega-brew(American-type) and mega-brew(International-type). Fine. What spawned this post is the set of discrete categories between mega and micro. What are they?

I figure it's time for an RFC:

• Homebrew. Yup.
• Nano-brew. Single-brewpub stuff.
• Micro-brew. Extremely local. Here, I'm thinking of things like Surly, Bridgeport, Flat Earth, Dick's, Dogfish Head, and Fish Tail. There's a decent chance I cannot name any you would recognize, because that's kind of the point.
• Local swill. Stuff that's totally unavailable outside its territory, but which isn't really produced with what might be called an artisan's touch. I'm thinking particularly of Henry Weinhard's, Leinenkugel's, and maybe Summit on a bad day. Generally a cut above mega-brew.
• Milli-brew. Sounds too much like "Miller," so let's just skip it.
• Centi-brew. Produced on a relatively small scale, but quite widely available, even on tap. New Belgium, Deschutes, Sierra Nevada,* and all those smaller international oddities like Chimay and Staropramen.
• Brew. Demilitarized zone; contains no actual brew.
• Hecto-brew. Post-micro-boom "artisanal" subsidiaries of major brewing concerns, as well as certain less-popular international items such as Murphy's and Beamish (both part of the Heineken empire, which is itself of the International flavor of mega-brew) and Smithwick's (part of Guinness).
• Kilo-brew. Reserved for future use.
• Mega-brew. Comes in both American and International types. Available damned near everywhere. American type is your basic watery lager. International type varies a bit more, but still contains a fair number of watery lagers (Heineken, Carlson, Kirin, Ichiban, Tiger, Singha, Harp, etc.). The main requirement is that it's pretty much goddamn everywhere.

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* Funny story about the size of the American beer world. You know how Sierra Nevada used to have twist-off tops, but they were really bitchily hard to open, and then they switched to pry-offs? One day, Summit's twist-off caps suddenly became really hard to open. Like, across the board, without exception.

Turned out that Sierra Nevada had bought a new bottling line, and immediately sold their old one to Summit.

So the big drama in Twin Cities quaffery lately is that New Belgium Brewing is distributing their beer here again, and people are kind of freaking out about it. I'll grant that I enjoy a bottle o' Fat Tire as much as the next guy or gal, but the whole thing is amusingly fanboyish. And, as you can see above, they are playing it to the hilt. (There are also posters up all over town. It's nuts.)

What's interesting is that this is probably the worst possible time for them to be making their triumphant return. Surly's been open for about a year and a half, and their brew is available in big pretty cans and something like a third of the tap-rows in town. Flat Earth opened their doors about four months ago, and looks to be aiming for a similar level of local stardom. The Cities have a real live brewery culture now. Two years ago, New Belgium probably could have waltzed straight back to the top tenth of the totem pole with zero opposition—nowadays, not so much.

Not that they're going to do badly, or anything. I'm just wondering what the scene is going to look like once the freakout dies down.

EDIT: Um, this just about broke me:

States in which Rainier Beer may be feasibly obtained:

(Obligatory links to other stuff from the visited states map dude.)

Train of thought? Well, sure, since you asked. ( Essay warning )