Philly Beer Week is a-comin’
We always want to go to Philly Beer Week, because we love Philadelphia’s awesome variety of beer bars, but we never do. And this year, Beer “Week” is actually a 10-day extravaganza of over 650 different beer events across the city, including FIVE different festivals. The most exciting thing, in our opinion, is the addition of Zythos America—the first time the famous Belgian beer fest of the same name has come stateside. Sweet.

Utah House get serious
Utah is close to getting its full-strength beer in bars and restaurants. They’ve got some weird, weird stuff on the books with the heavily Mormon population. We knew about the “near beer” but check this out:

Utah is also the only state that prohibits bartenders from serving cocktails directly over the counter at restaurant bars. A partition usually made of glass known as a Zion Curtain separates the two. … A measure awaiting a vote in the Senate would require that cocktails be mixed behind 10-foot-high walls in restaurants, in an effort to keep children from being tempted to take up drinking. The same measure would also make it illegal to appear drunk, giving state law enforcement officers widespread discretion in fining and shutting down bars and restaurants.

Alabama’s Free The Hops passes the House
Like the folks in Utah, Alabamians are celebrating today the passing of the “gourmet beer bill” (we hate that name) in the House, which must now to go to the Senate, in which the bill died last year, and the year before, and the year before that. Let’s visit Lew’s Blog and remind ourselves of what these folks are up against. “It drink pretty good, don’t it?” *sigh* Free the Hops! Bud had a strangle-hold in Alabama, but we wonder if The Merger with the Belgians will change that at all.

Turley answers the impossible question, “What’s your favorite beer?”
David, from the blog Musings Over a Pint, has a fantastic tongue-in-cheek answer to the question that we get a lot at the humble storefront. “This one.” It’s an impossible question to answer. Especially now that we know that the 2009 Brewers Association Beer Style Guidelines lists 139 different types of beer.