Today is the first Friday of the month, which means it’s time once again for The Session. This month’s “Beer Blogging Friday” is hosted by Stonch of Stonch’s Beer Blog. The topic – beer people. According to Stonch himself:
Choose someone you know personally. That person might be a brewer, a publican, someone who sups at your local, or maybe just a friend who is passionate about beer. Let’s read some pen portraits of your companions on the path to fermented enlightenment.
The person I chose had a great deal to do with my coming into beer appreciation. My brother Mike — who is coincidentally celebrating both his first wedding anniversary and a birth day this week, so please raise a glass to him — instilled a respect for better beer in me from the moment I was (legally) allowed to drink. For my 21st birthday he gave me money for my first homebrew kit and his own weathered copy of Charlie Papazian’s The New Complete Joy of Home Brewing
Mike also played host for my first trip to The Brickskeller – a monumental event in any beer-drinker’s life and one which is only heightened by the accompaniment of a good guide.
He continuously reads, critiques and comments on my posts here at A Blog About Beer (especially in the early going when I thought no one else was listening) and encourages all he knows to visit the site. As sappy as this post has turned out to be — but with a Session topic like Stonch’s it comes as no surprise — Mike is a great beer enthusiast (as well as brother and friend) and beer mentor, and I certainly wouldn’t be in the position I am in today without his guidance. Cheers!
First, for any new readers unfamiliar with The Session, an explanation:
“The Session, a.k.a. Beer Blogging Friday, is an opportunity once a month for beer bloggers from around the world to get together and write from their own unique perspective on a single topic. Each month, a different beer blogger hosts the Session, chooses a topic and creates a round-up listing all of the participants, along with a short pithy critique of each entry… The idea for the Sessions began with fellow beer writer Stan Hieronymus, who noticed similar group endeavors in other blogospheres and suggested those of us in the beer world create our own project.”
[tags]beer, beer blog, The Session[/tags]
