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What’s up, beer geek! This is The Beer Scholar 6-Pack weekly newsletter, a short clean email featuring 6 bulleted links with brief descriptions for each.

Howdy beer geeks. I got so many compliments on my recent 6 Pack about your poor reading comprehension and the oligarch that owns Pabst/Rainier beer, that I mic dropped and took a week off. Fear not my IRIL friends (that's "in real internet life" for you old folks), for I hath returned to regale thee with my sultry tales. 

You know what I miss? Roadtrips with brewery visits. I've been living in Portland, OR for a year, during which time I've buried myself in Beer Scholar work. This is easy as it's usually dark and rainy outside. It'd been bothering me that I haven't seen much of Oregon, so I did two roadtrips since my last 6 Pack. One was an easy day trip into WA state on country roads that included a winery stop, a hike by a waterfall, and dinner at a fish market (PDX locals, this article guided me). The other roadtrip was a two day-er in Oregon's hop country that included visits to three breweries, Foreland in McMinnville, Block 15 in Corvallis, and Benedictine in Mount Angel. There happened to be a surprise German festival with all the trappings -- beer, sausage, polka, & Tracht (aka dirndls and lederhosen) -- going on in Mount Angel, too! 

Those roadtrips were, for me, a simple reminder that we don't need to fly to far flung destinations to discover new things or have a unique experience (not that I don't enjoy far flung). Even when you've lived somewhere for much longer than I've lived in Portland, there's bound to be loads of cool sh1t nearby you haven't seen or experienced. Get out there and explore! 
 
Beer of the Week: Benedictine's Tyrant, a 7.2%  ABV Cascadian Dark Ale, aka Black IPA. We all know and love the Trappists, but it turns out the Catholic Benedictine order also brews in several locations around the world, including since 2018 at Benedictine Brewing at Mt Angel Abbey in OR. The beer is great, but I especially love the chutzpa of selling a style that hasn't been popular for about 8 years in Belgian glass 375ml bottles!

Also, while I was there a few...youngsters, we'll call them...were having a very heated discussion at the table next to us. It was impossible not to hear them. It became apparent they were both seminary (?) students at the Abbey - the man was training to be a monk and the woman to be a nun. They were fighting over the exact meaning of some words she had texted him, but he was mostly just browbeating her over nothing. It was really obvious that they just desperately needed to bang it out, like so so so obvious ... the tension was thick. 🍌🍩 And that's all I have to say about Catholicism. 

Pics below: 🍺  Rubbing my face on the beer of the week. Like my new glasses? 😸 Rubbing my face on Beanie, my next door neighbor's cat that comes in my window for treats and naps. 🛩️  An F-14A Tomcat, i.e. the Top Gun fighter jet. It's hard to see but it's facing a hop field! This is the Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum in McMinnville, OR, which houses Howard Hughes' famous Spruce Goose plane among MANY amazing exhibits. I rubbed my face on that fighter jet, but forgot to get a pic...sorry. 🥵 My long time road trip companion goes by the code name "sweet pea." I rubbed my face on her, too. 

As always, here are 6 dope links for your Friday 6 Pack. Enjoy.

TBS 4-Pack
*** Once again I wrote too much already! ***

DOES DIHYDROMYRICETIC (DHM) ACTUALLY KEEP YOU FROM GETTING HUNGOVER?!
Identification of Dihydromyricetin and Metabolites in Serum and Brain Associated with Acute Anti-Ethanol Intoxicating Effects in Mice by a bunch of scientists for some medical journal. Have y'all heard of this? Have any experience with it? I'm really interested to hear any stories. DHM came to my attention recently and appeared to be a b.s. supplement / snake oil. It's sold as a hangover fix if you take a bunch during/after drinking. I was curious enough to search it and sure enough there are people out there who say it works. More interesting than the anecdotes, I ran across scientific papers that say it's likely legit (a primary issue seems to be "bioavailability," i.e. when you eat it you're only absorbing ~4% of it). Obviously, I got some to try. 


WHEN BEER ADS WERE FUN
Guinness ad "Dreamer" by Jonathan Glazer. Am I on mushrooms rn? Did you follow that? 


LIVE YOUR AUTHENTIC VOICE 
Taming the Mammoth: Why You Should Stop Caring What Other People Thinkby Tim Urban for WaitButWhy. Tim Urban is part of the Tim Ferris, James Clear, etc Inspirational Self Help Meme Guru-Industrial Complex crew. Those folks have figured a few things out and this is a cute piece about how our need to conform, aka fear of being ourselves, is driven by evolutionary traits that are no longer very relevant to our survival and definitely aren't good for our happiness and well being. Good stuff. 


BEER TRAVEL IS THE BEST TRAVEL
11 Tips for Planning an Amazing Beercation by Ron Watt for Beer Connoisseur. I've done a metric ton of beer travel and it usually comes down to things like, "I want to go to a homebrew festival in a high school gym in a remote town in Norway, so let's build a trip around that," or "I'm already near the Czech Republic so it'd be insane not to go to Prague for a few days and I'm going to hit up famous beer writer Evan Rail while I'm there," or it can be as simple as, "I haven't gone on many road trips lately and there are breweries over yonder." Maybe you don't play things so fast and loose? There are some interesting ways to think about setting up a trip with a beer component in this piece, which I especially think could be cool for sitting down and planning a big trip with a partner who is, like...not as into beer as you are.   

Peace out, y'all!

Chris