With a re-shuffling of personal finances that would make Bernard Madoff stand up and slowly applaud it’s finally done – I’ve booked flight tickets to San Francisco and the Craft Brewers Conference this March!

Attending this event is something I’ve been wanting to do for years so please, just for a moment, humour me as I shout in words: San Francisco Baby! Hell Yeah!!!!

That’s so much better. Sorry about that. I came over all American for a moment there. The fact is however that I am ecstatic to be going across the Atlantic to see first hand what all this fuss is about with their beers.

As I recently wrote US craft beer continues to have a major influence on the way the Swedish beer scene is developing right now. A lot of the beer trends started over there eventually end up over here so I figured why not go straight to the source to find out what’s going on?

Those very nice people at the Brewers Association have already approved BeerSweden’s media credentials so I’ll be attending the show as a member of the press, which will hopefully make it easier for me to interview some of the brewers behind your favourite US craft beers and tour the conference tracking down new beer trends.

I’m also planning to get along to a couple of local microbreweries as well as some of the amazing brewpubs and beer bars San Francisco is famous for.

I’ll of course be blogging the entire trip, keeping you up-to-date with all the beery goings-on and even hope to do a spot of live streaming from within the conference hall itself to give you a rare insiders glimpse into the heart of the booming US craft beer industry.

I'll take that one. No, that one. No, that one. Hell I'll take them all!

But why the Craft Brewers Conference and not the Great American Beer Festival some of you might ask? Isn’t the CBC like a really big gathering of people selling steel pipes, silicon tubing and nipples (the valves, not the other kind) rather than, well, beer?

The answer is both yes and no. The CBC is the largest industry event for the craft beer community in the USA and so there are lots of companies there that provide the equipment that helps get the US beers you enjoy so much to your local Systembolaget.

But the CBC is also a wonderful meeting point for brewers and beery figureheads and represents an annual opportunity for the craft beer community to swap notes, update kit, check out the competition or simply just hang out with fellow beer fanatics without the insane numbers of festival goers the GABF attracts.

I promised you 2011 was going to be an amazing year of beer didn’t I!

(Despite all this good news I have to record my enormous frustration over the bizarre truth that it’s far easier for BeerSweden to gain acceptance and be treated as a member of the media in the USA than it is right here in Sweden. Just goes to prove the USA beer community has for several years recognised and embraced new media while some elements of the drinks industry in Sweden still view it with suspicion and distrust. Time to wake up I say, because I really think this Internet thing is here to stay).

Disclaimer – I’m a football nut. I’m also English. This is a very potent combination that can lead to silly behaviour, particularly when beer is added to the mix. Please take these World Cup episodes with a HUGE pinch of salt and see them for what they are intended to be – a bit of beery fun!

I really wanted this to work.

I’d taken home a quarter pounder with cheese for dinner and Bruce Springsteen was whipping the crowd into a patriotic frenzy as he blasted out Born in the USA on Spotify.

Conditions were as ideal as they could be considering I’m sitting 400 km south of the Arctic circle in Sweden to try my first ever glass of Spendrups’ new US-inspired Pistonhead Hot Roddin’ Lager

The bottle’s flaming skull motif was fairly eye-catching, as was the incorrect (brewed on…) and clumsy English (no bling??) on the back label. But these, I hoped, were merely scratches in this beer’s hot rod bodywork and that there was still a high performance brew revving up underneath the hood.

However instead of this……

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I got this.

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There’s no easy way to say this. Pistonhead is about as genuinely American as Arnold Schwarzeneggar. Spendrups promised a beer with attitude but delivers a lager that barely gets into first gear.

Appearance-wise Pistonhead is unspectacular – perhaps a shade more amber than most pale lagers with a bleached white head. The first clear sign that it has very little in the tank is the smell of it. American hops are known for their distinctive and explosive aromas of grapefruit, citrus and pine needles. Despite the fact that Pistonhead uses more than one US hop variety I just couldn’t locate them underneath thin smells of vegetables and butterscotch.

Taste-wise things went from bad to worse. Hash, metallic, raw malt flavours that thankfully vanished in one of the shortest aftertastes I’ve experienced in recent years of drinking beers. As for the hops…..they simply failed to turn up.

There seems little point in carrying on. In a previous post I gave kudos to Spendrups for seemingly breaking the brewery mould and daring to launch this beer. I still think they should be applauded for doing so, although I am hugely disappointed they didn’t give it the horsepower needed to make it worthy of the hype.

The back label proclaims Pistonhead comprises “only high quality parts and a lot of torque”.

Unfortunately it should read “a lot of talk” instead.

Pistonhead Hot Roddin’ Lager

A lager from Spendrups Brewery

5% ABV

Systembolaget Article Number: 1432-03