It’s fun to be able to share a beer with friends, but on a cold winter evening, it’s nice to be able to enjoy a tasty beverage in the comfort of my own home. But wait, I can have my cake and eat it, too – or perhaps that should be – have my beer and drink it, too. That’s where Skype or FaceTime comes in.

FaceTime with Ross

My son is in Roanoke and I have a friend in Canada and once in a while it’s nice to catch up over a beer. Even better if we happen to have the same beer on hand. When my buddy Scooter comes down from the cold we try to make sure that we swap 8 or 10 beers that we can then ‘share’ online at a future date.

Recently Ross and I had a beer over FT. I was a little jealous, though, because he had a very interesting bottle from Sly Fox. It was a triple called Incubus. I had a New Belgium Trippel which would have to do on my end. We both enjoyed the triples, but because they were different beers it was hard to make any comparison.

Picaroons Harvest Ale

A few Canadian beers

It takes some planning, but Scooter and I try to sample a beer or two from our collection of pairs. I have some of his Canadian beers and he has some American bottles from his last trip. During our last session we tried a Rickards Dark and a Picaroons Harvest Ale which sources local hops for this annual recipe. The interesting thing that we discovered was that, although these beers looked identical as first glance, they turned out to have been made using different hops. I don’t remember that varieties, but as we were comparing our tasting notes, we had rather different impressions of the two beers. Gee, who knew that the hops might affect the taste of the final product! There seems to be a movement in the US to do single hop beers – IPAs in particular – and apparently this is happening in Canada as well.

These five are awaiting another session.