Thursday, February 5, 2009

A minor complaint

I'm drinking a fantastic beer right now, but as is my wont, I see the glass as half-empty.*  Here's the beer:
It's a really delicious, hoppy beer.  It's as if someone were smashing a pink grapefruit on my face, and I mean that in the best possible way.  It's about as good as 3 Floyd's Dreadnaught, which might be the best beer I've ever had.  Even better, it comes in 12 oz bottles instead of the 22 oz. bomber that Dreadnaught is sold in.

Complaints I don't have, but could:
  • It's expensive.  It costs $18 a 6-pack, which is pretty extreme, even for someone who's used to paying about $10 per 6-pack (Alpha King).  However, I'm generally happy to pay $10 for a 4-pack of Dogfish Head 90 Minute IPA, so that's pretty close on a per-bottle basis.  And compared to Dreadnaught ($11 for 22 oz.), it's a bargain.
  • It's seasonal.  It's only available in January and February.  In fact, when I bought 2 6-packs last week, the beer guy said he was surprised he still had any left.    The limited availability doesn't bother me, and I'm not sure why.  It might be due to the fact that this is the first year I've tried the beer, so I'm not familiar with the 10.5 month period of longing. Instead, I'm just savoring each one, knowing that my supply is extremely limited.
Here's my issue:
I don't know how to type the name of the beer.  (You may have noticed that I've avoided mentioning it by name.)  I'm pretty nitpicky and I like to identify things appropriately, but I have no idea whether to capitalize the S.  My go-to beer site (beeradvocate.com) lists it as "HopSlam".  But Bell's website lists it as "Hopslam".  And maybe the brewer's website should be the last word, but there are two more arguments for capitalization:
  1. The label strongly hints at a capital S.  Look at it - the S is almost twice as large as the preceding p.
  2. A capitalized S really distinguishes the two components of the name.  It says, "This is a Hop Slam.  You are about to get slammed by a large batch of hops."  A lower-case s doesn't carry the same impact.
So I deem it HopSlam.  I really hate the idea that I'm effectively telling Bell's (the brewer) that they're misspelling the name of one of their beers.  But HopSlam seems to be such a dominant name relative to Hopslam that I feel ok doing it.  








*My glass is quite literally half-empty right now, but I mean this more in the figurative sense.

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