DRAFT Magazine

Bicycling Magazine recently listed the top 11 beers that are “tied to cycling in name, label, or by support from the brewery.”

I’ll save the suspense and let you know that, yes, New Belgium’s Fat Tire made the list, as well as Flying Dog’s Tire Bite Golden Ale.

The article also unearthed a good variety of more obscure beers, such as the Pike Tandem Double Ale (described as “like a hybrid of the dark Belgian style with an American IPA”) and Arbor Brewing Company’s Tree Fort Beer (”likely the only beer brewed in collaboration with a bike shop”).

Check out the full list here.

Oh, and by the way, this is the 100th Beer Runner blog post. Here’s how it all started. Thanks for reading, everyone.

Via Beer Activist and Bicycling Magazine

Far — far! — be it from me to gossip about the affairs of other magazines. But this case of public dirty-laundry drama at Bicycling magazine is too juicy to ignore.

Recently, Bicycling cut ties with its Style Man columnist after a decade-long ride. Style Man — who appointed himself an authority on such matters as butt-foaming spandex — zeroed in on Esquire-esque sartorial commentary in the expanding materialism of the cycling world.

Until now. In explaining the divorce, Editor In Chief Loren Mooney minced no words:

“He was done. Played out. Devoid of any new insight since back in 2004, when he invoked Soren Kierkegaard’s inverted Platonic paradigm to define a mountain bike helmet,” she writes in her May editor’s note.

She also added that he was a “pathetic, repetitive boor.”

Burn!

Actually, I doubt that’s really as harsh as it sounds. It was probably meant as a semi-ironic tribute to Style Man’s self-aware strident tone, proudly proclaiming to “offend the sensitive.”

In any event, we do now live in a different era than in 1999, and one Bicycling letter-writer proclaimed Style Man’s world to be “surface-deep, just for looks, pricey and detached for reality.” It is time to move on.

So in his place as columnist Bicycling has anointed the ANTI-Style Man: BikeSnobNYC.

If you’re not already familiar with BikeSnobNYC — and you should be if you’re reading this blog — the blogger is fiercely indepedent, DIY, and anti-authoritarian. Beer makes appearances in BSNYC, whether mocking fixed-gear hipsters’ love of cheap canned beer or telling stories that entail “pulled the wing off a dead pigeon, shotgunned a beer, and wrote my name in blood.”

It will be interesting to see if the Snob retains that edge as columnist for a corporate behemoth.

Evidence from the first column is inconclusive. It rails against the token Bike to Work Week and takes jabs at Oprah. Um, pretty tough targets, huh?

The Snob predicted as much.