Sarah Bennett

Drinking double IPAs is so 2011.

See also: Top 6 Los Angeles Breweries to Watch in 2013

It seems that every year, brewers across the country align on some psychic wavelength that motivates those with adventurous spirits to expand on a new, emerging beer style. Last year, anniversary beers and specialty one-offs became double black IPAs -- roasty, hoppy, boozy guys that warm the soul while wrecking palettes.

2012, however, was the year of the triple IPA -- an amped up version of the already-amped-up double IPA style made popular by the annual release of Russian River Brewing Company's much sought-after Pliny the Younger. The hype surrounding the brew -- which every Spring brings lines of obsessive's to bars offering first-come-first-serve pours of the stuff -- is almost understandable since until this year, Pliny the Younger was one of the few examples of this resinous, bitter style in existence.

Triple IPAs are such a new style that most national competitions (including the Great American Beer Festival) have yet to recognize it as its own distinct category, forcing most of the high-alcohol, hopped-to-hell beers to compete under "Imperial/Double IPA" headers. But the actual line between a double and a triple IPA is amorphous at best.

Some say that any IPA over 10%ABV should be considered a triple. Still, beers that might fit the ABV and hop-burn requirements -- such as Knuckle Sandwich from Fullerton's Bootlegger's Brewery -- are still labeled as a double IPA, leaving the term "triple IPA," at this point, more of a marketing preference than an official style.

Lack of official recognition, however, does not make the triple IPA any less formidable. We spent this year stumbling across nearly a dozen samples of the beefy style and before 2013 brings even more experimentation (smoked black saison, we're looking at you!), we wanted to remind ourselves of the best five. Turn the page for the best locally available versions of these hop-head wet dreams.

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Jim Thurman

Shen Jian Bao, Shang Ming, San Gabriel

The end of the year marks a time to re-evaluate, a time to step back and try to figure out exactly what the heck it was all about. Take for example, the food trends of 2012 in the San Gabriel Valley. We got word out through social media, message boards and e-mail asking those familiar with goings on in the SGV for their thoughts on trends, notable openings and notable closings for the year. With a big thanks to Kristie Hang of the (626) Foodettes website for throwing the net even wider, here is what folks came up with:

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G. Snyder

Summer salad at Alma

Every year dining trends come and go -- on the suface 2012 might not have looked like the most eventful year, aside from the foie gras ban and some high-profile restaurant closures. But like the Santa Ana's, the winds of change are forever blowing in L.A., and the seeds of what will likely arrive in 2013 have already been planted by some of the less noticeable developments in 2012. Here are some the most important changes we noticed this year that will likely change the way you eat next year.

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Jim Thurman

Spicy City, San Gabriel

As the calendar prepares to turn the page on yet another year, it's tradition time here at Squid Ink. A time for us to look back on the year and note restaurant openings and closings. When attempting to do this with the San Gabriel Valley, where an estimated 600 Chinese restaurants make up a vibrant scene with all the stability of quicksand, this can prove difficult. Restaurants that change names, change English names, change owners while retaining chefs, change menus and regional cuisines or relocate under entirely new names are all part of the SGV's grand pageant and maddening for those attempting to keep track.

It all adds up to a task more Sisyphean than Herculean. But, thanks to the record keeping of David Chan, Tony Chen's Meanwhile, In SGV updates at Eater LA, some folks at Chowhound and our own legwork, we came up with the following list of 2012 openings and closings in the SGV. And, as usual, a few opened and shuttered in the same year, with at least one space housing three different restaurants in 2012. We've listed those under closed, as there's no need for redundancy. We're bound to have missed some, so let us know in the comments or by e-mail. We fully expect a few additions to both sides of the ledger before 2013 dawns. Turn the page.

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theperfectlyhappyman.com

In the last twelve months, the craft beer world has welcomed new flavors from a slew of emerging styles including the rye saison (Avery's Eighteen), the wheat IPA (El Segundo Brewing's Picket Fence) and the seasonal imperial pumpkin ale (Flying Dog's The Fear). But no new style was more exciting for lovers of intense beers than the delicious marrying of dark malts, floral hops and high alcohol content that is a Double Black IPA.

Also known an Imperial Black IPA, these beers are a boozy extension of last year's most recognized emerging style -- Cascadian Dark Ales, a Pacific Northwest creation that has also been called a Black IPA, India Black Ale or India Dark Ale (the semantic debate raged so hard that when including it as a judged beer style for the first time in 2010, the Great American Beer Festival decided upon "American-Style India Black Ale").

But if 2010 was the year of the CDA -- bringing attention to Oregon breweries such as Deschutes and Rogue -- 2011 was the year the style left Cascadia and got even darker and more bitter at the hands of brewers in California and beyond. Turn the page for the top 4 Double Black IPAs that saw their first release in 2011.

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marcopierrewhite.org

Marco Pierre White in Afghanistan

One of the beautiful things about journalism, not unlike therapy, is that you get to talk to people about themselves. In this case, we have the enormous privilege of being able to take our notepads and recorders and iPhones into the kitchens and restaurants -- or hotel lobbies and neighborhood coffee houses -- of chefs and cookbook authors and other people in this industry. We ask them about their food, their projects, their lives, and they answer -- sometimes telling stories far beyond this plate or that menu. It is a joy, sometimes even an honor.

So to mark the end of the year (yeah, yeah, we're in full Dick-Clark-Anderson-Cooper mode here) we've collected 10 of our favorite interviews from 2011. Oh, and while it is true that one of these technically took place in 2010, once you see who it is, you'll get why we fudged the dates a bit. Wouldn't you?

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Anne Fishbein

Dan dan mian at Chuan Yu

As 2011 clicks down, Jonathan Gold considers the 10 best dishes of the year, a list that reads like a hopscotch through the strip mall neighborhoods and stalled streets of this town. Marrowbones and tsukemen. Stuffed squid and bacon biscuits. Almost makes you hungry.

Dan dan mian is at its best dialed up to 11, reddened with tons of oily chile sludge and zapped with enough fresh Sichuan peppercorns to leave your gums numb for a week.

Read the complete story in Gold's Counter Intelligence, "Let's Dish," and check out Anne Fishbein's photo gallery. Then maybe get in your car.

T. Nguyen

Clockwise: Pourover coffee at Coffee Tomo; an espresso from Handsome Coffee Roasters; siphon filters at Demitasse Cafe; a cappuccino from Broome St. General Store

Like National Coffee Day, summing up the Year in Coffee compels a certain knee-jerk response: every year is the year in coffee. But, then again, not every year is a year in great coffee. With over a dozen new coffee shops, several new homegrown coffee roasters, and customers willing to learn about what's in their cup, 2011 was a great year for great coffee.

This great year was several years in the making, and we can credit shops Klatch Coffee, Jones Coffee Roasters, Caffe Luxxe, Venice Grind and Intelligentsia, among others, for laying the foundation. Crucially, once that foundation set, there still was plenty of room for innovation and experimentation: the great thing about the developing coffee culture here, we were told time and time again, is that L.A. is essentially a blank slate. Without the burden of a well-established coffee scene like, say, Seattle, shop owners had carte blanche to forge their own path and plant their own unique flags. And that they did.

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A. Scattergood

It was a bad year for orange fruit (papayas, cantaloupes) and leafy greens (especially romaine). Ground turkey took a big hit (36 million pounds recalled), and raw milk products were pulled from shelves. Here's a look back at 2011 in food recalls, a year of E. coli conundrums, Listeria hysteria and Salmonella scares.

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Anne Fishbein

Maize cake Gambas at Playa

Food photography, as most of us who read food blogs these days know, is a lot harder than it sometimes looks. Restaurants so dim you need a flashlight to see your menu. Irate dinner companions who do not appreciate your Diane Arbus jokes while they're waiting for you to shoot their food from a dozen angles. Cluttered tables. Main dishes hidden behind strangely unphotogenic garnishes. Broken sauces. Melting ice cream. Hunks of meat.

Anne Fishbein, who has been photographing food for the Weekly for the last dozen or so years, makes it look effortless. We've watched her stow her gear under a tiny chair in the cramped closet of an unpronounceable restaurant in Koreatown, click through a swiftly disappearing banquet -- no room to maneuver, bad lighting, questionable bowls of bubbling soybeans -- with results that could hang in a gallery. Which of course they have. Fishbein's photography can be found not only in these pages, but in the Art Institute of Chicago, New York's Museum of Modern Art, National Gallery of Canada, Norton Family Collection and the San Francisco Museum of Fine Art. Oh, and she has a book too, with some pretty amazing photos of Russian bakers, among other portraits. Turn the page for 10 of our favorites from 2011. (Something to think about the next time you're shooting your dinner with your phone.)

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