For me, this album provided a vivid soundtrack of my formative impressions of this country as I hitchhiked around the West in the early ‘70s, impressions which eventually led me to settle here.

I’m always impressed that these dinosaurs of rock are still doing what they are doing, touring and playing music. Another everready troubadour is Bob Dylan — author of “The Neverending Tour,” he always seems to be playing somewhere. He turns 69 in a couple of days. I have a birthday coming up too — quicker and quicker they come, eh?

And so we observe the graying of the craft brewing community, the pioneers who set sail on the choppy seas of craft beer 20 and 30 years ago. The recent sale of Anchor Brewing and the retirement from beer of Fritz Maytag sent some minor shockwaves through the craft brewing community. What? The Godfather of Craft Beer is hanging it up? Fellow Californian Ken Anderson is hanging it up too — he recently sold his Boonville Brewing Co.

What does this mean for us? For craft brewing? In an industry whose face is embodied as much by the personalities that populate it as the beer they make (we pride ourselves on being a 98 percent ***hole -free industry), what will happen when these faces are gone? Faces like the trio who received industry awards at the Craft Brewers Conference in Chicago — brewer and technician supreme Ken Grossman of Sierra Nevada, former AP journalist Steve Hindy of Brooklyn Brewery and Larry Bell of Bell’s Brewing who quipped that he opened a commercial brewery because he didn’t want to go to jail — for selling homebrew to his friends.

To be sure, there will be more brewery sales, and probably to faceless beverage groups too. But it would also seem that there are plenty of personalities getting into craft beer, youthful brewers who have as much passion for beer as the early pioneers. Maybe even more.

Still, I believe the half century or so that began in, say, 1975, will be looked upon as a unique period in brewing history — unprecedented and perhaps unrepeatable. As brewers boldly go where none have gone before, we salute the pioneers, and we salute Fritz Maytag.

Whether it is new ground or old ground, the wholesale trend to barrel-aging beer cannot be ignored. Brewers are using wood in a big way, to add flavors of wine and spirits, or to expose beer to critters (bacteria) that live in the wood, and sour the beers.

At the Craft Brewing Conference in Chicago, Peter Bouckaert, who brought his Belgian barrel knowhow to New Belgium Brewing Co., told me a story about being introduced to Jim Koch when he first came to the U.S. “Ah, you’re the Bug Guy,” the Boston Beer prez said. When I told Bouckhaert that Boston beer had installed three foedors (large wooden fermenting barrels) at his Boston brewery, he said, “So Jim is a Bug Guy now too.”

Yes, there are a lot of Bug Guys out there now. In this issue, we take a look at where all these barrels come from — who the hell is drinking all that Bourbon? asks Warren “BeerSensei” Monteiro — and what’s being done with them.

So pervasive is the barrel-aging thing, that we were forced to tighten the focus of our blind tasting to “sour” barrel-aged beers only. Among the 15 samples, there was nary a bad one.

I need a clone! The weekend of June 5, I can’t go to the SAVOR food and beer extravaganza in D.C because I am at the Mondial de la biere festival in Montreal. For the same reason I cannot catch the first weekend of Philly Beer Week, but I will be there for the second, catching up on some of the more than 800 events planned during a  10-day span. Phew!

After that Boston has its Beer Week, and the NY Brewfest comes to Governor’s Island in NYC June 19. It’s going to be a busy season! So, get out there and enjoy some of this plethora of beer events, enjoy this issue, and enjoy the summer.