Professor Good Ales

Pensacola Area

Historically, the club’s elected officials have served for two years unless there is someone wanting to take office. So unless someone wants one of the offices the current elected officials have agreed to stay on for an additional year. The one exception is Carol Monroe wants to step down after several 2-year stints as Secretary. She has somehow convinced Buddy Mogle to take her job for the remainder of the 2 years that the rest of the elected officials are staying for. Unless anyone has an issue with these initiatives we will skip the elections this year and move on till the end of 2010 with myself as president, Mark Robertson as Vice President, Buddy Mogle as Secretary and Jim Martin as Treasurer. Make sure to thank Carol for all those years of faithful service to the club (and for those wonderful newsletters she sends out).

A change has been put in place for adding new members. As of this month all new members must fill out a written application which has to be approved by the elected officials before being approved. This process was put in place so that we could better control growth of the club by insuring there was an interest in homebrewing by the potential new member before being allowed to join. The written application will be posted on the website in the near future. We’ll discuss this more at the meeting on Sunday.

See you Sunday at the club meeting. Ozone Pizza at 4:oopm. We’ll meet in the new (Larger) room behind the kitchen. Just tell them you’re there for the meeting and they will point you to the new room.

Pat Johnson
850-261-9218

Continue reading “Club Update: EBH”

This is a trend in the industry, and has been since at least 1988. Yeasts from ships found at the bottom of the ocean, beers brewed by our forefathers. Here is an example of many of the past offerings in the industry. This by Anchor Brewing: Sumerian beer.

“Which came first? Beer or bread? A fascination with this question led to the recreation of a 2,700-year-old Sumerian beer, a project undertaken by Fritz Maytag, owner of San Francisco’s Anchor Brewing, and Dr. Solomon Katz, a bioanthropologist at the University of Pennsylvania’s Museum of Archeology and Anthropology.”

“Maytag had read a story in Expeditions, UPenn’s museum publication, of the beer vs. bread debate first posed in the 1950s. Robert Braidwood of the University of Chicago had written that there was a cause-effect relationship between bread malting and the domestication of cereal grains. Jonathan D. Sauer, a botanist from the University of Wisconsin, countered by suggesting that the first uses of domesticated cereals may have been for beer rather than bread. Braidwood decided to hold a symposium on the subject for the journal American Anthropologist titled, ‘Did man once live by beer alone?'”

And…
Continue reading “Historical Beer”

Nice foamy head with just a bit of “pillow” to it. Long lasting. Big Cascade nose. A slightly hazy deep gold. Chill haze? Mouth filled with carbonation and hop cling. Once I opened it up to the taste buds, hops dominante.

Profile by Ken Carman

Continue reading “Beer Profile: Hop Harvest; Wet Hop Ale Sierra Nevada”

10 Ancient Gods of Beer

“In Ancient Greek mythology, Silenus is the God of beer and a drinking companion. He is usually associated with his buddy, Dionysus. He is often featured as a bald and fat man, with a big beer belly. He is normally drunk and it is said that he had to be carried either by donkeys or satyrs…”

Here’s the LINK

“Reporting bad beer and bad beer news so you can do better than drinking or thinking crap.”

Professor Good Ales says: pronounced like “‘report’ as in Stephen Colbert Report.”

Written by Ye Olde Scribe

FINALLY. A beer column again. Been so many years since Hopping Around stopped hopping Scribe thought the whole beer blog biz would CASCADE without him. Not really. Just FUGGLE-ING with you.
Continue reading “Ye Olde Scribe’s Bad Beer Report”

Written by Ken Carman

Without intent, I have collected well over 1,000 beer bottles since the early 70s. When something finally had to be done about the cheap paneling in this old modular, I had a choice. Tear down the walls while, oh, so carefully, replacing the often rotted 1X3s. Or: cover them with… The Bottle Collection.

My first experience with true dark beer was in Montreal; a little second story Irish pub called Finnegans; probably named after the Irish song most notably made famous by Tom Makem and the Clancy Brothers before they broke up and followed another cliche’d Irish tradition… had a brawl over the rights to songs that in many cases were odes to drunkenness. Common guys, great way to confirm our often wrong preconceived notions about certain heritages.

That was Guinness Foreign Export.

But I was headed that way already. You see: I thought I hated beer. Pretty much all that was available at the timm in Upstate was the lighter fare: lager clones of Bud, or Bud itself. Same style, ever so slight variations. Even Cream Ale… as in Genny Cream for example, while being an ale, is a stylistic attempt to create a more lager-like beverage out of an ale yeast.

I didn’t know at the time that not all Bocks were dark. That’s just all that was sold locally. Never heard of Blonde Bock back then; or Eisbock, or Doppelbock. But Bock; even the only Bock we could buy in the early 70s, while still a lager, has a bit of a more complex malt bill hiding a sulfur-like lager yeast tang that annoys me. It also seems to limit the DMS taste that’s a bit like drinking water out of a can of unsweetened/”low sodium” corn. In almost every other style it’s called a defect at the high levels that especially corn-adjunct brewed lagers have. Rice is problematic too, in my opinion. Body suffers where there was little body to begin with. Make it thinner? Oh boy. Like going out of your way to make Twiggy-like creatures seem voluptuous.

While I drank a lot of these back when we were closer to the days of Marilyn Monroe than Marilyn Manson, I’m not sure they were real Bocks. I suspect these days I’d be repelled because what was available in Upstate NY was probably more food coloring-driven than a beverage brewed with a more complex, malt bill. But at the time it actually made beer worth drinking as long as “other” was occasionally available too. Previous to that I spent more time in a place I never visit anymore: mixed drink land.

Bocks that I remember were available to mid-Upstaters at the time include…
Continue reading “From the Bottle Collection: Bock to the 70s”

Nashville area

November meeting at Cool Springs Brewery for Saturday, November 14 at 2PM.

The directions from Nashville are:
Cool Springs Brewery
600A Frazier Drive
Suite 135
FranklinTN 37067
615-503-9626

Take I-65 South toward Franklin and exit at the Cool Springs Blvd. WEST exit (Exit No. 68B). After entering Cool Springs Blvd., merge to the outside left turn lane to turn left (South) onto Mallory Lane. Turn on the first street (not named) to the right in front of the FedEx store. Drive down the unnamed street in front of the strip mall where FedEx is located until you see Cool Springs Brewery on the left. If you see Sperry’s and Thomasville Furniture, you’ve gone too far.

Note: article to follow in a few days.

Mid South results…
Continue reading “Club Update: Music City Brewers”

Profile by Ken Carman

Continue reading “Beer Profile: Ommegang’s Rare Vos”