A Place to Gather and Talk
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.
Continue reading “Beer Profile: Hop Harvest; Wet Hop Ale Sierra Nevada”
“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.”
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”
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
615-503-9626Take 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”
Regulation Problems During the Civil War
The USBA claimed that they could not have removed beer brewed before September 1st without destroying it. To substantiate this, the brewers continually explained, to anyone who would listen, the manufacturing process of lager beer. Brewers made lager in winter; they stored this “stock” beer in underground vaults, preferably directly below the brewery, attempting to maintain as cold a temperature as possible through the summer season. St. Louis had natural limestone caves; brewers used ice from the from the Mississippi…
-From Brewing Battles, a History of American Beer by Amy Mittelman
Rise of the Malting Plants
…malting tended to become separated from brewing proper. Malting became a distinct industry. Even in colonial times there seem to have been independent malting plants. In Oneida County, NY we find a malting plant not connected to any brewery in the year 1910. In Albany (NY) the first one was established in 1823. In the sixties (1800s) there was everywhere noticeable, in addition to the expansion of the brewing industry, a general separation of the malting from the brewing business.
Scroll to pg. 68-67
by Herman Schluter (First published in 1910)
