A Place to Gather and Talk
One of the FAQs of The Pour Fool, out of several thousand emails, in our first ten years, is this one or variations thereof…
“Can you help me understand hops? I know what they do but there are so many of them that I can’t keep them straight. How do they taste? Are they about more than bitterness? What’s the deal with these things, anyway?â€
Well…how much time do ya have? This is a HUGE subject.
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Bamberg’s one of those places that you immediately sense is a beer town. The moment you step off the train on any given day, you’re greeted with the sweet aromas of malt from the Weyermann facility just north of the train station. And oh, the aromas in the air! A cascade of caramel and brown sugar sweetness, hazelnuts and chocolate, malted milk, freshly baked dark bread, and cookie dough!
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By now, you’ve read and heard quite enough wordplay about “Can Do†and the other dozen or so can-related descriptors that are applied to breweries which “buck the conventional wisdom†and put their suds into sealed metal cylinders. I’ll spare you another one and just observe that, if you are one of those benighted souls who STILL believes that cans are some cheap marketing trick or that you can “taste the can“, you should seriously think about getting with it. Cans are a FAR superior vessel, in nearly every way that matters, to glass bottles. They don’t suddenly spring leaks from the cap, don’t shatter and cover your floor or car or cooler with blood-seeking shards and stale beer aroma for two weeks, and they chill LOTS faster than do the traditional glass packaging.
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Apparently it happened at a campground in Port Hedland, Australia where some careless campers left their beer out before they went to bed . Not realizing the danger they put their beer in, it was reported to the campsite owners that there had been a pig running around the past few nights getting into people’s belongings. One camper who was set up across from the victims said they woke up and witnessed it all.
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Eight years ago, Dogfish Head and Boston Beer Company teamed up to brew a collaboration beer for the annual SAVOR craft beer and food pairing experience.
Today, the two companies announced the signing of a definitive merger agreement valued at about $300 million.
The deal is expected to close in the second quarter.
As part of the transaction, Dogfish Head co-founders Sam and Mariah Calagione will receive about 406,000 shares of Boston Beer stock (NYSE: SAM), valued at $314.60 per share, making them the largest non-institutional shareholders in the company, behind Boston Beer founder Jim Koch.
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Low side medium carbonation that approaches just medium. Low side medium body. No warmth. No creaminess. No astringency.
Aroma: grape like, concord to be specific. No hops noticed, debittered slightly darker malts-like sense way in background. Very fruity sense, again concord grape.
Visually about 31 srm almost no head dark red: almost burgundy. Deep orange almost red highlights under light. For this dark good clarity. Pours as a big head slight off white with slight purplish highlights. A lot of small to tiny bubbles. Fades very, very fast.
Finishes slightly dry with a concord grape-like aftertaste. Medium body, slight tart finish too. No hops noted except maybe slightest bitter that is also grape skin tannin-like. Yet there is also the slightest fruit sweet behind the dry.
Immensely enjoyable I would sip this night after night: buy a six and maybe one after that. Not all that sour: just a hint with the tart. The tart is supportive, not dominate. Concord grape sense dominates. Could use hint more malt sense. Describe more as “tart†because that works better than sour.
3.9 BA
3.6 untappd
89 RB/56 style
All of which would mean I’d be scoring it lower these days if someone entered something like that. Most likely it wouldn’t win in a barleywine only competition. In the 90s I remember a lot of barelywines were like this; the few brewpubs that served them and the few bottled examples on the shelf. Not all. However the profile has been shifted, from what I remember when I first started judging in the 90s, to reflect the higher hop usage/ibus trend.
Are we so significantly changing profiles sometimes we eliminate older, still worthy, subcategories? Continue reading “A Beer Judge’s Diary: Should We Be Eliminating Styles?”
The brewmasters at Tennessee Brew Works are doing their part to try to improve international relations with their latest collaboration, this time with Killarney Brewery Co., an independent Irish Craft brewery located in Killarney, County Kerry, Ireland. The two companies have struck up a relationship and an agreement to travel to each other’s locations to create unique beers, one here in Nashville and another on the Emerald Isle.
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What’s in a Date? 23 April, Lagers, and Beer Gardens
In brewers’ lore of yore, April meant more than showers bringing May flowers. In fact, the Feast of St. George on 23 April has influenced both the emergence of lager beers and the shaded beer gardens in which they have long been consumed.
Despite the best efforts of those who promulgated the Reinheitsgebot (Purity Law) of 1516, the quality of Bavarian beer remained uneven. In 1553, Albrecht V took steps to remedy the situation, declaring that Bavarians could brew beer only between St. Michael’s Day (September 29) and St. George’s Day (April 23). One reason prompting the decree of 1553 was a fear of summer fires caused by hot brew kettles. More importantly, though, brewers and the authorities who knew a good beer had, by the mid-1550s, learned a thing or two about the beneficial effects of cold fermentation on beer quality.
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