Month: March 2025

    A casual review of one of Utica area’s newer breweries..

    Ken Carman is a BJCP judge; homebrewer since 1979, club member at Salt City Homebrewers in Syracuse, NY. Former member of Escambia Bay Brewers, Clarksville Carboys and Music City Homebrewers. Ken has been writing on beer-related topics, and interviewing professional brewers all over the east coast, for well over 30 years.

    I know I haven’t written for quite a while, and I apologize. Living now in the Adirondacks, and no longer on the road like I was for 30 years and almost 10 months a year, well, I just don’t have all the breweries to write about.
    Except a small local brewery in Old Forge, to get to breweries we are about 70 miles away. And, of course, driving that kind of distance after sampling has its issues. With Grow I was lucky: they come up here for festivals like Snofest.
    This will be just an introduction. Perhaps I’ll write more; sometimes I like to provide a detailed perspective from a BJCP beer judge as if I were doing a scoresheet: one on each might I judge.
    Before this, IMO, the best top notch breweries within 100 miles were Woodland in Marcy, NY (just north of Utica) and Buried Acorn in Syracuse. It’s not that the others are “bad.” Some are quite good. Just not as remarkable, in comparison. Or that inventive, in comparison.
    Whether barreled, or some new take on older styles, the brews here edge out most of the others.
    Like ale yeast Grow is rising to the top. If nothing else is mentioned, I dare not skip their barrel aged barleywines. Like their other brews balance is superb. As Certified BJCP judges Millie and I can vouch for the fact that barrel aged beer can suffer from, “Damn, I think I’m just chewing on wood” syndrome. (Not an official term, I made it up.) Another syndrome, when the barrel previously had brandy, whiskey, whatever, in it I would call that the “Damn, if I just wanted to drink whiskey I would have BOUGHT whiskey” syndrome. (Yup, made it up again.) Continue reading “Brew Biz Werts and All: Grow Brewing”

Written by Franz Hofer for A Tempest in a Tankard

My Kind of Beer
Around this time last year I penned a series that began with an account of my tastes in beer, followed by an exploration of the kinds of beers I like. The series ended with a list of twenty-five beers that had caught my attention over the previous year.

The latter post resonated particularly well (people seem to love lists), so I’m back this year with a selection of beers worth seeking out in 2025. Since 2024 was a busy year for travel for me, I’m spotlighting fifty beers this year. You might also want to pair this list with the one I wrote last year. That’ll give you an additional twenty-five beers for your beer hunting adventures.

A Few Notes
Selection: As with last year, I confine my selection to beers I drank during the previous year. I returned to some places I hadn’t visited in decades, and visited some cities and regions for the first time. You’ll see beers from the Allgäu (a region that straddles Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg), Heidelberg, Karlsruhe, northern Germany (Lübeck, Stralsund, Berlin), and also Central Germany (Goslar, Göttingen). You’ll also see plenty of beers from Belgium, which I visited for the first time since the pandemic. What you won’t see are many beers from North America. That’s not a commentary on all the fine beers that surround me here.

Want to read more? Please click… HERE!!!