Author: Professor Good Ales

 

The craft beer boom, which can and has been attributed to millennials, has been kind to brewers like Samuel Adams, which have been brewing craft beers for the past 30 years – when millennials weren’t even born.

The increasing interest in craft beers hasn’t gone unnoticed by beer giants like MillerCoors and Anheuser-Busch. As a result, the two companies have tried their hands at scooping up a part of the market for themselves – MillerCoors’ with Blue Moon and Anheuser-Busch with Shock Top. Their efforts haven’t been for nothing. According to Moody’s, Shock Top is the fastest growing craft beer. Similarly, the number of Americans drinking Blue Moon doubled in the last four years. And while many fans of real craft beers – those brewing 6m barrels a year or less – argue that those aren’t real craft beers, semantics matter little when it comes to sales.

It’s hard to compete with companies like that when it comes to production, admits Jim Koch, founder of Boston Beer Company, which brews Samuel Adams beers. Boston Beer Company has 1,000 employees and trains them to be cicerones, meaning they are to beer what sommeliers are to wine. Koch talks about making beer for creativity, quality and taste – throwing in rose hips and other garden-scented ingredients into a spring beer and expanding product offerings.

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Profiled by Maria Devan for PGA

Pours with exceptional clarity. Light gold with lots of lager bubbles wafting toward the top to meet a fat soapy head of white foam that had better retention that I thought It might.

Nose is crisp with only a slight bit of apple, sweet grain and a bright hops character. A bit of lemon from those pride of ringwood hops as it warms.

Taste follows the nose all the way. The malt stays in the background until it warms and brings a light dry cracker. The apple is thin and delicious adding something cheerful and crisp. The carbonation has a small bite and the yeast imparts a bit of sourness to really round out this beer. Even though the middle is quite dry and palate cleansing, this beer finishes off dry and with a bit of sweet lemon and is very delicious. I would have this again.

Welcome to the PGA beer rating system: one beer “Don’t bother.” Two: Eh, if someone gives it to you, drink. Three: very good, go ahead and seek it out, but be aware there is at least one problem. Four: seek it out. Five: pretty much “perfecto.”

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Maria Devan lives in Ithaca, NY and is frequent reviewer of beer and a beer lover deluxe.

(Reuters) – Beer fans line up every winter at Intuition Ale Works in north Florida for the annual tapping of Underdark, a world-class dark brew aged for a year in bourbon barrels that sells out quickly even at $15 a bottle.

Ben Davis, who owns the four-year-old local craft brewery in Jacksonville, counts on Underdark’s two-day spike in revenue to grow his small business.

But a bill pending in the Florida Senate that would cut into Underdark’s profit has craft beer-makers crying foul.

The law would force craft brewers to sell their bottled and canned beer directly to a distributor. If they want to sell it in their own tap rooms, they would then have to buy it back at what is typically a 30-40 percent mark-up without the bottles or cans ever leaving the brewery, according to Joshua Aubuchon, a lawyer and lobbyist for the Florida Brewers Guild.

The rule would not apply to draft beer.

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The resources for the study of George Washington at The New York Public Library are important, and include such singular icons as the autograph manuscript of the great man’s Farewell Address to his fellow citizens upon leaving the Presidency. But certainly the most effervescent item of Washingtoniana in The New York Public Library is the first President’s personal recipe for “small beer,” which appears in the notebook dating from 1757 that Washington kept while he served as a colonel in the Virginia militia.

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