A Place to Gather and Talk
Massachusetts native Todd Ruggere finished a 266 day quest in September to drink a beer in each of the 351 towns in his home state. The beer tour raised money for cancer research.
In January, Ruggere will begin the same mission in Connecticut.
Ruggere, a 39-year-old from Grafton, Mass., said he came up with the idea when he was trying to list all the towns in Massachusetts.
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Looking for the perfect book for a craft beer lover — or yourself?
This has been another banner year for books about beer, with volumes written on everything from food pairings to hops, so there’s something on this list for everyone.
If you love food as much as beer — and who doesn’t? — you can’t go wrong with John Holl’s “American Craft Beer Cookbook” (Storey, $19.95, 352 pages), which has 155 mouthwatering recipes, including 14 contributed by Bay Area breweries such as Gordon Biersch and 21st Amendment.
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Samuel Adams releases its Utopias beer every two years at an insane price, and every batch is very different.
To start off: This year’s edition retails at $199 for a 750ml bottle. The reason is that while it is technically a beer, it smells, tastes and drinks like a liqueur and is 56 proof, or 28% alcohol content.
For those not familiar with Utopias, it is made with a combination of aged strong ale and storage in various combinations of whiskey, brandy, rum and/or wine casks. Every batch differs greatly.
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Image of sour beer brands courtesy nytimes.com
Yesterday I got into a discussion about what adjustments needed to be made to accurately determine the alcohol content of a sour beer. I’d always assumed that the souring process didn’t have much effect on the standard method, using a formula that takes into account the OG of the wort and the FG of the beer, but I’d never spent any time looking into it.
When we calculate the amount of alcohol in a beer we are judging the relative density of the wort before- and after fermentation. This reduction in density (specific gravity) comes from a couple sources (including yeast biomass growth), but most of it is from the conversion of sugars in the wort to ethanol and carbon dioxide by fermentation. I’d always read that the CO2 escaping into the atmosphere was the main cause of the reduction in density during fermentation.
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Feeling extra American this week? Wanna keep that post-turkey glow going? Well, how about a very American beverage: cider?
We’re not talking about the hot mulled stuff that steams up your kitchen, or the sweet pub draft in a pint glass. This cider is more like sparkling wine.
“This is a phenomenally funky, sour, even mildly smoky cider that has to be tasted to be believed,” says Greg Engert, one of the owners of a bar in Washington called ChurchKey. He’s pouring cider from a tall champagne-style bottle that retails for around $15.
ChurchKey is a bar known for beer, but on this night, lots of people are drinking cider.
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Now we KNOW fundamentalist Islam can be evil -PGA
Police enforcing strict Islamic law in Nigeria publicly destroyed more than 240,000 bottles of beer in an attempt to crack down on alcohol consumption and other “immoral” behavior in the area, an official said Thursday.
The Hisbah patrol shouted “Allahu Ahkbar” — God is great — during a lively ceremony attended by government officials in the city of Kano on Wednesday, a spokesperson for the group told NBC News by telephone.
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Generally, Americans are trained to pour their beers down the side of a glass, minimizing the foam. The makers of the Sonic Foamer, a bubble-inducing beer gadget, are on a mission to change all that. The device claims to improve the flavor of beer by boosting the aroma through the power of ultrasonic frequencies.
The first thing I had to do before testing the $39.99 Sonic Foamer was get rid of my preconceived notions about avoiding a big head on a beer. I had to mentally embrace the foam. I then took the device over to the most expert beer taster I know: my home-brewing scientist brother.
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VERY expensive green bottle alert! -PGA
You can now savor the taste of history — if you’re willing to find out how well beer keeps after a raging inferno and nearly a century in storage.
A beer rescued by a fireman from the smoldering ruins of the Hindenburg, the zeppelin that famously burst into flames while attempting to dock in New Jersey in 1937, will go on auction in the UK this week starting at $9,710 dollars, The Drinks Business reports.
The beer is described in the auction catalog as “Fire damaged Lowenbrau lager rescued from the remains of the Hindenburg. A standard size green bottle 23cm fitted with a crown top. The bottle is unopened but the label is scorched and damaged from the fire and the top foil is long gone.â€
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Silly laws like this? You can bet 99% of the time some big brewers has greased the palms of pols to pass it. And since finding a gallon jug with Grolsch top is almost impossible, breweries in FL are forced to do twist top, cider jug-like, growlers: that DON’T hold carbonation well. Hence people must drink them FASTER. This makes sense???-PGA
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – There are three growlers perched above the tap handles at Intuition Ale Works. One of the beer jugs holds 32 ounces, another 64, and the largest 128. Two of them can be sold lawfully in Florida; the third has a handwritten sign saying “Legalize it” as it sits on display at the brewery. And it’s probably not the one you’d guess.
Customers can have as many of the largest containers, with a full gallon, or the smallest jugs, with a quart, filled as they please. It’s the half-gallon growler — a 64-ounce container that’s popular from coast to coast — that’s illegal, thanks to Florida’s history of odd bottle laws.
“It’s such a stupid law,” said Ben Davis, owner of Intuition Ale Works. “You can come in here and buy a gallon, you can buy a quart, you can buy two quarts, but I can’t sell you a half-gallon. And it’s the industry standard. You go to Colorado, you go to a brewery there and say ‘Hey, I want a growler of X beer,’ they don’t ask you, ‘Hey! Do you want it in a quart or do you want it in a gallon?'”
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Another belter in The Broady, but not everyone`s cup of tea, I`m sure.
Over the past months, I have found increasing reasons to rave about The Broadfield and the regular appearances of this Somerset brewery`s wares are an real ale asset. The Broady is welcoming even if you are accompanied by kid or canine, want coffee or craft ale and they even have a selection of daily newspapers if you want catch up with the world as you kill an hour, or two. A real jack-of-all-trades.
Redwood had a hand-written note on it to say that it was a very limited edition with there only being 5 (?) barrels in existence and so it cost £2.50 for a kegged half pint. The knowledgeable bar-keep also insisted that I had a (sizeable) sample as he was aware that it had a very strong taste, one which he himself disliked. I downed the taster and was in for a penny (or 250 of them in this case).
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