Author: Professor Good Ales

Mythical poster at The LTS Good for What Ales You Beer Journal. Loves good beer. Hates same old, same old. Muses that Bud and Miller might as well be brewed in urinals. Drinks lagers too, if they are complex and interesting.
Posted on

Something’s Brewing – and it Ain’t No Storm

Picture: Adam Mathews, co-owner of Backyard Home Brewers and Education Center in Humble, offers a wide range of products needed to brew home-made beer.

Written by STEFANIE THOMAS foryourhoustonnews.com

Adam Mathews and Jon Denman aren’t giving up their day jobs just yet. They’re not interested in high-pressure sales tactics, they say, or making fortunes. They just want to share their passion: making beer.

A few days ago, with the incorporation of Backyard Home Brewers and Education Center, Humble became home to a home-brewing supply shop, with all its untapped potential.

At Backyard Home Brewers and Education Center in Humble, a couch is waiting in the corner for anyone who wants to plop down for a chat or a taste of brew. The dress code is casual. Strangers are greeted like old buddies – or maybe Mathews and Denman just never met a stranger. The scent of hops, barley and malt lingers like an olfactory premonition. Buckets of more than 30 different kinds of grains are stacked to the ceiling. Flasks and packets and tubes of yeast are neatly organized in a cooler in the back of the store. Kegs loom on the top shelves.

“Jon and I’ve been home-brewing for quite a while,” said Mathews, a Medicare consultant employed by a major insurance company who lives in Kingwood. “Last summer we went camping and we brought some homebrew out there with us, and we decided to open a homebrew store. We plotted out all kinds of ideas.”

The two friends say they depleted their savings to follow their dream of providing area home-brewing enthusiasts with quality products, a place to share the successes of their endeavors, bringing newcomers into the fold, and delivering support through education.
Continue reading “Something’s Brewing – and it Ain’t No Storm”

Posted on

Hogtown Brewers Enter the Toronto Craft Beer Fray

Canadian brewers following a trend set here in America-PGA

Written by Ben Johnsonfor blogto.com. Photos by Traven Benner

session beer. Thankfully for those people, the guys at href=”http://www.hogtownbrewers.ca/” target=”_blank”>Hogtown Brewers agreed, and decided to do something about it.

Founded by six guys who play rugby together, Hogtown Brewers was born out of a desire to create a local beer that had a decent amount of flavour but wasn’t so complex or heavy that you couldn’t drink a half a dozen or so in an evening (see above re: six dudes, rugby).

The idea, according to Pete Shippen, one of the brewery’s founders, was to develop a beer that was “just drinkable enough not to alienate.” With the help of experienced brewmaster Jay Cooke, that seems to be precisely what they’ve done.

Hogtown is probably Toronto’s only Kölsch-style beer, a lagered beer that is essentially Germany’s answer to the British Pale Ale. It’s a beer with a rich brewing tradition in Cologne, and the style choice is a reflection of brewmaster Cooke’s training at brew schools in Germany.

The beer is a pale straw color with a noticeable but not overbearing hops presence and a middle-of-the-road alcohol content of 5%. I can certainly confirm its easy drinkablilty, and if the throngs of after-work drinkers at the Duke of Devon, where the beer is currently being poured, are any indication, others agree.

Hogtown officially launched this past weekend, slightly ahead of schedule. The owners of the Duke of Devon told Shippen that they’d start pouring Hogtown on Wednesday, just as soon as the current supply of Alexander Keith’s Red was expected to run dry. Anxious to get their beer out there, however, Shippen and the rest of the Hogtown Brewers enlisted some friends and saw to it that the bar’s supply of Keith’s Red ran out ahead of schedule and Hogtown has been tapped at the Duke since Friday.

There are plans to take Hogtown to other bars, but in the meantime Shippen and his partners are happy staying a little bit exclusive. “We’ve had a lot of interest,” he notes, “but we want to be able to expand the right way.” The plan seems to be a level-headed approach not to get too far ahead of themselves and to grow the business in a way that ensures they can still service whomever opts to pour their beer.

Shippen brings just some of what seems like considerable business-savvy to a group of brewers/rugby players that comprise a few financial industry types, as well as a current student and a gum salesman. For now, they seem content to take it one step at a time, but during a conversation that included reference to the Duke of Devon as a “focus group” and a chat about their contract brewing (at Cool Brewery) as a “less capital intensive” approach, it seemed clear that the guys from Hogtown Brewers have their sights set on eventual distributing to a wider market. Given the rate at which people seem to be downing pints of their tasty Kölsch-style beer, Toronto’s beer drinkers will likely be ready for them when they do.

Posted on

Who’s the Country’s Biggest Brewer?

Written by Kim Peterson for money.msn.com

A new beer maker has surged ahead to become the largest in America — and it probably isn’t the one you think.

Anheuser-Busch, the maker of the No. 1 beer Bud Light? Nope. That’s a subsidiary ofAnheuser-Busch InBev (BUD +1.88%), which is based in Belgium.

How about MillerCoors, which makes No. 2 beer Coors Light? Nope. MillerCoors is a joint venture of London’s SABMiller (SBMRY -0.88%) and Molson Coors (TAP -0.73%), which operates out of Montreal and Denver.

The biggest U.S. brewer is now D.G. Yuengling and Son, based in Pottsville, Pa., the Allentown Morning Call reports. Yuengling saw shipments soar 16.9% last year to 2.5 million barrels. As a result, it barely squeaked into first place, surpassing Sam Adams maker Boston Beer (SAM -1.00%), which rose 8% to 2.4 million barrels.
Continue reading “Who’s the Country’s Biggest Brewer?”

Posted on

Crowd to Craft Beer via Facebook

Written by Donna Goodison for Bostonherald.com

Samuel Adams is giving its social network a say in the brewing process by crowd-sourcing a beer.

Using the “Crowd Craft Project” app, Facebook fans can determine the color, clarity, body and character of the malt, hops and yeast for the collaborative ale, which will make its debut during the South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas.

“We’re reaching out to our Facebook fans to engage them at the beginning of the beer-marking process, asking them for their ideas on what their perfect beer would be,” Sam Adams brewer Bert Boyce said. “We’ll put that input together and we’ll brew a beer for them.”
Continue reading “Crowd to Craft Beer via Facebook”

Posted on

Escapes: The Old Brewery’s Gone, but There’s Still Lots Brewing in Mount Joy, Pa.

Picture courtesy howderfamily.com and panoramio.com

Written by James F. Lee for Washingtonpost.com

Alois Bube was urging us on. “Drink plenty of beer!” he cried. “I put plenty of myself into every keg!”

Not needing any more prompting, I went up to the bar and ordered a Bube bock draft — rich, slightly sweet and with a hint of a coffee taste. As I sipped the dark brew, I wondered just what parts of Alois Bube I was drinking

This wasn’t the real Alois Bube, of course. He died in 1908. Our Alois Bube was an actor portraying the brew master in the murder mystery we were about to watch: “The Central Hotel Grand Opening.”

The Central Hotel bar is decorated like a fin de siecle Parisian brothel, with dark wallpaper, low lights, a ceiling painted green and portraits of scantily clad ladies in various poses gracing the walls. Great atmosphere. Perfect for a murder.

My wife and I were making a weekend of it at Bube’s Brewery in tiny Mount Joy, Pa., between Harrisburg and Lancaster. This lovely area of rolling farmland has long been dominated by residents of German descent; back in 1876, Bube, an immigrant from Bavaria, opened a brewery in a two-story stone structure on North Market Street to serve them his popular lager. As his fortunes rose, he outgrew the old brewery and added a bottling works next door. In 1879, he built the three-story, Victorian-style Central Hotel, notable for its intricate brickwork. It backed onto the other side of the original brewery building, completing the block-long row that still stands today. Bube’s empire lasted until 1920, the year Prohibition was introduced, and the brewery closed for good.
Continue reading “Escapes: The Old Brewery’s Gone, but There’s Still Lots Brewing in Mount Joy, Pa.”

Posted on

The Joys of Bottling (REALLY!)

Written by Will Trice for the AHA

Which is better, bottling or kegging? It’s one of the great homebrew debates, right up there with extract vs. all-grain and batch sparging vs. fly sparging. Both bottling and kegging have their advantages and disadvantages, and both can be onerous at times. Peeling labels off of used bottles is one of the worst tasks in homebrewing. But in the frustration department, finding a CO2 leak in your system when the beer is already in the keg is right up there.

I find that most homebrewers are strongly in one camp or the other. But I straddle the line, happily kegging or bottling each batch as my mood and circumstances guide me. And to be honest, I actually enjoy the bottling process more than kegging because I have found the five paths to bottling nirvana. But this wasn’t always the case.

Seventeen years ago, after just my third time homebrewing, I went out and bought a humongous, 1960s era, avocado green refrigerator and a very used CO2 bottle. Add to that a few used soda kegs, some fittings, hoses, and a picnic tap, and I was out of the bottling business for good. I hated bottling—the sanitizing, the filling, the capping. The chore of bottling was way more effort than I was willing to put into even this, the most satisfying of hobbies.

Continue reading “The Joys of Bottling (REALLY!)”

Posted on

Beer Profile

Profiled by Ken Carman for Professor Goodales

Nice long lasting head, brown, caramelized nose but not much else, lots of body to the mouthfeel with darker malt sense: perhaps a tad to heavy for a Scottish, this is very interesting. Kind of an odd Scottish Heavy with parts of the profile on steroids, and at least one a little bit off.

Did they put chocolate malt in this? Maybe Marris Otter too? The Marris is already, but I’d drop this amount of chocolate in the mouthfeel and taste.

The carbonation in the body is light, which is OK for the style. Not as sweet as say Old Peculier, but a tad sweet malt-wise. Hops: none, but none expected. Way in the back of the taste if at all. But that’s the style.

This is a beer you should try for yourself.

French Broad Wee Heavy-er. Ashville, NC., 7%
That surprises me I would even give that recommendation. The last French Broad (no perv jokes, please) I tried was pretty bad. Rye Hopper: so astringent I had to toss the rest of the bottle. Both BJCP judges felt the same: one Certified, one an Apprentice. Maybe I got a bad bottle? It does happen, I know. But there’s too much beer out there to try, and to profile for The Professor I won’t waste my money. Rye Hopper was so bad I probably wouldn’t try it again. The kind of “bad” that gives craft a crappy reputation. Yet the astringency really seemed like the rye and the hops, through one hell of a long boil, had combined to bite back: hard.

This had none of the astringency, and even had a hint of peated malt: not unexpected in the style.

But I think I’ll try another French Broad. Hopefully she won’t slap me with astringency again. Damn, there I go doing what I promised not to do!

Posted on

Beer Buzz: Craft beer predictions for 2012

Professional brewers and beer business people in Arizona predict the future of Craft beer: both in Arizona and for the nation. Picture courtesy Pat Shannahan/The Arizona Republic. Ron Kloth, owner of Papago Brewing Company, passed an extensive test on beer knowledge, from brewing to serving, including how to pair different beers with certain foods to become a cicerone. -The Professor

Written by Andy Ingram for azcentral.com

New Year’s resolutions never seem to stick. And looking back over the past year, picking winners and losers doesn’t appeal to me, either.

Predictions, however, seem right up my alley.

Better yet, I decided to ask a beer educator, a bar owner and a brewer what they see in their crystal balls as it pertains to craft brewing for 2012. Here’s what they said.

Steves Parkes, owner and lead instructor of the American Craft Brewers Guild

Parkes’ guild, located in Vermont, is a leading brewing school. If you’re serious about brewing, I’d get serious about schooling, and ACBG is one of the best. (Full disclosure: Parkes was my instructor, and he has very high standards.)

He predicts there will be a return to session beers “if brewers get it right.”

The return, Parkes suggests, will be in conjunction with “less wood, less sour and less fruit beers.” In other words, a return to the traditional.

Layrd Mahler, owner of Sonoran Brewing Co.
Continue reading “Beer Buzz: Craft beer predictions for 2012”

Posted on

Beer Profile: Stoudt’s Old Abominable Barley Wine

Profiled by Ken Carman for Professor Goodales

I love Barley Wine. I paid almost $20 for this champagne bottle of Abomniable… explaining why I’m kind of pissed. This had all the markings of a great Barley Wine packaging-wise, but it was Barley Wine light: mouthfeel, taste, aroma-wise. Looks good: solid gold, a bit foggy probably due to chill, plenty of head with a mostly pillow to it. So far so good, though the pour seemed a little light gravity-wise. But then I hit the aroma. Hops: some, not much else. Usually there’s some sweet complexity to the nose that damn near drags me into the bottle. The hops were citrus-y. I usually resist fruit comparisons because it does true fruit beers a disfavor, but this was that Centennial-like citrus some compare to grapefruit. I do a grapefruit ale. trust me: not the same. Where the hell is the alcohol? Where’s the body? This was more a nice, somewhat sweet, IPA over all. Do not spend 20 on this. It’s not worth it if you’re looking for Barley Wine.

I looked over several reviews and found the color seems to vary. Perhaps the malt profile varies from batch to batch, though I seemed consistent with other reviews otherwise. Note: I might have given a better review if the price wasn’t a bit out of line for the product. Regardless of the bottle size I expect one hell of a Barley Wine for 20. I’m one of the supplier’s for Big Bob’s Barley Wine bash in Pensacola and you can get better, more punchy, Barley Wines for less than 20, and in large bottles too. Might qualify as an American-hopped English of the style, though the body should be more substantial in that case.