Author: Professor Good Ales

The Lab, Ladyface Alehouse & Brasserie and, in 2012, Golden Road Brewing

Ladyface Alehouse and Brasserie has been
serving up beers for two years in Agoura Hills. (Ladyface Ale Companie/Red Tail
Media / December 8, 2011)

Written by Todd Martens for the Los Angeles Times

Opening a restaurant/bar and calling oneself Dr. Hops takes guts on the West Coast, where breweries have long delighted in maximizing the ingredient for all its tart and bitter glory.

“That was a joke, initially,” Roger Bott said. “We put it on the website with a little character, and it stuck from there. Home brewing, though, I was always using more hops than anyone said would taste good.”

Out of the gate, however, Bott is going for wide appeal, putting the emphasis on balance at his recently opened the Lab in Agoura Hills (30105 Agoura Road). Initial brews include an XPA, which stops short of the sharpness of its IPA brother, as well as an amber ale, in which hops give way to a sweeter finish. The space has room for two patios with outdoor fireplaces, as well as a bar and an indoor dining room. The copper-clad beer tanks are on full display, giving the spot, said Bott, a “rustic, old-town character.”

Want to read more? Please use the following URL/Link…
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-night-beer-notes9-20111209,0,3493021.story

Written by Nick Carbone for newsfeed.time.com

Clifton Vial wound up stuck in a snowdrift off a rural highway in eastern Alaska, his truck lacking the usual survival necessities. All that lay in the back was a few cans of Coors Light, frozen solid. And as any college student knows: beer is food. Even the relatively bland Coors Light contains calories to keep a person functioning. Foodless for nearly 60 hours, Vial munched on the frozen beer. Bear Grylls would be so proud.

Vial says he ate the beer like beans from a can. “I cut the lids off and dug it out with a knife,” he told the Anchorage Daily News. The 52-year-old lived off the ration of a couple of cans for more than three days while rescuers searched for him.

Vial had taken a drive late Monday night, getting stuck in a snowdrift 40 miles north of Nome. Far out of cell phone range and ill-dressed for the situation in tennis shoes, jeans and a cheap jacket, Vial huddled for warmth in a sleeping bag and shrouded his shivering feet in a towel. He turned on the engine occasionally to listen to the radio and get the heat flowing, but it was no match for the -17 degree temperatures. And by the third day, Vial’s gas gauge was toeing the “empty” line.
Continue reading “Alaskan Survives on Frozen Beer for Three Days While Stuck in Snowdrift”

Written by Victoria Pelham for cronkitenewsonline.com

PHOENIX – George Hancock sees great promise in this downtown warehouse filled with barrels containing fermenting barley and wheat and producing craft beer 600 gallons at a time.

He views the opportunity for microbrewers as so ripe here that he decided to pack up and leave a similar operation he had in Washington for Arizona, co-founding Phoenix Ale Brewery in June. He said the Seattle market is over-saturated but that Arizona still needs more breweries.

“It’s just getting started here, but the market for craft beer is growing rapidly,” Hancock said.

There were 39 microbreweries in Arizona in the 2011 fiscal year, which ended in June, according to the Arizona Department of Liquor Licenses and Control. That was up from 36 in fiscal 2010 and 31 in fiscal 2009.

Those operations are licensed to produce up to 1,240,000 gallons in a calendar year and are able to sell their products directly to consumers.

The largest concentration of breweries was in Maricopa County, with 20, according to data from the state.
Continue reading “Makers of Craft Beer See Untapped Potential in Arizona”

Jesse Darrow, of Ithaca,loads full bottles of CascaZilla Ale into cases as they come off the bottling line at Ithaca Beer Tuesday, Nov. 29, afternoon. / SIMON WHEELER / Gannett Staff Photo

Written by My-Ly Nguyen for pressconnects.com

On a recent Saturday night, a group of friends was willing to wait about two hours for a table at an Ithaca brewpub.

It was family weekend at Ithaca College and there was a concert at a local theater, helping to add to the long list of names waiting to be called.
Continue reading “Popularity of Craft Beer Spreads in Binghamton (NY) Area”

Posted under “Our View” at charlotteobserver.com

North Carolina, once a craft beer wasteland, has become one of the country’s most exciting states for good brews. Dozens of innovative breweries have popped up from the coast to Asheville, complementing a solid roster of fine brewers.

The growth began in 2005, when N.C. legislators passed a law allowing for higher content alcohol in beer sold here. Now, lawmakers have passed a smaller but important bill that allows breweries, regardless of size, to offer tastings and sell beer on site – even beers produced outside the state.

The measure would help North Carolina’s craft brewing industry flourish even more, not only by promoting interest in craft beer, but also by giving brewers another revenue stream. The change also could prompt larger west coast brewers to open east coast operations and bring jobs here.
Continue reading “Craft Beer Lovers Say Cheers to New Bill”

Written by Mark Christopher for examiner.com

 

Dunedin—Justin Stange has a lot to be proud of.  Justin has been a successful brewer with Sweetwater Brewing Company of Atlanta and recently Cigar City Brewing in Tampa.  In the same vein as his former employer, Cigar City, Stange recently lighted out on his own path.  Stange went from Tampa like a miner for the Yukon on a mission to make great beer.  Luckily for Tampa Bay beer enthusiasts, Justin did not go very far.  Stange found a small storefront in Dunedin and made a small brewery out of it with his partner and girlfriend, Devon Kreps.  He may or may not have realized at the time that converting the space into a brewery involved pouring the bar out of cement himself.  Seventh Sun’s Facebook page displays numerous photos of what Devon and Justin had to do to open the facility.  The construction and personal labor show exactly what two people will do to make and serve their own beer.  Justin may actually redefine the moniker “small brewery” in Seventh Sun’s cozy home, but he wants to focus his creativity on the beer.
Continue reading “Seventh Sun Becomes Tampa Bay’s Newest Brewery”

What do you do with a building near downtown in disrepair? Here’s one brew related idea- The Professor

Written by Jeff Beach for bizlex.com

Lexington, Ky. – Four partners are turning a former bread factory on Lexington’s north side into a craft brewery, with the goal of surrounding it with other community-minded organizations and businesses.

The West Sixth Brewing Co. has purchased what will be The Bread Box, the mixed-used development in the former Rainbo Bread factory at the corner of Sixth Street and Jefferson Street.

The craft brewery will anchor the 90,000 square-foot development, which has three tenants already lined up:

â—¦ Cricket Press, which designs and prints posters and other products. Much of its work is for music events and arts shows.

â—¦ Food Chain, a new non-profit focusing on urban farming. It will grow greens and tilapia fish in The Bread Box as part of a “vertical farm.”

â—¦ The Broke Spoke Community Bike Shop, a non-profit bike repair organization. It will be able to take advantage of the Legacy Trail, which when extended, will run across the back of The Bread Box property. Broke Spoke will use 2,500 square feet of the building.

The brewing company will begin producing beer in the spring. While they are still in product development, founding partner Ben Self said there will be “more than a handful” of high-quality hand-crafted beer varieties from the brewery which also will have a tasting room.
Continue reading “Micro-Brewery planned for Lexington’s (KY) Northside”

The Professor held off on the other 3 columns: for any homebrewer knows without yeast there is no beer. Plus yeast could be argued to be THE most important, and the most underrated ingredient. Try a Belgian Abbey Ale vs. an American Pale, for example. Hops can vary in both, and malts. But if you switch the yeasts you may have switched the styles.-The Professor

Written by Andy Ingram for azcentral.com and The Republic

There are four basic ingredients in beer. In previous installments of the Beer Buzz I’ve covered three: malt, hops and water.

I’ve held off on the fourth ingredient, yeast, because of the sheer scope of the topic. The amount of information on the science of fermentation is vast and, honestly, it would probably bore anyone with even a passing interest in microbiology.

So let’s take a simpler look at what yeast is and what it does for beer and brewers.

For centuries, before the invention of the microscope, yeast was a largely unknown ingredient in beer. What was known was that during each fermentation a light-colored, creamy substance was produced and was taken from the tops of fermenting beer and added to the next batch.

Some stories go that the substance, which caused the beer to ferment, was simply referred to as, “God is good.”
Continue reading “Beer Buzz: Yeast Key to Good Beer Making”