Author: Professor Good Ales

Using Brewing Herbs – An excerpt from The Homebrewer’s Garden by Joe Fisher and Dennis Fisher)

Brewing herbs have different characteristics, just as different hop varieties do. Most herbs traditionally associated with brewing are bitter. Others are more flavorful or aromatic. What you use an herb for and when you use it depends on the qualities of the herb and the kind of beer you wish to brew. Some herbs are multipurpose, though none approaches hops in overall utility. Beer without any hop character at all is an acquired taste. We usually add at least 1/2 ounce (14 g) of hops for a 5-gallon (19 L) batch of even our most herbal beers.
Continue reading “The Technical Edge”

Internet broadcasting has been popular for quite a while now, and sooner or later someone was bound to start net-blogging beer. Actually: sooner that soon. Now. For a while. Craft beer radio features podcasts, CBR Wiki, rankings and reports on many different beers. Is it great radio? The Professor only suggest you decide for yourself at www.craftbeerradio.com

Written by Norman Miller for GateHouse News Service and Wickedlocal.com

European brewers really like Christmas.

Breweries in Belgium brew some of their best beers for this jolly time of year, while England dedicated an entire beer style – the winter warmer – to the coldest of seasons.

Last week, I gave you my top 10 American winter seasonal beers. Here’s a look at my top 10 European winter seasonals, which change every year.

1. Christmas Ale, St. Bernardus, Belgium, 10 percent alcohol by volume (ABV)

St. Bernardus’ Christmas Ale is always one of the first winter beers I buy. This Belgian strong dark ale is full of flavors of dark fruit and spices.

Despite the high alcohol, this is so easy to drink. It’s actually relatively smooth. It’s sweet, but it’s what you’d expect from such a high-alcohol beer.

If you buy one Belgian Christmas ale a year, this is the one to buy.

2. Christmas Ale, Corsendonk, Belgium, 8.5 percent ABV

Continue reading “The Beer Nut: Top 10 European Winter Seasonals to Try”

By Food Blogga @ Craftbeer.com

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Difficulty: Easy

Time: 20 minutes

Beer Style: Brown Ale

Seasonality: Winter

Serves: 4

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The Food Blogga created this recipe for Roasted Sweet Potatoes in honor of San Diego Beer Week. It’s sweet, salty, smoky, and tangy. It’s great with beer buddies like pork and beef and goes really well with chicken sandwiches and salmon burgers.

Ingredients

Continue reading “Roasted Sweet Potatoes with Maple Smoked Bacon and Beer”

Written by Christian DeBenedetti for Eater.com

Think the craft beer lover in your life has everything? Well, unless they own a bottle of each of the following beers, they couldn’t possibly: presenting the most expensive beers ever sold. Collecting rare and vintage beers is for the most hard-core beer fans, who run the gamut from casual hoarders to nattily-attired collectors to a handful of real wingnuts. Below, their Holy Grail.

Antarctic Nail Ale, $800
A single bottle of Antarctic Nail Ale, made by Nail Brewing Co. of Fremantle, Australia, was sold for $800 at a charity auction last month. Why so spendy? A portion of the water used was melted Antarctic Sea ice harvested by the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society (of Whale Wars fame). Call it the Moby Dick of publicity stunts.
Continue reading “This Year, Give the Gift of Really, Really Expensive Beer”

Written by John Linn for blogs.browardpalmbeach.com

You might have noticed the proliferation of beers marketing themselves as “Fresh Hop” brews on the market recently. But you’re probably wondering: What does this mean? Don’t all beers have fresh hops in them? If not fresh, then what are they?

Hops are the budded plant that gives beer its bitter and aromatic qualities. They’re harvested in late summer/fall, from August to early September. Because of this, hops are most often dried or processed into compressed pellets or plugs that store year round. The techniques for this process are pretty sophisticated, so the quality of hop pellets are pretty good. If you’ve ever bought hop pellets from a homebrew store, these are essentially the same things that commercial brewers use year round in their beers.

During the fall, however, brewers have a rare opportunity to work with fresh hops. Also called wet hops, these buds don’t keep long and require a much larger dose than plugs or pellets to get the same bittering. They’re expensive and rarer, and so beers made with fresh (wet) hops are too.
Continue reading “Fresh Hop Brews”

Written by Ye Olde Scribe

Guldenberg Belgian Abbey Beer
8.5% abv
Brewery De Ranke, Wevelgem, Belgium

Scribe’s sample was a simple bottle: no wrap. Nice head: so what? It’s the beer that counts. Hops are a bit “musty”:” light, in the background. Light straw color, hazy.

Yes: Belgian.

Nose: about right.

Yeast: just right.

Body: lacking

A bit Tripel-ish. Not so much Belgian Abbey-ish. More body required. More complexity. Someone wanted to monopolize of Belgian beer’s popularity and got a shadow of a Tripel. Age might help, but doubtful. If you’re brewing a Tripel put the label on the $#@! package.

There are far better Belgian Abbey Ales.

“Beer Bandit” Gets Probation; Ordered to Undergo Counseling

Kenneth Wars mug shot courtesy of Angelina County Jail.
LUFKIN, Texas (KTRE) – An Alvarado man known since 2007 as the “Beer Bandit” has pleaded guilty to using a brick to break into an Angelina County convenience store to stealing 30-packs of beer.

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HERE

Some of the Beer Nut’s favorite winter seasonals. Art Illman/for Daily News and Wicked Local

Written by Norman Miller for Gatehouse News Service and blogs.wickedlocal.com

This is the most wonderful time of the year — well, at least when it comes to craft beer.

While craft brewers seem to settle on boring wheat ales during the summer, those same craft brewers pull out all of the stops for their winter seasonals.

It’s the biggest variety of beers — India pale ales, red ales, barley wines, stouts — it’s just a cornucopia of flavors.

Here are my picks for the top 10 winter seasonals available now. If you have any of my past lists, you’ll notice it changes each year. That reflects my ever-evolving personal tastes…

Want to read more? Please click…

HERE

Mikkeller Black Hole Stout, a coffee-enhanced craft beer [Photo: ramskov.org]

Written by Christian DeBenedetti for eater.com

Now that Four Loko — the 12% ABV malt beverage mixed with the chemically-added caffeine equivalent of three to six cups of strong coffees — has been effectively banned along with some similar drinks, people in the craft beer community are wringing their hands. What’s the worry? What could “The Blackout in a Can” have to do with artisanal ales made by hand and enjoyed with care? True, the FDA has ordered only four companies to remove the added caffeine or be pulled from shelves by mid-December. But thanks to the fist-pounding, nanny-state politicians like Charles Schumer, the worry is that the FDA or TTB (Federal Tax & Trade Bureau, formerly the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms) might try to ban all alcoholic drinks containing caffeine, which would have potentially wide-reaching effects. See, in the craft beer world, experimentation rules and adding crazy — but entirely legal — ingredients to the mix is the norm.

Brooklyn Brewery Brewmaster Garrett Oliver was particularly sanguine about the whole affair. “The thing that concerns me is that we might not be able to do the kind of stuff that we’ve done in the past,” said Oliver. “For example, with Stumptown Coffee roasters, we did a beer with them called Intensified Coffee Stout which used Finca el Injerto coffee. And of course many brewers make coffee stouts. We’ve had beers infused with cacao nibs as well, and all of these would be considered to be caffeinated. So, if we then became collateral damage for something like Four Loko, that would be more than spectacularly annoying.”

Craft Beers, Naturally-Caffeinated
Continue reading “Naturally-Caffeinated Craft Beer in the Post-Four Loko Era”