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.
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Try Beer, Not Wine, for Thanksgiving

Written by Fred Tasker for McClatchy Newspapers

Beer for Thanksgiving? Don’t reject it out of hand. One can make a very persuasive case for holiday brews.

Some historians say the Pilgrims drank beer on that first Thanksgiving, just as they did every day, because the water available to them was polluted. Others say this is poppycock.

Doesn’t matter. On Thanksgiving 2010, the reason to drink beer is that brewing has become so sophisticated that a thoughtful host can match beers with each course just as she or he would with wine.

As aperitifs, you can serve light brews – pale lagers or wheat beers – to get the conversation flowing. Such brews can be light as clouds, highly carbonated, full of festive, tiny bubbles just like champagne.

The hors d’oeuvres course at Thanksgiving is usually pretty light, given the fulsome nature of the coming meal. Crisp crudites, maybe, or smoked salmon on water crackers, just to keep your guests alive until dinner. For this, amber and dark lagers provide similar lightness but a bit more malty and hoppy flavor.

For the main course, with its sheer bulk and multitude of flavors, anything goes. This is the ale course – pale ales, dark ales of all hues and flavors. The smoky, caramelized flavors of these sturdier brews are great matches for the crackly, deep-brown skin of a well-roasted turkey, and their underlying herbal flavors go well with stuffing.

As for the side dishes, one can only say that hearty goes well with hearty.

When dessert comes, surprise your guests: Serve that pumpkin pie with a sweet and spicy pumpkin ale or that sugar-laden pecan pie with the wonderful accompaniment of a chocolate stout.
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Seasonal Beer Profiles

Profiled by Tom Becham


Republished for the season.

Pumpkin pie is appreciated for Thanksgiving and the Christmas Holiday as well, so these beers are passably seasonal for the rest of the year.
Pumpkin has a long history in ale making in the United States. The colonists used pumpkin as an adjunct, using the sugars as an aid to fermentation. And truly, since most Brits regard pumpkin as an item to be fed to cattle, it could really only have started in the New World.
The first of the three I tried was Dogfish Head’s Punkin Ale. Dogfish Head describes this as a spiced pumpkin beer with a brown ale base.
My impressions? It poured a nice rosy orange. On the nose, it smells like they dumped the whole friggin’ spice rack in this one. The usual pumpkin pie spices – cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger and allspice – are very strong on the nose. Only when the beer warms does the brown ale’s toffee-like malt aroma come forward. The head is small and short-lived, but a lovely tan color. Taste-wise, the spice again overwhelms the pumpkin at first. The pumpkin comes out to play only upon warming, and is never more than faint, and almost overwhelmed by the slight minty hop. On the plus-side, the 7% ABV is never obvious. I’d recommend this only if you like spice – and a lot of it – in your pumpkin ale. I love Dogfish Head for their intrepid spirit of experimentation. But sometimes – as with this beer – they swing and miss.
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Beer Lubricated the Rise of Civilization, Study Suggests

Written by Charles Choi for Foxnews.com

Could beer have helped lead to the rise of civilization? It’s a possibility, some archaeologists say.

Their argument is that Stone Age farmers were domesticating cereals not so much to fill their stomachs but to lighten their heads, by turning the grains into beer. That has been their take for more than 50 years, and now one archaeologist says the evidence is getting stronger.

Want to read more? Click…

HERE.

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Competition: Battle of the Knickerbockers

Reported by Ken Carman for Professorgoodales.net

Vastly superior to my own, pictures without a date stamp are courtesy Steve Smyth.

We spent the week in the middle of nowhere: our future retirement home/camp in the Central Adirondacks. About a thousand miles from our present home base for over 30 years: Nashville, TN. When we left we could have gone south, or go about a hundred miles in the opposite direction and judge beer in downtown Albany, NY. Being beer folk, never guess what we did.

Yup. Judge beer.

The ugly guy with the blond hair and the black mustache is me.

This was not my first trip to The Pump Station, otherwise known as C. H. Evans Brewing. Stopped by about 10 or more years ago. Downtown Albany, NY: right off of 787. You can see it as you exit the Clinton Ave exit coming from the north. Big brick building. On your right.

Of course you will find some of the pictures a bit dark and fuzzy. My second decent digital and it’s a bit quirky. “Decent” because the first AOL bought cam would have made Starry Night seem photo like. No matter what pic I would attempt to take. Wherever that camera would… Gogh.
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Ancient African Cocktail: Beer and a Shot of Antibiotic


Nubia region today. Source: Wiki

Written by Wynne Parry, LiveScience Senior Writer

About 1,500 years before the modern world discovered the antibiotic tetracycline, North Africans were fermenting and consuming it, probably for most of their lives, according to a chemical analysis of the bones of people who lived along the Nile.

The ancient human remains were recovered near the Sudanese-Egyptian border, where species of tetracycline-producing bacteria inhabit the soil. This region, in Northeastern Africa, was once known as Nubia. Much of it is was flooded when the Nile River was dammed.

The practice of brewing beer was widespread in the region, including in Ancient Egypt to the north, and the researchers think the Nubians fermented Streptomyces or related species with their grain to brew a thick, sour beer spiked with tetracycline. And everyone, from about 2 years old and up, consumed it. [Gallery: Amazing Egyptian Discoveries]
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Beer: “You can blame your Mother”


Perception of beer bitterness is both genetic and dependent on how hops are infused. Photo: Charlie Papazian

Written by Charlie Papazian

At Slow Food’s Salone del Gusto in Turin, Italy last month I participated in a “Bitterness and Beer Workshop.  It was an eye opening experience about the perception of bitterness and how it related to beer. The workshop was led by Mirco Marconi and Professor Paulo Gasparini (University of Trieste ).  Professor Gasparini distributed paper “taste strips” to all participants who were then asked to register their experience.
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Reviving Rheingold

Written by David Falchek for thetimes-tribune.com

A Connecticut beverage marketer has teamed up with the Lion Brewery in Wilkes-Barre to revive a beer brand, bringing Rheingold to the shelves for the first time in 35 years.

Drinks Americas hopes to give people a taste of the past by distributing Rheingold in the Eastern U.S., capitalizing on the coolness of retro products.

Rheingold has a special connection with its customers, said Drinks Americas President J. Patrick Kenny. The brand had dominated the New York metro market for decades, its popularity buoyed by an infectious jingle that began, “My beer is Rheingold, the dry beer.”
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Hippity Hops Farms—What’s Up Hop?

Written by Patrick Loch for hopheadnews.com

Thanks to passionate entrepreneurs like George and Leah Shetka and Paul Pavkovich of Hippity Hops Farms, LLC, Minnesota might be making some noise in the hop farming industry.

(Paul’s son Landon poses at Hippity Hops Farms, LLC, located in Forest Lake, Minnesota.)

The three got started when Paul suggested the idea. “I had four plants and thought, ‘why not go bigger?’” Turns out, it wasn’t terribly difficult to convince the Shetka’s that their front lawn would make a perfect hop-yard.

“We just went in circles mowing the grass there anyways,” said Leah.

In the fall of 2008, George and some other family members got to work situating rows of 20-foot poles strung together with rope. The following spring, 75 Cascade rhizomes went into the ground and began their frenzied climb. That first year, they harvested about 12 pounds of hops, all of which were handpicked.

“We want to emphasize we handpick everything,” said Paul. “That’s one thing we’re not going to stop doing.”
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