Author: Professor Good Ales

Next year, looking for a way to offer haunting beer at your Halloween party? These are sold out this year, but save the link for when spooky season rolls around!

LINK

Please note: Wiccans are not necessarily “witches”- PGA

Written by Adrian Chen for gawker.com

Wiccans flexed their muscles earlier this month by railing against the media’s treatment of Christine O’Donnell’s witchcraft revelations. Now, they’ve succeeded in getting the makers of Witch’s Wit ale to change their logo from a witch burning at the stake.

After famous witch lady Vicki Noble saw the label in the store, she shot off an email to her witch friends. The New York Times reprinted a choice bit of the email:

“Can you imagine them showing a black person being lynched or a Jewish person going to the oven?” she wrote. “Such images are simply not tolerated in our society anymore (thank the Goddess) and this one should not be, either.”

After being bombarded with emails, the brewery’s founder agreed to change the label. The once-ostracized witch community grows stronger every day! Won’t be long until we see campaign ads declaring: “I’m not a witch, but some of my best friends are.”

Written by Chris Bradley for examiner.com

There has been a lot of hoopla this week over the image on a bottle of beer portraying a witch being burned at the stake. The label is on the Witch’s Wit beer produced by The Lost Abbey brewery.   It’s a label that has been in place since 2008 and comes complete with a story depicting witches being persecuted for being evil.

This story apparently starts with a prominent member of the Pagan community coming across the label, then sharing her outrage over it with the online community.  A community that promptly took up the cause and brought an email letter campaign against the brewery.  Unfortunately, many of these emails contained insults, intolerance and hate themselves.  At The Lost Abbey Brewery website, they quote one such letter: “ “Screw you, you fat ass beer slugging alcoholic Christian Ass Hole.”  Surely this is not the way to get anyone to listen to us?

To tell the truth, I obviously dislike the horrible portrayal depicted in the art work. It’s completely not appropriate in this day and age.

Continue reading “Outrage Over Witch’s Wit Beer Label Better Focused on Real Persecution”

If you would like to own this beer mug by Halloween 2011, click…
HERE

From John Palmer’s How to Brew

Water for Extract Brewing

If the water smells bad, many odors (including chlorine) can be removed by boiling. Some city water supplies use a chemical called chloramine instead of chlorine to kill bacteria. Chloramine cannot be removed by boiling and will give a medicinal taste to beer. Chloramine can be removed by running the water through an activated-charcoal filter, or by adding a campden tablet (potassium metabisulfite). Charcoal filters are a good way to remove most odors and bad tastes due to dissolved gases and organic substances. These filters are relatively inexpensive and can be attached inline to the faucet or spigot. Campden tablets are used in winemaking and should be available at your homebrew supply shop. One tablet will treat 20 gallons, so use only a quarter or half of the tablet to help it dissolve. Another alternative is to use bottled water from the grocery store.

If the water has a metallic taste or leaves hard deposits on the plumbing, then aeration, boiling, and letting it cool overnight will precipitate the excess minerals. Pour the water off into another pot to leave the minerals behind. Water softening systems can also be used to remove bad-tasting minerals like iron, copper, and manganese as well as the scale-causing minerals, calcium and magnesium. Salt-based water softeners use ion exchange to replace these heavier metals with sodium. Softened water works fine for extract brewing but should be used with caution for all-grain brewing. Depending on the type of beer, the mashing process requires a particular balance of minerals in the water that the softening process will remove.

A good bet for your first batch of beer is the bottled water sold in most supermarkets as drinking water. Use the 2.5 gallon containers. Use one container for boiling the extract and set the other aside for addition to the fermenter later.

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Profiled by Ken Carman

To start: what an interesting concept. A black barleywine ale? Way too much head. More head than glass. Very black with just a hint of light. Creamy rocky bubble head mix: deep tan. The head fades slowly but always hangs around.

Continue reading “Beer Profile: Sierra Nevada’s 30 Anniversary Black Barley Wine Ale”

T.J. Steele handles bottles at the Straub Brewery in St. Marys, Pa. The brewery has so few bottles it’s affecting production.

Picture: Keith Srakocic/Associated Press

Written by Joe Mandak for The Columbus Dispatch

ST. MARYS, Pa. — For years, it was the way breweries did business: Sell bottles, then take back the empties. It just made sense — especially to folks weaned in the lean days of the Great Depression and World War II — that bottles should be scrubbed and refilled, not thrown away.

These days, in a culture where nearly everything is disposable, recycling is a rite and energy costs are high, the decision of whether to toss tradition into the trash heap lies with one brewery about 100 miles northeast of Pittsburgh.
Continue reading “Begging for bottles”

Written by Rev. Walter Snyder

This is an excerpt from an on site answer to a reader’s question about beer in the Bible. The complete: less beer related answer, can be found HERE.

Like you, I like to sit down occasionally to figure out what life was like in Bible times. It helps to understand the people and situations we meet on Scripture’s pages. I also like to sit down with a good beer. It helps to relax and refresh a world-weary pilgrim.

Since we Lutherans are often stereotyped as beer-lovers, it seems appropriate to examine Biblical precedent. After all, Martin Luther (probably only partially in jest) commented upon doing what he could, then having a brew and getting out of the Lord’s way during the Reformation: “I opposed indulgences and all the papists, but never with force. I simply taught, preached, and wrote God’s Word; otherwise I did nothing. And while I slept [cf. Mark 4:26–29], or drank Wittenberg beer with my friends Philipp [Melanchthon] and [Nicholas] Amsdorf, the Word so greatly weakened the papacy that no prince or emperor ever inflicted such losses upon it. I did nothing; the Word did everything.”
Continue reading “Beer in the Bible?”