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A Place to Gather and Talk
This article does skip Market Street: the first in the new wave of breweries/brewpubs in Nashville.-PGA

Ask Kent Taylor about changes in the craft beer scene in Nashville, and he’ll take you back to 1994, when he co-founded Blackstone Brewing Company.
“It was Bud country,” he said. And even when he would serve guests his lightest beer, they would sometimes ask for a “real” beer instead. “We might have been ahead of our time.”
Cut to 2013 and you’ll find Blackstone joined by thriving craft breweries like the 10-year-old Yazoo Brewing Company, which had its highest volume in sales last month, and the 2-year-old Jackalope Brewing Company, which reached 100 percent production in October of last year and will add canned beer to its repertoire thanks to a mobile canning unit rolling into town this fall.
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Aroma: sweet, rhubarb-like with a scent of orange. Some pale malt in the background.
The mouthfeel and taste are where it really shines. While no heavy quaff, the caramel-ish malt in the back ground makes it have as firm, somewhat bready, feel to it. This blends well with the slightly sourish, rhubarb taste that hangs in the mouth long after you’ve swallowed. Orange peel, pineapple, rhubarb combined with hint of brett. Though head is substantial, carbonation is slight, but pricks the tongue slightly.
There’s a great sweetness that also lingers, just a hint of brown sugar.
Listed at 9%. Until it warms you’d never know.
Rate Beer has it at 93. Beer Advocate=89.
Some claim it a Belgian Strong Pale, some a Saison.
I think it’s just damn good.

I realize you’re going to spend Independence Day happily drinking whatever cold adult beverage you’re served, because you’re polite and you’re an alcoholic. And I trust you’ll have a fine old time no matter what you drink. But that doesn’t mean America’s shitbrews are all the same. The list below breaks down 36 of them, from worst to least-worst.
36. Keystone. This is the worst beer currently sold on American soil. It sits behind chilled glass in a convenience-store fridge like a dumb rebuke to the explosion of American beer variety all around it. In 1978 there were 89 breweries in the U.S.; today there are more than 2,400, and most of the new ones are better than most of the old ones. In 2013 craft beer is no longer the exclusive domain of West Coast weirdos and psychotic woodsmen. These fine days you can score Samuel Adams or Sierra Nevada at the least ambitious of convenience stores and Dogfish Head 90 Minute on the least reliable of trains. And then there is Keystone, which first appeared to the world in 1989, in Chico, Calif., home of the Sierra Nevada Brewing Company. Keystone separates itself from the rest of the crap pack by augmenting the typical stale/sour flavor profile with notes of brown bananas and green armpits. Keystone is worse than Heineken and murder.
35. Bud Light Lime. When Anheuser-Busch spit this one out a few years ago it seemed like a pretty good idea, as terrible ideas go. The world never needs more flavors of Bud Light, but the popularity of the otherwise worthless Corona proves that folks love to limen up their beers. Barroom fruit is repulsive—ever think about where your lime’s been before it lands in your drink? Nowhere nice—so if Bud Light Lime were any good at all, it would be a little leap forward. But alas, the alleged lime flavoring in no way resembles people food. Bud Light Lime tastes like green Fruit Loops soaked in thigh sweat.
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(Politically correct idiocy in the name of beer.-PGA)
A Fox News guest host asserted on Friday that “the terrorists have won†because brewer Samuel Adams was not in invoking God in its television commercials to sell beer.
In the “Independence†television spot that began airing last month, an actor in a Samuel Adams Boston Lager commercial quotes from the Declaration of Independence.
“Why name a beer after Samuel Adams? Because Samuel Adams signed the Declaration of Independence,†the actor says. “He believed there was a better way to live: all men are created equal. They are endowed with certain unalienable rights: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Smooth, flavorful, we bow to no kings. Samuel Adams Boston lager: declare your independence.â€
On Friday, the three Fox & Friends guest hosts expressed outrage that the brewer had not included the phrase “endowed by their Creator†in the commercial.
“When political correctness takes over the beer advertising industry, the terrorists have won,†said Watters, who is better known for his job as a producer on Bill O’Reilly’s Fox News show. “I mean, this is absolutely outrageous!â€
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NEW YORK — To see how a small business can transform a neighborhood, just follow the barrels.
About 30 years ago, beer lovers wanting to create their own drinks started taking over abandoned old buildings in rundown city districts, refitted them with tanks, kettles and casks, and started churning out beer. The byproduct was a boom in craft beer drinkers: Barrels shipped have more than doubled in the past decade, according to trade publication Beer Marketer’s Insights. Craft beer now makes up nearly 7 percent of the slow-growing U.S. beer market.
But beer drinkers weren’t the only beneficiaries. The arrival of a craft brewery was also often one of the first signs that a neighborhood was changing. From New England to the West Coast, new businesses bubbled up around breweries, drawing young people and creating a vibrant community where families could plant roots and small businesses could thrive.
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