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Walking into Black Abbey’s taproom feels a bit like walking into church. As you enter the door and pass through a Gothic arch, you’ll see hand-crafted wood tables and church pews. The eight taps on the far wall rest under a deep-red Gothic arch. The lights hanging from the ceiling used to illuminate a little church in East Tennessee. It feels like a sacred place. But as Martin Luther said, “It is better to think of church in the ale-house than to think of the ale-house in church.”

The taproom is open to the brew house, so you’ll see everything that goes into beer production. Congregants are separated from the brew house by rustic wooden beams and railings. The wood in the beams and tables was recovered from a storm-damaged tobacco barn. That wood spent a century working, now it gets to retire to a brewery. There are five eight-foot tables for beer lovers to gather around and discuss things like fermentation and sanctification.

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I’ve long considered myself a bit of a geek, but the genesis of this Stone Farking Wheaton W00t Stout is so geeky, it’s almost outstrips my ability to process its nerdiness.

The beer is a collaboration between Stone Brewing co-founder and beer geek supreme Greg Koch, child actor turned geek hero Wil Wheaton, and Drew Curtis, the web geek behind Fark.com, a news website fueled by cleverly rewritten headlines and Photoshop contests, like this recent one featuring a hairy couch.

The origins of Stone Farking Wheaton W00t Stout can be traced back to 2005, when Stone Brewing went to congratulate the 10,000th person to sign up for their mailing list, to find that it was the one and only Wil Wheaton, star of the ‘80s coming of age story “Stand By Me” and “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” where he played young Wesley Crusher.  A friendship between Wheaton and Koch followed, and the idea to brew together took root.

 

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How it all began… a nano brewery: Beetje Brewery. SOURCE. (Now known as The Commons Brewery.)

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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Profiled by Ken Carman for professorgoodales.net

Tons and tons of head that fill the glass with pillow and big bubble rock. A bit hazy with a pale yellow: no more than 3 srm, more like 2. This is a beautiful beer, on the light side. Head hangs and literally coats the glass: refusing to leave.

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.

4, 4.6 if I could.

Welcome to the PGA beer rating system: one beer “Don’t bother.” Two: Eh, if someone gives it to you, drink. Three: very good, go ahead and seek it out, but be aware there is at least one problem. Four: seek it out. Five: pretty much “prefecto.”

 

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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Source: Wiki

Carlton Brewery, 1888: Australia