Category: Front Page

Courtesy of Community Beer Works

Written by Julia Burke for Buffalospree.com

 

Buffalo’s own Community Beer Works received much-deserved recognition on Friday when RateBeer.com, an influential international beer-review site, named the nanobrewery “Best New Brewery” in New York State. Dubbed “the world’s largest beer competition,” RateBeer’s annual roundup of the greatest brewers and beers in the world tallies votes by the site’s reviewers, this year including 180,000 beers from over 13,000 brewers. Community Beer Works, located on Buffalo’s West Side, recieved the state’s best new brewery vote, , while legendary Chautauqua-area brewery Southern Tier received both “top brewer” and “best beer” for its much-lauded Choklat stout.
Continue reading “Buffalo: Local Beer Gets a Big Thumbs-Up”

Profiled by Ken Carman for professorgoodales.net

As the lady said at Midtown in Nashville, I too have never been all that impressed with Bridgeport beers. Some “OK,” some a tad less than “OK,” some a hint over “OK.” This is an oak aged Barleywine @”OK.” Oak nose: light. Amber with good clarity. Head lasts quite a while: pin point bubbles with a nice compliment of pillow. In bottle picking a hint of barleywine sweetness on the nose.

Mouthfeel: oak/wood cling with some sweet. Medium body with a hint of barleywine sweetness. Very thin for style. Needs more malt background. A bit sticky, but barleywine can get so. This is probably the only barleywine sense that matches other bws.

To be honest, this is a nice, but very one dimensional, barleywine. There’s a nice sweetness backed up by a amber/caramel malt sense. Taste-wise a weak barleywine at best. Bourbon barrel aged? Getting the oak but a very, very tiny hint of bourbon at best. Oak, oak, oak. Some sherry notes though I suspect that’s the bourbon. Hops way in the background, but not as crucial as the other way too background issues.

“Too restrained” comes to mind. Less bw than it should be.

The issue here is balance, though I’m curious what aging will do. The oak is obvios, everthing else takes a background and one would expect both aroma and mouthfeel to be more aggressive. To the taste more of an aggressive amber with aggressive oak.

Suggestion: get the barleywine right first, then the rest.

Welcome to the new PGA 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.” This beer was rated…

On this day in 1935, canned beer makes its debut. In partnership with the American Can Company, the Gottfried Krueger Brewing Company delivered 2,000 cans of Krueger’s Finest Beer and Krueger’s Cream Ale to faithful Krueger drinkers in Richmond, Va. Ninety-one percent of the drinkers approved of the canned beer, driving Krueger to give the green light to further production.

(Courtesy History Magazine)

Without intent, I have collected well over 1,000 beer bottles since the early 70s. When something finally had to be done about the cheap paneling in this old modular, I had a choice. Tear down the walls while, oh, so carefully, replacing the often rotted 1X3s. Or: cover them with… The Bottle Collection.

Written by Ken Carman

I bought this some time in the late 90’s to early 2000’s. I remember it being a very mild Blueberry, pale malt, decent head, great clarity and obviously the rest pale malt. Mouthfeel was light, from what I remember. I do believe it was blueberry extract, or mostly extract. But at low levels it can be tough to tell.

The label claims medium body, but memory tells me pretty light. Probably the malt they used that made me feel that way. There are malts that give more of a sense of fullness. I’m guessing mostly pale. So the gravity may have been higher than the mouthfeel indicated.

The brewery had to have been in Marlborough, Massachusetts for only a brief while. I go through there every year and somehow missed it. There have been at least two breweries in the area, one before, one since. I keep missing Sherwood, which started brewing in the mid-2000s, and have had their beer. Tasty. And Pilgrim Brewing that used to be in Hudson in the 1990s. Hops growing outside. Warehouse environment. If I remember right I was attracted to Pilgrim because they were, at the time, brewing Dog’s Breath beer for Eagle Brook Saloon… now brewed by Ipswich.

According to legend they brewed it on a lark and served it under the name Underground Brewery at Northampton Brewfest. I attended the first one so it’s likely I conned the server into giving me an empty bottle because from what I have read the brewery never quite off the ground.

Written by Jay R. Brooks for The Contra Costa Times and mercurynews.com

The new year is a perfect time to start something new — like homebrewing. There’s no better way to appreciate the beer you drink, and unlike most hobbies, at the end of the day, you’ve got beer. How’s that for a reward?

There has been a huge surge of interest in homebrewing in recent years. The American Homebrewers Association saw its membership jump to 35,000, a 20 percent increase from 2011 to 2012. According to their estimates, 1 million people — including 130,000 Californians — made beer or wine at home last year. With more than a thousand clubs and 300-plus homebrewing competitions nationwide, it’s clear that the DIY beer bandwagon has arrived.
Continue reading “Brooks on Beer: Learning to Homebrew”

William Knoedelseder’s “Bitter Brew” offers a sometimes fascinating history of America’s most famous beer-makers

Written by Tom Dibblee for LA Review of Books and Salon.com

I decided to review William Knoedelseder’s Bitter Brew: The Rise and Fall of Anheuser-Busch and America’s Kings of Beer because of my loyalty to Bud Light Lime. I love Bud Light Lime, and I wanted to know where it came from. But because Bud Light Lime probably isn’t a natural beer of choice for the LARB crowd, I thought I’d take a second to explain its excellence.

Bud Light Lime does two things: it allows me to shed the burden of sophistication, and it restores beer to what it once was, when I was young — a tart nectar that makes me happy. Continue reading “Even Anheuser-Busch hates Bud Light”

Written by John Wright for Guardian UK

I hate waste, and spend a lot of time devising interesting ways of using kitchen scraps. No chicken carcass or leek top escapes my kitchen without being used in a stock, and all pastry off-cuts are turned into (largely inedible) jam tarts rather than being consigned directly to the bin.

A neglected box of Sugar Puffs whose contents have set into a solid, intractable lump is a fairly regular sight in our kitchen and it is only recently that I hit upon the (though I say so myself) rather brilliant idea of turning them into beer.
Continue reading “Against the Grain: Sugar Puff Beer”

Note: considering our early years as a nation and how many of our forefathers were both brewing and distilling, it probably just skipped quite a few generations. And the move to make beer one generic style did NOT help.