Category: Front Page

70 events, 46 places, beginning Thursday

Written by Polly Campbell for news.cincinnati.com

Note: the deconstructed beer dinner alone sounds worth it. A great idea for other festivals to consider.- The Professor

A look at the schedule for Cincinnati’s first Beer Week which begins Thursday, indicates just how much craft beer has taken over the imagination of beer drinkers in Cincinnati.

More than 70 events at 46 locations are scheduled for the week. All explore beer from local and national breweries dedicated to making unique, high-quality beers.

Though Cincinnati may be a little late to the party compared to other parts of the country, the wave of interest in craft beer here has taken off.
Continue reading ““Beer Week” Celebrates Craft of Brewing Distinctive Tastes”

Written by Norman Miller for GateHouse News Service and milforddailynews.com

It’s going to be a tough game Sunday when the New England Patriots and the New York Giants have a rematch in the Super Bowl. But who brews better beers, New England or New York?

Both have a lot going for them. New York is just huge. But New England is made up of six states, so that kind of equals out.

And, to make it a fairer competition, I’ll include the entire state of New York along with New Jersey (where the Giants play home games at MetLife Stadium), even though large portions of New York state do not root for the Giants. Some even root for the Buffalo Bills, for some reason.

OK, let’s start with which team has the best places to drink beer. We’ll do this sports section style, awarding checkmarks to which region gets the win.

Best places to drink beer

New York has some of the most well-known beer bars in the United States, like the Blind Tiger and Spuyten Duyvil. But New England also has some of the best bars in the country — Ebenezer’s Pub in Lovell, Maine, the Armsby Abbey in Worcester, Mass., and the Publick House in Brookline, Mass.

I think the win goes to New England, and this is not me being a hometown fan — Draft Magazine recently named the 100 Best Bars in the United States. New York had five beers on the list while New England had 10. Check mark to New England.

Who brews the best beer?

Next up is who brews the best beer. Obviously, ìbestî is always subjective. Three of my favorite breweries — Brewery Ommegang, the Brooklyn Brewery and Sixpoint –– are all brewed in New York.

Again, New England can more than hold its own. We have Hill Farmstead in Vermont, Pretty Things Beer & Ale Project in Massachusetts, Allagash Brewing Company in Maine, Smuttynose Brewing Company in New Hampshire, and so on and so on.

According to Beer Advocate, the top 100 beers (based on user reviews) features eight beers from New England and only one from New York state. Check mark again goes to New England.

New beers

Want more numbers? Let’s take a look at new beers. According to Beer Advocate’s list of the top 100 new beers (beers reviewed for the first time within the past six months), there are 15 from New England and only one from New York.

Want to read more? Please click…

HERE

 

 

Profiled by Ken Carman for Professorgoodales.net

The Saint Louis Brewery, Saint Louis Missouri

Slight tan head, mostly pillow. Great clarity w/ruby highlights. Head lasts even in small 4OZ glass. Nose: coffee, sweet-ish . Mouthfeel just a tad oatmeal chewy, full body with some roast. Taste: roast, no hops sensed: period. Just a hint of lactose in the taste and some sweet. Close to a Milk Stout, but not not quite. Espresso lingers lightly in the taste.

This is an excellent Stout, and fairly complex with the sweet, the coffee, the roast and the body. Seems to cross the bridge between Milk, Robust and Oatmeal. Not a Dry. There is also a hint of Guinness like sour.

Excellent.

Written by Dean Irvine for eatocracy.cnn.com

Shigeharu Asagiri loves beer so much he has even brewed it by the light of the moon.

He’s not a bathtub hootcher with vampiric tendencies, but the boss of Japanese microbrewery Coedo and a man committed to putting his craft beer on the map, no matter what it takes.

His nighttime brewing activity came just after the earthquake that rocked Japan’s Tohoku region last March led to frequent blackouts at his brewery just outside Tokyo.

From those difficult days and dark nights, Coedo has continued to make some award-winning beers that are helping to put the spotlight on interesting microbrews from Japan.

Earthquakes and blackouts aside, it hasn’t been easy for Coedo, founded in 1997 by Asagiri’s father-in-law. It wasn’t until prohibitive laws against small commercial breweries were repealed in 1994 that a microbrew scene in Japan could emerge.
Continue reading “Craft beer from the Land of the Rising Sun”

Written by Josh Noel for the Chicago Tribune. Image courtesy myextralife.com

Rick Schuler was there first Friday, idling in his blue Volkswagen Jetta outside Binny’s in south Lincoln Park, 40 minutes before the doors would open.

Then came the guy in flip-flops. And the doctor still in scrubs just off her shift at Swedish Covenant Hospital. And the father of three who left his kids with a baby-sitter to go to “daddy’s liquor store.”

For more than an hour, beer connoisseurs came, knowing that the window to buy a $12.99 bottle of limited edition Goose Island stout brewed with coffee beans and aged in bourbon barrels, would quickly close. Or, more accurately, slam — as Schuler had learned a day before, the beer’s first release day, when he arrived at a different Binny’s 20 minutes too late.

“That’s why I couldn’t take any chances today,” he said.
Continue reading “Connoisseurs Stand in Line to Grab Limited Quantities of Rare Craft Brews”

Written by Steve Body for http://blog.seattlepi.com

Sam Calagione, owner of Dogfish Head Brewing in Delaware and éminence grise of the American Craft Beer community, was recently moved by what he read in the forums of BeerAdvocate.com to write the following. It has since gone viral and is – justifiably – being used as a virtual manifesto by those of us who reject the increasing tendency of craft beer’s hard-core fanboys/geekazoids to cop attitudes and begin, in effect, to Eat Their Own when a brewery dares to become successful.

I found Sam’s essay to be a piece of diplomacy on the order of one of Hank Kissinger’s forays into Palestine. I would have been nowhere near as nice about it and I applaud his decency, common sense, and restraint. For a graphic example of how NOT to respond to stuff like Sam found in BA, read what I have to say after Sam’s eloquence…(this has been lightly edited for space)
Continue reading “Sam Calagione vs. The Beer Geeks: Dogfish Top Dog Speaks MY Mind”

Picture: Adam Mathews, co-owner of Backyard Home Brewers and Education Center in Humble, offers a wide range of products needed to brew home-made beer.

Written by STEFANIE THOMAS foryourhoustonnews.com

Adam Mathews and Jon Denman aren’t giving up their day jobs just yet. They’re not interested in high-pressure sales tactics, they say, or making fortunes. They just want to share their passion: making beer.

A few days ago, with the incorporation of Backyard Home Brewers and Education Center, Humble became home to a home-brewing supply shop, with all its untapped potential.

At Backyard Home Brewers and Education Center in Humble, a couch is waiting in the corner for anyone who wants to plop down for a chat or a taste of brew. The dress code is casual. Strangers are greeted like old buddies – or maybe Mathews and Denman just never met a stranger. The scent of hops, barley and malt lingers like an olfactory premonition. Buckets of more than 30 different kinds of grains are stacked to the ceiling. Flasks and packets and tubes of yeast are neatly organized in a cooler in the back of the store. Kegs loom on the top shelves.

“Jon and I’ve been home-brewing for quite a while,” said Mathews, a Medicare consultant employed by a major insurance company who lives in Kingwood. “Last summer we went camping and we brought some homebrew out there with us, and we decided to open a homebrew store. We plotted out all kinds of ideas.”

The two friends say they depleted their savings to follow their dream of providing area home-brewing enthusiasts with quality products, a place to share the successes of their endeavors, bringing newcomers into the fold, and delivering support through education.
Continue reading “Something’s Brewing – and it Ain’t No Storm”

Canadian brewers following a trend set here in America-PGA

Written by Ben Johnsonfor blogto.com. Photos by Traven Benner

session beer. Thankfully for those people, the guys at href=”http://www.hogtownbrewers.ca/” target=”_blank”>Hogtown Brewers agreed, and decided to do something about it.

Founded by six guys who play rugby together, Hogtown Brewers was born out of a desire to create a local beer that had a decent amount of flavour but wasn’t so complex or heavy that you couldn’t drink a half a dozen or so in an evening (see above re: six dudes, rugby).

The idea, according to Pete Shippen, one of the brewery’s founders, was to develop a beer that was “just drinkable enough not to alienate.” With the help of experienced brewmaster Jay Cooke, that seems to be precisely what they’ve done.

Hogtown is probably Toronto’s only Kölsch-style beer, a lagered beer that is essentially Germany’s answer to the British Pale Ale. It’s a beer with a rich brewing tradition in Cologne, and the style choice is a reflection of brewmaster Cooke’s training at brew schools in Germany.

The beer is a pale straw color with a noticeable but not overbearing hops presence and a middle-of-the-road alcohol content of 5%. I can certainly confirm its easy drinkablilty, and if the throngs of after-work drinkers at the Duke of Devon, where the beer is currently being poured, are any indication, others agree.

Hogtown officially launched this past weekend, slightly ahead of schedule. The owners of the Duke of Devon told Shippen that they’d start pouring Hogtown on Wednesday, just as soon as the current supply of Alexander Keith’s Red was expected to run dry. Anxious to get their beer out there, however, Shippen and the rest of the Hogtown Brewers enlisted some friends and saw to it that the bar’s supply of Keith’s Red ran out ahead of schedule and Hogtown has been tapped at the Duke since Friday.

There are plans to take Hogtown to other bars, but in the meantime Shippen and his partners are happy staying a little bit exclusive. “We’ve had a lot of interest,” he notes, “but we want to be able to expand the right way.” The plan seems to be a level-headed approach not to get too far ahead of themselves and to grow the business in a way that ensures they can still service whomever opts to pour their beer.

Shippen brings just some of what seems like considerable business-savvy to a group of brewers/rugby players that comprise a few financial industry types, as well as a current student and a gum salesman. For now, they seem content to take it one step at a time, but during a conversation that included reference to the Duke of Devon as a “focus group” and a chat about their contract brewing (at Cool Brewery) as a “less capital intensive” approach, it seemed clear that the guys from Hogtown Brewers have their sights set on eventual distributing to a wider market. Given the rate at which people seem to be downing pints of their tasty Kölsch-style beer, Toronto’s beer drinkers will likely be ready for them when they do.