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How Craft Beer Brewers Hope To Help Towns Hit By Hard Times

Written by Matthew Battles for fastcompany.com

A new initiative aims to find ways for craft breweries to be the business that powers dying industrial towns.
The recession isn’t new to the mill towns of the Northeast; they hit the skids long ago. Decades before the most recent economic collapse, proud, river-encircled cities from Maine to Pennsylvania had faded to mere shadows of the engines of productivity they were during the Industrial Revolution. In place of idle smokestacks and shattered windows, Shoe Town to Brew Town–billed as “a friendly forum over food and drink” to be held at New York’s Brooklyn Brewery–imagines another scene: historic manufacturies throbbing with the yeasty vapors of craft beer, and producing not only brew but sustainably raised fish, hydroponic produce, and enough natural gas to meet their own energy demands.

The project began as a notion hatched in the mind of New York restaurateur Jimmy Carbone. Imagining himself elected mayor of his hometown of Haverhill, Massachusetts, he had a vision of the city’s moribund shoe factories transformed into breweries. A co-creator of the “Good Beer Seal,” which certifies bars that show a commitment to craft brewing and local stewardship, Carbone was aware of the need for resource-intensive breweries to focus on sustainability. Working together, Carbone realized, beer producers, developers, and community groups could churn out a heady brew of opportunity and sustainability. The event, on July 19, gives brewers a chance to come together with activists, architects, and designers to talk about the catalytic potential of craft brewing.
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Tech Talk: Top 10 Steps to Better Beer

Written by Chris Colby for byo.com

Everybody loves his or her first batch of beer. However, after the initial enthusiasm fades, most brewers start looking for ways to improve their beer. And here, beginning homebrewers face a problem. The problem isn’t a lack of information; it’s a surfeit of it. From books to magazines to on-line forums, everyone has an opinion on how to brew better beer. Do you make a yeast starter or try to mimic Burton Upon Trent’s water? Should you keep things clean or build a HERMS machine? Will a little zinc improve your drink? Is avoiding hot side aeration the key to a great libation?

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Beer Profile: Lucky Bucket IPA

Profiled by Ken Carman

Lucky Bucket Brewing Company
La Vista, Nebraska

We had this on tap a few weeks ago and really enjoyed it. So how’s the bottled version?

Upon first sniff it’s Cascade, perhaps Chinook and very much American IPA to the nose. Grapefruit-like nose? Yes, but a bit more complex than that with malt sneaking in under the grapefruit: there enough for support… and a barely discernible hop mix other than the usual suspects I mentioned. Reminds me of Liberty Ale.

Pours with a nice, thick, pillow head… bit of a chill haze and a nice gold.

Mouthfeel is bitter yet not quite astringent, carbonation gives a firm backbone to a nice body.

Taste: not Liberty Ale. Obviously high alpha hops used early in the boil. Could use more, later, to add complexity to nose and taste. Note: the tap, as I remember it was more complex; better. This IPA didn’t translate as well into a bottled version. Expected, to a certain extent, but this was too much of a contrast. The hops wound up just bitter, the malt faded into little but the adequate support. Almost totally different beer.

Try it on tap, if you can. I don’t mean to dis the bottled version. Tis enjoyable, but can be so much more.

Now I’ll go back to dreaming of Lucky Bucket on tap. Could we also do a nitro push, or hand pulled?

Yum.

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Flags and beer: A Baltimore tradition

The kindness of a Baltimore brewer plays a small part in the story of America’s national anthem

Written by Rob Kasper for The Baltimore Sun

During the Fourth of July weekend in Baltimore, there will be plenty of flags flying and beers sipped. This connection between the American flag and Baltimore beer goes back almost 200 years and played a small but interesting role in history.

During the War of 1812, seamstress Mary Pickersgill was hard at work on the large American flag that would eventually fly over Fort McHenry and inspire Francis Scott Key to write the poem that would become The Star Spangled Banner. In the summer of 1814, Washington had just been burned, and the British were turning their attention to Baltimore, then the third largest port in America and home to privateers, a nemesis of the British Navy.

The story goes that Colonel George Armistead, who was preparing the defense of the fort, felt that the only thing still needed was “a flag so large that the British should have no difficulty seeing it from a distance.” Mrs. Pickersgill got the job because she was an accomplished seamstress, having learned the flag making trade in Philadelphia from her mother, Rebecca Young. She also had family connections. She was related by marriage to Commodore Joshua Barney and General John Stricker, two of the men in charge of the defense of Baltimore.

She fashioned two flags, a massive 30 foot by 42 foot flag with stars that measured two feet point to point, and a smaller 17 foot by 25 foot flag called a storm flag. In bad weather the larger flag, soaked with moisture, could be too difficult to hoist, so the smaller storm flag could be substituted.

Assembling these large flags required a lot of room, which Pickersgill’s house on Queen Street, now called Pratt Street, did not have. She, however, was on good terms with a neighbor, George I. Brown, who has just bought a brewery at Lombard Street and the Jones Falls.

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Brewfest on Tap

Even though you may not live in the New England area, this article also has the interesting story of of a brewer who brewed a Pilgrim beer and his venture into professional brewing.-PGA

Written by Beth I. Gandelman for newburyportnews.com

AMESBURY— A competition for best home brew and the soft launch of Riverwalk Brewing will highlight today’s annual Amesbrewery Days Invitational Craft Brewfest.

Participants will have the opportunity to sample the craft beer creations of more than 20 artisan brewers and vote from two finalists for their favorite IPA beer during the event, which goes from 5 to 8 p.m. in the Amesbury Town Hall parking lot on Friend Street.

Sponsored by Heat Event Management of Amesbury, the festival is geared toward the smaller, lesser-known brewers who put quality above quantity and have passion, a unique message and a stake in the art of beer-making.

Among them will be Amesbury’s Steve Sanderson, winner of the History Channel’s “History on Tap” brewer competition last year.
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American Craft Beer: the Hippest of Hops

American craft beer from the Brit perspective- The Prof

Posted by Tony Naylor at www.guardian.co.uk

From tasteless mass-produced beers a decade ago, innovative, flavoursome American ales from a thriving craft brewing scene can now be found in the UK. Is this a welcome invasion?

If you have ever drunk Budweiser, Michelob or Miller Lite, the phrase, craft brewed American beer, may sound like an oxymoron. A joke, even. But, for several years now, it is US microbreweries which have been setting the pace internationally, exciting beer geeks and inspiring several radical new British breweries.

If, however, that Stateside creativity was previously an open secret, mainly of interest to a small beer-drinking cognoscenti, all that is about to change. Thanks to the advocacy of new wave specialist beer bars like Manchester’s Port Street Beer House, Bradford’s Sparrow, Leeds’ North bar, London’s Rake, the Draft House venues, the Euston Tap, and Brewdog’s small chain of Scottish bars, US craft beer is suddenly gathering a significant momentum in the UK. Previously obscure beers from Flying Dog, AleSmith, Stone, Odell and other small US breweries are gaining exposure here, among discerning drinkers, like never before.

Californian craft brewer Tim Goeppinger takes a sample of beer. Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
At the same time, several of the better-known American craft beers are beginning to form a bridgehead in Britain’s supermarkets, with both Brooklyn lager and Sierra Nevada’s Pale Ale (the beer that Brewdog used to try and mimic in their first garage-based home-brewing experiments) now widely available. Goose Island’s beers will appear in 250 Tesco stores from mid-August, reinforcing the sense that, like it or not, the Americans are coming.

Which, if you are looking for excitement in your glass, is reason to celebrate. In sharp contrast to their often conservative UK counterparts, America’s 1,600 microbreweries specialise in big, bold, punchy flavours. Their beers are typically dosed with huge quantities of hops – both hops high in alpha acids, early in the brewing process, for bitterness; then dry, uncooked hops later on for fruitier flavours – in order to cram taste into their beers. As Steve Taylor co-owner of London bar, Mason & Taylor explains:

“Over the last 30 years or so, American agricultural universities and hop farms developed a multitude of new hop strains, like Amarillo, Cascade and Citra, most of which have bold aggressive bitterness and huge, fresh, largely tropical flavours. Those hops inspired a pale ale revolution which elevated US beers beyond the unremarkable brown session beers which had previously, and to a certain extent still, dominate English cask beer production.”

First and foremost, British beer drinkers are responding positively to the exuberant flavours characteristic of US craft beers. That those beers are slickly packaged, however – not just in terms of memorable or modish branding, but in the way the labels tend to clearly explain how said beer was made and how it might taste – is an important factor, too.
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Ohio Budget Lamented by Beer Aficionados

DAYTON, Ohio (AP) – Beer buffs say the state will miss out on sales and potential tax revenue because a proposal to let Ohioans buy higher-alcohol beers was dropped from the state budget.

The owner of a home-brewing supply store in Dayton says people who want craft beers with more buzz will have to go to other states. Mike Schwartz tells the Dayton Daily News he doesn’t understand why the alcohol content in beer is more limited when he can sell a rum that’s more than 75% alcohol.

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