Category: Front Page

One Bottle Collection beer for every 5 days before Christmas. Rating system: not actually meant as a “tense” comment. All these beers either don’t exist anymore, or I tasted in the past. Hopefully, if not so hot before, they’re better now. If they do still exist. Or hopefully, if not better they’re as dead as the… Dickens.

Ghost of Christmas Present… remember him? Jolly, fun: the kind of guy you’d invite to a party for the season, and the kind of beer you could bring to a festive affair and not be totally laughed out of the room by festive beer geeks. That’s the best a beer gets in this series. Now Ghost of Christmas Past isn’t a great award. You can see from the picture he can be a bit of a grump. Probably from mediocre’ beer. And best not bring a Ghost of Christmas Past Beer to a beer geek festive affair. You’ll be the limp wet noodle of the party. A Ghost of Christmas Future beer? You remember that guy, right? If you want to be laughed at, have to bring most of your offering home and feel like you’ve just attended your own funeral instead of a party, bring a Ghost of Christmas Future beer. Some Ghost of Future Beer might best serve as embalming fluid.

Written by Ken Carman

Market Street Winter

What exactly made this a Christmas/Seasonal beer I don’t remember, but I do remember that this came into my collection towards the end of Bohanan Brewing being a Nashville phenomenon and into being a Nashville scourge. They were the first in craft beer world to take Nashvillian beer lovers by storm and they were pretty good. I rememeber a vanilla beer that was tasty.

For some reason they got burned out just as the competition started to heat up and stopped caring. Their local product was phenolic and loaded with DMS. Various versions of Gack! I don’t know how they achieved this, because as far as I know they had no bottling line: they vended out, but the bottled stuff was as bad or worse. Let the barf begin! Like chewing on the coal left in your stocking because someone was a bad brewer.

Bring this to the party and there would be no need to wait for over

You see the Ghost of Christmases Yet To Come? Yeah, he’s telling you all the other brewers are eagerly dividing your brew equipment up while laughing.

So sad. Didn’t have to be that way. And poor Tiny Tim? That’s may be why the beer was so bad at the end. Did he fall into the kettle and you used him as an adjunct?

Continue reading “From the Bottle Collection: 3 Days Before Christmas Beer”

Associated Press

KINGSPORT, Tenn. (AP) — Kingsport police say a 61-year-old man attacked his neighbor after being denied a beer.

The man, Alfred E. Bruner, was arrested and charged with aggravated assault on Wednesday night after his neighbor reported to police that Bruner came to his apartment asking for a beer.

According to a police report obtained by the Kingsport Times-News, the victim was attacked after telling Bruner he was out of beer. Bruner was also accused of coming at the neighbor with a 6- to 7-foot-long stick.

Police spoke with Bruner who appeared heavily intoxicated.

‘Police spoke with Bruner who appeared heavily intoxicated.” -PGA: “DUH!!!

For about six years Millie and Ken Carman have hosted a gathering in honor of Ed Tate who brought many years of cheer to this gathering of Music City Brewers and beer loving folks. We have moved it to the first non-holiday weekend in January to avoid conflict with the holidays: hence “New Brew Year.” This year: same time, same place, different date.

2PM, Saturday, 1/8/11, Flying Saucer 111 10th Avenue S # 310 Nashville, TN 37203-3815 (615) 259-3039

Written by Patrick Loch for hopheadnews.com

Thanks to passionate entrepreneurs like George and Leah Shetka and Paul Pavkovich of Hippity Hops Farms, LLC, Minnesota might be making some noise in the hop farming industry.

(Paul’s son Landon poses at Hippity Hops Farms, LLC, located in Forest Lake, Minnesota.)

The three got started when Paul suggested the idea. “I had four plants and thought, ‘why not go bigger?’” Turns out, it wasn’t terribly difficult to convince the Shetka’s that their front lawn would make a perfect hop-yard.

“We just went in circles mowing the grass there anyways,” said Leah.

In the fall of 2008, George and some other family members got to work situating rows of 20-foot poles strung together with rope. The following spring, 75 Cascade rhizomes went into the ground and began their frenzied climb. That first year, they harvested about 12 pounds of hops, all of which were handpicked.

“We want to emphasize we handpick everything,” said Paul. “That’s one thing we’re not going to stop doing.”
Continue reading “Hippity Hops Farms—What’s Up Hop?”

How to make your home brew even more “home brew”-ish? What about roasting your own beans? Coffee Stout or Witte anyone?- PGA

Picture of roasting beans, Doug Beghtel, The Oregonian

Written by Grant Butler for The Oregonian

Portland loves its DIY culture, with all its craft fairs, knitting classes and home-brewing get-togethers. Portland also loves coffee, with temples of java dotting the map like tattoos on the arms of baristas.

That these passions have come together seems inevitable. Instead of just heading to a nearby coffee shop for an artfully poured latte, more people are learning what it takes to make coffee at home that’s vastly superior to what people used to drink. And there’s a fast-growing trend of people roasting their own coffee beans.
Continue reading “Roasting Your Own Coffee Begins with Green Beans and a Skillet”

“Kind of like, ya know, mold grows on an OLDE Scribe”

Written with a TOAST by da OLDE Scribe wid da MOST!

At first Scribe hated Oxymoron. A mild IPA, where the hops slowly assert themselves to full IPA. Three German malts, six German hop varieties, and a lager yeast strain.

Great name. Weird lager/pilsner malt mix. A project brew feature brewers from Left Hand and Terrapin. But this one grows on you. Nice head. Fades fast. Deep burnt gold. Vague hop aroma: no hop specific, Oxymoron has a full body and makes an Olde Scribe take notice. About as complex as a union between Einstein and Britney Spears.

A bit confusing.

Interesting.

Confuse yourself today. Give it a try. Make up your own %$#@! mind.

How the Busch clan lost control of an iconic American beer company.

Written By Patrick Cooke for The Wall Street Journal

If ever an American company represented the land of milk and honey for corporate executives it was Anheuser-Busch, though perhaps the land of hops, rice and barley would be more apt. For decades a palace of well-paid vice presidents in cushy offices presided over the manufacture of Budweiser, America’s beer, in that most American of cities, St. Louis. They also oversaw the Busch Gardens theme parks in Virginia and in Florida, where Shamu the killer whale was on the payroll, along with a stable of 250 Clydesdale horses. It was a first-class operation all the way. There were $1,000 dinners, hunting lodges, sky suites at Busch Stadium and a fleet of Dassault Falcon corporate jets with a staff of 20 waiting pilots. Every kitchenette refrigerator at corporate headquarters was well stocked with Bud, Bud Lite and Michelob.
Continue reading “This Bud’s for Sale”

A press release from the Discovery Channel

Experiencing the World One Pint at a Time: Discovery Channel Raises a Glass for Brew Masters

-Premiering Sunday, November 21 at 10 PM E/P on Discovery Channel-

(Silver Spring, MD) – It’s cold, it’s comforting, it’s beer….but for Sam Calagione, founder of one of America’s leading craft brewers Dogfish Head Brewery, beer is a passion, a business and a personal quest for best, most imaginative brews. Premiering Sunday, November 21 at 10 PM E/P on Discovery Channel, BREW MASTERS follows Sam and his partners in suds as they travel the country and the world sourcing exotic ingredients and discovering ancient techniques to produce beers of astounding originality.
Continue reading “Brew Masters on Discovery Channel (with Sam Calagione) Debuts in November”

For the green-conscious crowd, it can be argued that it’s far more important to drink beers from environment-friendly breweries than to seek out organic beers that may leave you unsatisfied. (Photo: Phil Velasquez/Chicago Tribune)

Written by Evan S. Benn for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch McClatchy-Tribune

Over a plate of eggs from a free-range, hormone-free, vegetarian-fed, organic chicken, I pondered the carbon footprint of my beer consumption.

I recycle bottles and cans, sure; but is that enough to offset all the water, energy and other resources that go into making liquid gold?

So I started looking into organic beers — and I was underwhelmed. Unlike the wine industry, which in recent years has exploded with bio-dynamic and organic wines produced in sustainable ways, there are still only a relative few number of beers out there that have gone green.
Continue reading “Green beer: Not Just for St. Patty’s Day”