Category: Front Page

Picture courtesy Beer Archives. NOT Woodland Brewery’s Adambier.

A dated article, but I have heard no one talk of this style. Just had one in Marcy, NY. Interesting-Ken Carman

A Dortmunder Adambier is malt dominated strong ale from Northern Germany. No one can be certain on the origin. Dortmund was one of the cities in the 14th Century Hanseatic League (along with Einbeck — the home of Bock); the city was best known for beer and brewing. In the 19th Century, King Frederick William IV of Prussia was known as a hard drinking man. He visited Dortmund and some Adambier put him under the table for more than a whole day! With the development of lagers, this style fell out of favor among German beer drinkers, and now is very difficult to find. Even the BJCP (sadly) abandoned the style when they revised the guidelines in 1998.

My first exposure to Dortmunder Adambier was when I was judging European Ales in the mid 1990s. There was this wonderful strong beer that tasted like a cross between an English Barley wine and a dopplebock. I later found out that Bruce Brode and Brian Vessa were the brewers and have since brewed several myself. The only commercial example of an Adambier I know of is Hair of the Dog’s Adam. Brewer Alan Sprints goes to great trouble with this flagship beer. Each batch is numbered, and the carbonation comes from krausening, where Hair of the Dog adds some new fermenting Adam to some that is ready to be bottled. One can tell, Adam will last many years if kept cold, and the head is as intense and rocky as any beer I’ve ever seen. Alan adds some smoked malt as well — peat if you can believe it. If you haven’t tried Adam, do yourself a favor and get some. Stuffed Sandwich has many aged magnums going back a number of years.

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Dairy that is fermented and brewed like beer could soon be on tap as Sam Alcaine, M.S. ’07, assistant professor in the Department of Food Science, turns dairy waste into a flavorful drink with an alcoholic kick.

The research is more than a compelling addition to the craft beer craze: Alcoholic dairy products could be a solution to an increasing problem for New York’s powerhouse Greek yogurt industry.

The production of Greek yogurt creates acid whey, a leftover liquid with very little protein and few profitable uses. Alcaine, former product innovation manager at Miller Brewing Co., thinks there may be a place for alcoholic dairy beverages made from whey.

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Written by Franz Hofer for Tempest in a Tankard

Only an hour by train from Brussels, West Flanders is renowned for its picturesque medieval towns replete with belfries and beguinages, sandy North Sea beaches, verdant open fields, and a harrowing First World War history. Bruges is West Flanders’ heavily visited capital, but the region is also home to the Poperinge hop district and some of Belgium’s most unique beers in a country famous for unique beer. Roeselare, Vleteren, and Vichte are but a few of the towns and villages that conjure up visions of Trappist brewers and the sweet-sour beers of the region. If the bucolic Payottenland due west of Brussels is known for lambic, the western part of the country answers with Flemish red ale and the oud bruin of East Flanders.

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When Josh pFriem, Ken Whiteman and Rudy Kellner cooked up the notion of a new brewery in Hood River, Oregon, back in 2011, they had a notion – because of Josh’s extensive experience as an assistant (most notably with the legendary Chuckanut Brewing of Bellingham, WA, and its brewmaster emeritus, Wil Kemper) and a frankly wonky immersion in All Things Fermentable – that this new venture just might be pretty good. They were certainly optimistic, as proven by the unusually handsome and adaptable digs down at Hood River’s new Waterfront Park Business Center, and by the measure-twice-cut-once thoroughness of their planning. Unlike so many – maybe the majority of – new breweries, pFriem was planned for success.

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DOUBTFUL. More likely it will just add to the pantheon.-PGA

For those who have grown weary of the hazy beer trend, a new hope has arrived. Unlike the murky and juicy Northeast-style IPAs that have dominated the beer scene for the last couple years, the hot new sub-style of IPA is pale, clear and ridiculously dry — and it was born right here in Northern California.

The first Extra Brut IPA — called Hop Champagne, so named for its high carbonation, light body and champagne-like finish — was brewed last year by Kim Sturdavant at Social Kitchen & Brewery in San Francisco. Largely influenced by trendsetters such as Vinnie Cilurzo at Russian River Brewing Company, brewers long have been using corn sugar to enhance the dryness of their IPAs, but the Extra Brut IPA takes that concept a step further.

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There are people with whom we become “friends” on Facebook and have never even met in daily life. This is our new paradigm: digital friendships. I contend that these relationships – which many people regard as phony or artificial – can be, in some ways, as close as the more superficial relationships we have with casual acquaintances or co-workers. What do we make friends with, anyway? Our friend’s eyebrows? Nose? Shoes? No, we make friends with the content of their character, their conversations with us, their wisdom or sense of humor. And much of that, their personality and smarts, can be communicated via the internet, just as easily as on adjoining bar stools.

Two days ago, I committed what I – and many others – regard as an egregious lapse of courtesy against a friend whose name I have known for years and whose work I’ve greatly admired for that whole time.

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We had a story about pot beer a while back written by Tom Becham. This is from Beer Advocate-PGA

Cue the “highly limited” jokes. In an intersection of cannabis and humulus, Petaluma, Calif.-based Lagunitas Brewing Co. partnered with Santa Rosa-based AbsoluteXtracts to release SuperCritical, an IPA brewed with THC-free cannabis terpenes for aroma. The August release, briefly available in California, is the latest in a string of brews incorporating cannabis from producers in cannabis-friendly states like Vermont and Oregon.

THC’s non-psychoactive cousin, cannabidiol, or CBD, is a compound found in cannabis and hemp plants. “Hops and hemp are very close relatives, and share many chemical characteristics,” says Bill Stewart, a chemical engineer and maker of infused edibles who helped Coalition Brewing in Oregon develop its CBD beers.

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The Brew is Out There!

We’re back to the world of historic German beer and this time, Andreas is busting out the research from his book (see link below) to talk through the differences between Bavarian beer and the brown beers of Northern Germany and just what happened to them!

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Then press play.

In a couple months, Chicago Tribune reporter Josh Noel will release his multi-year odyssey into the story of Goose Island and AB InBev. It is an exceptionally well-reported story about what happens to a brewery and its beer once it becomes a brand in an international corporation’s portfolio. If you want a sense of what you’ll find inside, I refer you to Josh’s latest article at the Trib. It captures all the elements present in his book by describing the moves ABI is making with Goose to perk up a brand that tanked in 2017.

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The past few years have revealed some disturbing news for the alcohol industry. In 2015, CBS news broke the announcement of a lawsuit against 31 brands of wines for high levels of inorganic arsenic. In 2016, beer testing in Germany also revealed residues of glyphosate in every single sampletested, even independent beers. Moms Across America released test results of 12 California wines that were all found to be positive for glyphosate in 2016. We tested further and released new findings last week of glyphosate in all of the most popular brands of wines in the world, the majority of which are from the U.S., and in batch test results in American beer.

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