Category: Front Page

BAKER LAKE, Wash. —Editor’s Note: The events in this story took place in 2004 and began receiving renewed interest online this week.

Agents from the department of Fish and Wildlife in Washington found a black bear sleeping off a major buzz, with three dozen empty cans of Rainier beer close by.

“This is a new one on me,” Sgt. Bill Heinck said. “I’ve known them to get into cans, but nothing like this.”

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Start homebrewing?-PGA

LIMA, Peru — Throughout their country’s descent into political and economic crisis, Venezuelans of all stripes have at least been able to rely on one thing: drowning their sorrows in beer.

Locals of the sweltering South American nation love to down the kinds of heavily chilled light lagers popular from Mexico to Argentina.

But pretty soon Venezuela could run dry. And that could be even more devastating than it sounds.

How did it come to this?

For one, brewery workers are on strike demanding higher wages.

Members of the Sintraterricentro union downed tools last week at two bottling plants belonging to the Polar brewery. It supplies roughly 80% of Venezuela’s beer, including market leader Polar Pilsen. The union is tiny but its members hold key positions at the plant, meaning that production has ground to a halt.

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Lager lovers can now officially raise a toast because Gibson and his colleagues recently logged the success of re-creating the ancient fling between S. cerevisiae and S. eubayanus. “You can now produce lager yeasts that are very different from one another,” Gibson says. All the resulting hybrids outperformed their parents, producing alcohol faster and at higher concentrations and turning out tastier products, as documented in a paper published in the Journal of Industrial Microbiology & Biotechnology. In particular, they made 4-vinylguaiacol, which resulted in flavors more characteristic of Belgian wheat beers. “The beers have a clovey aroma,” Gibson says. “It’s actually quite nice but maybe something we don’t always want. The idea is to have a whole range of strains, and you just pick and choose.” The hunt has now turned to finding new yeast unions that gobble up sugar more effectively, potentially creating lower-calorie beers.

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A questionable claim, at best. But we’re glad that Hoppin Frog, covered by our writer: Ken Carman, made the list. Maui? We guess our writer. Tom Becham may question that. Picture from different post, courtesy www.manteresting.com.

Ohio

Hoppin’ Frog Brewery (address and info)
Akron
Great Lakes, with its Christmas Ale and Eliot Ness, might be Ohio’s most iconic brewery, but down the road in Akron, Hoppin’ Frog’s clandestinely brewing up the state’s best beer in what appears to be a storage unit. One sip of the 9.4% beast that is Barrel Aged B.O.R.I.S. The Crusher, an imperial oatmeal stout, should be enough to make a fan out of anybody who doubts its reputation as one of the finest beers in the world.

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Beaches and brews are two of the great staples of summer vacation.

Last year we published the feature “5 of America’s Beeriest Beach Towns” and received an overwhelming response from our readers. The story no doubt struck a chord with all those among us who love the smell of the ocean, the sound of the surf and the taste of a fresh beer.

With the dramatic rise in popularity of flavorful, hand-crafted ales and lagers produced by our country’s small and independent craft brewers, even remote coastal towns now offer plenty of breweries, brewpubs and bottle shops.

And so, for the summer of 2015, we present five more places to seek out for a beery, beachside getaway:

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Think of how few flavour additives are ever added to Belgian beer – rarely anything other than fruit, of course, and the odd spice such as coriander and Curaçao. Then think of what lengths brewers go to in order to inject flavours into their beers using different sorts of malt, special yeast and, especially nowadays, all kinds of exotic hops.

Isn’t it odd that you would try to create fruity, spicy or herbal flavours without using fruit, spice or herbs? Not any more. Thanks to a new collaboration between lambic brewers Lindemans and Danish beer firm Mikkeller, you can now sample a lambic beer made with the addition of fresh basil leaves – if you’ve ever wondered what the best beer is to go with pizza, wonder no longer.

Lindemans reckons, and few would disagree, that the new trend worldwide is towards sour beers, even if the hype surrounding bitter-hopped beers is not yet played out. Mikkeller, known for its desire always to test boundaries, agrees.

“The Belgian Lambics have something mysterious about them,” says Mikkel Borg Bjergsø, co-founder of Mikkeller. “The spontaneous fermentation process adds to that mystery. We have been experimenting with pretty much all beer styles, and finally we got to work with Lindemans lambic!”

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According to historians, beer has existed for at least six millennia and has been savored on every continent (even Antarctica!). With credentials like that, it’s no wonder that brewers have occasionally turned to some highly unusual techniques and ingredients to make their beverages stand out. Here are eight of the oddest.

1. Dead Whales

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I began washing and harvesting my own yeast about a year ago. I got excited and harvested 4 jars from 4 batches in the first month, leaving me with 16 jars of 4 different yeasts. Since I usually brew twice per month, I had a ton of yeast just sitting in my fridge. After using some of this stored (aka old) yeast in beers that came out less than perfect, I began tossing it – hours of work, down the drain. Then I had an idea – why can’t I just harvest clean yeast directly from my starter? After trying out a few techniques, here’s the process that seems most efficient:

Step 1: Make a starter (3 days prior to brewing) that is .5 liter larger than you need for your beer. Since the majority of 5 gallon batches require no more than a 1 liter starter, a standard 2000 mL flask or even gallon growler will work great. In the photo below, I needed a 2 L starter for a 10 gallon batch, so I made 2.5 L.

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