Take two engineers, a linguist, a surveyor, a school administrator, a mycologist, an entomologist, and a historian. Add a dash of homebrewing expertise, BJCP judging experience, Scotch connoisseurship, and a general love of hops and malt. Mix all of this together with a beer-laden table on a Sunday night shortly after Halloween, and what do you get?
The Oklahoma Six-Pack Project.
The task: Choose six favourites in a blind tasting of some one-and-a-half dozen Oklahoma beers.
A spectre is haunting the craft beer world –– the spectre of Sir Maltalot. Laid low by a tsunami of IPA, the wild yeasts have set in to consume his legacy. Extreme beerists have entered into an unholy alliance with sharp-fanged sours, enlisting sturdy barrel-aged beers to confine Sir Maltalot within their cavernous depths. Buried under layer upon layer of rum, oak, bourbon, and peppers, his spirit lies in wait.
Fall is finally over, which means the annual inundation of pumpkin beers has (thankfully) come to an end. For many, winter is the best time to cozy up to a glass–not a bottle–of beer. (Seriously, pour your beer.)
Winter seasonals are characterized by their rich, sweet flavors and particularly high alcohol content. These are the months where it’s not uncommon to see an entire shelf full of beers that have been aged in whiskey barrels, or a cooler stocked with “spiced” ales.
Although there are countless spectacular local beers in small corners of every market, these are the best ones that can be found in pretty much every part of the country. Cheers!
Goose Island Bourbon County Brand Stout
From: Chicago, Illinois Variety: Bourbon barrel–aged imperial stout ABV: 12%–16%, depending on the vintage Availability: Black Friday–Late Winter
The mother of all winter beers, Goose Island’s Bourbon County Brand Stout (BCBS) has been wooing casual and hardcore beer fans alike since the early 90s. Every year, people line up for the release of BCBS and its myriad accompanying variants, which vary in style from year-to-year.
Craft beer fans love capped jugs known as “growlers,” and they’re an efficient way to carry fresh beer home. But in Florida, half-gallon growlers are banned, even though it’s legal to fill jugs that are smaller and larger. Critics call the law “stupid” and now one bar owner is fighting the state of Florida in court, reports CBS News Vicente Arenas.
In craft beer bars across the country, the half-gallon jug, called a growler, has become a best seller.
“Four and half pints, almost five pints to share with friends at home or for the weekend, 64 oz is a good amount, I think,” a New York City bartender said.
But filling a growler is a sobering thought at the Crafted Keg in Stuart, Florida, where bar owner Guy Piasecki would be breaking the law if he sold you one.
“I don’t get it,” Piasecki said. “I can buy the small and the large but not the medium.”
Your next specialty beer could cost you a lot more.
High demand for craft beers is creating a black market for some small batch brews, and unauthorized dealers are selling the beers underground (or online) for inflated prices up to 20 times above retail.
“Whether it’s a top-rated brew or one with new or seasonal ingredients, everyone wants to get their hands on exclusive batches. The demand is certainly there, and people are stepping in to fulfill that need in unsavory ways,” said beer cicerone Anne Becerra.
It’s common for craft brewers to release small or limited-time batches of a beer. Most of the time, it’s out of necessity.
Fritz Maytag re-launched Anchor Brewing Co. in 1965.On Oct. 29, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History hosted a talk and a dinner to honor the contributions of some of the earliest makers of fine wine in the United States. It was also part of the museum’s American Food and Wine History Project, which has been curating artifacts, oral histories and documents about the history of U.S. wine and winemaking.
Distinguished guests on Oct. 29 included Warren Winiarski, the winemaker who crafted the Cabernet Sauvignon that famously won the red wine half of a blind-tasting in Paris in 1976, and Fred Frank, the grandson of the late Konstantin Frank, a Ukrainian immigrant who proved that delicate, European varieties of grapes could thrive in harsher climates (in Frank’s case, New York’s Finger Lakes region).
All the honorees could trace the reason for their presence at the Smithsonian back to the early and mid-1960s, that period when American wine fine began to slowly—then quickly—emerge from France’s shadow and stake its critical, as well as commercial, claim upon the world stage. The September 1966 launch of the Robert Mondavi Winery, Napa Valley’s first ground-up winery since Prohibition, is generally credited with birthing modern fine wine in the United States.
Curiously, a full year before, Fritz Maytag’s re-launch of the Anchor Brewing Co. in nearby San Francisco birthed modern beer and brewing in the United States. Not that the Smithsonian appears to have noticed. Yes, in roughly 10 months, August 2015, it will have been a full half-century since Maytag famously saved Anchor from closing.
I was out all day and away from the computer. I sat down and clicked onto Facebook and scrolled down a half page or so and caught a whiff: “Stunned by the news about 10 Barrel sold to AB…“
WHAT?!?
More scrolling and confirmation: “Haters gonna hate, Tonya Cornett. Congrats on getting the chance to take that berliner global (not to mention the others).†It got worse just that fast. One of my all-time favorite brewers, Tonya Cornett, is now one of the pawns in this sordid tale. If AB had come to me and asked, they couldn’t have found a person about whom I would be more grief-stricken to see absorbed by the Beer-Borg Collective. Jimmy Seifrit, former brewmaster under Larry Sidor at my beloved Deschutes was also involved. It was exactly like a death; like someone I knew and loved was in excellent health one day and stone dead the next.
Take two engineers, a linguist, a surveyor, a school administrator, a mycologist, an entomologist, and a historian. Add a dash of homebrewing expertise, BJCP judging experience, Scotch connoisseurship, and a general love of hops and malt. Mix all of this together with a beer-laden table on a Sunday night shortly after Halloween, and what do you get?
Your next specialty beer could cost you a lot more.
It was like a punch in the face, today…
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