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Written by Franz Hofer for Tempest in a Tankard

The Tasting Sessions

I tasted the following beers this past spring and summer under different circumstances each time. The 750mL bottles of 2012 and 2013 Choc Signature Series Gose (Oklahoma), along with the 330mL bottle of Bayrischer Bahnhof Gose (Leipzig) were tasted blind and in the company of an ever-reliable drinking compadre. I sampled the 12oz cans of Westbrook’s Gose (South Carolina) and Anderson Valley’s curiously named “The Kimmie, the Yink, and the Holy Gose Ale” (California) in a non-blind session.

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Colin “My Waggling Eyebrows Are Hypnotizing” Farrell’s character was so wrong to be cranky about being stuck in Bruges in the movie In Bruges (pronounced “Brooooszh” in my head) — that city is about to be the first in Belgium to install its very own beer pipeline. I repeat: A beer pipeline.

Alas, all of our hopes of a beer sink in every home in Bruges are for naught, my friends — the medieval town in Belgium did approve the construction of a beer pipeline under the city, but only to link its 500-year-old De Halve Maan brewery to a bottling factory nearby that will send its liquid wares out to the far corners of the Earth, reports the AFP.

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Courtesy oldmancorner.co.uk and wearyourbeer.com

As it kicks off pumpkin spice season, Starbucks is also trying out a beer-flavored coffee drink, the Dark Barrel Latte.

The nonalcoholic beverage includes a chocolaty, stout-flavored sauce, whipped cream and dark caramel drizzle, and it’s being tested in some locations in Ohio and Florida, a Starbucks spokeswoman told the Los Angeles Times.

People who have tried the drink seem to agree that it tastes like beer, but there’s no consensus on whether it’s good. People said on Twitter that it tastes “like drinking a Guinness in the early morning… So yuck,” “like a beer but with espresso #notbad,” like “this icky mix of molasses and almost beer taste” or “just like beer & I might be in love.”

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That rain on the plain that saturated Montana’s malt barley crop in late August could be tears in the beer of American brewers in 2015.

Heavy late-August rains have damaged crops in the nation’s largest malt-barley producing states, Montana and Idaho. The rains caused much of the states’ barley to sprout in the field, rendering much of it useless for beer making.

Maltsters are warning brewers that barley will be available but pricey in 2015 when this year’s crop becomes next year’s beer ingredient.

“We’ve been told to expect major price increases for malt,” said Tim Mohr of Angry Hank’s Brewery in Billings. “There is no panic yet. Everybody has been telling us not to panic. There is carry-over from last year’s malt supply. Our prices are stable until January, but beer prices are going up.”

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DON’T ASK for a pint of pumpkin beer at South Street’s Brauhaus Schmitz. One of Philly’s few bastions of Bavarian beer purity doesn’t serve the spice stuff because the Germans already have a perfectly fine autumn beer, thank you.

It’s Oktoberfestbier, also known as Marzen, that copper-colored beauty, rich in malt with a smooth body for endless guzzling.

“Personally, I’m OK with pumpkin beer,” Brauhaus Schmitz owner Doug Hager said. “But as a card-carrying German beer snob, we kind of laugh at it.”

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It doesn’t take more than a cursory glance at the IPA section of your local grocery store to know that ratcheting up hop levels has helped fuel America’s craft beer movement. But could the flavorful flowers also be the next big thing in coffee? Quite possibly, and a Colorado roaster is leading the charge.

For many, coffee and beer comprise the yin and yang of an average day. Coffee for the morning pick-me-up; beer for the evening come down. Even if they bookend your day, they do have a lot of similarities. Both are brewed, both tend to emphasize bitter flavors and both command their own houses (coffee- or brew-). So the marriage makes some sense. That’s why we’ve seen coffee-infused stouts in America’s craft beer lineup for years.

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