Professor Good Ales

Profiled by Maria Devan for PGA

Poured the color of grapefruit juice. Golden hazy and with a slight orange blush on it. Fat creamy head of white foam that lasted well and left lace. This beer smells floral and fruity.

Lovely light citrus, pineapple and mango for intense sweetness. Earthy pine that is not heavy and does not stand out past the other scents. The malt on this nose is a light sweet perfume.

So wonderful how all Hill’s beer has this quality of lightness both in the nose and in the drink. I think if I had to summarize Hill’s trademark as a brewer I would do it like this – He is trying to put the hops in the beer and leave them on the vine at the same time. He has a way with hops and in this beer they are so fruity and yet so light on the palate. That’s his other trademark, the light malt that is so light it’s like the beer wants to just float out of the glass.

Crisp, light sweetness like a floral nectar, a bit of light sweet cracker that has exactly the perfect balance. The beer has a resonance rather than an aftertaste and it’s light floral and fruitiness. As the beer warms some sweet grass and pine comes forward and this is just a lovely beer.

4.5

Welcome to the PGA beer rating system: one beer “Don’t bother.” Two: Eh, if someone gives it to you, drink. Three: very good, go ahead and seek it out, but be aware there is at least one problem. Four: seek it out. Five: pretty much “perfecto.”

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Maria Devan lives in Ithaca, NY and is frequent reviewer of beer and a beer lover deluxe.

1. “Is it ready yet?”

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NEW YORK (CNNMoney) –

Nestled on a New York side street, a new type of laundromat has opened its doors, offering gourmet cheese sandwiches and drop-off laundry services.

“Our coffee shop is a bar, cafe and a laundromat. It’s a winning formula,” said 31-year old Lee Kerzner, a native New Yorker who opened the Wash House in the East Village last month. “The response from the local community has been amazing. We’re doing more laundry than we ever expected and selling out of coffee.”

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Note: actual the first sentence is not quite right since other yeasts/organisms are used sometimes. This may be Belgium sours/lambics, or Specialty. There’s even a beer out there using yeast culled off the brewer’s beard-PGA

A beer is either a lager or an ale. Some 90% of beers sold in America are lagers. Yet, around 90% of craft beers sold are ales. While the masses have long-preferred the taste of flavorless “lite” lagers, beer geeks have long gone for the more complex flavors typically found in ales. But, all of a sudden I’m craving lagers. Begging New England friends to procure bottles for me. Recently, en route to Boston, I even took a detour to Framingham so I could purchase my first career growler of lager. My newfound behavior is thanks to Jack’s Abby Brewing and their iconoclastic takes on an oft-misunderstood style.

Lagers dominate the marketplace in most of the world. If you can easily name a beer from a country, it will surely be a lager. Corona in Mexico, Foster’s in Australia, Heineken in The Netherlands, Stella, Tsingtao, Red Stripe, Peroni, Beck’s…and, of course, Bud, Miller, and Coors. The world’s ten best-selling beers are lagers and all taste virtually the same. They don’t need to.

Lagers only differ from ales in that bottom-fermenting yeast is used, they are fermented cold, and necessitate a longer brew cycle (lager is the German word for storage). But “lager” encompasses far more styles than you think, running the gamut from helles and pilsners on the lighter end up to schwarzbier and marzens (Oktoberfests) then onto Baltic porters, dopplebocks, and eisbocks on the more alcoholic end of the spectrum.

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