Professor Good Ales

Courtesy homebrewtalk.com

Sorry, there’s just not enough mead to go around.”

The writer of these words could very well be describing the mead (also known as honey wine) brewed by Ben and Becky Starr, owners and brew masters at Starrlight Mead in Pittsboro.

Come to think of it, the heart of North Carolina is probably not the first place that comes to mind when you think of mead. Your memory probably hearkens back to the days of old, reminiscent of Renaissance Fairs, Vikings and old English castles.

The Starrs opened Starrlight Mead in 2010, taking a gamble that folks would embrace their homemade wines as much as they and their friends have.

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Courtesy kinkycurlycoilyme.com
America, and American workers, had an official alcoholic beverage, it would probably be beer. According to the Brewers Association, the overall U.S. beer market was worth $96 billion in 2011, when some 200 million barrels of beer were sold (1 barrel equals 31 gallons of beer). In the same year, 1,989 breweries in the United States were fermenting everything from light lagers to chocolaty stouts.

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Image courtesy Reuters

For those readers who make mead and mead related quaffs-PGA

As scientists race to pinpoint the cause of the global collapse of honey bee populations that pollinate a third of the world’s crops, environmental groups have indentified one culprit: US authorities who continue to approve pesticides implicated in the apian apocalypse.

Case in point: The US Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) conditional approval in May of sulfoxaflor, a type of agricultural pesticide known as a neonicotinoid. The European Union has banned neonicotinoids for two years in response to scientific studies linking their use to the sudden death of entire beehives, a phenomenon known as Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). Over the past six years, CCD has wiped out an estimated 10 million beehives worth $2 billion. Bee colonies in the US are so decimated that it takes 60% of the nation’s bee population to pollinate a single crop, California almonds. And that’s not just a local problem; California supplies 80% of the world’s almonds.

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Written by Brandon Jones for embracethefunk.com

As brewers and especially sour/wild brewers we love to age/ferment in different kinds of wood vessels. There is something beautiful and romantic about walking by large oak foudres or seeing rows of stacked barrels each living and breathing new life into a beer. Each different but striving for the same thing: to make incredible beer. All this is wonderful and utopian…until it isn’t.

(To the left: One of my barrels decided to leak after 4 months this past summer)

One of my favorite things about what I do at Yazoo is sourcing and picking out new (well new to us) barrels with some sort of neat character. Looking for the next interesting or hard to find barrel can feel like an ISO/FT post on one of the many beer trading forums. With many breweries having some sort of barrel aging program it can be a challenge to find exciting barrels in the quantity you need. Some of our barrels hail from places like Portugal and Jamacia…which have to be shipped into the USA then trucked to us. So imagine (and I know some of you know this first hand) that sinking feeling when you are walking by your beautiful row of neatly stacked barrels and step into a puddle of beer…or you leak test this incredible barrel and its not just weeping water; its flowing out!
Continue reading “For The Love of The Barrel”

Written by Dee Gross for Crazycow252.blogspot.com

It was definitely a dark and stormy night.  Talk of tornado and high winds were in the forecast.  Even these perils could not stop the most motivated mad scientist.  Festoon in our most holiday ware, we drove down a long country road to visit our friends at Briarscratch Brewery.  This is an up and coming brewery in Sumner County in a tiny hamlet known as Cottontown.  We had to drive down the end of a tiny road and nearly ran into a fence, but we made it a fashionably one hour late. Continue reading “Music in the Dark”

Every club might be able to do something like this! If you’re doing an event have a homebrew canned, or bottled and labeld, etched. In Nashville we have a mobile cannery, BTW, who just did a brew for Jackalope. What a great collectible!

And Merry to you and kin.

From

PGA

Kate Baker and Suzanne Schalow founded Craft Beer Cellar in Belmont in 2010, and today, at any given time, its 1,500 square feet of retail space are filled with more than 1,000 beers from 350 breweries. Beers are organized by region, from Worcester to the West Coast, with an emphasis on local brews. Employees have jobs like Head Beer Geek, Ambassador of Fine Ales and Lagers, and Hoptologist and wear hooded sweat shirts emblazoned with the words “Beer Geek.”

“People take two steps in the door and they don’t know how to proceed,” says Brian Shaw, who opened a Craft Beer Cellar in Newton Centre recently, joining franchises in Winchester, Westford, and Braintree. “People say, ‘Oh my God, I didn’t know there was this much beer.’ ”

Is there ever. And now Baker and Schalow are betting their model can work elsewhere as they expand to New Hampshire and Vermont, as well as Florida, St. Louis, and maybe Seattle. Their goal is to make people think about whether to buy a Pretty Things Jack D’Or or a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale as carefully as they would wrestle between a cabernet or a merlot.

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