Professor Good Ales

In general, getting a cease-and-desist letter from a big corporation isn’t the mark of a good day. But after a brewery owner got a letter from a law firm representing Starbucks, he saw a chance to draw distinctions between the businesses — and to be funny.

The coffee company’s bone of contention, Missouri brewer Jeff Britton was told in a Dec. 9 letter, was the use of the name “Frappicino” to describe a stout served at Exit 6 Brewery, a brewpub in a tidy strip mall in Cottleville, northwest of St. Louis.

The name too closely resembled Starbucks’ Frappuccino, Anessa Owen Kramer, an attorney at a law firm that protects Starbucks’ trademarks, wrote. The similar names might cause customers to “mistakenly believe that Exit 6 or this beer product is affiliated with or licensed by Starbucks Coffee Co., when they are not,” the letter said.

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This is about Minnesota, but the nation too-PGA

In Minnesota, 14 brewers opened operations in 2013, making it a very good year in the brewing universe. By all accounts it’s been another banner year for Minnesota beer. The state’s collective brew IQ continued to rise, and seemingly every new bar or restaurant eagerly touted its local tap selection.

The big-league festivals put on by the Minnesota Craft Brewers Guild and the Beer Dabbler each sold out, collectively drawing 16,840 beer fans. The phrase “craft beer boom” was used by the local media approximately 2,487 times (well, probably) in the never-ending stories about new breweries, surging demand or Minnesota’s brew-conomy (roughly 8,000 jobs strong and counting, says the Brewers Association).

So how about one more beer article to close out 2013?

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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!