A Place to Gather and Talk
A Colorado brewery that created a limited-run beer flavored with bull testicles for a beer festival is making the ballsy move to offer it all year round.
Wynkoop Brewing Company’s Rocky Mountain Oyster Stout will now be sold nationwide in cans–available in (what else?) two-packs starting this month.
Continue reading “Bull Testicle Beer to be Sold Nationwide”
Many people reach for Champagne or sparkling wine to celebrate New Year’s Eve, but there’s a growing trend in another bubbly direction: beer cocktails. Originally, a cocktail was just one type of mixed drink, a subset of the genre, such as a julep, flip, swizzle, fizz or toddy. Several cocktail recipes were included in the 1862 “Bar-Tender’s Guide,” and the term took on its more modern meaning over the next few decades.
But it was Prohibition that really led to a surge in popularity of the cocktail. With no legal alcohol to serve, speak-easies had to make do with illegal hooch. Mixing bathtub gin with sweeter, more flavorful additions made the booze more palatable — and probably more profitable.
Scarcities during World War II nearly killed off the grander cocktails, making way for simpler mixed drinks — gin and tonic, for example, and rum and cola. By the 1980s, classic cocktails were nearly as dead as good beer.
Continue reading “Brooks: Beer Cocktails”
A cattle ranch in Texas swears by a secret ingredient that makes its beef juicer: Beer.
Texas T Kobe ranch in Wallis pours beer into the hay its cows eat, CBS affiliate KHOU-TV reports. The ranch says the yeast in the double IPA helps promote digestion and improves the flavor and texture of the herd’s meat.
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Mac Rusling turned his 40-year hobby of brewing beer from home into a career when he opened Brewhaha Homebrew Supply Company in December. Photo by Jacob Fuller.
PGA Note: this is about a homebrew store in a state where homebrewing is illegal. In neighboring Alabama, where it is also illegal the police came in like a pot raid, confiscated everything: charges pending after the raid.
Mississippi home brewers may not have the law fully on their side, but they now have a place to buy all the hops, barley, yeast and equipment they need to create and bottle their own beer.
Mac Rusling, a former commercial airline pilot, opened Brewhaha Homebrew Supply Company, a one-stop shop for all things home brewing, Dec. 19 in the Lefleur’s Gallery Shopping Center (4800 I-55 N., Suite 17A, 601-362-0201, brewhahasupply.com).
Brewhaha is a no-frills kind of place. The beige walls to the left and right of the entrance are lined with 8-foot high shelves stocked with ingredients, recipe books and equipment. On the back wall sit two refrigerators filled with 
more ingredients.
Continue reading “Home Brews and Latin Flavors”
Arwen Lehman
As we transition into 2013, “experts” in every field are making their annual predictions about what’s bound to happen in the new year. But does anyone really care about who’s planning to get preggers (like the world needs another Kardashian) or which social network’s gonna go bust? Not so much.
Screw the unnecessary prognostications. There are only a few things worth guessing about ahead of time, and one of ’em is booze. So Short Order spoke to Arwen Lehman, AKA the Craft Brewja, on the popularity of barrel-aged brews, numeric triples and why cans are where it’s at in 2013.
Continue reading “Booze Hound Craft Brewja Arwen Lehman’s 2013 Beer Predictions”
MOSCOW — A big question for many Russians in 2013 may be “How do I get a beer around here?”
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Let’s make this clear from the start: you cannot buy this beer, at least not yet, unless someone sells you one of the few pre-bought bottles. How sad for you.
Rocky head: not a lot in a small glass. The first pour: none. Second: better. Black as midnight.
Bourbon barrel aroma mixed with roasted barley. A little dark chocolate with a bare hint of smoke. There’s a nice sweet sense that I am guessing is from the barrels.
Mouthfeel: just a hint of slick and, again, smoke. Roasted barley sense provided the roast with also a whisper of higher alcohol, but only as expected if placed in a bourbon barrel. 6.2 abv seems about right. The body seems fuller that it really is: probably the bourbon and the nibs helped with that.
I have enjoyed many a beer from Jackalope and seen them grow from using a Brew Magic system where the pale, to provide one example, was pleasant, yet cloudy and even a bit milky… in looks only, to a brewery with nice clear beers that kept the integrity of the original recipes, and then some. But this has to be the best beer ever out of the partnership of Bailey, Steve and Robyn.
This was aged with bacon in a bourbon barrel. The bourbon taste, and sweetness, are obvious, yet not cloying. The bacon is more background, but murmurs in the background, almost like the gentler ghosts from The Sixth Sense. Cocoa nibs (I’ve seen this spelled “Cocao” nibs too.) provide a slight dark chocolate bitter that compliments all the other additions. The balance for all added, perfect if looking to avoid a sense of “too aggressive.”
A nice nitro push, on tap, at the tasting room, would be a dream come true.
“Tannakin” was named after a legend about a woman born with hog-like features.
This was a special purchase: the first hand bottled, wax sealed with a logo, labelled beer from Jackalope, Nashville, TN. Only 50 bottles and we got three, sold one to a lady who was desperately looking for one for her husband as a surprise. The second bottle is being saved for the summer when I do beer tastings in the Adirondacks.
If they do not brew this again, I’ll see if I can get some of the more unpleasant Sixth Sense ghosts to rattle their chains in the brewery, 24 hours a day, or the spirit of Tannakin herself to possess the wood this fine beer sat on, until they say, “Think we’d better go ahead and brew more: these ghosts have us over a bourbon barrel!”
Turtle Anarchy
216 Noah Drive
Franklin, Tennessee 37064
(615)595-8855
Brewer: Mike Kraft
 
Mike’s from Nashville originally, Siebel trained. His first job as a brewer was at Hubcap Brewing in Veil, Colorado, and he spent nine years as the head brewer at Two Rows Brewing, with brewpubs in Allen, Houston and the Dallas area. Like many pro-brewers Mike comes from a ‘mixed’ background where he started out as an electrical engineer, but found his ‘happy’ in brewing.
  
Once up a time a brewery like Turtle Anarchy wouldn’t expect a lot of visitors. Over the years I have interviewed many a brewer in industrial locations and business parks and, at best, there may have been a tiny tasting room: mostly for the few who would stop by out of curiosity. Tucked away in industrial locations, business parks and other odd places, it was a quieter time where the beer went out a door that few folks, except the brewers, would pass through. Continue reading “Brew Biz: Werts and All”
As far back as Aristotle, the scientists and philosophers have insisted that our knowledge of the exterior world is limited to and defined by our sensory perceptions; and that that all sensory input can be compartmentalized into five neat packages: sight, sound, touch, hearing, and taste. However, those of us who home brew for a hobby realize that this is an inadequate explanation for what we understand to be a much “bigger picture.â€
Sure, we can feast our eyes on the sensuous ruby hues of CaraRed barley, or the occult darkness of chocolate malt. We can ogle the vibrant color of the orange peel we are “zesting†to add to our boil. Moreover, I don’t know about you, but watching a good krausen orgy in my carboy is far more entertaining than watching most television programs. Continue reading “Come to Your Senses, Man!”
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