Profiled by Ye Olde Scribe for professorgoodales.net
Dry Guinness with a lager yeast.
Brew Biz: Werts and All
Written by Ken Carman for Professorgoodales.net
Ken Carman is a BJCP judge; homebrewer since 1979, club member at Escambia Bay and Music City Homebrewers, who has been interviewing professional brewers all over the east coast for over 10 years.
The Topic: Brew Ghosts
One of the most haunting things about getting older is the ghosts. Oh, I don’t mean the obvious: parents, pets, the bullies we buried in our backyard. Shhh… don’t tell the police. I mean floors we used to walk that don’t exist anymore, places we and our friends used to play, walk and, yes, even drink beer: like The Barber Shop in Utica, New York. When I was in college it was a fun place to go drink dark beer for a 50 cents a glass and eat small paper trays of shelled peanuts for free.
The Barber Shop advertised “Where John and Mary meet.” Well, like my ex-girlfriends who I took there, John and Mary don’t meet anymore: the streets rerouted like our lives, as time tends to do. Or the fact that one such ex… short redhead… was a total b…
Never mind.
Then you have breweries. I used to hang around Newman’s in downtown Albany, NY: one of the first craft breweries when the trend started to nibble on the northeast in the 80s and 90s. Newman’s was in a somewhat disgusting part of downtown that, since Newman’s is long gone, has probably gone to “brewing” less legal substances.
Sorry. That was a not so funny… crack… I just made.
Cough Cough.
Then you have Laughing Pines in Slidell, Louisiana, and many other breweries long gone.
I think that’s why the following story caught my interest from syracuse.com…
The Otisca Building, a historic but hazardous former brewery that looms over a block of Butternut Street on Syracuse’s (NY) North Side, is destined to be demolished within weeks.
City officials plan to seize the rambling two- and three-story brick complex for back taxes and sell it to a company controlled by St. Joseph’s Hospital Health Center and Home HeadQuarters, which will pay for the six-figure demolition.”
But the story doesn’t end there…
“Beer Week” Celebrates Craft of Brewing Distinctive Tastes
70 events, 46 places, beginning Thursday
Written by Polly Campbell for news.cincinnati.com
Note: the deconstructed beer dinner alone sounds worth it. A great idea for other festivals to consider.- The Professor
A look at the schedule for Cincinnati’s first Beer Week which begins Thursday, indicates just how much craft beer has taken over the imagination of beer drinkers in Cincinnati.
More than 70 events at 46 locations are scheduled for the week. All explore beer from local and national breweries dedicated to making unique, high-quality beers.
Though Cincinnati may be a little late to the party compared to other parts of the country, the wave of interest in craft beer here has taken off.
Continue reading ““Beer Week” Celebrates Craft of Brewing Distinctive Tastes”
The Beer Nut: It’s New York vs. New England in the Battle of the Brews
Written by Norman Miller for GateHouse News Service and milforddailynews.com
It’s going to be a tough game Sunday when the New England Patriots and the New York Giants have a rematch in the Super Bowl. But who brews better beers, New England or New York?
Both have a lot going for them. New York is just huge. But New England is made up of six states, so that kind of equals out.
And, to make it a fairer competition, I’ll include the entire state of New York along with New Jersey (where the Giants play home games at MetLife Stadium), even though large portions of New York state do not root for the Giants. Some even root for the Buffalo Bills, for some reason.
OK, let’s start with which team has the best places to drink beer. We’ll do this sports section style, awarding checkmarks to which region gets the win.
Best places to drink beer
New York has some of the most well-known beer bars in the United States, like the Blind Tiger and Spuyten Duyvil. But New England also has some of the best bars in the country — Ebenezer’s Pub in Lovell, Maine, the Armsby Abbey in Worcester, Mass., and the Publick House in Brookline, Mass.
I think the win goes to New England, and this is not me being a hometown fan — Draft Magazine recently named the 100 Best Bars in the United States. New York had five beers on the list while New England had 10. Check mark to New England.
Who brews the best beer?
Next up is who brews the best beer. Obviously, ìbestî is always subjective. Three of my favorite breweries — Brewery Ommegang, the Brooklyn Brewery and Sixpoint –– are all brewed in New York.
Again, New England can more than hold its own. We have Hill Farmstead in Vermont, Pretty Things Beer & Ale Project in Massachusetts, Allagash Brewing Company in Maine, Smuttynose Brewing Company in New Hampshire, and so on and so on.
According to Beer Advocate, the top 100 beers (based on user reviews) features eight beers from New England and only one from New York state. Check mark again goes to New England.
New beers
Want more numbers? Let’s take a look at new beers. According to Beer Advocate’s list of the top 100 new beers (beers reviewed for the first time within the past six months), there are 15 from New England and only one from New York.
Want to read more? Please click…
Beer Profile: Schlafly Coffee Stout
Profiled by Ken Carman for Professorgoodales.net
The Saint Louis Brewery, Saint Louis Missouri
Slight tan head, mostly pillow. Great clarity w/ruby highlights. Head lasts even in small 4OZ glass. Nose: coffee, sweet-ish . Mouthfeel just a tad oatmeal chewy, full body with some roast. Taste: roast, no hops sensed: period. Just a hint of lactose in the taste and some sweet. Close to a Milk Stout, but not not quite. Espresso lingers lightly in the taste.
This is an excellent Stout, and fairly complex with the sweet, the coffee, the roast and the body. Seems to cross the bridge between Milk, Robust and Oatmeal. Not a Dry. There is also a hint of Guinness like sour.
Excellent.
Craft beer from the Land of the Rising Sun
Written by Dean Irvine for eatocracy.cnn.com
Shigeharu Asagiri loves beer so much he has even brewed it by the light of the moon.
He’s not a bathtub hootcher with vampiric tendencies, but the boss of Japanese microbrewery Coedo and a man committed to putting his craft beer on the map, no matter what it takes.
His nighttime brewing activity came just after the earthquake that rocked Japan’s Tohoku region last March led to frequent blackouts at his brewery just outside Tokyo.
From those difficult days and dark nights, Coedo has continued to make some award-winning beers that are helping to put the spotlight on interesting microbrews from Japan.
Earthquakes and blackouts aside, it hasn’t been easy for Coedo, founded in 1997 by Asagiri’s father-in-law. It wasn’t until prohibitive laws against small commercial breweries were repealed in 1994 that a microbrew scene in Japan could emerge.
Continue reading “Craft beer from the Land of the Rising Sun”
Listen to the Lyrics Too!
Connoisseurs Stand in Line to Grab Limited Quantities of Rare Craft Brews
Written by Josh Noel for the Chicago Tribune. Image courtesy myextralife.com
Rick Schuler was there first Friday, idling in his blue Volkswagen Jetta outside Binny’s in south Lincoln Park, 40 minutes before the doors would open.
Then came the guy in flip-flops. And the doctor still in scrubs just off her shift at Swedish Covenant Hospital. And the father of three who left his kids with a baby-sitter to go to “daddy’s liquor store.”
For more than an hour, beer connoisseurs came, knowing that the window to buy a $12.99 bottle of limited edition Goose Island stout brewed with coffee beans and aged in bourbon barrels, would quickly close. Or, more accurately, slam — as Schuler had learned a day before, the beer’s first release day, when he arrived at a different Binny’s 20 minutes too late.
“That’s why I couldn’t take any chances today,” he said.
Continue reading “Connoisseurs Stand in Line to Grab Limited Quantities of Rare Craft Brews”
What Were They Smoking? (Dogfish Ad)
Sam Calagione vs. The Beer Geeks: Dogfish Top Dog Speaks MY Mind
Written by Steve Body for http://blog.seattlepi.com
Sam Calagione, owner of Dogfish Head Brewing in Delaware and éminence grise of the American Craft Beer community, was recently moved by what he read in the forums of BeerAdvocate.com to write the following. It has since gone viral and is – justifiably – being used as a virtual manifesto by those of us who reject the increasing tendency of craft beer’s hard-core fanboys/geekazoids to cop attitudes and begin, in effect, to Eat Their Own when a brewery dares to become successful.
I found Sam’s essay to be a piece of diplomacy on the order of one of Hank Kissinger’s forays into Palestine. I would have been nowhere near as nice about it and I applaud his decency, common sense, and restraint. For a graphic example of how NOT to respond to stuff like Sam found in BA, read what I have to say after Sam’s eloquence…(this has been lightly edited for space)
Continue reading “Sam Calagione vs. The Beer Geeks: Dogfish Top Dog Speaks MY Mind”
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