Take a Sip: Beer on Ice
Written by Mike Sula for chicagoreader.com
Beer on ice is delicious and refreshing.
Stay with me here.
Continue reading “Take a Sip: Beer on Ice”
Dead Animal Beer Bottles at £500 Each “Perverse”
The End of History – featuring dead animals – comes at £500 a bottle
From the BBC
A beer served in bottles made from stuffed animals has been criticized as “perverse” and “pushing the boundaries of acceptability”. The End of History, made by BrewDog of Fraserburgh, Aberdeenshire, is 55% and £500 a bottle. The bottles have been made using seven dead stoats, four squirrels and a hare, said to be roadkill.
However, Advocates for Animals and Alcohol Focus Scotland both condemned the marketing.
Continue reading “Dead Animal Beer Bottles at £500 Each “Perverse””
What the Colonists Might Have Quaffed
Written by Greg Kitsock for The Washington Post
Yards Brewing Co.’s Ales of the Revolution are beers with a history chaser. The Philadelphia microbrewery, which opened in 1995 in a building the size of a toolshed and now occupies a former skateboard rink, has attempted to replicate the brews our Colonial forefathers would have downed while talking sedition in wayside taverns.
General Washington’s Tavern Porter takes its cue from a home-brew recipe, preserved in the New York Public Library, that Washington jotted down while he was serving in the Continental Army. It calls for fermenting a “small beer” from molasses, evidently a more common ingredient than barley in that era.
Yards President Tom Kehoe compromised, beginning with a base rich in dark, heavily roasted malts, then adding four pounds per barrel of baking molasses during the second fermentation. The sugar-rich molasses kicks up the alcohol to 7 percent by volume, but enough residual sweetness remains in the beer to balance the sharper, coffeelike flavors.
Thomas Jefferson’s Tavern Ale presented a bit of a dilemma, Kehoe says. Jefferson brewed extensively at Monticello, but in his voluminous records he never recorded a complete beer recipe. Rather, he left the fine details to a slave named Peter Hemings, brother of the more famous Sally Hemings.
Kehoe scoured our third president’s farm records and “used whatever was available at Monticello in formulating the beer.” In addition to barley, Tavern Ale is brewed from 30 percent wheat (a major crop at Monticello), plus small amounts of corn, oats, rye and honey. At 8 percent alcohol, it’s more potent than the porter. “They made them strong back then to hide their mistakes,” Kehoe says with a laugh.
Continue reading “What the Colonists Might Have Quaffed”
Meantime Brewery Tour: London
From Wiki…
It was founded in 2000 by Brewmaster,Alastair Hook,[1] who trained at the world famous brewing school at the Technical University of Munich of Weihenstephan. The Greenwich Brewery, home of the Meantime Brewing Company, is located 0° 2′ 12″ east of the Greenwich Meridian, though the brewery will be moving to new premises in 2010.
This mission driven company aims to help the consumer rediscover their cultural and culinary beer heritage, which it believes has, in the UK at least, largely been lost as beer manufacture has been concentrated in the hands of a smaller number of ever bigger brewers, who do not wish the consumer to have any great understanding or appreciation of beer.
Since its establishment Meantime has built a worldwide reputation for both quality and for the authentic recreation of several of the world’s iconic and pivotal beer styles. Its India Pale Ale and London Porter (beer) are generally regarded as being amongst the most historically accurate recreations of these beers available today.
Meantime has matched its reputation for autheticity with one for innovation. Its CoffeePorter – launched in 2005 – was Britain’s first Fairtrade beer (using coffee from the Maraba Coffee cooperative of Rwanda), and went on to win a gold medal at the 2006 World Beer Cup. Meantime was the first British brewery to win medals at the World Beer Cup in 2004 and is the only British brewery to have won medals at every WBC since. In 2007 Meantime had no fewer than four beers ranked in the ‘Worlds 50 Best Beers’ as compiled by the UK based International Beer Challenge; a feat it repeated in 2008.
As a consequence of Meantime’s stiving to raise the bar of British brewing Alastair Hook was named the 2008 Brewer of the Year by the British Guild of Beer Writers.
The tour video tour guide from The Guardian visits with a Meantime brewer. Our video tour guide makes the tour even better! Want to watch? Click…
HERE
Beermobile
Labatt’s, Labatt Breweries, Canada.
No Potato Famine Here
After 1 potato beer, 2 potato, 4… we often get the munchies and eat a lot more!
Psychostick – BEER!
Brew Biz: Werts and All
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.
Written by Ken Carman
Barrington Brewery and Restaurant
aka: Berkshire Mountain Brewery
420 Stockbridge Road
Great Barrington, MA 01230
413-528-8282
Brewer and owner: Andrew Mankin
As a kid I traveled a few times through the west side of New England, via Connecticut. I was with my father… on business trips. Not the nicest locations in New England, to be overly polite. And we flew into Boston once, going to… ah, once again, “not the nicest locations…†So when my friend Dell, and his mother Kathleen Setzer, kept asking me to go with them to a camp near Otis, Massachusetts, I avoided it like intentionally exposing myself to chicken pox again.
Boy did I screw up.
The Berkshires are every bit as beautiful as my beloved Adirondacks. But on the plus side, I might never have had the adventure of discovering the Berkshires with an adult’s perspective and going places that simply weren’t around back then, like Great Barrington Brewery.
Great Barrington Brewery; otherwise known as Berkshire Mountain Brewing, sits just a few miles north of dead center Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Duh: hence the name. If you’re coming out of Pittsfield or Lee, Massachusetts you take Rt. 7 straight down to GB, but from Becket it’s route 8 to 23 west to route 7 north. It’s be on the eastern side of 7; midst an antique store and several shops in the Jennifer House Commons.
I met Andrew Mankin the brewer, for the first time, last year. A little tall; thin, he is also the owner and the creative inspiration behind this brewpub. He is not classically trained, yet he brews beers that are stylistically more on the mark than most Siebel/UC Davis/etc. brewers I have met. Unlike too many “classically†trained-only brewers I have met, most of his beers I’ve tried are not only on the mark style-wise, but couldn’t be described as bland, or boring. Last year I shared his Vienna with my beer tasters in Beaver River and they raved about it. As a judge I was impressed with the stylistic accuracy of his Vienna, yet just how individually pleasing of a brew it was. A brew can fit the styles quite well, yet be so boring you wonder if you should drink it, or use it to wash your car seats to give it that pleasing beer scent the officers so love. “Well, I was going to give you a ticket, but the interior of you car is so pleasingly odoriferous…â€
Continue reading “Brew Biz: Werts and All”
Beer Profile: Saranac Summer Brew
Profiled by Ken Carman
I approached this brew with a bit of “barf” mentality as beer judge. There are some fruit beers I like, but gimmicky brews remind me of Zima: a product that should have been sent to Gitmo and waterboarded until it admitted responsibility for all the other crappy gimmick beer that followed. Yet I found Saranac Summer Brew refreshing and irresistible. The lemonade is up front, yet not sickly sweet. If there hops in this they are so background they’re really not worth the mention. The malt background is just substantial enough to parade the marriage of beer and lemonade around as if they were the perfect couple. That acidic, annoyingly tart, lager yeast background I frequently kvetch about, being an ale geek? If it’s there, it’s probably covered by the lemon.
I would call it a lawnmower beer, but that term needs to banished. I have no big toe on my left foot from a lawnmower accident in the 60s. So let’s just leave it at: “Drinking beer: any beer, and mowing is for pure idiots,” OK?
Yellow, from the lemonade, our sample had plenty of foam… not too much, not too little. It smells exactly as it should: lemonade beer. “Thirst quenching” is the perfect phrase. There were three of us. One: a beer judge; me. One a hesitant experimenter, at best… a friend named George. And Jolene, his wife, who is pretty much a light fruit beer person, if any beer at all. She prefers fruity mixed drinks.
All three of us raved about this.
Hey, Fred Matt!!! This one needs to go as nationwide as possible
You must be logged in to post a comment.