Professor Good Ales

Two weekends ago, I spent an enjoyable Saturday at the For What It’s Wort competition at Destihl’s brewery in Normal, Illinois.  It is sponsored by the Association of Bloomington-Normal Brewers (ABNormal Brewers) and they did an excellent job organizing it.  Bloomington-Normal is a two-hour drive or Amtrak ride from downtown Chicago, and while I don’t know everyone, I think I was the only judge from the city, with a couple of other judges from the suburbs.

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As the craft landscape has become increasingly competitive and as growth has slowed, some craft brewers are beginning to alter their approaches to expansion.

While some companies have restructured their sales and marketing teams and laid off employees, others are starting to reexamine their brick-and-mortar strategies. Take the divergent paths of Other Half Brewing Company in Brooklyn and Renegade Brewing Company in Denver, for example.

Other Half yesterday announced that it had purchased the former Nedloh Brewing Company facility in Upstate New York, which closed in October 2017, for $660,000. The 4-year-old, 8,000 sq. ft. facility, which includes a 10-barrel brewing system and taproom, will be transformed into a second location for Other Half as it looks to service demand in a more emerging market.

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Did you know all beer is red? We don’t perceive all beer as red, of course, but deep down in its molecules, it is. Since all beer is red, what determines the color of beer?

Grain is by far the strongest coloring agent in beer, and grains are colored by melanin, a rust-red pigment that drives the color of beer. But what about Pale Ales and Imperial Stouts, you say? Some beers don’t appear red at all. As with most questions about beer, the answer involves chemistry – in fact, a number of factors can affect color, and we’ll take a closer look at all of them. We’ll also examine what beer color can (and can’t) cue us to expect in terms of flavor, as well as how beer color is measured and described.

The Chemistry of Color

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Learning how to say the word Gueuze is maybe the hardest part of learning about this quirky, exotic style of ale. Broken down into its phonetics, the pronunciation begins with one of those odd, half-swallowed syllables that comes out to “guh-YOOZ-eh”, with just a bare hint of that “eh” on the end, which is the proper Belgian way of saying it. But for purposes of our dumbed-down, non-Euro language facilities, saying “GOOZ-uh” works just fine.

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It’s our annual post conference wrapup and we hit the latest in beer news, look at some new books and revisit some really old brews. And then in the lounge, Drew sits down with the iconic craft brew veteran, Alan Sprints of Hair of the Dog. We taste some beers and talk about his unqiue take on building beers. There’s even one beer that Drew thought should be a mess, but was amazingly sublime.
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I’m standing in line at the liquor store. In one hand, I have a six-pack of Leinenkugel’s Summer Shandy. In the other, I have Short Pants Shandy from Bauhaus. The guy in front of me looks me up and down like a cartoon wolf.

He doesn’t seem to like what he sees.

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