After hearing that a fellow beer blogger Luke Livingston (of www.blogaboutbeer.com) was opening a brewery in Maine – I knew that I had to learn about how this came to be. I mean, how many craft beer enthusiasts have dreamt of standing at the doorway of a brewery and saying, “I did this!” Luke has hired the well-known Michael LaCharite as head brewer, and the beer will start flowing out of Baxter Brewing in Fall of 2010 – in cans!

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Brattleboro Brewers Festival

On a warm weekend morning, I got in my car and drove two states to the Brattleboro Brewer’s Festival in Brattleboro, VT. Fellow beer bloggers Tim & Amy Brady (www.hereforthebeer.com) rallied their local and national beer community to pull off the first ever Brattleboro Beer fest. With a little bit of a unique philosophy (embracing both super-local and small distribution brewers side-by-side with “the big guys”) the event featured about 40 brewers, ranging from bigshots such as Stone, Sierra Nevada, Dogfish Head to everything awesome that New England has to offer (including Smuttynose, Rock Art, Magic Hat and many others that I hadn’t yet met).

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My first experience pairing chocolate and beer was at a fundraiser beer pairing event in Portsmouth, NH. The Passport Beer dinner featured local restaurants and NH breweries in pairings of food items and one of their beers. I walked the grounds of the historic Strawberry Banke living history museum and tasted some amazing food. Smuttynose brewing company’s featured pairing was their Baltic Porter (a heavy, rich beautiful beer) and some Lindt Chili Dark Chocolate. I was caught on camera saying, “Beer… and chocolate… is amazing. This just made my day.” Something about the way the beer played with the creaminess, and the hot chilis cut the intense richness of the beer was divine – it was truly inspired.

Since then, the opportunities that I’ve had to sample great beer and great chocolate have been limited – but I was lucky enough to hear about an event atNovare Res – my favorite Belgian beer bar in Portland, ME. For Valentine’s day weekend, they paired up with a local chocolatier – Sweet Marguerites – to create custom beer and chocolate pairings. I was lucky enough to sample several of these.

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Everyone has a laundry list of resolutions, I’m sure. Lose weight, finish the novel, donate more to charity… I made up a short list of my own as far as my own beer drinking was concerned, and one stuck out to me – “support local beer.” In the days of this economy, where each little business is hanging on the hopes of their customers, it seems more important than ever to me to take a step back and look back into our own neighborhoods. Let’s face it – national craft beer distibution is a wonderful thing, and there are some fabulous beers from “away” that I enjoy very often. But I started to wonder if this national distribution was keeping me from truly enjoying the local flavors around me. [read more]

The beer babe does the math – what craft ABV %s can mean for drinking and driving

I went to a defensive driving course a few months ago as a requirement for one of my jobs. I wasn’t surprised, but the video that they played was from about 1985 (complete with yellow suits with hideous shoulder pads – yikes!) and that I had seen it several times before in other trainings. As it should be, there was a section of the course on drinking and driving. [Read more...]

The Grand Cru – When you aim for the moon…

I have professed in the past that I am a beer geek, not a beer snob. I will try and review anything, and I will be open to trying whatever comes cross my way. That being said, I do have strong opinions about non-craft beer, but I try when ever possible not to let them cloud my judgment of a beer. For example, when Budeweiser came out with their American Ale, I gave it an honest and fair shot. Many people wrote it off immediately as “trying to be craft beer” or just something that couldn’t possibly taste good. [read more]