First of all, any brewer that uses “quaffable” on the bottle is okay in my book. Secondly – by using only malt, hops, yeast and water, it takes a lot of precision to get the tastes where you like them. Any brewer can add fruit, or pumpkin, or whatever to their beer and add flavor, but not any brewer can stick to the basics and brew something clean, tasty and flawless.
Alright, I admit it. I’m one of those people constantly fiddling with on their smart phone in a beer bar. But I’m …
These days, I don’t often have an opportunity to enjoy german-style wheat beers. They’ve just fallen out of my regular rotation. This is a pretty regular find around here, and there are two versions: the Brooklyner Schneider and the Schneider Brooklyner. The collaborative brew was brewed at each of the breweries, and was slightly different at each version. This is the “Brooklyner” version so was brewed by Brooklyn Brewery.
Feature Fridays are back! I got an email from a graphic designer this week who’d just made a beer-related infographic and I thought you’d all get a kick out of it. It’s entitled “How to Survive Oktoberfest with your Liver Intact” and offers some good advice for Oktoberfest events as well as several lessons that can be great advice for beer festivals as well.
Last summer, on a tour of the Dogfish Head brewery in Milton, DE, I saw one of the original machines used to continuously hop beer produced there – “Sir Hops a Lot”. Sir Hops a Lot had been retired, and was sitting, sadly, on the ground in a back corner of the brewery, and had been replaced with “Me So Hoppy” – an in-line system that automatically feeds hops through to the brewing process which is now a *much* larger scale. I remembered back to my first introduction to craft beer – the days of “Sir Hops a Lot” and the dynamics of hops, when I was first educated.
I haven’t written about too many Saisons on this blog, and it is mostly because until recently, it was challenging – to say the least – to find domestically-produced amazing saisons that were worth writing about. Because I don’t review import beer on my site (though I admit to loving it a lot) that has left Sasions out of the styles I’ve reviewed much.
Kegs have been tapped, beers have been poured, cups have been dropped, and medals have been won at the 2011 Great American Beer Festival (GABF). While the event participants and organizers were nursing their hangovers, I was doing some thinking on my front steps while watching the first autumn leaves fall. While I have heard some local news about winners at this year’s GABF, I began to wonder about how New England breweries stacked up against the rest of the country.
