No wheat, no barley, no beer? Part 1

The Problem:


Skye: As we have been getting around and exploring the room of beer culture, history, and enjoyment it has become more and more clear that beer is a personal thing. People enjoy it differently, both in types, how and where they drink it, and their expectations from it.


For folks that suffer from celiac disease though any enjoyment of beer is a hard sell.  Being allergic to wheat, barley, and other grains can put a real damper on enjoying a beverage that revels in them,


Here is what the Mayo Clinic says about it:

This would not be an
enjoyable way through life
(Original here)

"Celiac (SEE-lee-ak) disease is a digestive condition triggered by consumption of the protein gluten, which is primarily found in bread, pasta, cookies, pizza crust and many other foods containing wheat, barley or rye. People with celiac disease who eat foods containing gluten experience an immune reaction in their small intestines, causing damage to the inner surface of the small intestine and an inability to absorb certain nutrients."


Rudy: I am stilled amazed at how many people have developed allergies to food. It seems we can not go a day in the kitchen without having a customer relate to a server that they have a food allergy, (celiac disease). Over the last 30 odd years I have worked in many types and styles of restaurants; one of the major concerns has always been food allergies. Gluten allergies are the worst, for many reasons. We tend to use gluten in everything; pasta, thickeners, breads, pastry’s, cereals and the list goes on.


Wikipedia describes gluten as:
"Gluten (from Latin gluten, "glue") is a protein composite found in foods processed from wheat and related grain species, including barley and rye. It gives elasticity to dough, helping it to rise and to keep its shape, and often giving the final product a chewy texture."


Now that we have a background on “Gluten free” we can finally discuss the real reasons why we are writing this article. Today's brewers are imaginative and creative to say the least and the pure genius of creating diverse beer is remarkable, but to create beer for everyone is a gift worth celebrating (and consuming.) We here at JGF are going to explore some gluten-free beers and look for an answer to the question, "Are they worthwhile?" 


If you have any recommendation let us know in the comments. Stay tuned because on Thursday we will let you know what we found out!

My 5 Favorite Beers of All Time

When we agreed to do our five favorite beers of all time, I thought that this could be really hard or really easy.  Who is going to challenge me if I just list five obscure beers and provide some boilerplate descriptions?  Really, at a minimum I come off as pretentious and at a maximum I might even become insightful and illuminating.  Is it honest or ethical?  No and I would be losing the trust of my buds on this blog and that would SUCK.

So now we are back to being honest about it.   But five all time favorite beers?  Frankly, my beer memory doesn’t go back much further than a couple of weeks.  Perhaps I am drinking less than memorable beer?  Perhaps I am doing my drinking in the moment?  I have a feeling it is somewhere in between.

(Original Here)

Now as a child of the late 60’s and 70’s, I was being reared squarely in a time of beer paucity.  In some ways, beer was more about the emotional attachment to the moments that surrounded its consumption than the consumption itself.  So the first of my all-time favorites is Olympia.  A mouthful of cold Oly with my Dad in our yard is a favored memory and thus a favored beer.  A close second is what became my Dad’s signature beer when he upgraded his own beer game – Henry Weinhard’s Private Reserve.  It doesn’t make my list, but opened the door to experimenting beyond the light pilsners of the day.

Sierra Nevada Pale Ale is the second beer on my list.  The 60’s and 70’s may have had a dearth of quality beer, but that situation began to change for me in the late 1980’s when I came of age.  To facilitate that transformation, we head to Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, CA (Go Bears!) and Raleigh’s[1] with their Beers of the World promotion.  Get your card on your first visit and when you completed getting all of the beers on the list stamped, you got the free t-shirt.  (Always amazed me how a university education was powered by beer, pizza and t-shirts.)  The first beer on my list – taken in the company of my good friends – was Sierra Nevada Pale Ale.  I still have the glass.

My next beer on the favorites list is Spendrup’s.  It’s a Swedish beer, the kind of beer that compliments a long refreshing sauna or ordered in a pub with friends on a Friday after work.  Simple, tasty, a pilsner with a high sociability factor.  Good times, good beer.

Now Yuengling is our regular household beer, something that we buy in cases from Costco.  A nice everyday beer, OK when a bit warm, better as it cools and best when it is cold.  You would think that this would make it automatically on the list, but this is one time when familiarity breeds contempt.  Great for everyday, but it just doesn’t stand out on its own.  I’ll be drinking it for a long time, but not an all timer.

In 1996, I took a business trip to US European Command in Stuttgart.  After a great dinner out, we retreated to the hotel bar for a final beer before heading for bed.  We had been at a brewery and sausage palace with several excellent beers.  However, the one beer that stood out for me was my first hefeweizen or weissbier.  I don’t remember the brewer, but it was full bodied, filling and satisfying.  Truly bread in a glass, served a 0.4l at a time.  It ranks as an all time favorite.

Now for the final beer on the list.  One that I thought was going to be more of a novelty when I got a hold of it, but found that it had a hook that was refreshing and satisfying.  It’s a chocolate stout.  Thick, full-bodied, chocolate like flavors coming from the roasted malts rather than chocolate itself.  Chocolate may be a misnomer, but it’s a great description of the flavor bouquet. Bought my first at Total Wine and plan to go back for more.

Ask me again next month, you may get a different list, but it will be an honest answer to the question.

---

[1] Raleigh’s was destroyed in a fire in November, 2011.  Dozens reported homeless.

These favored few...Sarah's 5 favorite beers

This man knows what he is
talking about. (Original here)

Skye and I had a debate as to how one person really chooses his or her FAVORITE beers. I agree with Fred Eckhardt (who I don’t believe is the original person to say this), saying that my favorite beer is the one in my hand right now. Unfortunately, Skye thought this was a cop out (and he sounded a little annoyed when I told him this answer), so here I go, thinking through my FAVORITE beers... it’s funny how I can commit to marriage and yet I feel as though I’m cheating on beer by listing my favorites.

Here are my top five beers, in NO particular order.

1. Cambridge Brewing Company’s Great Pumpkin Ale

When one thinks about pumpkin flavored beer, usually you immediately think about the spices that are in pumpkin pies. That is why this beer is so GREAT! It isn’t pumpkin pie spices, it’s actual pumpkin. As quoted on CBC’s website:

“CBC’s Great Pumpkin Ale is brewed with 150 pounds of fresh, locally grown, organic sugar pumpkins in each batch, and it has an appropriately distinct orange hue.”

The Brewer may HATE creating this beer, but the fans love it (and insist upon it). I love the high carbonation and slight spice of the beer. To note, I have a soft spot in my heart for this beer because the first time I had it was the night I met my wife for the first time...awwww!

2. New Glarus Spotted Cow

This was an easy choice for me. I simply asked myself: “self, what beer would you want on your death bed?” This was the answer, even if it is a bit macabre.

3. Smuttynose IPA

Many a summer night has been spent where I’ve kicked back and drank a few Smuttynose IPAs. The hoppy flavor is perfectly balanced by the bitterness, making it worthy of session drinking. If I still lived on the East Coast, I’m sure I’d have this always stocked in my fridge. To note - it was very hard picking one IPA, since this is my favorite style of beer.

4. St. Bernardus Abt 12

My wife, also an avid beer drinker, introduced me to the world of Belgian beers. While many of them can be a bit too sweet for my palette, the St. Bernardus Abt 12 is bready, earthy, and over all just a fantastic beer. One where you just can’t stopping drinking when it’s in front of you...then you realize it’s a 10.5% ABV and think: “oh shit...” well it was worth it!

5. Double Mountain IRA

Since I promised myself I wouldn’t choose two IPAs (the Hop Lava is a fantastic beer by Double Mountain), it was easy to pick the IRA by Double Mountain as a favorite beer. This decision was made simple when I asked myself - “self, what beer would you miss the most if you no longer lived on the West Coast?” This one was the answer! With its lovely complex flavors of malts and a kick of hops (okay, so it’s technically an IPA, you got me there!) its a mouthful of happiness at all hours of the day, including breakfast (have you been to the Horse Brass in Portland, Oregon, for soccer and a traditional English style breakfast? trust me, you will want this beer, especially on cask, for this occasion).

Honorable Mentions:

Bells Two Hearted Ale
Hops and malts balance perfectly in this hearty (nice pun!) ale. Every time I go home to Wisconsin I buy this as my second beer (right after my Spotted Cow).

Founder’s Red Rye
Dry hopped and packed with bitter, this beer is filled with great, complex taste, and fantastic pairing abilities. Another beer I would stock all the time if I lived where I can buy it.

{ prost! }

Sarah James
Editor and Writer for Beer Meets Cheese (www.beermeetscheese.com)

Thanks Sarah! Go check out her site. Next up is Brian!

These favored few…Skye's favorite beers of all time

“Beer, it’s personal.” 

My friend Kim told me that a few weeks ago while I was rambling about some beer topic like I'm prone to do. Like a lot of truths it was succinct and deep all in one go. We talk about the two tenets of this blog every so often, how beer should always be approachable and how there is a time and place for every beer. Now I think there is room for the “Beer, it’s personal” statement as a third tenet, because let’s face it, beer is personal. It can bring back memories, sights, smells, sounds and everything else. Beer gets tied to a time and place like only food can. With that in mind it is time to talk about our favorites.

So the challenge put for the members of the Jolly Good Fellows was this: name your five favorite beers of all time. Not the event, such as the first beer of vacation, or a style, but the actual beer and why you return to it when you can.

If there is a theme in mine it is beer that was formative to how I approach it now, going through my list, each one of these now serves a standard bearer for what I expect from beer

I only have one more bottle of this beer.
I enjoyed this one on New Years this year

New Glarus Stone Soup – This is my favorite beer hands down. It does so many things for me and it always takes me back home to Wisconsin. If you told me that I could only drink one more beer in my lifetime, I am going to choose this one because I know that I will enjoy it. I’ll be incredibly disappointed if New Glarus stops brewing this at some point.

Fraoch Heather Ale – This was the beer where I really felt I was starting to venture out into a much greater and impressive world of beer. It had history on its side, unique ingredients, and tasted so good and different than anything else up to that point. It gave me a confidence to continue to expand my beer horizons. A few years after I had encountered this beer in the states I had this on draught in Edinburgh and it was otherworldly delicious. I haven’t had a bottle in several months; I think it is time to remedy that.

New Glarus Spotted Cow – Reliable and refreshing, I have drunk many gallons of this. 

Spotted Cow is a hard working beer that doesn’t do anything spectacular but it has become iconic in the state of Wisconsin. If I only could have one session beer for the rest of my life this would be the beer chosen.

Lindemans Cassis - I have no one but my friend Rob to thank for this entry. I heard Rob tell stories about his brief time in France drinking Lindemans Kriek so often that when I did stumble across a bottle in JRs in Stevens Point it was immediately purchased and drank. It was a revelation; soon after I had tried the peche and framboise. It was the Cassis though that was really captivating and stays so to this day. For me the black currants make it a much more rewarding beer. Sweet lambics may get pushed around a bit by beer snobs now but I’ll never forget that these were my doorway into that awesome world. There is a bottle in my fridge right now.

Central Waters Satin Solstice Imperial Stout – Mackeson’s introduced me to the dark world of stouts, but this beer stole my heart. I know that there are better stouts out there, hell I’ve even had a few of them, but when it comes time to measure how good they are they are all compared to this one. Hence the reason it was the first review for stout month!

Honorable Mentions

New Glarus Solstice – This beer has been retired for years and in my opinion every wheat style beer New Glarus has brewed since doesn’t measure up to my memory of the Solstice.

Shiner Ruby Redbird –This turned out to be the summer beer I never knew I was actually looking for all along.  

Let's see yours in the comments and come back tomorrow to see Sarah's five favorites.

Our top 5 best beers of 2011

It is New Years Eve, the last day of 2011. This year has been a lot of things to many people, but for beer drinkers it has been a pretty decent year.  All this week we have been reading the best/ worst articles floating around the news and the internet.  We decided to compile one of our own from the best of category. As stated before in this blog, beer is subjective. Like food, it has memories that go with it and make it special, time and place become important. The beer experience is enhanced by the surroundings, the people, and your state of mind. With that in mind we each tackled the answer slightly differently.  

Brian Smith

Westvleteren beers are considered
some of the best in the world...
we didn't have any of those this year.

The first beer on a long vacation (This time it was an Old Dominion Aviator Amber)

Dark Helmet Schwartzbier at Titletown Brewery in Green Bay, Wisconsin

New Belgium Fat Tire Amber Ale, now readily available in northern Virginia.

Samuel Adams Winter Lager

Yuengling Traditional Lager, the house beer of the Smiths.

Jessica a.k.a Loverfishy

Red Eye Almost 100% Organic Pumpkin Ale. Pumpkin pie spice and aged over graham crackers (like their holiday ale was too) Pumpkin pie in a glass…I don’t even like pumpkin pie, and I couldn’t get enough

Rogue Juniper Pale Ale – Tastes like a pine tree in a glass according to my dad. To me, an IPA addict, that’s a pretty awesome thing. I discovered it at the Chocolate Moose in Ely, Minnesota of all places.

Lagunitas Maximus IPA – My absolute favorite IPA. Not very common in the upper Midwest, I get a bit excited when I luck out and find it on tap somewhere. Super hoppy, but still balanced, and not as much of a pucker-up aftertaste as the other superhopped IPAs.

Breckenridge Vanilla Porter – Yeah, quite a few places make a vanilla porter, but this was deep, rich, and smooth. One of the best I’ve tried.

I have to give number five a non-beer honorable mention to Stranahan’s Colorado whisky. Went on a distillery tour…cool place, and it’s owned by the guy who founded Flying Dog Brewery. The whisky is superb…buttery and smooth.

Skye Marthaler

New Glarus Stone Soup – This is my favorite beer and anytime I can get back to Wisconsin and find it makes me a happy man. I made it back this last May and brought a case back east with me. I don't know if New Glarus will be producing this in 2012 and if not that really sucks. 

Shmaltz He'brew Jewbelation 15 – A revelation and by far the best holiday beer I had. I recently got a second bottle to age out and I am looking forward to Jewbelation 16. I shared this with my father-in-law over Christmas.

Bruery Coton – Shared this with my best friend Rob back in May. We didn’t know what we had, it was my first Bruery experience, but we enjoyed the hell out that bottle. Maybe I should have aged that bottle but if you can’t share a ridiculously good beer with your best friend then fuck off. Seriously.

Dogfish Head Theobroma – Shared this with my brother Cody and his friend Matt while playing Settlers of Catan in September the night before we went to the Packers - Panthers game in Charolotte. It was delicious and both Cody and I are searching for another bottle of it.

Shiner Ruby Redbird – I drank gallons of this over the summer. I don’t know why it grabbed me like it did, but once it got a hold on me it became my go to summer beer. I still have one bottle left in the fridge that I will break out early next year on a cold winter’s day to remind me that summer does come back.

Honorable Mentions: New Glarus Spotted Cow in the stands at Lambeau Field and the Red Eye Rye Porter at the tailgate earlier that day.  


So there you go, our favorites or "best" beers of 2011. What were yours? Tell us down in the comments!

The 1st Annual Jolly Good Fellows Gift Guide

Once again, first image Google shows
when you type beer gifts. I have to stop doing that.
The above is an option but you can do better.

Welcome to December, the month where we give presents to people, some of whom we actually like.  We proudly present to you the JGF 1^st annual beer lovers gift guide. So you have a beer lover in your ranks and you need to get them something. You could go the easy route and just pick up a sixer, or bomber of their favorite beer,  you could also do this, or you could do that AND add something special to the mix. 

Below are several suggestions from myself, Rudy and Brian on more good beer related gifts.

While receiving beer is nice the extra bits are appreciated. You may wish to get them something extra from their favorite brewery, apparel, coasters, etc. (I think I may need this Lagunitas butterfly opener.) A quick Google search can set you on your way. 

If your up and coming beer aficionado is just getting into beer then some glassware may well be the ticket. I have asked for these Spiegelau glasses. If they prefer a certain style of beer or brewery then get them the corresponding glassware. Along with those a beer tasting kit might come in handy. Here’s one example, here is another. If they have a nostalgia bent you can find some excellent breweriana, here were a few interesting things recently spotted on eBay as examples.

In our effort to improve literacy and thereby gain more readers to Jolly Good Fellows, here are several books to help them through the winter months. (We recommend stouts and strong ales to go with winter reading)

• The Oxford Companion to Beer (You can get this on sale right now!) 
• 1001 Beers You Must Taste Before You Die (The book that led to the creation of this site)
• The Complete Joy of Home Brewing

Need something to hang on the wall and fill in some space? Pop Chart Lab’s poster, The Very Many Varieties of Beer Poster may well fit the bill. 

Plan for a day trip with a  tour and tasting session to your beer drinkers favorite brewery. Here is the one for St. Arnold Brewery as an example. Want to go bigger? There are many excellent beer festivals around the North America and worth attending, but there is only one Great American Beer Festival. But you say you want to go bigger?! Well then it is Belgium tour time. A true mecca for beer connoisseurs around the world. 

Sarah, who runs the excellent site Beer Meets Cheese, is running a month long gift guide. We recommend heading over there to check out her recommendations too!

In the end if all else fails there are gift certificates. Believe it or not this is actually a pretty solid choice. One of the things I enjoy most as a beer drinker is being in the store, looking at the selections, and picking out new things to try. It is even better if what I want to purchase is already paid for.  

Thanks for stopping by!

Happy Thanksgiving!

We here at Jolly Good Fellows hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday.

Here is what we Fellows have on our table for today.

Sarah from Beermeetscheese.com

St. Bernadus Abt 12
New Glarus Uff-Da
Deschutes Black Butte Porter

Rob

New Glarus Cran-bic
Souther Tier Pumking
Sam Adams Black Lager

Brian

Sam Adams Winter Lager
Troegs Mad Elf
Shock Top Wheat Ale

Skye

Yazoo Sly Rye Porter
Troegs Troegenator Double Bock
Brooklyn Oktoberfest
New Belgium Frambozen

Have a great day and be safe. Let us know what you are having for Thanksgiving beer down in the comments!

How Could I Not Avoid It and Didn’t Really Mind

Mine is a beer drinking family. Well, more accurately, half of my family is a beer drinking family. The Smith/Findley/O’Brien Clan, rooted in my father and his siblings have been known to put away plenty of fine golden liquid at any number of family functions. Well, lets back track a bit – not always “fine” golden liquid as golden liquid. Hamms was the main brew of the day – Grandpa liked it, so the family drank it. My rebel cousin who looks like Jesus and swears like a sailor was the rebel outcast who drank Coors. My uncle drank whatever was cheap and his son drank himself to an early grave. Generic beer was the worst, but beer always remained. It was a topic of conversation. It was always there. To this day, a reminder accompanies Smith Family functions that “there are cold ones in the fridge outside.”

I thought nothing of it. My schoolmates and teachers were a little different. For a class project in 1^st grade, we needed to collect pull tabs. My mother dutifully informed the family of the project. On our next trip to Grandpa and Grandma Smith’s house I was presented with a what would be a talisman, part of the right of passage – a brown paper sack filled with pull tabs from beer cans. The smell in the bag and the number of pull tabs brought a raised eyebrow from my slightly hippy, yet very cool, teacher, but I was proud to have brought in the most tabs for our chain.

My Dad was a bit of a “do it yourselfer” and that directly contributed to my first personal engagement with beer. Warm Sunday afternoons, ball game on the radio, Dad would be out working in the yard and would ask me to run inside and grab him a cold one from the fridge. Olympia was his beer of choice at that point. Bringing him a cold beer entitled me to a sip, a small sip, but my one swallow nevertheless. As I got older, I could open the can in the house, pour it into a glass and take my own sip before running it out to him. Dad eventually switched to Henry Weinhard’s Private Reserve and the sips came to an end. Halcyon days.

When I got to be a teenager, my relationship to beer changed, but not in the way one might expect. My mother had the first of several cancer related surgeries. One resulted in a nearly continuous bout of pain. It was a miserable time for her and I was frequently the target of long bouts of listening. I had always been a pretty good kid and she was under terrible stress, as was my Dad in the construction recession of the early 1980s, so my response was to minimize my teenage rebellion and deciding that I wanted to see if I could wait until I was 21 before actually drinking. I was allowed a glass of wine at the dinner table and could still have a mouthful of beer, but never one of my own, and so it stayed until I turned the legal age. Two years in a Bud friendly fraternity put it to the test, but I did manage and enjoyed that first beer of my own.

Now some would argue that I didn’t hold to the pledge completely. The beer that I had in the back of the bus at Dave’s house was no more than the sip that I had from Dad’s glass. Being tanked at my cousin’s wedding when I was 9 is completely out of the question because that was champagne raided from my tee-totaling aunt and her daughter. God loves them and so do I, but a hungover 9 year old is not pretty.

I would say my tastes have evolved as I got more exposure courtesy of the micro-brew explosions on the West Coast. Sierra Nevada and Anchor Steam are the “home town” brews thought there are many that I am sure to have missed. Today Yuengling is the house beer in my home with Dogfish Head mixes providing a little variety. Oly holds a special place, maybe it was the tee-shirt entitled “Artesian Search and Rescue Team” or just the special treatment I had I got getting a good mouthful of cold beer on a hot day – being a big guy with my Dad.

Introductions!

Over the next few days the Jolly Good Fellows writing team will be introducing themselves. Instead of sharing how we love moonlight nights and long walks on the beach though (and really who doesn't, especially with a tasty beverage in hand) we will be introducing ourselves through how we came to beer. Up first is Jeremy, aka JustLeftofNormal.

One other note, we are up on twitter and can be found here: @beerfellows. Follow us for updates and commentary though in little sips, not giant quaffs.