Spring is officially shows up tomorrow though it feels like it has been lurking around for the last few weeks. How bad is it? I actually had to mow my lawn this last weekend. Now I got that to look forward to for the next 7 months.
If I lived closer I would totally go to this. Once again, I need to start getting some correspondents from beer hot spots.
Did you honestly expect something else when I talk about beer and water? (Original here)
Now for a public service announcement:
The EPA's Assistant Administrator for Water, Nancy Stoner, will be hosting a Twitter chat about the 40th anniversary of the Clean Water Act.
We all know that great beer demands clean water. We also know that it takes a lot of water to make great beer. Go ask them some questions! The hashtag is #cleanwater and you can find them at @EPAwater from 2:00 to 2:30pm EDT.
In site news!
It has been over a month but the Jolly Good Fellows podcast will be recording tomorrow night! In other news the brackets have been recently updated to the Sweet 16 beers, Brian will finish out his Pennsylvania adventure, and you can expect some ramblings from me!
As always you can find us on Untappd, Facebook, twitter, and Google Plus. Just click on the little boxes in the top right corner. Thanks for sticking with us, we are glad you stopped by!
The remaining field has once again been halved. Only 16 beers remain. Now that we have a brief pause, go check out any of the remaining beers if you can. If you have drank any of them in the past tell us how they were.
To celebrate March Madness for 2012 we paired up breweries with the 68 teams selected for the NCAA men's basketball tournament. To make it more "simple" we tried to grab the brewery that was geographically closest to the respective university or college. In some cases that really wasn't possible so we did the best we could. Then we selected a beer from that brewery's line up, we tried to keep some diversity, but sometimes our beer biases won out. I'm sure we forgot some big ones and there may be grievances so let us know in the comments.
The selected brews success is shackled to their associated teams. We were originally going to do voting but time was factor so as stated above. we tried to keep it simple. Once the set 64 are decided we will through up the brackets. You can expect that tomorrow evening.
We have the start of March Madness, the Ides of March (also known as my anniversary), and St.
Patrick’s Day. There is a lot of craziness happening this week so off we go!
Be advised we are aren't talking about "true" session beers here. The ones they showcase in this article are my definition of a standard brew (about 5% ABV)
Want to celebrate your Irishness this weekend? Skip the
green beer and dive into these instead! Do it right and you can unlock your Luck of the Irish badge on Untappd.
The white whale that is KBS. The Canadian Breakfast Stout is
even more elusive. One day though I will have them.
In site news!
After all the lying I did last week, this week I am not committing to anything other than our beer brackets and a spring seasonal review.
What I can promise you is that the JGF team working hard to get back on track both with the podcast and a regular posting schedule. There may be a few more bumps in the road but we are getting things squared away. Thanks as always for stopping in and thanks even more for your patience.
After 29 dark liquid days we have come
to the end of stout month. Before we go though two final looks.
Someday I will have one in Dublin.
Our first review is
of a classic. For most people in the world it is the first beer they will think
of when they here the words “stout beer.” I am of course referring to Guinness.
I don’t think you can do a stout month and not look at the biggest one in the world.
Memory is a tricky thing
because this was not as dry as I remembered; years of dark beer drinking have
blended and faded my memories of past Guinness stouts. Truth be told I was
never that big of a fan of Guinness, as I mentioned earlier this month I
preferred Mackesons XXX Stout.
This particular model was the Foreign Extra Stout and it poured
clear and very, very dark brown tinged with red and had a light tan head. The
head stuck around for awhile, if I would have poured hard it may have stuck
around for the entire glass. The drink it self has little carbonation, and a
light coffee, malty taste. On the first drink it all came rushing back,
particularly the characteristic Guinness slightly sweet aftertaste. It occurred
to me I worked through the glass that the aftertaste actually sets up the next
swig of beer and I was enjoying this more than when I started the glass.
While the color is very dark
and could lead to expectations of a heavy beer, you would be mistaken. This is rather
light in body though it does pack a solid punch coming in at 7.5% ABV. The
alcohol is well camouflaged though, making for a pleasant drinking experience.
I can see why this is one of
the most popular beers in the world, it has enough characteristic to differentiate
itself from others and honestly, it is a decent brew. It is not too heavy and
it tastes good. It can be both an effective gateway to other stouts but there
is enough allure that I can understand how this could also become somebody’s
favorite beer. The end result is you can’t really go wrong with a Guinness but
for veteran stout drinkers this may come up a bit short.
For those keeping track at
home this is a book beer and can be found on page 702.
The foil adds a nice touch of flair!
Our other candidate is
Samuel Smith Oatmeal Stout. A product of England, this beer poured clear and
very dark brown with a light tan head. I poured it hard so the head stuck
around for a while.
On the drink this was very
smooth, with minimal carbonation. It has a light chocolate malt taste followed
by a pleasant and slightly sweet aftertaste that dissipates of the palette relatively
quickly. Like the Guinness, while dark it is fairly light in body. Alcohol
content comes in at 5% ABV and really I was hard pressed to taste the alcohol. Overall
you could easily tip a few pints of this for an enjoyable evening.
Overall I would recommend
this beer as a very accessible gateway to the joys of drinking dark, stout
beers. It is an easy drinker but that should not take away from the fact that
this is a fine crafted beer that has enough complexity to captivate both
rookies and seasoned pros.
Here is the “party lines” on the Guinness and the Samuel Smith Oatmeal Stout.
Foreign Extra Stout is brewed with generous hops and
roasted barley for a bittersweet balance & full-flavored, natural bite.
Developed over 200 years ago for global export from Ireland, the addition of
extra hops ensured this Stout would arrive to its destination in perfect
condition.
“Brewed with well
water (the original well at the Old Brewery, sunk in 1758, is still in use,
with the hard well water being drawn from 85 feet underground); fermented in
‘stone Yorkshire squares’ to create an almost opaque, wonderfully silky and
smooth textured ale with a complex medium dry palate and bittersweet finish”
Look for our stout month recap
later this week where we will go through what we liked, what surprised us, and
what disappointed us.
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.
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.
I found no actual leap day beers, just this label. I'm rather disappointed. (Original here)
If I was
a craft brewer or even a half way decent homebrewer I would brew a leap beer,
available only on February 29. The real question would be what type of beer it
should be? My first thought was it should be something that would be able
to age up from one leap day to the next. My second thought was completely
opposite. Make it something so fresh and perishable it has to be enjoyed immediately;
after all you may not make the next leap day. On that note…
A new
era in beer making(The Journal) I could make an entire post about new breweries coming on line. Hell this blog could be strictly dedicated to that.
Brewer
backs Marathon, hops for ‘26.2’ beer(Boston Herald) I know
when I ran my marathon many years ago a beer was not the first thing on my mind when I finished. Race spectators or participants let us know how
this tastes in April.
I’ve
never had North Korean beer, but on everything I have read about North Korea
I’m thinking Pabst is probably a real step up.I do find it funny that Snoopy and Pabst are leading the charge.
Rick Santorum’s Beer Money (Mother Jones) It is always interesting to see where the money is coming from and how much it can buy. In this case quite a bit.
First off a thanks to Sarah for keeping this thing running with posts over the weekend while I gallivanted around the Carolinas. Thanks Sarah you rock socks!
This week
you will finally find out Brian’s five favorite beers and his beer adventure in
Pennsylvania, we’ll talk about our Brewvival experience, and we finish out
stout month with some classics. On the JGF Beercast we recorded our first "live" beer round table this last weekend, we will have it posted by the middle of this week.
As always, you can find us on a variety of forums; facebook, untapped, twitter, and google+, the widget in the top right corner of the page will take you where you want to go. We really appreciate it when you comment.
You can also subscribe to the Jolly Good Fellows beercast on iTunes. Please take the time to rate us, it increases our exposure and gets us out to larger audiences.
Welcome to episode 6 of the Jolly Good Fellows Beercast. This time we enjoy some Lancaster Milk Stout and since I was not prepared in the slightest I "wing" the entire episode while Dan talks about his adventures in online dating.
Remember to subscribe on iTunes and it will automatically update on your devices. Thanks to the folks who have rated us and left comments, they are appreciated.
Continue spreading the word and if you like what you are listening to then please rate us and comment on iTunes. Doing that gets us more exposure!
And from that mighty summit tumble down into the gutter for beer crime!
Go read this article and keep in mind the When Keeping it Real Goes Wrong, Chappelle Show skit.
Our continuing update on the
beer situation in Africa. The Bigs are throwing tons of money into that
continent to grow those markets to make up for their shortfalls elsewhere.
Politics and beer, they will
be forever intertwined. This is pretty step and does seem like a regressive
tax, but until I know the numbers I can’t real cut one way or the other.
I can only imagine how the
beer tastes…we may have to live review it on the beercast…but I can’t fault
these guys. This was such an obvious idea that I can’t understand why it didn't happen sooner.
In site news!
This is a big week. Episode
6 of the JGF Beercast will be uploaded tomorrow, we will be looking at 3
Southern Tier stouts this week, expect some beer commentary on Presidents and
Lent. Most importantly, Dan, Brett and I will be at Brewvival this Saturday,
February 25th! Look for us there if you are going, if not expect
some tweeting and untappd madness.
As always, you can find us
on a variety of forums; facebook, untapped, twitter, and google+, the widget in
the top right corner of the page will take you where you want to go. We really
appreciate it when you comment.
You can also subscribe to
the Jolly Good Fellows beercast on iTunes. Please take the time to rate us, it increases our exposure and gets us out to larger audiences.
Here is the second part of our interview with Chip and Lucas from Lucky Town Brewing. They discuss Lucky Town's beer line up, why they chose Kickstarter, and what you can expect from them in 2012.
Be looking for this if you want
to find creative southern beer.
Let’s talk about your
beer for a bit; I know that you have introduced four of them on your video (see below). Tell us a bit about them?
Lucas:
Absolutely, our first beer and our staple is our maple and brown sugar oatmeal
stout. We thought of adding that in there one day and started playing with
recipes and took it down and won a competition with it. It turned out to be a
really good beer. You don’t get as much sweetness as people think when you say
that because we actually put the maple and brown sugar in the bowl so most of
it ferments out, so you get a little bit of sweetness but you get a lot of
additional flavor out of it.
Lucas: On top of
that we have our Ballistic Blonde which is a Belgian style blonde. It is a very
simple beer but we stay slightly true to form with the Belgian style but we
added more hops to it because we love hops and it was just not hoppy enough. It
does have some fruity notes, the yeast gives off some nice esters. We have our
Lizard Tail Pale Ale which was kind of an accident one day, but it turned out
really well. It is dry hopped, again we love hops so we use them more than we
should. Then there is our Hop Fiasco that has been evolving ever since we have
started it. The reason we call it the Hop Fiasco is because we dumped over half
a pound of hops in a five gallon batch. It was a little intense for what we
wanted so we backed it off, we changed up the hop schedule a little bit, and it
has gotten to be a really, really good beer.
What is on the tap for future styles?
Lucas: We are playing with a lot of things, of course
seasonals, we have an Octoberfest, we have an amber that was designed by
Brandon Blacklidge our R&D manager. It was his first designed beer and it
came out extremely well. The boy has the best palette I have ever been around
when it comes to beer tasting. He has come a long way with his recipe
formulation. Saisons, I’ve got one sitting right now that we are messing with.
That one is going to be something that will constantly change. Of course we
eventually want to get in to doing sours and all the weird, funky stuff,
because we love it and there is not one style that we all enjoy so much that we
don’t want to drink anything else. So we want to play with everything.
Chip: We also did
some experimenting with the holiday porter which had…
Lucas: ...vanilla,
fig, cinnamon, nutmeg, clove, it was a smorgasbord of holiday spices.
How has the reception
been with people in the area in regards to the beer?
Lucas: Very
positive. As a brewer it makes you feel better than nothing else when you see
somebody and you know by looking at them that they have never tried anything
unique and they drink it and they love it. We had such a good reception for
that stout because most people down here when they think of stout they only
think of Guinness at best. Guinness is just not for everybody, so when they
drink ours they are really surprised and you can see it in their face. They are
not used to something like that so we have had an extremely good reception and
I hope it keeps up that way.
Any particular style
a favorite of yours?
Lucas: I’m
typically a stout guy, I love oatmeal stouts , that is why we have one on
there, but I don’t stick to one thing on any evening so that is kind of hard to
say. I just love beer.
Chip: I tend to
go either one of two ways, I like hops a lot so I like stong pale ales and
hoppy IPAs, but also there are times that I prefer a smooth creamy porter or
stout. It kind of depends on what mood I am in.
Tell us a bit about
why you chose Kickstarter for the Lucky Town Brewery project?
Chip: We didn’t
know about Kickstarter for awhile until after we started the business. We
actually saw another brewery that was starting up use it which was Wilderness Brewing, which is Mike and Nate out of Kansas City, Missouri, so I gave them a
call and we talked and about what our goals were and what we were trying to do.
I asked him how was it and how was the reception because they were successful
in their Kickstarter project. I brought it to the team and said that I think
this would be a really good idea for us to get people involved not only on the
startup side of it, from the ground up, but also because it attracts people
that want to be involved but they don’t have the means to drop a big investment
in a new company. It kind of gives them a little bit of pride and passion,
especially for local people.
Lucas: It gets
our name out there and like Chip said, it allows people to be a part of
something for very little investment. It helps us in several ways, for the
first phase of our business plan it allows us to get a little starter with
minimal capital risk on our part. It will jump start us, I guess kickstart just
like the website is called. It helps us get involved with people that want to
be involved with the brewery. We have met so many people that want to be
supportive of this since we have started so from every aspect this has been
helpful to us.
What do you see as
your projected output?
Lucas: We would
like to start, and this is part of the plan now, we are projecting to start with
a 15 barrel system. That allows us to not be too big starting off, but we can
also add larger fermenters and upscale our output without completely changing
the brewhouse size. We don’t want to go any smaller than that because we feel
that with the market we are sitting in we will overrun the system very quickly.
It may be a little larger, but I doubt it. I think 15 barrels is our target
size to start off with.
Will you be
distributing in bottles, cans?
Chip: Starting
out we will be on draft and only on tap. It will be distributed throughout the
central Mississippi region. In Mississippi, the law requires that all
manufactured beer from a production brewery must be distributed by a
distributor so we won’t be able to self-distribute anything and we also cannot
have a taproom right now.
Lucas: Yes, that
is another thing that hasn’t even attempted to be changed yet, but we would
like to make a good business case to some of the legislature around here to see
if we can’t do something about that. No one has tried to change that because we
only have one brewery and they are kind of located out in the country so a
taproom is really not that enticing for them, but we have gone places, I have
personally visited Yazoo Brewing in Nashville and you can sit on their front
porch and drink in the afternoon and take a tour which is just awesome. It is a
great part of the community, so through this year we are going to see if we can
get the legislature on our side to change that law for next year hopefully, or
at least get it brought up because that will influence us when we go straight
to brick and mortar on where we put the brewery. There is no sense in getting
in the middle of Jackson if we can’t have a taproom. It is not going to be that
conducive to us.
What can folks expect
from Lucky Town Brewing in 2012?
Chip: Beer.
Lucas: We should
have two styles flowing by the end of this year.
Do you plan on having
a grand opening, or is that too far down the road?
Lucas: We will
when we get to that point.
********
That wraps up our interview with Lucky Town Brewing. A big thanks to Chip and Lucas for taking the time to talk with us.
Check out their Kickstarter project and chip in a few bucks
to help make a better beer world.
For more information on Lucky Town Brewing check out their
website, facebook page, follow them on twitter or see what they are enjoying on Untappd.
