By Jay Brooks
Saturday’s Wisconsin State Journal had a very well done quiz on their state’s beer labels. They’ve removed the text from sixteen Wisconsin beer labels, and you have to choose which is which. I got two wrong, fourteen correct. How many can you get right? Post your results below. Enjoy.
By Jay Brooks
Golden West Brewing, who is the parent company of Chico-based Butte Creek Brewing, issued a press release today that they have created a new division within the company, dubbed Blue Marble Brewing. This new division will be launching a new organic brand beginning next month with the release of Blue Marble Organic Pilsner. According to the press release, they “are in negotiations with a key nationwide retailer to create a nationwide platform for the selling and marketing of this exciting new brand.” PR-speak aside, presumably that would be a chain like Whole Foods, to hazard a guess.
By Jay Brooks
Reuters is reporting that SABMiller has overtaken rival InBev to become the world’s largest beer company. This is based on preliminary numbers from 2007, and assumes both SABMiller completes the expected purchase of Grolsch and the S&N breakup is approved. Additionally, Heineken’s acquisition of a portion of S&N will also net them the number three spot, displacing Anheuser-Busch who’ll fall to fourth. That will make the new top five look like this:
The world beer market grew almost 5% in 2007, also based on the same preliminary figures, up from 3% the previous year.
By Jay Brooks
The Barley Wine made by Bridgeport Brewing, Old Knucklehead, has long had one of my favorite names for a beer. For whatever reason, I’ve always loved the word knucklehead. As insulting epithets go, it hearkens back to a gentler age when people called each other big galoot, nincompoop or goof ball. To me, they’re the kind of insult you call your friend when he makes a mistake that you want to point out, but without really hurting his feelings. They seem more in the good-natured ribbing category of name-calling. And that’s how I see Old Knucklehead. With each label, a different beery luminary was featured in an illustration. Batch No. 11, for example, had Portland beer writer Fred Eckhardt on the label. The new one, which makes its debut today, has John DeBenedetti on it.
DeBenedetti owns F.H. Steinbart, a well-known homebrew shop in Portland. Batch 12 was aged in bourbon barrels and then was blended back into a cask. 1,100 cases will be bottled. John Foyston has the full story in today’s Oregonian.
By Jay Brooks
MSNBC had an article last week on the increased costs of hops and barley, and what that’s doing to Rising Beer Prices. There’s nothing particularly illuminating or novel about the piece, apart from the video, which was shot at both Los Gatos Brewing and the Tied House, both in the San Jose area.
By Jay Brooks
Last week Miller’s Brew Blog revealed that Costco was brewing up three private label beers under the Kirkland private label brand name. Today they’re reporting a fourth one, this time a German Lager. So the news for smaller brands in Costco stores is even more grim. As I opined last week, these Costco Beers will more than likely displace existing beer skus.
The German Style Lager label.
The back label tells the tale.
NOTE: Noble Beer News has posted all four of the labels if anyone is keen to see them. I knew all the illustrations on the labels would have something to do with brewing, but curiously the Amber Ale drawing is of Weyermann Specialty Malts, a malthouse in Bamberg that I visited in November. I wonder if owners Thomas and Sabine are aware of that?
By Jay Brooks
This is part two in my two-part series of goofy YouTube videos about beer I’ve stumbled upon. This one uses stop-motion, a cheap but time-consuming way to make an animated film. If you haven’t guessed by now, among my many other idiosyncratic passions, is animation. I fell in love with cartoons and all things animated at an early age and never really stopped. My favorites are Rocky & Bullwinkle (I even tried to name my son Bullwinkle, but my wife vetoed that one), the old black and white Max Fleischer Popeyes, anything by Tex Avery and more recently, Wallace & Gromit. Anyway, this one isn’t high quality, animation-wise, but it is a little humorous and the idea has potential. Enjoy.
By Jay Brooks
Continuing my recent posts about beer and chocolate, my good friend and colleague, Stephen Beaumont, in his monthly feature for February, also tackles pairing the two. He nicely takes to task fellow Canadian wine writer Natalie MacLean, for her own list of wines to pair with Valentine’s Day treats. Beaumont takes her list of ten chocolate desserts and suggests some delightful sounding matches. Since her original wine pairings came from an e-mailed newsletter, I don’t know what wines she chose for the desserts (NOTE: Ms. MacLean has been kind enough to post those wine pairings in a comment, to see them please click on “Comments” below), but they can’t have been anywhere near as perfect as the beer. It will be certainly interesting to see if MacLean takes the bait and agrees to a side-by-side tasting of both.
By Jay Brooks
You’ve probably heard this song before. I know I have. It’s been around for a while now, attributed to everybody from Weird Al Yankovic to They Might Be Giants, though I’m still not entirely sure who actually performs it. It’s only mildly amusing, in a baser sort of way, but the video here really makes it. Whoever edited this together did a great job of matching the song to various snippets from Japanese anime. That’s what makes it funny, at least in my opinion. Enjoy.
By Jay Brooks
Wow, it’s hard to believe this is our twelfth Session or that a full year has gone by since we began this delicious odyssey. Our host this time around, Jon Abernathy, of The Brew Site, has chosen one of my favorite beer styles, and a most appropriate one for the season: Barley Wine. I was fortunate enough last year to judge both a preliminary round and the finals for Barley Wine at the Great American Beer Festival, along with Rich Norgrove, from Bear Republic, and George Reisch, brewmaster at Anheuser-Busch, among others. We had some very lively and engaging discussions about the style guidelines. It was a most enjoyable and satisfying way to spend an afternoon.
|
The earliest Barley Wines were not well defined, but were simply the strongest beers a brewery made, usually using the first mash runnings. They were originally called by names like first sort, malt wine and malt liquor to indicate both their relative strength and their distinctiveness as compared to grape wine, and later as old ale, stock ale or simply strong ale. Other names have been used, and in some cases continue to used occasionally, such as stingo, wee heavy and even winter ale. It wasn’t until the early part of the 20th century that the name Barley Wine began to take hold. One of the earliest, and perhaps most famous, was Bass No. 1, which was labeled Barley Wine beginning in 1903, according to most accounts. The first Barley Wine I can recall enjoying was a bottle of 1977 Thomas Hardy, which I drank while still living in New York around 1979 or 80. It was at that time as different as anything I’d ever let pass through my lips. But it wasn’t until relocating from North Carolina to California in the mid-1980s that I had another example. |
Naturally, our paternalistic government can’t chance us being too stupid to know the difference between a beer and a wine, though why that would be such a horror I can’t fathom. For that reason, the TTB prohibits not only mixing beer and wine but even a label that might confuse the average citizen, who apparently they believe is an idiot. Thus it is in the U.S. that Barley Wine is almost always referred to as the cumbersome barleywine-style ale. In America, over fifty brewers currently bottle a version of Barley Wine, and undoubtedly many more make only a draft interpretation.
|
Anchor’s Old Foghorn was the first Barley Wine in America, at least after Prohibition. It was first brewed in 1975, and first appeared in bottles the following year. And while it’s essentially an English-style Barley Wine, the only hops used are our native citrusy Cascades, making it one of the most successful single-hop beers. It’s also well-hopped, for an English-style, at around 65 IBUs. Cascades are also used for dry-hopping. Anchor ages it for at least nine-months (and as long as eighteen), and thereafter put it in 7 oz. bottles — at least until 2005 when they changed it to a 12 oz. size. The beer is quite lively when poured into a glass, and the effervescence is very evident as the tan head builds before your eyes. The colors I saw were copper with beautiful streaks of a deep ruby red. My three-year old daughter, Alice, looked at me quizzically as I held the glass up to the light. So I invited her to tell me what colors she saw. Alice saw oranges and pink. The nose was sweet and malty with just a touch of lemon citrus aromas fighting their way to the surface. There was also some earthy and raisin aromas too. The initial sensation is one of dancing bubbles on the tongue, as the effervescence continues into the taste. The flavors of malty sweetness dominate, especially in the foretaste, but then playful hops cut in mid-taste making the overall character surprisingly mild. The finish lingers long as a warming sensation with sweet malt remaining after the hops have left the dance early. It improves as it warms as more and more of the flavors are released from cold storage. Despite years of more extreme examples, Anchor’s delicate flavors and balance make this still one of the finest American-made Barley Wines. It’s just a delight from start to finish. I just love the complexity and diversity that this style exhibits. No two taste exactly alike, and therein, at least for me, lies their charm. The Toronado Barleywine Festival is just two weeks away, and I can’t wait to taste this year’s crop. I’m also planning a trip to Seattle in mid-March for the Hard Liver Barleywine Festival at Brouwer’s. This should be a fun late winter. |
