CraftHaus has moved one step closer to opening their brewery while simultaneously benefiting any future breweries planning on opening in the city of Henderson. They’ve worked with the city to get the brewpub license amended to something a bit more practical for startup breweries. To see the details of change, and how this benefits not just CraftHaus, but future breweries as well, read below. (more…)
2013 was a great year for us and we want to thank you all for continuing to read and share our articles, tagging your photos #hookedonhops, and saying hello to us when we are out at a bar or festival. We appreciate all of it, and we are excited for what’s to come in 2014!
In the meantime, I have compiled the articles and topics that were the most popular over the past year. Enjoy! (more…)
We have created new Emily and Melissa Drink Beer videos! First up, Full Sail Brewing Company’s 2012 Old Boardhead Barleywine Ale.
For additional backstory behind these videos, read below
Lagers tend to not get the same amount of respect within the craft beer community that ales do. The name alone tends to bring up connotations of industrially brewed “fizzy yellow beer,” despite there being about 20 different styles of lagers to choose from. This likely stems from the fact that most craft breweries start out focusing on ales, likely because they are cheaper to make. Lagers not only require a lower fermentation temperature, they also require a much longer aging process, tying up fermentors that could’ve turned over a couple batches of ale. While there are several craft brewers in America that are known for their lagers, they tend to focus on making traditional examples of the styles.
What I would like to see, is the sort of innovation and creativity that American brewers have used to create very uniquely American ales, but towards the different lager styles. (more…)
A year later than what was originally announced, but I was right when I suggested that the year-round sour would likely be a blended sour beer. The press release suggests that they will rotate through various sour beers by stating that “The brewery will use this expansion to bring Lips of Faith offerings like Tart Lychee and Eric’s Ale into year round production by 2015.” Tart Lychee was an amazing beer, and I’ve heard similar comments made about Eric’s Ale as well.
The benefits of using beer blends is that less of of the aged sour beer needs to be used for each batch, allowing them to then release more beer than if the beer was made up of 100% sour beer. Additionally, these beers would be less sour, and thus more approachable to drinkers who are unfamiliar with sour beers. As the label on Eric’s Ale states: “This is a sour beer for those who don’t like sour beers.”
Full press release below (more…)
I originally posted this article last year, and I got a lot of great responses from many of you who used Belgian beers to pair with your Thanksgiving feasts, so since it’s that time of year again, I thought I’d repost it. (more…)
Part 3 of my “Tasting Beer” series. The first two posts are here and here.
Thing one: wine-ification is a terrible word. Thing two: I’m pretty sure my first exposure to wine was out of a box, so it took a while before I understood the idea of wine being fancy. That is not to say that beer ever had a “fancy persona” in my mind either, but I guess that’s kind of the point to all of this.
Lately, thanks to the rapid growth of craft beer in America, there has been an increase in restaurants that feature craft beer, and programs like Cicerone have been getting more attention. This is of course is when the opinions start to come out about craft beer’s role, and often times, it is compared to wine. The New York Times had an article associating beer bottle sizes with “wine-ification,” Food & Wine compared beer glassware and food pairing with snobbery, and NPR recently discussed Cicerones.
I mentioned before in part 1 that statistically when wine is blind tasted, interesting things happen. For a full explanation, read here, but I want to highlight two specific examples:
– The same wine, judged by the same judges, received varied scores when judged blind multiple times
– The same wine was presented to the same set of judges twice, but with two different labels. One label was for a standard table wine, and the other for a pricer grand cru. When judged as a table wine, descriptors were “weak, light and flat” compared to “complex, balanced, long and woody” when judged as a grand cru.
To an extent, I believe that the same can be true of beer as well, but it also depends on the situation. (more…)
A three part article regarding the drinking of beer for pleasure and how our opinions of beer are often influenced by external forces.
Jeff Alworth of Beervana recently discussed on his site the extrinsic factors that influence the price of a bottle of beer. He uses the example the graffiti artist Banksy selling original artwork without his name attached and only getting 1/500th of their actual value.
It’s not true for every beer in the grocery store, but when you start looking at bombers and special releases, you see that breweries are getting a lot more than the intrinsic value of the beverage–which is often no more than the value of the regular sixer of craft beer. Like a Banksy canvas, that label means a whole lot to the consumer.
Confirmed by a recent Reddit AMA:
We will have some kind of sour out year round starting in 2014
I’m a huge fan of New Belgium’s sours, and I’m excited to see what, and how, they release a year round sour beer. More than likely, I think this may be referring to La Folie. Lauren Salazar has said before that she hopes to be able to release La Folie year round.
My other guess, is that it won’t be a 100% sour beer, and will instead be a blended beer; ie La Folie is 100% dark sour beer (Oscar) and Le Terrior is 100% light sour beer (Felix). A beer like Tart Lychee, on the other hand, is actually a blend of Felix with non-sour beer. This allows them to use less sour beer (an important consideration since it takes a year or two to sour a batch of beer), but it also makes the beer less sour. If it’s going to be available year-round, this will allow it to be more approachable for more people who don’t have the palate for a full blown sour beer.
