Category Archives: Beer

Beer for the Big Screen

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Can someone get this man a towel?

When I was 25 my roommate and I concocted an elaborate drinking game to play while watching John Cusack’s High Fidelity. Every time a top five list was created: drink; every time Rob got rained on: drink; and most importantly, every time Rob unearthed some greater life truth: drink.

By the end of the movie we both had empty wine bottles in our hands and felt wise in a way you only can when you’re drunk, 25, and just watched a John Cusack movie with your best friend. Turns out we may have been a little over-ambitious in our rules, like, maybe Rob’s line about the sad cottony reality behind women’s choice of day-to-day undergarments shouldn’t have counted as a greater life truth. If I were to do this all over again, I’d definitely do things differently. First, I would have beer, instead.

Llalan’s top five movie/beer combinations:

And don't try to tell me this isn't horror: it's effing scary!

1. Horror (The Shining)
My gut reaction with this is stout, and everyone knows you must go with your gut reactions in horror movies; if you over think it or are black, you’re dead. Drinking a stout gives you something to hold on to, something heavy, solid, both a companion and something that could be easily used as a weapon. For The Shining, I’d go with a Russian Imperial like North Coast Brewing’s Old Rasputin, which’ll have you spinning spells by scene in the hedgerow maze. Continue reading →

Bottled Sunshine: a Summer Beer Sampler

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Southern Tier's Hop Sun: the last & best beer we try...coincidence?

Last summer we discussed a variety of styles typically put out as summer beers. This year it’s time to get down to brass tacks (whatever that means!) and sample some breweries’ summer offerings.

We pick the first beer to try because its label was the most summery: Brooklyn Summer Ale. Its initial sharp bite brings you right out into a sunny summer afternoon picnic before it smooths out and takes you to a shady place. In fact, these exact words float through my head as part of the Pixie’s hit, Gigantic. Though an ale, the beer is pilsner-esque with that taste in the back of the mouth that borders on skunky. Must not be too bad though, because I quickly forget to taste it and instead debate the relative creepiness-level of this song: like, is the singer a voyeur or envious or both? And then admit that, man, it took me a long time to get that whole “hunk of love” line.

Up next is Victory’s Summer Love — far from a beer you’d get at a baseball game, despite the game-themed label. The perfect juxtaposition to Brooklyn, its bright sunny taste began smooth and ended dry. Reminiscent of a good pinot grigio. Suddenly and inexplicably I’m watching Liam Lynch’s This Town Sucks which I immediately recognize as my own teenage anthem to summertime doldrums. I think I quite like this beer and ponder what a difference a little Summer Love would have made to my seventeenth summer. Continue reading →

Funny T-Shirts & Beer Festivals: Two of My Favorite Things

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Four hours and, like, 50 samples later...

There is always a time-lapse between the beginning of a beer festival and the point when people react to my T-shirt; that is, people have to have enough samples in their bellies before they’re willing to point at my chest and say, “Huh. That’s funny.” The shirt appears to be designed after an Arm & Hammer box, but instead of the usual logo the arm holds a gun and the seal reads, “Armed & Hammered.” In that I have arms, by this late point in the afternoon at the beer festival my T-shirt had a perfectly truthful statement. And yes, those are two unhappily sober policemen behind me, perhaps wishing we weren’t all so goddamn goofy and nonviolent.

"I'm a Cleveland Fan"

Last Saturday I went to what was billed as the World Beer Festival, though in reality it was primarily US breweries, heavy on the Ohio-end of things. But that’s fine by me, given that Ohio makes some pretty rockin’ beer.  It took place on the harbor in Cleveland under tents, inside a huge open warehouse, and beneath a brilliantly blue sky. Its proximity to the lake made it easily the coolest location I’d ever been to for a beer fest. The first funny T-shirt — spotted walking in before we even arrived at the entrance — epitomized the city and its love/hate relationship with sports and its reputation for rampant alcoholism. I laughed, but maybe just because I’m an Ohioan. (Click on the images to see them larger.)

Everything's better in stick figure

This is the next funny shirt I saw, while standing behind the guy in line for the ever-amazing Rockmill Brewery stand. I hadn’t had enough beer yet to tell him I thought it was funny, so Ben and I snickered behind his back and snuck a picture while he pretended not to notice us. If it had been later in the day I would have said “HA!” and pointed, but as it was I thought I should probably be feeling somewhat uncomfortable. Continue reading →

Pennsylvania Beer Kicks Sweet Patootie

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Me hiking, pre-shellacking

Ben sat the tulip glass gently on our table and looked at me seriously. “This is strong…like, really.” I hiccuped and snorted a little in agreement. We were sitting on the lower patio of the Shawnee Craft Brewing Company, near the border between Pennsylvania and New Jersey, which looked out over a small waterfall and a river that flowed away into a lush forest. Wildflowers. Delicate breeze. Bird song.

We were on our honeymoon and we were thoroughly shellacked. I’ve heard that’s normal. We had ordered a flight of Shawnee’s beers and a glass of the extremely potent Triple Pale Ale on nitro, and that 32 ounces of beer kicked our respective asses.

To be honest, Pennsylvania beers just kick ass, in general. I recognized several of the breweries while browsing the state store a few weeks ago and we took the opportunity to try new varieties.

Victory, out of Downingtown, may be best known for its Prima Pils but my favorite is Hop Wallop, an IPA that does, indeed, pack a wallop, whatever that is (I think it’s equivalent to about one kick in the pants). I also enjoy their Hop Devil, which tastes sharper than Wallop to me, despite the lower abv — maybe more of a smack on the head. Continue reading →

Yazoo Brewery: Teaching Us to Embrace that Tennessee Funk

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yazoo hefeweizen

Our regular beer columnist, the incomparable Big Lla, is rambling the country in newly-wedded bliss at the moment, and though I am a poor substitute, I was pleased at the chance to write about Yazoo Brewery, a happy discovery that I made at Bonnaroo last weekend. Yazoo first caught my eye because it was the only Tennessee brewer slated to be in the Brooer’s Fest (Bonnaroo’s collection of yummy microbrew booths), and I always like tasting the local nectar. But my interest was further piqued when my brother-in-law Andrew called Yazoo’s Dos Perros “the most awesomest tastingest beer in Nashville.” Sold.

While sampling the Hefeweizen and Gerst Amber that were on tap at the festival, we caught up with Adam Jones, who, in addition to marketing the fine brews at Yazoo, has eyes so kind that he reminded me of a koala. Here’s more from Adam on hoppy experiments and Yazoo’s efforts to put the sour back into beer:

yazoo hop projectWhat’s your favorite Yazoo brew?
Honestly, the first one that I really fell in love with was the hefeweizen. It has such strong banana notes that it really grabbed me, and then when I started to work with them, I realized there’s no banana in it; it’s all the yeast. That really intrigued me and made me want to learn more.
I’m a big fan on the Hop Project IPA, too. The recipe of the hops changes with each batch. They use a little different combination, a little different hops each time, which gives it a different character and keeps you guessing—something new and fun each time.

Anything new coming up for Yazoo this summer?
We’ve actually just started a sour and wild ale program. It’s a series of beer called “Embrace the Funk.” Sour ales are brewed with a different strand of yeast that you usually want to keep out of your beer. But combined with other things—one of ours has cherries and currants—you get the sour initial taste and end with a malty finish, and it’s a big spectrum of flavor. We’ve got two on tap in the taproom now, and we’re bottling it soon. They’re pretty awesome.

Bonnaroo 2013: She-Said/He-Said

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A kind stranger named Jake took this picture of us during the Wilco set. His wife (lower left) kind of dogged his photography skills beforehand, but I think it turned out quite well.

Shannon says…

Jason says…
The kale, feta and parmesan mac and cheese from Dan’s Gourmet was incredibly flavorful, and it gave me the energy to walk back to the campsite late at night.

Best thing I ate all weekend

 The Amish donut.  Duh.  But, yeah, that mac and cheese was sick.
The David Lynch coffee that I got for free at the screening of his meditation documentary was really good: very nutty tasting with dried fruit at the end. Perfect cup for a misty Tennessee morning.

Best coffee to be found

 We switched from regular coffee to the iced version.  I suppose this sullies the purity of the comparison, but it was something like 90 degrees.   So I will just have to accept the sullying.  Nashville’s Frothy Monkey sold us black iced coffee that was delicious: dark, thick-tasting, and spicy on a level usually reserved for coffees with a sharp bite, which this coffee did not have.  Excellent festival coffee for those people who are into coffee like other people are into homebrewed beer.
The dancing of the man in the Taco Supply booth was so earnest and passionate that I ordered a veggie taco even though I wasn’t hungry.

Most endearing food vendor

 The ladies out in Tent City blasting “Misty Mountain Hop.”  I didn’t eat their food, don’t even recall what they were selling, but by Saturday it was about time I heard some cranked Zeppelin.
I loved those hefeweizens in the summer heat, especially the banana-y one from Yazoo and the orange-y Razor Wit from Highland.

Tastiest beer on tap

 Terrapin Maggie’s Peach Farmhouse Ale out of Athens.  Super peachy without being sweet, super smooth without being light, super refreshing, even for this IPA man. Continue reading →

Matrimoni-Ale Bliss & A Hoppy Ever After

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It was all beer and pretzel necklaces in the beginning...

Our wounds from replanting the hops plants healed enough to be barely noticeable in our wedding photos. In fact, in most of the pictures, save a few formal ones for the parents, I am sporting my red sunglasses and a tall glass of our homemade beer. The brew, a floral pale ale called “Hop Burst,” was a hit — or at least everyone felt obligated to compliment us since we dressed up and everything. We filled pitchers of the Hop Burst for every table at toast time, and it felt quite nice to have everyone toasting us with our own beer, I do say.

But now what?

Though our guests drank an admirable amount of beer during the wedding and the next day’s barbeque, Ben and I are still left with a fridge-full of bottled homemade beer, complete with cute labels, which someone was supposed to hand out to guests as they left. (That someone was quite possibly me.) We surprised ourselves yesterday by saying to each other, “how are we going to drink all this beer?” Did I really say that ? What is happening to us?

In the beginning, we didn’t tell people we were planning to make beer; it seemed crazy from the mouths of two people who’d barely just met. But by our third date we knew we were destined to brew together. Continue reading →

When Two Hop-Heads Fall in Love…

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Last year's ripening hops

Four days from our wedding and I find myself sitting in the dirt of a mostly unplanted garden, wishing I could turn the hose on myself. Ben and I have just finished uprooting an entire row of hops plants from his parents’ old home and replanting them at my family’s place out in the countryside of central Ohio. Bill, my parents’ orange cat, is rolling around in the dust next to me, but knew enough to not get too close. It is so hot and sticky and dirty and we haven’t even set up the trellis yet. But if we want to make beer right ourselves, we have to do it right. Ourselves.

Hops on a trellis

Hops are a climbing perennial plant, much like grapes, only taller. They grow in rows on trellises about 12 feet high. They are said to have originated in China, but apparently no one there thought, “Hm, I wonder what would happen if I threw this in water and drank it after several weeks!” There are records of the Dutch processing hops as early as the 1400s, which is how it got some fun-to-say phrases attached to it like “oast house” (drying barn) and “scuppet” (flat spade for turning drying hops).

We knew the plants were pretty tenacious and spread easily, but we did not fully grasp how hard they’d be to move. First, I have to admit here that I’m not exactly the most experienced of gardeners. So when I was handed a shovel I eyed it warily before pushing at it ineffectively with one tennis shoe. Fortunately Ben’s father saw I was struggling (as much as you can call not trying “struggling”) and took the tool from me — clearly this was not a two-person job for these particular two people. Continue reading →

Issues of Connotation in the Phrase, “Beer-Themed”

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Beer-themed invites...so subtlety is not our forte

When I saw the phrase “beer-themed” noted on the wedding photographer’s invoice, I felt surprisingly embarrassed. My stomach fell in a way it hasn’t since the Fritos incident of 1988. Yes, the wedding is beer-themed, though we had never used those words to describe this momentous occasion. I felt “beer-themed” better described certain dude movies like Beer Fest or, you know, real beer festivals (which, coincidentally, are actually dude-themed).

As a beverage, beer has earned a certain reputation — that being that it is not wine. Or champagne. I believe I’ve soap boxed before about beer being my drink of choice to cheers with for celebrations large and small. But how do we differentiate between a “beer-themed” celebration of a union of two people in love and a thinly veiled (sorry) excuse get blotto. …Perhaps the larger question here is: does it really matter?  Continue reading →

Brewing for the Masses: Always Be Prepared

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Wedding beer label prototype

Ben and I are attempting to make our homebrew as non-beer-drinker-friendly as possible. We are getting married in a month (…a month from tomorrow, exactly. Holy shit.) Anyway, the plan is to craft our Matrimoni-Ale with home-grown hops and lots of love and to have enough to send everyone home with a bottle. It seems strange that we would be friends with many non-beer drinkers, but family had to be invited too, or so I was told.

There are a number of differences between homebrewed and store-bought beer, some which may frighten off the uninitiated. Par example, sometimes there is a weensy bit of bonus beer sludge at the bottom of a bottle. In my opinion, not nearly as gross as a worm in bottom of my tequila, but what do I know, I won’t eat any dead animals, in bacon form or no.

Scientifically known as "beer sludge"

When you let your homebrew sit and stew for a minute, a sizable amount of sediment settles out of it into a righteously gross sludge on the bottom. It’s composed of yeast, hop detritus and other nontoxic beer-making byproducts, but discovering a bit of this roughage in the bottom of the bottle really freaks some people out, especially if they’re used to crystal clear, ice cold, virtually tasteless, but very well-marketed American lagers. We are siphoning our beer off the yeast bed from one fermenter into another carboy a few times to have as little of this harmless but unappealing phenomenon as possible. Continue reading →