Belgian Beer Fest

Tomorrow, Mark and I will be attending Beer Advocate's Belgian Beer Fest in Boston. While belgians certainly aren't my favorite beers I'm still extremely excited about this event.

It's sold out so we'll be sure to give you unlucky souls who can't be there in person a rundown of all the highs and lows next week.

Better Beer

It was a great night last night. Too bad the Sox brass couldn't get these guys anything better than Bud Lite.

White House Beer List

I haven't been able to get myself too fired up about this election so far but this may have just sealed the deal for me.

Do we really want four years of shit beer in the Oval Office. Come on, we've already had eight years of no beer, we need to get this country back on the right track and ensuring the quality of alcoholic beverages is as good a place to start as any.

This election just got a whole lot clearer: Which do you think is more presidential this or this?

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

That's right boys and girls, after nine long hard months of waiting, it's Pumpkinhead season!

Yesterday was the first day this wonderful beer hit the shelves in my hometown so I dutifully bought my favorite liquor store's entire stock and placed orders at two more stores.

It's gonna be a good month.

BrewHappens Update

As promised, here's an update of my latest adventure in homebrewing. If you remember, the plan was to make a summertime beer with a hint of citrus in it without abandoning barley malts for wheat.

On Sunday, I opened the lighter of the two recipes. It's a lightly hopped Kölsch with the juice from 3 decent sized limes added at the end of the boil. The result was better than I ever could have expected. I was worried it would come out too light but it came out a very pretty color. Most importantly, the lime, while understated, is definitely there and I think adds a nice extra dimension. A bunch of us kicked back and drank this BeerHappens original while barbequing in the backyard.

Last night, I open up the other citrus beer I worked on. This one was meant to be an amber ale, again lightly hopped, but this one included both lemon and lime in the boil.

This tasting was disappointing for two reasons:
(1) I must have screwed up the priming sugar because, this beer was way over carbonated. The first bottle fizzed up as soon as I opened it and made a giant mess. Very sad. Very big waste of beer.
(2) Once it settled down and I was able actually drink beer instead of foam, there was really no citrus flavor to be found. I used a good amount of lemon and lime juice in this one but I guess it wasn't enough so it all got masked by the amber malts.

Besides that, it's a good beer. To use Mark's favorite term, it's a Dog Show Beer. It tastes just like was an amber ale should taste like. Nothing too remarkable about it, just what you'd expect from an amber. It's a bit of a downer for me, though, especially after the Kölsch was such a success the night before. In the end, you just have to look on the bright side: it's still beer. Exploding beer, but still beer.

Of these two, the Kölsch is definitely the winner and it has earned the right to be called Zitrus.

Victory Lap

As promised today’s post is dedicated to the far and away winners of the 2008 Ale-ympics, the Germans.

Best original German style? How do you choose? Altbier, Kölsch, Weizen, Bock, Helles, Roggenbier, Schwarzbier, Dunkel; they’re all German and they’re all fantastic. That’s eight styles I just came up with off the top of my head, each worthy of a 9 or 10. Some would even argue that it’s more appropriate to break up Bocks into the various different types (Urbock, Eisbock, Doppelbock, Maibock, etc.) because they vary so greatly. You know what, I’m not even going to pick one. It’s so hard to choose, let’s just agree that at least one of those styles is worthy of a 10 and move on.

Determining the single best German beer is probably a taller order than deciding on the best style, once again because there’s just so many. Once again, I could just cop out and say “We all know that one of these deserves a 10” and move on but I’m gonna use this as an opportunity to pitch Hirschbraus’s Doppel-Hirsch. It’s very hard to come by on the east coast and I only stumbled upon it up by accident (literally, I got home and was angry with myself for having grabbed the wrong bottle) but it has become of my favorite brews and is easily my favorite Doppelbock. Hirschbrau is a Bavarian brewery that only imports to the U.S. through an Oregon based company (yet another reason to move out west) but I’m dying to try some of their other offerings so I keep scouring the liquor stores. Anyways, another 10 for Deutschland.

As for the beer culture category, this is pretty much a cakewalk for the lederhosen wearing ale-thletes. One Word: Oktoberfest. That alone is worthy of a perfect score but Germany’s impact on beer culture goes way farther than that. Even when it comes to beers invented outside of Germany, the Germans have a knack for improving on other people’s work. Think of the Marzens I discussed in the last post. Hell, the pilsner wasn’t an original German invention but look at the close association with it today. And look at the amazing impact German immigrants have had on beer here in America. Without Jim Koch’s great-great-grandfather’s recipe, there would be no Sam Adams. The German impact on the beer world has been huge, so huge, in fact, that if I hadn’t already used the joke, I’d give them an 11, but since I can’t, they get a 10.

So congratulations to the German team Have fun celebrating guys, just don’t do go overboard.

And for any of you out there upset with the results of this illustrious competition, I’ll remind you, just like the events in the real Olympics, no one is going to give a shit about it for the next four years.

The bad news? Some of the athletes in Nicks ale-ympics were recently discovered by their competitors to be underage and in violation of sport rules.

The good news? Sometime this weekend, once I've had a little bit of sleep, the real beer Olympics will start. As soon as I think of a funny name for them.