Displaying Beer! posts.

This post was originally published 11/4/2010. But good beer advice is timeless.

Thanksgiving is only three weeks away & CBW is here to advocate that you consider having beer on your table rather than (or in addition to!) wine.

WHY BEER WITH FOOD
We are obviously beer guys – opening a brewery would be a dumb thing to do if we weren’t – so you could say that we’re kind of biased.  But beer does have characteristics that arguably make it as good (or better than) wine when you’re paring it with food.  Brewmasters have a wider variety of ingredients to work with than vinters.  Beer’s carbonation cleanses your tongue when you’ve eaten something rich.  Beer can stand up to some flavors wine simply can’t.  It doesn’t hurt that you can walk into a better beer store and buy some of the world’s best beers for a fraction of what you would spend on a comparable wine.

WHAT ARE YOU EATING?

Just begging for a beer

Well, you’ll probably be eating turkey (or a tofu/textured vegetable protein mimicking said bird), mashed starch(es) of some variety, cranberry sauce, stuffing, brussel sprouts, matzoh ball soup (thats a tradition in other families, right?), green bean casserole,  rolls, pies, pies, pies and pies.  Thats kind of all over the place, but we’re ok with that if you are.

WHAT BEERS PAIR WELL?
You’re going to have a lot of flavors on your plate and that means that we have a lot of room to play around.  The safe bet is a Belgian-style saison (which, it happens, CBW will be producing – so plan on drinking CBW saison with next year’s Thanksgiving dinner) but there is a lot of variety in that style.  There are a handful of amazing saisons available in the Buffalo area – top among them Brasserie Dupont’s Saison Dupont, Goose Island’s Sofie, New York’s own Ommegang Hennepin and Glazen Toren Saison*.  All of these make me think of a field of wildflowers in early spring.  They share a similar soft, slightly lemony yeast character.  They’re going to vary in malt profile (the Hennepin being the most pronounced) and alcohol (again, Hennepin has the highest ABV at 7.7%).  They’re all delicious though & would be a great addition to your table.

Ask for it by name.

Wild beers are amazing with food.  These are beers that have been at least partially fermented with yeast & bacteria outside the normal spectrum used by brewers.  Frightened by the mention of bacteria?  Don’t be – you like yogurt, right?  Its a similar process here.  The character imparted by wild yeast & bacteria varies greatly, from what I describe as vaguely cherry pie flavored to full on sour.  They’re slightly more expensive than a usual craft brew but totally worth it.  Want an easy entry point?  Try Orval, which is one of the most sublime beers in the world.  A Flanders-style red, such as Rodenbach Grand Cru* is more aggressive in it’s tartness but retains a bunch of cherry & malt sweetness.  Or go all out (note: I’ll be going all out) and get something from Cantillion*, Drie Fontienen* or Girardin* for a complex, sour treat.

Not in the mood for something Belgian?  Not a problem.  A good Brown Ale (Avery Brewing’s Ellies Brown, Goose Island Nut Brown, Smuttynose Old Brown Dog) is going to play really well with that delicious crispy turkey skin.  So is a well made pilsner (Victory Prima Pils, Sly Fox Pikeland Pils, and if you manage to find it really fresh Pilsener Urquell).  While it won’t match perfectly I can’t help but suggest robust porters (Southern Tier Porter, Great Lakes Edmund Fitzgerald, Smuttynose Robust Porter) as well.

Another fine beer

Done with dinner already?  How about a digestif?  Barleywines, Imperial Stouts and Belgian Quads/Strong Ales are all going to help you relax on the couch as that post-turkey glow envelops you.  If you want something roasty, chocolately & potentially a little burnt go for an Imperial Stout (Great Divide Yeti [oak aged or not], Smuttynose Imperial Stout, Brooklyn Black Chocolate Stout) .  Want something with more caramel character - Go for a barleywine (Anchor Old Foghorn, J.W. Lee’s Harvest*, Dogfish Head Olde School*).  Plums, figs & lightly fruity yeast – go for a Belgian Quad or Strong Ale (St. Bernardus Abt 12, Struise Pannepot*,  Gouden Carolus Grand Cru of the Emperor*).  These are all going to be pretty darn high in alcohol - so consider sharing with your friends and family, no matter how much you want to keep them to yourself.

WHERE DO I FIND THEM?
There are lots of great beer stores throughout the Buffalo/Niagara region these days.  Premier Gourmet on Delaware has the most extensive selection in the area.  Village Beer Merchant on Elmwood also has a wide array of beers that would pair nicely with Thanksgiving dinner.  Wegmans has really stepped up their beer selection in the last few years and you can find a lot of great options there.  Consumers Beverages is a solid outlet for good beer as well.

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving, no matter what you drink.  May your turkey skin be perfectly browned.

* Anything marked with an asterisk is going to be a little harder to find.  Premier should have it but other stores may not.

Ok, so you know where to find good beer in Western New York.  You know what brands are available and what beers you like from each brand.  You’ve got a guy at your local good bottle shop that calls you when something rare and delicious comes in.  But you find you’re going on a trip and don’t know a thing about the beer scene in the city you’re going to. How do you start beer hunting in a totally new city?

The Swans. They like craft beer, right?

I’m taking two road trips in September.  One is beer centric – Boston for The Beer Advocate Night of the Funk/Belgian Beer fest.  The other is to Asbury Park, NJ for the All Tomorrow’s Parties Don’t Look Back music festival.  I don’t know either city, and while the fact that I’m heading to Boston for a beer fest is going to make it easy to find good beer on that trip the last time I went to an All Tomorrow’s Parties event my selection was limited to Bud, Heineken and maybe Coors.  I’m not concerned about finding good beer in and around Asbury Park though.  Why?  Because I’ve got this thing you might have heard of: the Internet.

There is a stupid amount of info out there on locating good beer.  First things first, take a look at Ratebeer’s places section and Beer Advocate’s Beer Fly.  They’re both going to help you find the best spots wherever you’re going.  Ratebeer’s places section doesn’t show me anything for Asbury Park but their regional grouping shows me places to check out in nearby towns.  Beer Fly does provide a few hits – one of which is right down the street from my hotel so I’ll be sure to check it out between sets.

In addition to the two big websites there are a ton of smartphone apps out there that work on crowdsourced data.  I’ve got Ratebeer Places, Beer Cloud and Beer Map on my iPod.  One particularly cool feature of these apps is the ability to perform a proximity search, easily allowing you to find places of interest within a certain distance of your current location.  Each of these apps gives slightly different results based on their user contributed data.  You might find that Beer Cloud is useful in the Northeast, Beer Map in the Midwest and Ratebeer places on the West Coast.  No app is going to be the absolute “best” – but for the most part these apps are free, so it doesn’t hurt to load up your smartphone before heading out on your trip.  Ethan has an Android phone and uses Beer Cloud pretty exclusively in terms of apps.  There are others Android apps out there – take a look around the marketplace and see what you can find!

CBW poses for a pre-road trip snapshot. R to L: Dave, Matt, Ethan, Dan, Greg, Chris, Rudy

When you’re planning your trip don’t forget the towns & cities you’ll be passing on the way to your destination.  Brewpubs are a great place to stretch your legs after a few hours on the road & they’re sure to offer beers you’ve never encountered before.  Popping into a bottle shop in a town you’ve never been to before might yield you some really cool beer you’ve been trying to find for months, or something you’ve never heard of before that will become a new favorite.

Good beer places are, to make a sweeping generalization, real places.  These aren’t going to be cookie cutter, touristy businesses in cookie cutter, touristy areas.  Spending a little time seeking out these places is going to help you find good people, good food, and of course, good beer.  Happy hunting!

Squib has a lot of definitions… freedictionary.com says it can mean

a. A small firecracker.

b. A broken firecracker that burns but does not explode.

By extension, a squib is also a dud round of ammunition, one that doesn’t even quite make it out of the barrel… (and it’s the next shot that’ll really screw things up, see the photo!)

And of course there’s the Potteresque meaning of

“A Squib is someone who was born into a wizarding family but hasn’t got any magic powers. Kind of the opposite of Muggle-born wizards, but Squibs are quite unusual.”

—Ron Weasley discussing Argus Filch [link]

Not to mention that they are “a sentient species from Skor II known for collecting, trading, and haggling,” but I know you already knew that.

What Google's Image Search Will Do For You!

‘Course it’s also an historical Bristish film with the unlikely synopsis of:

“In this musical comedy, a Cockney flower girl is in love with a policeman whom she wants to marry. Unfortunately, her father opposes the union because he is involved in a little crooked investing. Fortunately, the young woman wins a lottery and is able to find wealth and marital bliss”

But where I am heading with it is really this:

“A squib is a brief satirical or witty piece of writing or speech, like a lampoon, or a short, sometimes humorous piece in a newspaper or magazine, used as a filler. It can be intended to ignite thinking and discourse by others on topics of theoretical importance – e.g., see MIT Press’s journal, Linguistic Inquiry [1], but is often less substantial than this and just humorous”

Which makes sense if you know that my non-beery background is in linguistics & cognitive science… I remember friends in the linguistic graduate program at the UofA submitting them to LI and I always liked the concept.

Filler, brief, humorous… meant to spark discussion.  On the web, what isn’t a squib, really?

So, I am declaring my intent to write a bunch of squibs for the blog.  What that means is, these spontaneously occurring posts will be like a Tweet, but usually longer.  Or like Tumblr, but more blog-like.  Or not.  Or just, you know… a lot like this:

Facebook:

I just referred to our future as “teh beerz ov CBW” on a friend’s status update.  How do you feel about “teh beerz ov CBW?” as a marketing slogan?  If it makes you think of a band called Sleepchamber, you’re probably me.

http://sleepchamber.info/

I’m not saying CBW’s beers will be brimming with industrial noise and sexmagick; Briess simply doesn’t make any kind of malt yet that really expresses that.  On the other hand, if any brewer can make a beer taste like John Zewizz makes music sound/look/feel, it’s RudyBob, so… Look for our series of genre-defying melchizedeks (hand bottled, corked & caged! Available only by subscription!) soon after opening.

Yeah, I have not posted in awhile. But here I am!  There are just a few things on my mind and well… I have a soapbox, er, blog.  So, getting down to it…

The first, really the big point is related to the title.  Before Community Beer Works, there was Beer-O-Vision, the blog that Dan and I wrote at for a couple of years.  I would not claim it was the world’s greatest beer blog, or even A Good Beer Blog, but I am proud of it nonetheless and I’d stand by every word we wrote.  The thing is, when we wrote all that stuff–and made those videos–we were just a couple of guys who liked beer and wanted to talk about it.  Once you get into the industry, things change a bit.  For one thing, you become somewhat more attuned to the to’s and fro’s of the industry… I mean, we get The New Brewer now, so we are privy to a  lot of  ”insider” (like anyone can’t get it; we know) information.  But more than that, you start to realize you need to be a bit more circumspect.  By which I mean, you can’t go around shitting where you eat.

Possibly Offensive.

So, it seems like a bit of a risk to jump into any of the controversies that roil the beer blogosphere.  Sure, we’ve made some noise here and there about various news items- AB-InBev’s acquistion of Goose Island for example, or Dan’s lovely peice of satire on the trademarking of area codes (picked up by another blog, incidently).  But we aren’t editorializing so much in those posts, we’re mainly poiting out some news and I suppose, gently mocking the Big Boys.  Low hanging fruit, as they say.  Still, thisparticular one has been on my mind a bit since it went down earlier last week, and I am going  to add my two cents.

linky (I’m just not sophisticated enough to embed the video, but if you don’t watch it, the rest of what I write might still make sense… eh, probably better watch it. Or read this, anyway.)

I’ll let the clip set the stage and save myself some typing.  I’ve had a number of Clown Shoes beers, and they are, to my tastes, fine.  Not mind-blowing, but pretty tasty.  The labels–or let’s be precise, two of them, anyway–are to my mind not very classy, but I wouldn’t sayoutright sexist or offensive.  Also, not light-hearted or funny, really.  But you know, that’s a matter of opinion.  I think, though, the question is more one of where to put the balance of your interest: in the beers themselves, or in the entirety of the beer, from price to label to the ethos of the company.  Because really, at the end of the day, you don’t just buy a beer.  You buy into a brand.  Here’s two examples, pro and con.

I've come from 1882, to make beer for you

Pro: I love Pretty Things.  I just like everything about them, from their artwork, to the company’s story, to the individuals Dann and Martha, and yes, the beers themselves.  Is every beer they make the best beer ever?  Meh, it’s unknowable and  irrelevant.  When I drink them, they are.  Because it is about more than just the liquid passing over my tongue and off-gassing into my nose.  Sure that matters, but it’s not everything, because ultimately the experience happens in my brain, not my mouth.  Once the liquid sets off certain patterns of electrical activity in my tongue and in my nose, all sorts of other things interact with that: memory, expectations, time of day, blood-sugar levels, the context in which I am drinking, &c.  We beer enthusiasts are foolish in some sense to rate beer, to attempt to quantify the subjective.  Four people drink the same beer, and four very distinct and ineffable conscious experiences ensue.  That’s the nature of human experience, and so if one person tells me the beer is crap, I’m in some sense best off leaving it at that; for all I know, that beer makes her remember a bad time, a sad time, a lonely time, or heck: it just makes her gag a bit.  How am I supposed to tell her she’s wrong?

Con: I don’t drink Blue Moon.  It’s not because it’s garbage; quite the contrary: it’s not a bad example of a Belgian Wit, on the ocassion I have had some.  Seems to hit the BJCP style guidelines at a 38+ anyway, if I’m going to get all judge-y on it.  But even if it were the ne plus ultra of the style, better than Hoegaarden, better than Ommegang’s… I’m still not going to enjoy the beer exactly, because I know to whom my hard-earned money is going when I buy that beer–MolsonCoors–and I am not interested in supporting a company that 1) hardly needs my money anyway, thanks, and 2) will turn around and put my dollars towards causes I do not support, politically.  I simply do not like that company, and so their beers will necessarily taste a bit nasty to me, just as much as Pretty Things beers taste like teh awesome.

So, back to Clown Shoes and tying this into CBW perhaps… I’m not going to boycott them, or rant about them from my bully pulpit, but I’m not probably going to buy more of their stuff than I have already, because I agree with Candice Alström down at Beer Advocate that they’re sort of tacky.  I mean whatever, I’ve bought one of each of their beers so far and I’ll probably check out new ones as they become available to me; I’m curious and like I said above, the beers seem to taste alright to me.  But I do think Craft Beer doesn’t really need to go there to sell beers to me anyway.  To you?  Don’t know.  Have at ‘em, really.  Personally, I recommend either the Clementine (speaking of Belgian wits) or Hoppy Feet (a bit on the roasty side for the style, but pleasant).  But CBW’s ethos perculdes this kind of marketing effort.  Sure, we’re silly and ocassionally obtuse (does anyone understand “In C” but us? Even us?).  But we’re not going to stray anywhere near the arena Clown Shoes is playing in; it’s just not our style.  We hope that doesn’t, em… offend you.

********************************************************************************

Having blown 1,000 words on that, I only wanted to make my other points but quickly.  So first–second?–I want to make a tip of the hat to our own Mr. Dan Conley, who not only celebrated his 6th wedding anniversary this weekend but also wrote a damn fine peice of satire last week that drew some attention in the beer blogosphere: nicely done, Dan.  Sadly, we don’t in fact own 716, so you can continue to dial your relatives back here from Charlotte all you want, but we do hope that when you come back for a beef on weck, you stop by the brewery and buy yourself some beer or at least a t-shirt.  Well, right now, definitely a t-shirt, since we don’t exactly make beer yet.

Not Dan; Elixy. Suck it, hubby!

Secondly, did you hear we got out TTB approval?  We’ll probably crow about it some more, because we’re really pretty over the moon about it, and we haven’t even all been in the same room yet to celebrate this milestone, but folks: There. Will. Be. Beer!  Sure, we have more milestones ahead of us–the “brewery” is yet more of a warehouse with condensation on the floor ofttimes. But nonetheless, getting through the Federal permitting process pretty much guarantees us to be in the “not if but when” stage now.  W00t!

Ok, that’s all for now; Dan will be back on Thirsty Thursday with more coolness; see you then!

Yes, we know, the state senate should really be focusing its energy on silly things like ensuring all people are treated like actual human beings with basic rights. But there’s another important issue they need to address as well: the rights of small brewers vs distributors.

S1315 is currently in the Rules Committee. It would allow small breweries to terminate contracts with distributors by paying them “fair compensation.” Currently, a contract can only be terminated with “good cause.” In this bill, a “small brewery” is defined as one producing less than 300,000 barrels per year: for reference, Flying Bison is estimated to produce 6,500 barrels this year.

Small breweries can choose to self distribute, and that’s what we plan to do, at least in the foreseeable future. Once you get big enough, though, it’s not feasible: Flying Bison reached a point where it was not worth the amount of effort to manage distribution themselves, and so they use a distributor.

This bill would allow a brewery to change distributors or manage it themselves again. Their current distributor would be compensated and they could then change their distribution method to whatever worked for them. It will allow breweries to expand in a method that works for them. This will lead to more jobs and more beer.

This is a good thing! You need to tell the members of the Senate Rules Committee that you think it is: find your state senator, then see if they’re on the rules committee. That last link autoplays video, by the way, so if you don’t feel like smooth jazz being played on your speakers then pause the first embed on the page. Then, tell them you think this bill needs to come to a vote.

Ideally, this needs to happen today or tomorrow. So don’t delay! Shoot them an email or make a quick phone call now. (If you happen to live in Brooklyn, Senator Golden in particular is on the fence)