A tasting note you couldn’t make up:
“It’s a sweet lager, with a warm citrus flavor reminiscent of an India pale ale, but without an ale’s added gravity.”
And this tells me what?
Taken from a story about Half Acre Beer in Chicago. The headline refers to it as a “local brew” but it is made under contract […]

One of the many perks - beyond watching a roadrunner pace up and down the burm outside my office window right now, not quite sure what his plan is - of living where I do is that I know that the New Mexico Rio Grande Valley is not the Best.Beer.Region.On.Earth.
They worry about such things in […]

The September issue of Portfolio magazine (the same folks behind the website Lew Bryson writes an every-other week column for) has a very disturbing photo.
Please do not show it to a beer geek friend until you make sure that a) he or she is on the first floor of the building and b) no sharp […]

Berkshire Brewing founders Chris Lalli and Gary Bogoff first brewed Raspberry Strong Ale for Christmas in 1990 using three-quarters pound of whole raspberries per gallon and it became in instant Christmas tradition.
When they started making it commercially in 1996 they stuck with real fruit, which is why it seems like an excellent choice for today’s […]

OK, I have a plan.
I’ve written several times that I think I should try Miller Chill. I’ve been seeing advertisements for six months (New Mexico was a test market) and sales are rockin’. And today I received a press release from an agency that represents Corona with recipes for Michelada, Michelada Roja and Chelada. (Miller […]

Good morning and Happy Fourth of July.
I’m almost ready to begin lautering (you start brewing early in the morning on these hot summer days in New Mexico), so two quick suggestions for the holiday:
- Head on over to the Champagne of Blogs and read Our Second Sudsy Salute to America. Topical and regional.
- Drink a […]

I suspect more than one “beer geek” will be surprised by Samurai, a new bottle release from Great Divide Brewing in Denver.
Some might just grab a six-pack because of the name (after all, a samurai is a warrior), the excellent packaging and the fact it comes from Great Divide, best known outside of Colorado for […]

Class will be in session next week when Mike Steinberger launches a three-part series on sensory perception and wine at Slate, the online magazine.
Steinberger warms up with a discussion of why wine writers use the descriptions they do.
What does this have to do with beer? The wine flavor wheel and the beer flavor wheel (click […]

When we started The Session in March I was hoping each monthly host would not feel constrained to make the theme a particular beer style, so kudos to Snekse for making the June theme Drink Local.
If New Mexico has a state beer adjective it is hoppy, and the state beer style would be India Pale […]

In all fairness to Todd Haefer - who writes a Beer Man column that appears in many newspapers part of the Gannett chain and already catches enough grief for some of his comments - he didn’t write the headline and the term didn’t appears in his copy, but here it is:
Beer Man: New Glarus nails […]