place/local/ingredients/sensory

Ales Through the Ages II

Sorry, this event has been canceled.

Some of the world’s brightest beer scholars and I will be returning to Colonial Williamsburg for another round of Ales Through the Ages. The last one was terrific (read Martyn Cornell’s recap) and the next one is Oct. 19-21.

My brochure arrived yesterday.

Ales Through the Ages, Colonial Williamsburg
Here’s the speaker lineup (there are also receptions and speakers roundtables Saturday and and Sunday):

FRIDAY, October 19
5:15 p.m. – Keynote presentation. Pete Brown.

SATURDAY, October 20
9 a.m. – From Caelia to Celctic Brews & Brigid to Benedict: Beer Beyond Roman Rule. Travis Rupp.
9:45 a.m. – The Sexual Habits of Hops: How They Changed Beer, and Changed It Again. Stan Hieronymus.
(Pardon the whining, but I also followed Travis last year. This is a lousy position. He is an engaging speaker who actually knows what he is talking about.)
11 a.m. – British Fungus: Brettanomyces in British Brewing. Ron Pattinson.

2 p.m. – Messing About with Old Ale & Beer. Marc Meltonville.
2:45 p.m. – Pale Ale Before IPA: The Birth of a Legend. Martyn Cornell.
4 p.m. – Speakers Roundtable.

SUNDAY, October 21
9 a.m. – Gruit: Back to the Future of Brewing? Butch Heilshorn.
9:45 a.m. – Molasses Beer, Hops and the Enslaved: Brewing in 18th Century Virginia. Frank Clark and Lee Graves.
11 a.m. – Albany Ale: 400 Years of Brewing in New York’s Hudson Valley. Craig Gravina.
2 p.m. – The Nobel Failure: How Vermont’s Period of Prohibition Shape the Present Culture and Landscape. Adam Krakowski.
3:15 p.m. – Speakers Roundtable.

Meet me in Asheville

Hops for the future, beers from the past. My kind of weekend fare.

Mike Karnowski at Zebulon Artisan Ales in Ashville, N.C., has invited me to ramble on at a couple of events during Asheville Beer Week. So we rounded up a bunch of experimental hops to try in beers one evening, and grabbed some recipes from Brewing Local and elsewhere that Mike turned into beers I’m certainly looking forward to tasting the following afternoon. He’s done the hard part.

We’ll taste beers made with sexy hop names like CF212 and Auss 016 from 5 to 7 p.m. May 27 at Zebulon (details). The lineup of 1800s beers (1-3 p.m. May 28) includes early American porter, Albany Ale, Brilliant ale, pro-Prohibition pilsner, Kentucky Common and Swankey. Yes, the elusive Swankey. (Details.)

In case you are wondering, a clip from the Newport, Pa., News, March 24, 1910:

Swankey clips

Monday links: Balance, in commerce & community, as well as beer

BEER AND WINE LINKS 02.19.18

The Craft of Balance.
This feels like a Noah’s Ark issue of beer links, with many related stories, mostly in pairs. But before getting to those, in my favorite of the week Pete Brown writes about balance.

My wife Liz has much lower tolerance for chill heat than me. She had a tiny spoonful of it, and just managed to say ‘That’s gorgeous” before the screaming started. ‘Never bring that near me again,” she said between gulps of water. But a couple of days later, when I heated up the last of it for my dinner, she couldn’t resist having another taste. She knew it was going to hurt, but she was compelled to try the incredible depth and layering of flavour once more.’

Ale better: how craft beer found its mission.
The Business of Inclusion — Beer’s Unique Intersection of Community and Commerce.
Craft brewers seek to involve more African Americans.
The headline from Good Beer Hunting (second link) states what seems so obvious that you wonder why more breweries aren’t more proactive about making their businesses more diverse for simple economic reasons. Their responsibilities to communities they expect to support them should be equally obvious.

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Monday beer links: News, terroir & finding new paths

BEER AND WINE LINKS 01.15.18
NEWS/TRENDS

– Front and center because the “underbelly of misogyny” still lurks. Related: Good Beer Hunting followed up its “What Boyz Like” post with several supporting essays last week, and in addition Austin Ray provided to link to this one with serious “questions of privilege, whiteness, power, and masculinity.”

– Sobering details about the “craft beverage” tax cut. “For every $20 of alcohol tax cuts in the legislation, only about $1 actually goes to the true craft brewers or small distillers.” (I should have spotted this for last week’s links, but important enough to suggest reading anyway.)

– New Zealand has added craft beer to the basket of goods it monitors to measure inflation. Meanwhile DVD players and sewing machines were among items removed from the Consumers Price Index.

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Exit through the bottle shop

Altes Mädchen Braugasthaus

If a beer writer falls down in a bar and there’s no one there to hear it, do they make a sound? Or do they just Instagram it instead?

– Pete Brown

Craft Beer Store, Hamburg, GermanyThe photo at the top was taken at Altes Mädchen Braugasthaus, a sprawling brewery, bakery, restaurant, biergarten and bottle shop in Hamburg. (Customers pass through the Craft Beer Store entering and leaving.) As well as Ratsherrn beers brewed on site, there’s plenty of other beer from small and larger breweries inside and outside of Germany. It is a fine place to land after a day or two of Christmas markets and other Hamburg experiences, such as the sobering St. Nikolai Memorial and museum.

The evening and the beer were different than at Banana Jam Cafe in Cape Town, South Africa, at Brewberry in Paris, at Turtle’s Bar & Grill in Shakopee, Minn., at Cervejaria Unika on a Brazilian hillside, or at scores of locations I somehow ended up in last year. And that is how it should be. It’s not like I didn’t already know how big and diverse the beer world is, or that sharing time over beer shouldn’t be just about the beer.

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