At one point when I was homebrewing more, I was dreaming up ideas for what would make a good breakfast beer. Something that could actually be enjoyed once in awhile with (or for) breakfast, like mimosas or Bloody Marys. A fruit beer, or a lambic like Lindemans Framboise are the obvious styles to come to mind, but how about something more creative?

It seems to me that such a beer should have some weight to it, some body and flavor, something like a hearty breakfast should be. If you're going to drink a light fruit ale, then you might as well stick to champagne; a breakfast beer should offer more.

Let's cover some brewing possibilities:

• Oatmeal. The quintessential breakfast cereal, it brews up a terrific stout—thick, chewy, smooth.
• Coffee. This tends to pair best with darker, richer beers, like porters and stouts.
• Malted wheat. Beyond the traditional hefeweizen and other wheat beers, this could add some interesting characteristics to a darker beer.
• Milk sugar (lactose). Makes a beer sweeter with more mouthfeel. I began thinking of this when, at the Oregon Brewers Festival, a tent featuring the (I think) Oregon State University's brewing science department (or somesuch) was offering up a milk stout they had brewed, largely with milk sugar. And what goes better with cereal than milk...
• Maple syrup.
• Fruit. Notwithstanding what I wrote about fruit above, certain fruits can add tremendously to the character of a dark beer. I'm thinking along the lines of raspberries, blueberries, blackberries; a blueberry porter, for instance, or raspberry stout. Avoid citrus fruits at all cost, though.
• Honey. This tends to ferment out very cleanly, so you might not get much of a honey character to the beer.
• Chocolate. Something remniscent of hot cocoa or a mocha coffee drink?

The beer I envision is something like an oatmeal milk stout. Possibly with fruit and/or honey. Done right, a tall pint of this could be the meal in itself. I think you'd want to try to keep bitterness to a minimum and shoot for a sweeter, maltier profile, but that might just be me.

Now, as to what types of beer would be appropriate with breakfast, that's a different post...

Kind of a throwaway article, but still kind of interesting, "Brewer's goal is a chicken in every pint" is about an award-winning homebrewer who brews with odd ingredients.

Just check out some of the ingredients the award-winning home brewer has put in his beer: spinach, sweet potatoes, marshmallows, tea, coffee, beans and all sorts of spices and peppers.

Heck, Jones' ultimate goal is to brew a poultry ale.

"I've got to get a chicken into a beer," the Brockport resident says....

Other times he'll brew a beer just to see whether he can. On a visit to the Penn Yan Buckwheat Festival, he picked up some buckwheat and brewed it with maple syrup to create "the ultimate breakfast beer."

I can't say I've ever brewed with anything as weird as this guy, but I have brewed beer with pumpkin, ginger, licorice, spruce essence, coffee, and even a hot pepper or two once—you know, the usual stuff. I once wondered what would result by adding yeast to a batch of Kool-Aid, but fortunately I never tried.

However, I don't really know what the last line of the article is supposed to mean: "Just because the brew is strange, it shouldn't kill what's inside of you."

Scientists brew low-calorie stout: This just doesn't sound right to me. They claim it "has the same consistency, taste and texture as its full-bodied equivalent," but I just can't believe that. Read on:

Normal stout has about 2g of carbohydrate and contains 32 calories per 100ml while the new version has 0.6g of carbs and 24 calories per 100ml.

Elke Arendt, a lecturer in food technology who is leading the research, said: "We modified the mashing procedure, which is part of the brewing process, by adding an enzyme which can degrade carbohydrate. We also modified our fermentation process to get a lower carbohydrate content by picking a specific yeast strain."

Arendt said the full-bodied taste that is typically lost by reducing carbohydrate content has been retained in the light stout. "The product has the same mouth feel — it isn't watery, it tastes exactly like a normal stout," he said. "There are no drawbacks by reducing calories or carbohydrates."

See, when you start changing the basic chemistry of a beer, it just won't be the same. How does this enzyme affect yeast? How does the "degraded carbohydrate" affect the beer—does it leave undigestible bits and pieces behind? Particulate matter? How does it affect the various proteins and fats that also come from the grain? Etc. etc.

Creepy. I'll avoid it, if it ever makes it here.

I don't remember how I found this, but it's not something I would have ordinarily come across: BellaOnline, a "comprehensive, online Network created by women for women," has a Beer and Brewing channel. Huh. Most women I know (my wife included) don't like beer, so this is pretty cool. I haven't had a chance to check out most of the articles, but a couple I looked at seem pretty good.

Ooop, looks like the RSS isn't working. Hm. Oh well, I bookmarked it anyway.

Bend.com has an article about Oregon's beer economy:

Beer-related businesses, including brewers, wholesalers, and retailers, contribute $2.2 billion to the Oregon economy, according to a new study released today by the National Beer Wholesalers Association (NBWA) and the Beer Institute.

The industry’s economic impact in the state includes 26,435 jobs paying $732.4 million in wages as well as more than $338 million in federal, state and local taxes generated and paid, including consumption taxes.

It's mostly just a press release, nothing too outstanding, except for one thing: there's a link at the end to Beer Serves America, the group that released the economic study. On their homepage, they have a neat clickable map of the U.S. that lets you view the economic impact of the beer industry on each state. Useful. California's impact, for instance, is $22 billion; Texas is $11 billion; Virginia is $3.7 billion. What seems to be missing, though, is a comparative chart: I want to see how all 50 states rank compared to each other, and I don't want to have to click through each state myself to figure it out.

Interesting article in the Boston Herald about Boston's brewing history, worth checking out.

Few visible reminders remain - except a two-decades-old beer named after one of the city's fieriest Revolutionary War patriots - but the Boston of a century ago was a beer-brewing hub to rival Midwestern suds capitals such as Milwaukee, St. Louis and Chicago.

Research by local historians who pored over city records has turned up evidence of 31 operating breweries inside the city limits in the late 19th century. A city better known for its baked beans and clam chowder had the greatest number of breweries per capita at the time, said Michael Reiskind, a Boston historian who has researched Boston's brewing history.

But efforts to preserve the past have gained little momentum. That has left the Samuel Adams Brewery Tour and its Boston Beer Museum the chief repository of the city's brewing history - a place to learn about the past and toast the legacy by downing some sample Sam Adams varieties....

The Sam Adams tour, which is free with a $2 donation to charity encouraged, promotes the city's most well-known current beer brand. It also recaptures some of the city's brewing past through historical displays, memorabilia, and even a 30-foot-long glass-lined brewing tank that has been cut open and placed on its side to walk through.

Sounds like a good reason to visit Boston someday...

I'd be remiss in letting Valentine's Day go by without offering up some beer suggestions for those so inclined. Keep in mind, though, that just because you might like beer, that doesn't mean your significant other will, so take all this with a grain of salt. :)

First off, there's an article on MercuryNews.com about beer and chocolate (however, the site requires user registration to access the article, so I'm not linking it directly. Those required registrations to news sites annoy me), with two angles: pairing types of beer with chocolate, and beer brewed with chocolate.

Think pork loin with creamy milk chocolate mashed potatoes served with the Los Gatos Brewing Co.'s Pale Ale. Or cocoa-crusted sweetbreads with white chocolate parsnip flan paired with Bosteels Kwak Ale of Belgium. Or pan-seared skate with foie gras and chocolate balsamic brown butter accompanied by Bosteels Tripel Karmeleit. Those are among the imaginative dishes that have starred at Slosberg's events.

After all, chocolate has the marvelous ability to make so many foods lusher and richer, and beer is bold enough to heighten or contrast that....

Dark beers, with fruity, spicy, coffee, almost chocolate-y flavors, go exceptionally well with dark chocolates, Slosberg says. Dark beers such as stouts or porters also are a great foil for dark chocolate caramels. Amber ales, with their nutty, Grape Nuts-like taste, are ideal with chocolates with nuts. Amber ales done in the Belgian Abbey style, which is stronger, thicker and fruitier, go wonderfully with medium dark chocolates with fruit, especially strawberries. And India pale ales, which have a strong malty flavor, go well with milk chocolates that aren't overwhelmingly sweet.

I think the advice above on pairing beer with chocolate sounds more appealing that the chocolate dishes. White chocolate parsnip flan? Chocolate balsamic brown butter?

I'd say stick to the chocolate flavored brews, especially if your tastes run to rich, darker beers. Some ones to try are Rogue's excellent Chocolate Stout, Samuel Adams' Chocolate Bock (recommended by the Mercury News article), Brooklyn Brewery's Black Chocolate Stout, or Young's Double Chocolate Stout.

For the homebrewer, try Papazian's Unspoken Passion Imperial Stout from The Home Brewer's Companion. I've always wanted to try it. It's a big beer, with 11 pounds of raspberries. (Okay, not this year, but you could always brew it in time for next Valentine's Day.)

Of course, many people are not fans of dark beer. Or even beer in general. So my next suggestion is something that almost can't go wrong: Lambic. My wife loves Lindemans Framboise in particular, a delicious raspberry lambic with a taste that's about as far away from beer as you can get.

Ironically, this article in the Anchorage Press is on exactly this topic and beer.

The resounding, annual Valentine's Day favorite is Lindemans Framboise, which is a raspberry lambic from Vlezenbeek, Belgium. The deep, reddish purple will score easy points with your lady, and it smells of sweet, hand-picked raspberries. This is followed by a very sweet, cloying raspberry concoction that sours appreciably in the end, and only resembles beer because it's got some light carbonation. Framboise drinks more like a soda pop than a beer. It's 4 percent alcohol by volume, so you can woo her with more than one. Lindemans Framboise is considered one of the sexiest beers around by some.

Framboise will be fantastic with any dessert made from chocolate. Another Lindemans lambic, Peche (peach) is said to go very well with cheesecake. Both beers (and types of desserts) are of course perfect Valentine's Day delicacies.

And, one final suggestion: mead. Mead is a beer-like beverage brewed from honey rather that barley, and is often more like a wine (or champagne) than a beer. If you can find it commercially, look for a sweet mead, or perhaps a sparkling mead. Or one brewed with fruit. I'll be honest, though, that while I've had a good homebrewed mead, I've not had as much luck with the few commercial ones I've tried (although that's as likely a side effect of living in a small town in Central Oregon). If you go this route, try pairing a sparkling mead with fruit (like strawberries), and a sweet mead with a lighter, non-chocolate dessert (a custard, perhaps).

Good luck, and happy Valentine's Day!

Spotted this article from our local Bend Bulletin newspaper. Legislators are trying to increase Oregon's beer tax, which is currently one of the lowest in the nation. Interesting article, full of good information.

Pointing to millions of dollars spent annually to cope with addiction and alcohol-related injuries and medical conditions, activists and Sen. Bill Morrisette, D-Springfield, say the state should boost beer taxes by more than 1,000 percent.

Today, you'll pay less than a penny of tax for a 12-ounce bottle of your favorite malt beverage.

Morrisette and the Oregon Council on Alcohol Abuse want to raise it to a dime per drink with the proceeds dedicated to cash-strapped county health departments, drug courts and law enforcement.

But if history is any guide, the likelihood for any increase is slim.

Oregon hasn't hiked its beer taxes since 1977 and the rate is among the lowest in the nation, but there's apparently little anticipation it could change this year. No hearing has been scheduled.

Oregon's current beer tax is eight cents per gallon, or less than a penny for a standard 12-ounce bottle. The proposed increase would be to ten cents per bottle for brewers producing more than 200,000 barrels per year (Busch, Coors, Miller), and five cents per bottle for smaller brewers. Knowing how we hate our taxes here in Oregon, I'd guess this won't pass.

There's also an interesting chart of Oregon beer sales for 2004 at the end:

1. Anheuser-Busch Co. (Mo.), 799,066 [barrels].
2. Coors Brewing Co. (Col.), 427,844.
3. Miller Brewing (Wis.), 359,558.
4. Pabst Brewing Co. (Wash.), 136,619.
5. Barton Beers, LTD (Ill.), 99,327.
6. Deschutes Brewery (Ore.), 63,609.
7. Widmer Brewing (Ore.), 57,258.
8. McKenzie River Brewing (Wis.), 50,547.
9. Fosters Breweries (Va.), 38,114.
10. Labatt Brewery (Conn.), 27,552.
32. Cascade Lakes Brewing Co. (Ore.), 2,432.
54. Bend Brewing Co. (Ore.), 876.

Better late than never: some beer events for February.

• KLCC Microbrew Festival: Friday (today) and Saturday, February 11 and 12, in Eugene, Oregon. Microbreweries from all over the West! Admission is $10 and includes souvenir glass and 1 drink ticket. Brews are 50 cents a taste.
• Beerapalooza: Saturday, February 12 through Sunday, February 20 in San Francisco.
• Ogrefest: Tuesday, February 15 through Sunday, February 20, in Cleveland, Ohio. 16 Draft Barleywines and Imperial IPAs on tap.
• 5th 'Cask Head' Cask Ale Festival: Friday, February 18 through Sunday, February 20 in Brooklyn, New York.
• Toronado Barleywine Fest: Saturday, February 19 through Saturday, February 26 in San Francisco.
• Celebrator Anniversary Party: Sunday, February 20 in Berkeley, California. 17th Anniversary Party for Celebrator Beer News with Battle of the Brewery Bands featuring music by Anchor, Sierra Nevada, Lagunitas, the Maltose Falcons and the Rolling Boil Blues Band.

The Get Fuzzy comic strip this week has been about homebrewing. It's my favorite strip these days, so I thought I'd share the goodness. The first day is here and just read through til Friday's.

This article caught my attention today: Breck Brewery celebrates 15 years. No particular reason, other than it's cool when a small brewery like that can survive (and grow) for that long. Congrats, Breckenridge Brewery!

Here's an unusual beer tasting that's happening locally (ie, Central Oregon):

Wanderlust Tours is offering its next Brews and Views beer tasting snowshoe event in partnership with Cascade Lakes Brewing Company over Presidents' weekend on Sunday, February 20, 2005, from 1 to 5 p.m.

Guests will snowshoe off trail with Wanderlust Tours guides into the snowy winter wonderland of the Cascade Mountains to relax around a glowing "bonfire" in the middle of an amphitheater hand-carved into the snow and sample various beers from Central Oregon's own Cascade Lakes Brewing Company.

Sound interesting. $75 per person.

Via Hail the Ale! comes this link to a bit of beer and geek humor: If Operating Systems were Beers. Perfect humor if you're into beer and a computer geek (like me). It's a little dated—current up to Windows 95.

Mac Beer
At first, came only in a 16-oz. can, but now comes in a 32-oz. can. Considered by many to be a "light" beer. All the cans look identical. When you take one from the fridge, it opens itself. The ingredients list is not on the can. If you call the brewery to ask about the ingredients, you are told that "you don't need to know." A notice on the side reminds you to drag your empties to the trash can.

Windows 95 Beer
No one drinks it much yet, but a lot of people have taste-tested it and claim it's wonderful. The can looks a lot like Mac Beer's can, but tastes more like Windows 3.1 Beer. It comes in 32-oz. cans, but when you look inside, the cans only have 16 oz. of beer in them. Most people will probably keep drinking Windows 3.1 Beer until their friends try Windows 95 Beer and say they like it. The ingredients list, when you look at the small print, has some of the same ingredients that come in DOS beer, even though the manufacturer claims that this is an entirely new brew.

AmigaDOS Beer
The company has gone out of business, but their recipe has been picked up by some weird German company, so now this beer will be an import. AmigaDOS Beer never really sold very well because the original manufacturer didn't understand marketing. Like UNIX Beer, AmigaDOS Beer fans are an extremely loyal and loud group. It originally came in a 16-oz. can, but now comes in 32-oz. cans too. When this can was originally introduced, it appeared flashy and colorful, but the design hasn't changed much over the years, so it appears dated now. Critics of this beer claim that it is only meant for watching TV anyway.

There's a really good article from the Anchorage Press (Oldies but goodies) that talks about old beer. "Old" not in the sense of that stale, warm sixpack of Coors you found in your trunk from three years ago, but "old" as in vintage—like old wines.

It was a real treat to experience three years of vintage Thomas Hardy beers from Eldridge Pope in England. We sampled a '94, an '83 and a '74. My eyes really widened when I was treated to a 1958 John Smith's Founder's Ale. This beer was brewed in the year I was born. With each beer, I kept adding notes to my journal indicating "this is the oldest beer I've ever had." The most amazing beer, however, was the 1937 John Courage Anniversary Ale. I was dumfounded that at 21 years my senior, this beer was in better shape than I was. The highly sophisticated palates who shared the beer with me agreed that certain beers can pass the test of time.

1937 and 1958? Wow. The oldest beer I have is a Thomas Hardy from (I think, without checking) 1989. Well, the oldest beer I'd consider drinkable, really—I have six bottles of old and/or foreign beer that I rescued from a local wine shop that was going out of business (this was about six or more years ago), but I would in no way trust those to be drinkable. I'll have to find those and blog about them.

Mmmm, cooking with beer. Newsday has an article featuring four recipes made with beer to go along with Superbowl Sunday. Monterey Jack Cheese Dip, Brew Haus Onion Soup, Pork and Hominy Stew, and Grace Neill's Chocolate and Guinness Brownies. The onion soup and the brownies sound especially good.

Another site I just found: Beercook.com. Look like it has 72 recipes and a number of articles, cool.

Lots of other good resources on Google, too. I'll have to start collecting promising recipes and trying them out (writing up the results, of course).

No, not really. An Australian woman was busted for selling a non-existent case of Duff Beer three times on eBay. From Mum caught in Duff beer scam:

A mother raising funds to buy her children Christmas presents sold a non-existent carton of Homer Simpson's favourite brew Duff Beer three times on eBay, a court has been told....

Australian breweries in the mid-1990s released their own versions of Duff beer until legal action was taken by the creators of The Simpsons and the Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp.

Duff beer is now a collector's item and cartons can sell for as much as $1000 on eBay, while one empty and damaged can was for sale today for $15.

Note to potential eBay fraudsters: don't use your real name, address or email if you're planning on ripping people off.

Via RateBeer comes this news about San Francisco's Magnolia Pub & Brewery's Strong Beer Month (all this February).

Magnolia and the 21st Amendment Brewery and Restaurant have teamed up once again to celebrate this rich brewing tradition. Our cellars are full of wintertime ales designed to provide comfort and warmth while delighting the palate. Some were begun as early as August or September in anticipation of their imminent February 1st tapping. These special offerings are a thanks to our loyal customers and a respectful tribute to the role such commemorative beers have always held in their communities. They're also an amazing opportunity for us, as brewers, to explore the most creative facets of our craft.

Both breweries have pulled out all the stops this year to make this Strong Beer Month the best yet. Five strong ales will flow from the Magnolia taps and four more from the faucets of the 21st Amendment, a record for both breweries. Try all nine, anytime in February (while supplies last), and keep the special stemmed glass. T-shirts will be available for sale, too (including a rare reappearance of Old Thunderpussy shirts a little later in the month).

Gotta wonder where they get the name "Old Thunderpussy Barleywine." From their Ales page, it says it's "a tribute to the most famous tenant of our historic building." Oookay...

Well, this can't be good: Breweries close as German thirst for beer fades. Along with the other "signs" I've pointed to (here, here and here), maybe it's the beer apocalypse?

The shake-out in the German brewery business is gathering pace as a trend to healthy living and a fall in beer drinking in the country continues to fall.

On Tuesday, two of Germany's leading breweries, the Kindl in Berlin and the Brinkhoff in Dortmund, annoucned that they are to shut down their operations.

My previous post about Bend Brewing's latest beer reminds me of a story about their website and domain name... Way back in 2000, when I was working for an internet development company (Alpine Internet Solutions, they're still here), I had grabbed a bunch of "brewing" domains (we could get domain names cheap, for $10). Among them were the very locally-oriented "redmondbrewing.com", "sistersbrewing.com" and—you guessed it—"bendbrewing.com."

Not long after I registered bendbrewing.com, the company got a call from the Bend Brewing Company; it seems they were upgrading their website (they had had a site for some time, only parked under some convoluted hosted domain) and were inquiring about the bendbrewing.com domain. I thought it was cool that they called and said I'd have no problem giving them the domain if they were interested in our company hosting their site. Hell, I almost would've given the domain to them at retail, if they asked.

Instead, they merely said thanks, but no thanks, and launched their new site under their current domain name—"bendbrewingco.com."

Really, I had no intention of being a cybersquatter! It just worked out that way.

This press release on Bend.com touts our local Bend Brewing Company's newest beer, Axe Head Red.

In spring of 1905, Bend's first fire destroyed the O'Kane Saloon and encouraged city officials to organize a volunteer fire department. In honor of that inflammatory incident, and the protection of our fine city by the men and women of the Bend Fire Department in the 100 years since, Bend Brewing Co. has brewed the special commemorative ale Axe Head Red, to be released February 1.

There is nothing timid about Axe Head Red's brave, full flavor. Appropriately, Centennial Hops add a spicy, bittersweet finish to the underlying lush fruit tones, reminiscent of cherries and raisins. Simultaneously courageously malty and fearlessly hoppy, Axe Head Red is robust, spirited, and worthy of any hero.

Sounds good. I still have some gift certificates to Bend Brewing from Christmas lying around somewhere...