Just a quick note about Bend Brewing Company's seasonal Apricot Ale. Very quick because we had dinner there Wednesday night (after visting the farmer's market) and I only had a taster of it... and yes, I guess I do have the kind of hubris that would compel me to write a review of a beer based on a two-ounce taster... :)

At 4.8 percent alcohol by volume, it was very light, and had enough of a fruity flavor that you could guess "apricots," but not a defining apricot flavor that you'd find in, say, Pyramid Apricot Ale. I would drink it if I were sitting out on the patio in the hot sun—it's that kind of beer—but ultimately didn't choose it to accompany a dinner of fish and chips.

We visited our local new Best Buy this weekend and saw this: the Haier BrewMaster Beer Dispenser. Had to drool over it for a minute. Not only can you put your cornelius keg in there, but it comes with wire racks so you can also stack up your bottled (or canned) beer. Nice...

There's a nice article here about summer ales and Maine's growing homebrewing and microbrewing scenes.

The beauty of summer ales is that they don't really exist, as a historical style of beer, so they can be whatever the brewer wants them to be.

Petersen, for instance, makes a summertime watermelon lager, with Vienna malt, German lager yeast, Irish moss, and pureed watermelon....

The term "summer ale" is largely a marketing term created by microbreweries a decade or so ago, when they sensed that their customers liked the idea of seasonal ales, that is, a different beer to try every few months.

I really need to homebrew again; this is a good article to get thinking about all the various possibilities you can take advantage of when formulating a beer...

Got a comment on my More on gluten free beer post from a couple months back from the Ramapo Valley Brewery. They produce a gluten free beer, too, so I thought I'd reprint their comment here as a full post:

Greetings from Ramapo Valley Brewery. We are a brewery in Rockland County,NY. We have developed a wonderful Gluten Free Beer. It is an innovative brew with neither barley or wheat. The color is bright golden, and it has a wonderful honey flavor while still being a true beer.Please add us to your website and hopefully people will be interested in checking us out. We are pretty well known throughout the Celiac community as we travel to various support groups and conferences.
Thanks

So, that's cool, they're searching the web for items about gluten free beer. A strike against them, though, is their website: first, it prompts you for your birthdate before you can enter, and second, it's all in Flash. Yech. Gimme straight quick-loading HTML! :).

I'm not sure I understand this article completely:

A 'virtual brewery' started by former employees of Red Hat and Computer Associates could be listed on the Newcastle Stock Exchange by the end of the year.

Brewtopia, described by former Red Hat employee and now chief executive officer Liam Mulhall as "...a marketing experiment to see if you could bring a product to market that did not exist without spending money on advertising," succeeded by using a strategy Mulhall calls "viral equity".

The scheme sees would-be customers awarded a share in the company if they join its e-mail list, an additional share each time they buy a case of its "Blowfly" beer and another share each time they encourage four friends to join the e-mail list.

Their website describes it as an "open source beer company." It seems that they allow anyone to design their own label and customize their own beer and then order it up... I think. And then by offering shares to people just by signing up, and ordering beer, that's where the "viral" part comes in.

Interesting concept, if I'm following it correctly. But, I'll admit that I still don't quite get it.

And, they're located in Australia. Do they ship outside of the country?

The state of North Carolina restricts the amount of alcohol in beer that can be sold—a maximum of six percent by volume. Sound backwards? It is—especially considering there's no limit to the amount of alcohol in wine or hard liquor. And wine is just as easy to buy as beer. This restriction is a throwback to Prohibition and just nonsensical. But there's a group trying to repeal the law and get the limit raised to 15 percent: Pop the Cap, a grassroots organization. They're profiled in this article, which also delves into the beer laws of North Carolina a bit.

It's not so much a matter of more alcoholic beer — Scottish ales tend to be around the 8-percent mark — but of better beer and more choices. Approximately one-third of the world's beers are not available in North Carolina due to the law....

The Pop the Cap bill passed the state House of Representatives June 2 by a vote of 68 to 46. Locally, only Rep. Phil Haire (D-Sylva) voted for the bill. Rep. Roger West (R-Andrews) and Rep. Ray Rapp (D-Mars Hill) both voted against it....

One of the arguments opponents of the Pop the Cap bill have raised is that opening the door for beer with higher alcohol content only will facilitate drinkers getting drunk faster.

"The toughest hurdles were in the beginning with the ABC committee," said Wong, president of The Highland Brewing Company. "There were a lot of people who felt it really wasn't necessary to go increasing alcohol levels. There were a few people that felt that there was enough availability."

Currently five other states limit the amount of alcohol in beer: South Carolina, Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi and West Virginia. That just seems so... backward to me.

Discovered an unusual new beer this weekend: Orange Blossom Cream Ale from Buffalo Bill's Brewery. I was expecting a light, slightly fruity cream ale—a good summertime beer—and was pleasantly surprised to find that the "Orange Blossom" part of the name is quite literal: there's a strong sweet aroma and flavor of oranges in this beer.

As fruit beers go, orange is rare. Not orange peel, which you'll often find with coriander in Belgian ales, but orange flavor itself. Part of this is simply because citrus fruits (the acid in them) don't play well with the other ingredients in beer. The other part is that it's just hard to strike a good balance trying to marry a flavor like orange into a beer.

Overall, it works here though. The ale is golden amber in color, and very clear. There was a decent head that dissipated quickly. The aroma is charming; very strong orange blossom (obviously), orange peel, and sweet orange (fruit). The mouthfeel is smooth and creamy, well done for the style (it is a cream ale, after all); it's nicely carbonated without exploding in your mouth.

It's the flavor that stands out. Hints of the bitterness of the orange peel, and the surprising sweet orange flavor that the reviewers on the BeerAdvocate review variously described as "orange push-up pops," "Sunkist orange soda," "orangeade," and "orange cream soda." I'll mostly agree with those assessments, though I thought the floral notes and malt are there too.

I rather like it. Not something I could drink a bunch of in one sitting, but it's pleasant, different, refreshing. It's a good summertime beer but I think it could also work well as a holiday ale, around Christmas time, maybe paired with fruitcake. Now there's a thought... yum.

Well, here's one: Lawmakers seek to create New York beer trail.

A bill making its way through the Legislature aims to create a New York state beer trail, similar to those the wine industry has successfully used to attract millions of oenophiles to the Finger Lakes, Hudson Valley and eastern Long Island. Sponsors of the legislation say it will highlight the reemergence of breweries in New York and help brewers cash-in on the popularity of their oatmeal stouts, India pale ales and bitters.

"Such a rich history of the brewing industry is here and we ought to be exploiting that if we can," said Lentol, whose district was the home of original Schaeffer brewery and currently hosts the Brooklyn Brewery, a regionally well-known outfit. "I can't think of any other state except Wisconsin that has as much brewing tradition as New York. It's part of our heritage."

Under the bill, which has already passed the Senate, the Empire State Brewery Trails Program would create an "I Love NY Beer" promotion that will include a brewery trail, vacation itineraries, and "brewery passports" with information on breweries and surrounding attractions as well as discounts and other incentives visitors can take advantage of.

Okay. We'll see how well this works; I know when I think "New York," beer is not the first (or second, or third) thing to come to mind.

Via UtterlyBoring. Jake incidentally wonders why the Oregon tourism board isn't doing this. My best guess is we Oregonians prefer to drink our beer rather that just talk about it :).

This is interesting... RateBeer ran their own "best beer" contest—the "RateBeer Best"—and have announced the top 100 beers in the world. If I'm reading it correctly, it's actually the 100 top-rated beers from their database over the last nine months... meaning they're tapping the collective power of their contributors. Nice.

RateBeer Best was once again the world's largest beer competition — over 30,000 different beers from over 4000 brewers in 120 different countries were eligible for awards. RateBeer's total archive includes over a half million beer ratings collected on its internet servers from tasters worldwide. An emphasis was placed on beer and brewer performance over the last 9 months for this events' judging.

Unlike other beer festival events, the judging was performed by thousands of mostly 25-35 year old beer enthusiasts from 65 countries around the world and with commercial samples - not special festival editions.

They have breakdowns by overall 100, by style, by country and by state. Lots of data to check out. The number one brewer: AleSmith Brewing Company in San Diego, California.

Now here's a recipe that doesn't sound half bad: Peanut Butter Porter v0.1, from the SleezySherm Breweries weblog. He took steps to minimize the amount of oil going into the beer; I don't think you can completely remove the oil from peanut butter, and it's the oil that prevents head forming/retention. I've read homebrewing advice that advocated just staying away from peanut butter to avoid this type of hassle.

Of course, you could always try skipping the peanut butter and processing peanuts directly, or other nuts (hazelnuts are relatively common in beer). One method of doing this (at least with hazelnuts, if I remember correctly) is grinding them up and steeping them in vodka to extract the nut "essence," and adding that to the brew as a flavoring agent (during fermentation, not at the boil). I've never tried it myself.

This is classic: A Guide For The Un-Initated To Buying Guinness In An Irish Pub.

3 The barman will fill the glass between 70% and 80% capacity. It will then be put to the side for a few moments to allow it "to settle". Once the brownish liquid has almost turned to a solid black the barman will then fill the rest of the glass. NB: do not under any circumstances take the glass before it is filled. Some virgins seem to think that the settling stage is the final stage and walk away with an unfinished pint. At this point we Irish DO understand the predicament, but I assure you it causes endless mirth as well.

Via LifeHacker.

Litigation is in the air! As detailed here, some Missouri-based company has demanded two separate Montana brewers cease and desist usage of the name "Yellowstone"—apparently this Missouri company, which makes alcoholic products, trademarked the name "Yellowstone Bourbon" and is now trying to go after Yellowstone Valley Brewing Company and Yellowstone Beer Company. Sounds incredibly shady:

Last year, David Sherman Corp. of St. Louis threatened Yellowstone Valley Brewing Co. of Billings, asking it to stop using its name and turn over all its products.

In a May 20 letter this spring, the Missouri distiller issued a similar threat to Yellowstone Beer Co. of West Yellowstone.

Owners Victor and Mary Cavalier said the certified letter ordered them to stop using their corporate name and to ship all their labels and beer to St. Louis.

However, the letter was sent to the wrong person and address, to a former employee of Lewis & Clark Brewery in Helena.

"I think they are fishing," Victor Cavalier said. "They came up with the name of a guy who hadn't even worked with Lewis & Clark for five years."

The article also points out that under U.S. law, geographical names cannot be trademarked.

See also Star Bock.

Here's an interesting article about Pakistan's only brewery, the Murree Brewery:

The Murree Brewery, established in 1861 to slake the thirst of British soldiers across the Indian subcontinent, lost much of its market when Pakistan won independence nearly 60 years ago, but it still prospers as the Islamic country's only licensed beer-maker.

Despite a law that bars Muslims - about 97 per cent of Pakistan's 150 million people - from drinking alcohol, business is brisk.

The brewery ostensibly caters to the country's small communities of Christians, Hindus, Sikhs, Parsees and foreigners. In reality, much of its output supplies a black market for illicit drinkers.

It's not as extreme as Palestine's first brewery, but it's along similar lines.

They brew more than just beer at the Murree Brewery, too; along with the first article above, I found this article (more of a press release, really) about their new 18-year-old malt whiskey and how they're looking for a name for it.

As the title suggests, a couple of historical-archaeological beer-related stories to post about. The first is from the Portland Communique, an historical footnote about Skidmore Fountain in Portland (Oregon), located between SW Burnside and Ankeny, and between 1st and Front. In 1888, for the unveiling ceremony for the fountain, brewer Henry Weinhard offered to fill the fountain with free beer for a day. Imagine, free beer flowing from a fountain... Anyway, he was turned down. More's the pity.

The other item is darker in tone: Man Dies Looking for Artifacts.

An amateur archeologist looking for remnants of a demolished brewery near the 101 Freeway died Tuesday night when a dirt berm collapsed on top of him and another collector, fire officials said. A group of four people was searching for artifacts at the site of the former Maier Brewing Co. near 417 Commercial St., just south of the 101 Freeway. The brewery - known for its Brew 102 and other brands of beer - stood on the plot for more than a century and housed a bottling plant, malt house, refrigeration cellars and a stable and blacksmith shop for horse-drawn delivery wagons. The brewery was demolished in the 1980s.

Poor guy. Digging at the site of a former brewery, that sounds like something I would do.

Kind of a downer follow-up to my Star Bock post the other day: Star Bock brewer's bar closes after wife dies. So even if he wins, he loses. That's tough.

A good review of Rogue's Public House showed up online today.

A top destination for these seasonal favorites is Newport — specifically Rogue Ales Public House on the historic bayfront.

While the bayfront isn't really a beach, it's a classic beach town — a perfect blend of kitschy (Ripley's Believe It or Not and a wax museum), classy (galleries and upscale shops) and working (commercial fish-processing plants).

Tucked amidst all this, the brew pub serves up award-winning beers and what the menu dubs "the world's greatest hamburger."

Sandwiches, salads and pizza round out the better-than-average pub grub options, and, because a trip to the coast should include seafood, the pub shines here, too.

I've been to Rogue's main brewery across the bay more times than the Public House, but the Public House does have a great spot on the waterfront. I love Newport's waterfront (as a teenager I spent three summers there on my uncle's commercial fishing boat), it's a great mix of restaurants, gift shops, fish processing plants, docks, and touristy things like The Wax Works (mentioned in the article) and the Undersea Gardens, both located in Mariner Square. If you ever get the chance to stop in to Rogue for lunch, or a beer tasting, don't miss it.

I've been seeing this pop up in the news lately and found a good article: 'Star Bock' beer has coffee giant Starbucks steamed. Apparently a bar owner in Texas has been selling his Star Bock brand of beer for two years now, and wants to go national, and Starbucks (the coffee people) are suing him for trademark infringement.

Uhm, no.

While I can understand the need to try to enforce trademarks in order to keep them alive—"the company goes to great lengths to differentiate itself from competitors and protect its reputation for consistent high quality," according to the article—there's nothing here that either competes with Starbucks or tarnishes their reputation as a coffee seller. I don't see how Starbucks could win this case.

On the other hand, what a great amount of publicity for the guy if he does go national... almost like it was planned that way.

Well, someone has responded to my post awhile ago about having a beer show on the Food Network, but the link they provided doesn't exactly point to a Food Network show specifically. It's The Beer Show, and while it looks interesting, the site says it will air on Brisbane (that's Brisbane, Australia) Community Television channel 31. That's cool, but it's a little bit out of my network. As in, unless they post it online, I'm never going to be able to get Brisbane channel 31.

Best of luck though, they have a nice looking (if hard to read) site shaping up so far.

Now, as to Food Network (which I do get), about that beer show... maybe something with Michael Jackson, The Beer Hunter?

As I've seen first on Hail the Ale! and now Pfiff!, a resort in Austria is actually offering "beer baths" or pools filled with beer that people can, er, swim in.

The Starkenber Beer Myth resort located in and around the medieval castle of Starkenberger in Austria's Tyrol region has filled seven 13ft long pools with the beer.

The management claims that beer baths heal various skin diseases.

[Ananova]

Yeah, I don't know. The three pictures I've seen of it so far just look entirely too gay. (Hey, don't blame me—follow those links and see for yourself!)

This short review of the High Street Brewery & Café in Eugene, Oregon, caught my eye and sounded interesting. Opened in 1988, it's apparently Eugene's first microbrewery since Prohibition.

And while other brew pubs have come and gone since the mid-1990s microbrew craze, High Street Brewery still stands thanks to its savory brews and comfortable atmosphere, which remains a sublime alternative to the hard-drinking, male-dominated sports bars that dot the city.

The pub sits inside an early 1900s house at 1243 High Street. From the curtains shading the antique windows right down to the vintage rugs adorning the worn wood floor, the furnishings add a rustic touch to the already well-preserved structure, and the resulting ambiance is categorically laid-back.

In other words, it's a perfect McMenamins type of brewery. I'll have to look it up if I'm ever in Eugene.

This press release came in on the site's contact form today, so I'm posting it:

Not Your Typical Chili Cook-Off: Chili Pepper & Brew Fest combines music, chili, and microbrews June 17-19

Snowmass Village, Colorado. June 1, 2005. In just a few short weeks, Snowmass' summer kicks into high gear with a vibrant weekend of phenomenal music, some of the world's best chili, and the nations' top microwbrewers. The Chili Pepper & Brew Fest takes place June 17-19 and keeps the music, food and beer tastings, and activities going all weekend long.

"Chili Pepper & Brew Fest is a unparalleled value for both locals and visitors," says Event Director Josh Behrman. "You won't find such low ticket prices for this caliber of event anywhere in the mountains this summer. We've got a world-class line-up with so many different components going all weekend long. There's very few festivals out there like this."

What makes this festival so noteworthy? First there's the music. Friday afternoon heats up with the tunes of New Monsoon at 5 p.m. and Keller Williams at 7 p.m. New Monsoon offers an irresistible blend of sophisticated songcraft, inventive musical exploration and down home rock-n-roll, while Keller Williams is one of today's most distinctive guitarists/singer-songwriters who offers inventive solo performances that have garnered him the nickname of "mad scientist." Beloved Boulder DJ Harry closes down the night at the Blue Door with an accessible sensibility that appeals to a wide range of listeners and dance floor offerings.

On Saturday, DJ Dillon starts off the music action at 4 p.m. on the Snowmass Village Mall with an All the Freaky People funk and costume party at 4 p.m. Chuck Prophet, described as a "singular, maverick creative force" takes to the stage at 5 p.m., followed by artist of conscience and wildly popular and controversial Michael Franti & Spearhead at 7 p.m. Afterwards, the Blue Door takes the party indoors with Lotus, a five-piece ensemble that performs astonishingly danceable soundscapes. The music scene continues on Sunday with the finals of the Roaring Fork Valley Battle of the Bands Competition at 1 p.m. where local bands vie for a $1,000 cash prize.

The music alone is enough of a reason to head to the mountains for Chili Pepper & Brew Fest, but it's actually only a third of the festival's appeal. Friday and Saturday offer International Chili Society-sanctioned competitions, where district and regional competitors will vie for the chance to move on to the world competition and $40,000 in prize money. Competitions will be held both days in the categories of Chili Red, Chili Salsa, and the popular Chili Verde and several previous world champion competitors are expected to attend. On Sunday, locals test out their spicy sides in a local's cook-off. All three days offer afternoon chili tastings for the public. A bowl of chili isn't complete without an ice cold beer on the side, and Chili Pepper & Brew Fest obliges by luring some of the nation's top microbrewers for two days of tastings and a prestigious summer ale competition. From lesser known microbrews like Oskar Blues to aficionado favorites like Dogfish Head and Stone to perennial favorites like beer sponsor Tommy Knocker and New Belgium Ale, Snowmass will be awash in fine ale and food.

Perhaps the best part of Chili Pepper & Brew Fest is the cost: tickets are only $15 per day and include access to the concerts, food concessionaires, and arts & crafts vendors. For only $10 more, a $25/day party pass allows unlimited access to the microbrew tastings and the opportunity to sample 10 different types of chili per day. With most lodging within walking distance and at extremely reasonable early summer rates, the Chili Pepper & Brew Fest offers an unbeatable mountain combination.

For a complete schedule and event information, media can visit www.snowmasspress.com/chili. Visitor and lodging information is available at www.snowmassvillage.com or by calling 1-800-SNOWMASS. Tickets for the event are available online at www.baselineticketing.com or at various local outlets including: Village Liquors in Snowmass, Sounds Easy in Carbondale, Wheeler Opera House in Aspen, Glenwood Music in Glenwood Springs, All that Jazz in Steamboat Springs, Mo Jo Music in Avon, Affordable Music in Dillon, Cabin Fever in Gunnison.