While I was costume shopping and downing the first of the Christmas beers, Gothamist reported the news that Brooklyn Brewery received a New York state grant that will help it expand, upping its production from 8,000 to 50,000 barrels a year.

This is big news not just for the neighborhood, which will see new business and jobs as a result. It’s great for the beer world because Brooklyn is what I call a major “ambassador brewery” — that is, they introduce many people to good beer because they’re widespread and available in places that don’t serve much craft beer. As with Sierra Nevada and Samuel Adams, it’s good news for anyone that likes beer when these guys do well.

Attention area food bloggers (floggers?): November’s Food Blogger Happy Hour will be this Wednesday at the beer-friendly Black Squirrel. If you write, come. If you come, and you don’t try Dale’s Pale Ale on draft, you’re doing it wrong.

Cheers to ModernDomestic, The Arugula Files, Gradually Greener, Capital Spice, and Capital Cooking for putting it together. See you there!

November Food Blogger Happy Hour
Wednesday, Nov. 4, 6 p.m.
The Black Squirrel
2427 18th St. NW
www.blacksquirreldc.com

I mean no disrespect to the Lager Heads, who had great coverage today of a beer vs. wine competition — I’ve levied plenty of jokes at wine myself. But NYT’s Eric Asimov wrote a wonderful call to sanity today on his blog The Pour, “A Plea for Peaceful Coexistence” (likely in response to the same event the Lager Heads covered). The crux:

The irony is that great beer and great wine are on the same team. The enemy of beer is not wine and the enemy of wine is not beer, just as the enemy of bread is not fruit and vice versa. But the enemy of good beer and good wine, and good food in general, is bad beer, bad wine and, yes, bad food.

This is exactly the kind of clear, sober (ahem) thinking that informs my philosophy about what beers to review, and how. The enemy of good beer is bad beer, and by far the largest propagators of bad beer are macrobreweries like Anheuser-Busch InBev and MillerCoors. Hell, they’re the largest propagators of any type of beer — macros make up 96% of the market.

Cheers to Asimov for addressing this topic in a large, mainstream publication. But a wag of a finger for tasting 10 stouts and not including a single entrant from Bell’s or Founders, which are both available in New York and, among widely distributed microbreweries, two of the country’s most dominant stout brewers. Eric, can you help me out here?

Photo by Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

I was seduced at The Brickskeller last night, and it wasn’t by the gents pictured above. It was by a barleywine.

The beer tasting was called “Why is there beer?” and featured a well-curated lineup by an expert panel. All 10 beers were tasty, except the Grozet gooseberry and wheat beer, which was more like soapy fruit. But a pair of rare, aged beers — a 1997 Anchor Old Foghorn and a 2005 Thomas Hardy’s barleywine — elevated the night to a special occasion. Going in, I was skeptical, nay fearful, of tasting a 12-year-old beer. Even an aging beer like Old Foghorn typically peaks in the first five years, and the last time I had a beer that old at Brickskeller, it tasted like furniture.

Read More “I Was Seduced at The Brickskeller” »

Birch & Barley, the oft-promised beer bar and restaurant, will open tonight at 5 p.m. And while we’ve drooled over it for months, we’ve heard little about it other than the numbers they promised: 555 bottles, 50 taps, and 5 casks. I admit I was skeptical, worried that the list would be vaporware like the 1,000+ beer menu at The Brickskeller — but a swing by the bar yesterday put me at ease.

Read More “Birch & Barley Opens Today. What’s Inside?” »

Over the Top Oktoberfest from Hot Knivez on Vimeo.

I stay up on the cooking blog Hot Knives, and not just because they pair their dishes with beers like Jolly Pumpkin Oro de Calabaza (a dry, super-fresh saison) and music by Os Mutantes.

No, it’s because their love for good beer comes out in crazy, almost cartoonish, recipes for stuff like hefeweizen popsicles. But it’s not kitsch for kitsch’s sake; the recipe seems well thought out, with a dry German hefe (Franziskaner), sugar, water, and lemon and clove to accentuate the beer’s traditional flavors. Alex and Evan, next time you’re in D.C., first round of 3 Fonteinen Oude Geuze is on me.

Yesterday Tim Carman, Mr. Y&H himself, asked you an intriguing question: “When Should a Critic Just Trash a Place?” And you responded.

But can we ask the same question about good beer? Craft beer makes up just 4% of U.S. sales, while the other 96% is dominated by a few giant corporations turning out products that are so inferior they’re insulting to beer drinkers. Reviewing, say, Stella Artois (AB InBev), would be akin to Tim reviewing Burger King Chicken Fries — good for a laugh, but not exactly a public service.

My thinking has been that I have finite space in the paper each week to review beer, so I might as well use it to highlight something good. But what do you think? If I taste a bad craft beer, should I pan it? When you read Beerspotter in the paper or me and the Lager Heads on Y&H, what are you looking for?

“Alcohol — enemy of production”

By Internet magic, a friend of a friend sent me this link to The Museum of Anti-Alcohol Posters, a collection of Soviet anti-alcohol propaganda. Throughout Russian history, vodka has been alternately a source of pride and a social ill, a state-owned industry and a health hazard. Loads of cool retro design and sweet alcohol imagery, with translations, at the museum.

This week for Blogtoberfest, share your beer travel stories. Where have you tippled? What was it like? Blog it, tweet it, share it on Facebook. The Internet’s a wondrous place.

Yesterday I wrote about the Czech Republic’s two kinds of beers: sweet dark lagers and light pilsners. But studying in Prague in college, I learned a more important distinction: girl beer and man beer.

The funny thing is that a lot of Americans new to beer consider “dark beer” bitter, heavy, and therefore manly. These generalizations are of course way off — dark color means more malts, and if anything a sweeter beer. In the Czech Republic, their dark beer is all dark lager, akin to the German schwarzbier, and is indeed sweet. Thus, they consider it “girl beer.”

Really. Studying in Prague in college, I got called out by more than one professional barfly who wanted to know if I was drinking the dark beer because my boyfriend had dumped me, or, say, for certain menstrual reasons. I wanted to explain that even a man could enjoy the molasses maltiness of a Kozel Cerny, but any attempt at speaking Czech was perceived by the barkeep as an order of French fries. Really the solution was simple: order a pilsner and double-fist through the night.

Photo by Török Gábor via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution License

For all its storied beer history, the Czech Republic has essentially two beer styles: dark and light. It’s a spartan selection even in comparison to Germany and its Reinheitsgebot. There’s the dark, chocolaty cerny (pronounced with a “ch” sound), and there’s pilsner, the famous light-colored lager from the city of Plzen. Poured fresh, they’re clear, bready, crisp, and delicious — and the reason Czechs drink more beer per capita than any country in the world.

But the best pilsner is a fresh pilsner, which is why the Pilsner Urquell we get in the States tastes like detergent. (An unfiltered keg of the stuff, a rare find even in Prague, is the beer equivalent of fresh-squeezed OJ.) In D.C., it doesn’t get better than Victory Prima Pils for a crisp, hoppy take on the style, while pilsners are always good choices at brewpubs like District Chophouse and Capitol City Brewing Co. In Virginia, seek out a bottle of Legend Pilsner, a slightly sweeter, appley version. And if you must try an import, start with Czechvar, the nom de plume of Budvar, the original “Budweiser.”

Read More “Czech Republic: One Country, Two Beers” »