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” »

One week into this thing called Blogtoberfest, and already we’ve seen some great beer stories from non-beer writers. Here’s the quick and dirty, but follow all the action on the Blogtoberfest Facebook page.

• The Hill Is Home lists five can’t-miss beer experiences on Capitol Hill and H Street NE.
• Capital Spice tastes 13 pumpkin beers.
• The Hops Honey ponders splitting beers.
• Hurra Bier (a new discovery for me) checks out a new barleywine.
• And my post about how I got into beer got a buttload of Twitter responses, including:
  @ThBlackSquirrel By going to Gingerman in Hou, TX when I was in college. Cool spot.
  @FlyingDogJT My informal education www.juniorsbeer.com while @UTAustin
  @Cizauskas Sipping my father’s bier as a child in Germany. @beerspotter asks for Blogotberfest: How did YOU get into #beer? http://bit.ly/BCKWJ

Are you a blogger? Then join the Blogtoberfest Facebook group and post your beer stories for us all to read. Cheers!

Photo by eelke dekker via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution License

Everywhere I go, all people are asking me about is pumpkin beer! Well, OK, no one ever actually recognizes me, but I have a habit of bringing up beer in the first minute of any conversation. The other person usually ignores this and inexplicably keeps the conversation on some non-beer topic like telling me what they do or asking me to please be quiet, the movie is playing. But if I talk long enough for the person to find out that I write about beer, then they ask me: Which pumpkin beer do you like?

I don’t know. I know I liked the squashy, not-too-sweet Pumpkinator at Capitol City, which will be in the Beerspotter column next Thursday. But there’s so many, and most of the time I don’t get down with a pint of cinnamon syrup. So bless the people at Capital Spice, who tasted 13 (!) pumpkin beers and rated them on presentation, flavor, and the all-important label art. Personal favorites by Southern Tier and New Holland were sipped, as well as more mainstream ones by Blue Moon (ahem, MillerCoors) and Michelob (A-B InBev).

Which pumpkin beer was the best? Read the results, and quit asking me!

Two exciting beer events are coming to D.C. this month — both on the same day. Both parties involved assured me that neither knew the about other, which seems unlikely in a small town with so much tweeting, but I made them all cross their hearts.

Brasserie Beck will host Brooklyn Brewmaster Garrett Oliver, who will pour five of his beers alongside a four-course dinner. The lineup includes two new treats: Reinschweinsgebot, described as “a bacon-infused beer, aged in Rittenhouse rye barrels, fat-washed and then infused with botanicals used in vermouth and bitters.” (Fat-washing is when you pour a flavorful fat into a liquid, let infuse, and then strain out the fat by freezing the liquid and letting the fat coagulate.) Also featured is the beer Manhattan Project, which sounds like an porkless version of the former.

Meanwhile, The Brickskeller hosts a roster of five D.C. beer folk, each of which will present two of their favorite beers and spin stories about each. The speaker list includes Bob Tupper, schoolteacher, beer historian, and the man behind the defunct (but soon returning) Tuppers Hop Pocket Ale. Also on the mic will be Bill Catron, a Belgian brewery rep who was Brasserie Beck’s first beer manager.

So which event to choose? Tough choice, right? Full menus and prices after the jump.

Read More “Two Beer Events on Oct. 27: Bacon Beer and Story Time” »

Get it? Peddle, pedal? He’s on a bike!

Ahem. So yeah, AP reports that Lance Armstrong will be a spokesman for Michelob Ultra, the preferred beer of fitness assholes.

It’s disheartening to see such a joke beer get more attention, but then again it’s not like you could expect Lance to endorse a good microbrewery. That’d be like Michael Jordan ditching his Nikes for some sweet Onitsuka Tigers. So where could a small brewery find an athlete spokesperson? Competitive table tennis, bowling…Matt Leinart?

Photo by puliarf via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution License

So, how did you get into beer? This month, bloggers of all stripes are sharing their beer stories for Blogtoberfest. Got a story? If you’ve got a blog, post it on the Facebook group page. If you’re not blogging, share it in the comments and @beerspotter!

I started caring about beer during senior year of college, which was by turns sleepy and exciting (point is, I went easy on the work). I was living on the edge of Chapel Hill, N.C., a 3-minute walk from Carrboro’s Weaver Street Market, where my education began.

Weaver Street is a local supermarket co-op, with a grocery and prepared-food selection comparable to, say, Whole Foods, but less expensive and with the aisles sort of squished together. People were always smiley there, too. That may be the nostalgia talking, or it might be the 100 or so microbrews that lined their fridge.

Read More “How Did You Get Into Beer?” »