Posts Tagged ‘Avery’
Follow The Lagerheads’ Colorado Beer Odyssey
The Lagerheads are about to depart DC and Y&H for two weeks in Colorado with family and friends. We’ll be leaving behind our laptops but definitely not putting down our beer mugs. How could we when our trip just so happens to coincide with Denver’s Great American Beer Festival? Put on by the Brewers Association, the same great folks that organize Savor, GABF is a beer extravaganza that will draw as many as 50,000 people to the Mile High City from September 24th to 26th to sample from 2,000 beers made by 450 different American breweries.
We’ll be at this annual beer mecca, and, if you choose to follow our progress on Facebook and Twitter, you can be there, too (virtually). iPhone in hand, we’ll be sending photos and updates about what we’re drinking, eating, seeing, and learning–as much as we can each day until the combination of heightened elevation and alcohol take hold. If you have any tips to help us keep our wits about us or suggestions for places we should go–let us know in the comments section. Details on our trip after the jump.
Belgian Styles: Putting Rumors to Rest
You’d be hard pressed to go into a DC bar and not find at least one Belgian beer, or Belgian-influenced beer, available. In establishments with, shall we say, less than robust selections this usually means Stella, Blue Moon, or Leinie’s Sunset Wheat, but DC Beer Week has had a lot of really great Belgian beer all over town. To our delight, more and more bars in DC are carrying a wider range of Belgian styles on a regular basis, including saisons, Belgian IPAs, and the dubiously-named dubbels, tripels, and quadrupels.
At some point, everyone has wondered why the latter three Belgian beers have been named in relation to each other. Is there math involved? If so, what factor is being multiplied? Speculation runs high, and we have heard claims of all kinds. “The styles have twice, three times, and four times the alcohol content of the monks’ basic brew.” “No, it’s the malt that’s doubled, tripled, and quadrupled in the recipes.” “It has nothing to do with ingredients. Most people couldn’t read back then, so the barrels of types of beer were marked with one, two, or three X’s.”
Each account has a bit of truth to it, but none is entirely correct. The simplest (while still accurate) answer is that the names have to do with the amount of malt used. However, the full explanation has more to do with an old brewing process in which the same malt was used for multiple batches of beer than it does with simply math and the unique characteristics that each style has come to exhibit today.
When Bavaria and Brooklyn Collide…
Brewery collaborations are much in vogue these days. Dogfish Head recently teamed up with Three Floyds. Three Floyds with Mikkeller. Avery has mixed things up with Russian River. And most recently, Bell’s got together with De Proef. There are probably numerous other examples of brewers cross-pollinating. (If you know of more, please let us know in the comments section.) But the purpose of this post is to praise as effusively as possible the collaboration between Garret Oliver at Brooklyn Brewery and German brewgod Hans-Peter Drexler at Schneider. We tasted the result at Quarry House in Silver Spring over the weekend. It was nothing short of a revelation. The Brooklyner-Scheider Hopfen-Weisse is exactly what it sounds like: a brilliant mix of a classic German wheat beer, full of malty pleasure, with the bitter hops that American brewers love so much. An unlikely pairing, yes, but one that works to perfection.
On July 4th Weekend, Buy American Beer
When I was little I once saw a Family Circus cartoon in which the father, on Independence Day, thanked China for their fireworks, Germany for their picnic of sausages and coleslaw, and so on. It was about as funny as, well, Family Circus — but the message stuck with me.
So on that note, I remind those of you stuck in the imports section of your beer store that America is home to the world’s most diverse beer selection, including many of the finest and certainly the freshest. This Independence Day weekend (I’m starting mine today), buy American beer. If you have a friend who thinks Stella Artois is the gods’ gift to Belgium, send ‘em this way for a list of proper American substitutes.
- Heineken (or Stella Artois) — Of the imports on this list, Heiney’s the one I’m least offended to get for free at a party. But it’s still just the Budweiser of Europe. If crisp, clean lagers are your thing (and in July, they’re certainly mine), try Stoudt’s Gold Lager or Sierra Nevada Summerfest.
New Craft Seasonals Bound for DC’s Beer Shelves
There’s a beer for every season, and thanks to the folks at the Brewer’s Association in Boulder, Colorado, you can get a heads up on what to expect as the days grow longer. One recent market survey found that last year craft beer seasonals exceeded pale ales in sales volume for the first time, with supermarket sales up 15.7 percent in 2008 versus the previous year. That’s big business, even if it is atomized among the hundreds of craft breweries around the country.
Now, thanks to the Seasonal Beer and Food search engine on the Brewer’s Association page, you can keep track of what will be hitting the shelves in the DC metro area in the coming months and get suggestions on food pairings. A quick perusal of this month’s offerings reveals some interesting candidates, including Shmaltz Brewing Company’s “Rejewvenator,” described as “a half doppelbock, half Belgian-inspired dubbel, infused with both figs and dates.” Then there’s Avery’s “Karma Ale,” which the brewery characterizes as “a decidedly fruity and estery ale, intricate in body and nose, all driven by a unique Belgian yeast strain.” The Avery table was a favorite at last year’s Savor, so if you were lucky enough to score tickets to this year’s event, maybe you’ll also be able to score a sample of Karma Ale, or two, or three.
