Earlier this week, I got a chance to sit down for an hour with the two hosts of Beer Sessions: Jimmy Carbone of Jimmy’s No. 43 and Ray Deter of d.b.a. Also joining us was Juan Cruz of Sunswick 35/35, a beer bar in Astoria, Queens - a borough whose beer scene is deserving of much more attention than it gets.
Naturally, this whole hour was recorded. Listen to it here, and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes to hear much more. The show is going on the road for Belgium Comes to Cooperstown next week to record some shows you’ll hear next month.
You’re probably not particularly in the Christmas spirit on a 90-degree day (unless you grew up in Australia), but Blind Tiger Ale House will be tonight, when they roll out a huge selection of winter beers starting at 4pm. It’s their annual Christmas in July event, and you’ll swear it’s the middle of January when you see the beer list:
Brooklyn Cookie Jar Porter Dogfish Head Worldwide Stout ‘08 (via randall) De Ranke Noel Geants Noel Ridgeway Criminally Bad Elf Kulmbacher Eisbock Mikkeller Santa Heavy Seas Siren Noir Victory St. Victorious Stoudts Winter Blue Point Winter Ale Smuttynose Winter Scaldis Noel D'achouffe N'ice Abita X-Mas Troegs Mad Elf '08 Weyerbacher Winter Ale Kuhnhenns Winter Speakeasy Winter Spice Sly Fox Winter St. Fluenns Noel Emelisse Winterbier The Tournay De Noel
Now that Blind Tiger's air conditioning is fixed, it’ll feel a bit more like winter at the bar. Bring a heavy coat!
Where the hell is Lakewood, New York? Well, it’s a suburb of Jamestown. Haven’t heard of Jamestown? That’s about an hour and a half south of Buffalo. Haven’t heard of Buffalo? Get a map. Anyway, Lakewood is home to Southern Tier Brewing Company, which will pull out all the stops tonight for an event at Rattle-N-Hum tonight. Here’s the draft list:
Farmers Tan Imperial Pale Lager Pale Ale 422 Pale Wheat Ale Iniquity Mokah Creme Brulee Stout IPA Backburner Barleywine Porter Hop Sun Java Stout Oak Aged UnEarthly Phin & Matts Extraordinary Ale Gemini Choklat UnEarthly DIPA UnEarthly on cask
Over at Jimmy’s No. 43, they’ll be doing their weekly $10 Tuesday Tasting tonight at 7:00. This week: Italian craft beers. When we’re talking Italian craft beer, we’re not talking about the god-awful Peroni or its clones, but rather real, honest-to-goodness good Italian beer. After all, it’s Good Beer Month!
Also tonight: starting at 5pm, you can listen to my appearance on Beer Sessions, the Internet radio show from the minds of Jimmy Carbone of Jimmy’s No. 43, Sam Merritt of Civilization of Beer, and Ray Deter of d.b.a. Trust me, though: I’m much better in print than in audio form.
Here’s a video from the folks at Working Class Foodie on the background of Sixpoint Signal, the brewery’s newest beer, brewed specially for Good Beer Month.
Imagine, if you will, a place with fewer than one-tenth as many people as New York City, but nearly ten times as many breweries. That place is Vermont, only a 45-minute flight from JFK. The state of Vermont is blessed with some of the best beer that the East Coast has to offer, and there’s no better place to sample all of it than the two-day Vermont Brewers Festival.
The setting for the festival is Waterfront Park in Burlington, Vermont’s largest city. The backdrop is the low-rise skyline of Burlington, Lake Champlain, and New York's Adirondacks in the distance. The outdoor setting has its perks, but it led to some challenges this year: the threat of thunderstorms shut down the festival early on Saturday night, and the extreme heat (at least by Vermont standards) led me to consume more water than beer on Saturday afternoon.
The set-up of the festival is generally well-organized. For $25, you receive a tasting glass and fifteen tasting tickets. Plus, you get a program that lists each brewery and the beers they’re serving (some include a brief description). This is helpful in planning your attack; when the tasting area opens up, it’s off to the races.
At noon on Saturday, our mad dash was to the tent from Lawson’s Finest Liquids, a tiny brewery in Warren, Vermont whose beer is almost impossibly hard to find. They had a rough start, struggling to get everything up and running before noon, so we waited about 15 minutes for brewer Sean Lawson and his crew to get the beer flowing and the cask tapped. This, paired with the brewery's popularity, led to up to half-hour waits for their beer all afternoon and evening. It was worth the wait. First, I tried their collaboration with Zero Gravity/American Flatbreadbrewer Destiny Saxon called Local Potion - a maple ale made entirely with New England ingredients, including Maine barley, Vermont hops and maple syrup, and in-house yeast from Zero Gravity.
Local Potion was good enough, but Lawson’s took it one step further by dry-tipping a cask of the brew with red spruce tips. They called it Noonan’s Tribute, one of two beers at the festival honoring the late Greg Noonan. Noonan, who passed away last October, was a beer author and the founder of Vermont Pub & Brewery, in addition to being a wealth of information and help to fledgling brewers in Vermont. Another tribute beer came from Noonan’s own Vermont Pub & Brewery, who served up Tulach Leis, a Flemish Sour Red Ale that was purported to be his favorite style.
Elsewhere, there were plenty of new Vermont breweries making debuts at the festival. Two of the state’s newest breweries - Trapp Family Lodge Breweryand Hill Farmstead- weren’t in attendance because they simply don’t have the capacity to brew enough beer for the festival yet (the organizers require upwards of four barrels for the three sessions). The two-month old Vermont Beer Company at the Perfect Pear Cafe offered a crisp, hoppy IPA and a mellow porter. Bennington’s seven-month old Northshire Brewery poured their Pilsner and Battenkill Ale, an easy-drinking brown ale.
Other smaller brewers made a big splash this year, including Jasper Murdock’s Alehouse with their Dark Humor (a black Wit), The Bobcat Cafe with a list of offerings that went twelve deep, Switchback with a slow-fermented Brown Ale, and Rock Art, where owner Matt Nadeau received more than a few pats on the back for his defense of the Vermonster name. The Quebecois were also out in full force this year; Dieu du Ciel’s lines were nearly as long as Lawson’s, and Benelux, Hopfenstark, and Le Trou du Diable all showed how rich Quebec’s beer scene has become.
It’s amazing to think that even last year, some of this festival’s biggest draws were out-of-state brewers like Dogfish Head and Stone. This year, with so many successful Vermont breweries, the focus moved almost entirely local. The largest breweries at this year’s festival both brew beer in Vermont: Magic Hat and Harpoon. Even the lines for Otter Creekand Long Trailstayed short, despite some unique offerings for the brewfest. Beer geeks are increasingly focused on the small breweries with fresh creative minds at the helm. If this means that there’s a better market for even more craft breweries, that’s fantastic. But respect has to be paid for some of the larger breweries that act as great entry points for getting people to break their fizzy yellow beer habits.
It was exhausting, overwhelming, and yet, I went out for more beers in Burlington afterwards. Beer and heat can do strange things to people.
