Follow Sean Inman to the best in craft beer
I have had pumpkin beers and numerous fruit beers but this is the first sweet potato with milky cream that I have ever seen.
“Jefferson Stout, Lazy Magnolia’s original Sweet Potato Cream Stout, is Lazy Magnolia’s version of the ideal Southern-Style Stout. Jefferson Stout is brewed with sweet potatoes and lactose (milk sugar). The sweet potatoes provide the background to an impressive taste with added notes of roasted chocolate, coffee and caramel flavors.”
I love the inventiveness.
Here is what RateBeer blogger Josh Christie reports about this under the radar brewery: “Rum Riot, founded by Kyle Jongerden and Benjamin Jones, takes it’s name from the Portland Rum Riot in 1855. As the story goes, the recently passed “The Maine Law” read: “here ye, here ye, all alcohol shall be prohibited!” Portlanders, who then and still today like their booze, weren’t too happy. Thousands of protested descended on Portland’s City Hall to protest the law on June 2nd of ‘55 under threat of gunfire, and in the wake of the protest the law was repealed. Rum Riot Brewing thus presents to you “a dedication to all Portlanders’ passion, independence, and desire for alcohol.”
Rum Riot’s beer is readily available on the first Friday of every month for Portland’s art walk. At the Two Point Gallery, the brewery brings free beer on every first Friday, and occasionally has 22oz bottles for sale. Right now, there isn’t much info to be found on Rum Riot’s plans for expansion, if any exist. They do at least offer plenty of info about their current brews – Belgian Summer, German Summer and American Summer as of June.”
You are not a true beer geek until you have visited and taken in the beer culture in Ireland and Germany. I have been fortunate to have been to both BUT I did not visit all the breweries PLUS more have sprung up!
So this month, I will offer up an underknown brewery from each country that should be on your next beer travel itinerary. First up, the Emerald Isle…
“We’re dedicated to producing distinctive and outstanding beer from only natural ingredients.”, so says the Trouble Brewing website and I believe them. They are starting small and hoping to build up.
Here’s the info on beer # 1: Ór “A smooth, refreshing golden ale that is full-bodied and has a distinctive hop flavour. Brewed using the best two-row Maris Otter pale malt interwoven with a complimentary selection of speciality malt for a robust taste. It is hopped with a combination of traditional English and modern American hops, to produce a beer with subtle fruit flavours and a crisp, lingering finish. 4.3% A.B.V.”
Slainté
While Mikkeller the nomad brewer was in Chicago for the Craft Brewers Conference, he apparently made another side trip to Munster, Indiana to make another collaboration brew with Three Floyds. The unpronounceable Ruggoop is a 10% ABV “Rye Wine.”
These two eccentric and much loved and followed breweries have been down this road before. Weird names, weirder labels and even weirder styles. Hvedegoop – a hoppy wheatwine was the first collaboration. Second came Oatgoop. That beer was a wheatwine brewed with oats.
Maybe next up will be a brett wine.
This is one of the lightest beers that I have had in a long, long time…..
Here is what you (faithful blog reader) can look forward to in this months posts.
– Video reviews of Caldera Kettle Series beers
– Quick tours of Irish and German breweries that you should visit
– Session # 42 – A Favorite Beer Memory
– A recap of the Stone 14th Anniversary party
– I suggest (3) beers to put into your ‘fridge
– Beers to try and events to attend
– 50 Beers from 50 States updates
– The monthly tapping of the Firkin, my opinion on the beer world.
Cheers!
We have all heard the saying, “You get what you paid for”. Problem is, here in the land of plenty (yes, even a land of plenty in a recession), it can be hard if not near impossible to know how much something should cost. And that includes craft beer.
Take a regular craft beer for instance and let’s stick to basics. Some of your costs are: ingredients, facility, wages, packaging, marketing, distribution, taxes to name some of the bigger bills.
Even the most math oriented of the beer geek community wouldn’t be able to parse the data stream and come up with a per bottle estimate without the context of how that brewery operates and their financial statements. You can try to extrapolate across the country from there but a brewery in Los Angeles will have higher land costs than Portland and eastside Portland may be less in some areas than the westside. And who wants to go to all that trouble while in your local beer emporium?
Why am I talking about the accounting side? Because it plays into the enjoyment side for many people. A six-pack that is a B+ and $8.00 is better than a B+ bomber that is $5.00. Right? Because we expect the bomber to be an A.
I would like to turn that thinking upside down. We, in the beer loving community, need to recalibrate our selection criteria. Instead of focusing on price as an indicator of enjoyment, we need to answer a simple question.
Why am I buying beer today?
Is it for the BBQ? Is it for the cellar? Is it for after work on a Friday? I believe that when we buy with a purpose and a clear head, the chance of disappointment goes down.
You might get a soured IPA or a porter that is not thick and chewy enough but even if that happens, you will have given yourself the best chance to have a satisfying beer.
For the last day of Oregon Craft Beer Month, here are some photos of the first day….
Saw this English brewery mentioned on the always interesting Pete Brown blog and if he is a fan then we should all be on the lookout.
Hardknott Brewery came into being when a publican named David Bailey decided he wanted to brew instead of serve and this is what was created:
Fusion – a 4% ginger beer that has had chilli added to the mix.
Dark Energy – a 4.9% ‘sort of a stout perhaps, dark and fruity dry hops’ in Dave’s words
Continuum – their 4% ‘standard’ beer, dry hopped in the cask
Infra-Red – a 6.2% IPA (apparently ‘hoppier than a bucket of frogs’)
And in bottle there’s Granite (Barley Wine style) and Aether Blaec (Islay whisky barrel-aged stout).
If you want the straight scoop about the Portland beer scene then head over to the Beervana blog.
Jeff Alworth is funny and direct. (His post about beer reviewing is pretty dead on.) So check him out, you will learn something.