In my endless preparation for brewing my first batch of homebrew, which I plan to make a hoppy weizen, I have been on the hunt for more heavily hopped wheat beers, be they wits, weizens, or American wheats. I really think that the balance of sweetness and spice in a good weizen could really be [...]
A few weeks ago I was given two bottles of JW Dundee’s Porter by my boss, who had gotten them from somebody somewhere. They are from the High Falls Brewing Co. of Rochester, New York and to my knowledge have no distribution here downstate. I had drank one of them the day after [...]
On a trip out to the west coast a few months back, I firmly and finally fell in love with the insanity of American IPA and DIPA styles. Green Flash’s “West Coast IPA” was my first love, and since then, I’ve tried to sample as many examples of the style as possible. Two of these [...]
Bell’s Expedition Stout is a straight up glass of midnight. Thick, chewy, improbable, and huge on every level. When you’re pouring this beer into a glass, it looks otherworldly, like some other state of matter that fluctuates between liquid and solid. It has an insane amount of hops, an insane amount of malt, an appropriate [...]
Two of us Brew Dogs took a ride up to Northampton, Massachusetts this weekend on a musical endeavor. Riding in the back seat of a hatchback with a bunch of equipment is not the most comfortable way to spend a weekend evening, let me tell you. Though I didn’t have to share a cramped seat-and-a-half [...]
Spuyten Duyvil is a bar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn which specializes in Belgian Beer, but has a lot of great selections to offer in general — usually one selection on Cask, 5 or 6 on regular draught, and a ton of amazing bottles to choose from. Since we had some friends in from out of [...]
The Gulden Fraug caught my eye at The Foodery in Philadelphia because I’m always game to try Belgian Styles by acclaimed US brewers. The “celebration” style isn’t always my favorite, but I was intrigued to see how Hoppin’ Frog (whose Double IPA “Mean Manalishi” I enjoyed quite a bit and reviewed for this site [...]
The Brooklyn Brewery is a storied and controversial institution where we live. Of the “next” generation of breweries that replaced the old guard that pocked the Bushwick and “East Williamsburg” areas of Brooklyn in the earlier part of the century, Brooklyn has has the most to say, and the Brewmaster ain’t afraid to say [...]
After our Russian River heavy tasting last week I had a serious taste for the stink of an infected brew, and I started seeking them out more actively. Luckily for me, Jacob at 4th Ave Pub had just tapped the keg of Cantillon Gueze he had been stashing when I visited a few days later. [...]
The side of the bottle of Bam Biere, Jolly Pumpkin’s Farmhouse Ale, tells the story of a dog who got hit by a car and bounced right back. To me, this brew is a lot like that. I was lucky enough to grab a few bottles of this earlier in the year when [...]
