As I wound around corners on Rt. 2 in Massachusetts heading towards Gardner, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I have made friends with several homebrewers who are brewing excellent beer, but I’ve never actually attended a homebrew festival or competition before, let alone been asked to be a “guest judge” for one. I decided, [...]
It seems as if every year the process of trying to obtain a much sought-after bottle of Portsmouth Brewery’s “Kate the Great” changes, and this year they’ve added an element of chance. Instead of having people line up on the release day to get a calendar page to get in to buy a bottle, they’ve taken an entirely different approach. Starting around – and I say around because the facebook page for the brewery just reminded everyone that there’s no firm date – January 24th, the brewery will be selling custom-printed scratch tickets that offer a chance to buy a bottle of Kate for $2 each. Now, before you bristle about the brewery capitalizing on demand and making their own lottery, you have to hear part 2 of the plan. They’re going to take all the sales from the chance tickets and give it to a local charity.
Here’s a question that I posed to myself after talking to a few friends this weekend.
Craft beer, on a whole, is a bit more expensive than macro beer, but also tends to have, on average, a higher Alcohol by Volume (ABV) per bottle or can as well. So, if you do the math, is it economically better to buy macro beer at volume to achieve the same amount of intoxication, or to drink fewer, higher ABV beers?
This may seem like a ridiculous question to ask – most craft beer drinkers that I know don’t drink only to get intoxicated, and most are not drinking craft beer for any kind of drunken economic advantage. But i realized that I’ve never actually checked it out for myself… so I decided to follow through a little experiment to see what I’d actually come up with – just in case I ever had to make the argument someday.
It is human nature to seek out the rare, the new and the novel and I am certainly no exception. Marketers and product producers count on this type of behavior – and it’s no more common in beer than it is in clothing, video games or other optional (non-commodity) purchases. The argument, then, is whether or not these brews are less artfully crafted than their session counterparts and get by on their novelty alone.
Sitting in my Aunt’s living room on Thanksgiving, I looked at the only remaining beer – some warm Budweiser that my Grandmother brought over – and sighed. Funny how the Pilgrims that we were thanking might have ruined my plans. How did I end up at a Thanksgiving with no beer?
Every year on my blog I write a post about what beers to bring to Thanksgiving dinner. I don’t do this soley because the variety of dishes served at this meal are just waiting to be paired with some great craft beer, but instead beacause its an opportunity for beer education. What better way to [...]
Imagine, if you will, a strong, strong IPA with lots of malt. So, something like a Dogfish Head 90 minute IPA or a Stone Ruination. Then, subtract a little hops but leave that extreme beer flavor… and follow it with a healthy serving of moonshine.
Author’s note: This post is in response to a session held at the first annual Beer Bloggers Conference in Boulder, CO. For more information on the conference, check out www.beerbloggersconference.org. Wrap-up posts will appear on my regular blog http://www.thebeerbabe.com in a day or so. I’d like to share with you my thoughts on a mini-controversy [...]
The idea behind this event (in its second year) is to feature the best of NH beer and pair it with the best of NH and local Portsmouth restaurants as a benefit for both Strawberry Banke (a living history museum in Portsmouth, NH) and NH Public Television. Last year’s event was extremely sucessfull, and its [...]
While many of my fellow beer lovers and bloggers enjoyed the revelries of GABF, I was driving down I95 to Boston, MA for a different kind of beer event. I had the occasion to meet several other craft beer enthusiasts at a beer “tweet up” - hosted by beer blogger, Josh who writes “Lost in the [...]
