It is simple choose your first initial from the first list second from the second, etc. Let me know your results!

Click on picture for larger image.

Since she was in the process of moving she had two choices, stay put in Wisconsin for the next 6 months while this is taken care of and rehabbed or stay the course and move, move all her care to MI, and have the operation up there.  She chose the latter.  It does make sense financially and for aftercare reasons, as her new place is only a couple blocks away from my sister Stacy.

So getting back to Jim, he is with her this week, coordinating doctor appointments, record transfers, moving trucks, and driving her and her dog up to Michigan.  If everything is going according to plan he is driving to Michigan today, probably as I type this.  Once there they will stay with my sister, and Jim will coordinate the move into the new place and begin to unpack.  Meanwhile we will try to get mom scheduled ASAP for hip replacement surgery.

I wanted to let everyone know why Jim is a little sparce around these parts for this week, although I just got off the phone with him, and he has a really cool beer story he will be posting later this week, so he won’t be non-existent.

I have managed to do a bit of drinking and moreover some cooking with beer this last week or so.  Actually I have cooked more with beer this week, and ever before, and lets just say the results have been stellar! First the beer…

Mendocino Brewing is a new brewery around these parts, although the brewery itself is almost 30 years old.  What initially drew me to them was their price point.  This 12 oz bottle of Oatmeal Stout only ran about $2.25.  I figured even if it was just ok, for that price I could afford to find out.  To my surprise it was better than ok, it was good.  It pours nice and dark with a tan head and a bit of froth that lingered throughout.

The mouthfeel was kind of medium bodied to light, and I was hoping for a little more viscosity than it had, but not unexpected for a lighter stout at 6% ABV and not a deal killer.  The flavor was all oatmeal stout!  It had the kind of grainy oatiness that you would expect that combined with the sweet maltiness of the stout for a very solid flavor.  My one problem with this beer was there was a bit of an astringent aftertaste, which is not uncommon for the style, but this was just a little more pronounced than I would have preferred.  I only drank about a half a bottle, and it was the kind of flavor that would most likely dissipate once your palate acclimated to it.  So overall I liked it.  Not out of this world, but a solid oatmeal stout.

Where this brew really shined was in cooking.  I made these brussel sprouts with this beer and they were fantastic!  Worthy of any 4 star restaurant IMHO.  These cooked up beautifully, and here is how I did it.

That afternoon I fried up about a half pound of bacon and crumbled it into bits.  I then cleaned and stemmed about 1.5 pounds of fresh brussel sprouts and cut them in half.  In a fry pan over medium heat I heated some olive oil and put the sprouts in and let them saute for about 4 or 5 minutes until they turned a bright green.

I then threw in the bacon crumbles and stirred them around.  Then I turned up the heat to about an 8 and let the pan get good and hot.  I then added about 2/3 cup of the oatmeal stout and covered the pan and let them steep in the sizzling beer for about 7 or 8 minutes until they got softish.  I then removed the cover and stirred them until the cut sides of the brussel sprouts turned a golden brown.

That was it.  I then ate them…almost all of them! They were fantastic.  Oh yeah, I also added a bit of fresh ground pepper and sea salt towards the beginning of the saute.  The sweetness of the beer counteracted the Brussel Sprout’s natural acrid flavor and made them delectable!

Later that week I used a Mendocino Imperial Stout to cook a Pork Shoulder for pulled pork, that my family is still raving about!  This is good solid beer, and great beers for cooking as it will not break the bank to cook with and imparts a ton of delicious flavor into your food.  What beer recipes do you have?  What was your favorite?

-Don

I’m not sure if this is cool or cringe-worthy, but I’m leaning towards cringe-worthy.  There’s something about the whole process that makes me sightly…uncomfortable.

Everybody loves babies, and quite a few folks like to drink.  Put these two things together, and you get drunken babies, an almost irresistible marketing force. 

At least that’s the way the Latin American branch of Dentsu, one of the worlds largest advertising agencies, figures it.  They put together this drunken baby campaign to promote L’univers de Chocolat, which are French chocolates infused with Jack Daniels whiskey made in Brazil.  Hey, that covers three continents!

Guess these treats are best kept away from toddlers.

I haven’t seen an ad campaign as “brilliant” as this one since those Boy Scouts with beards!

Click an image below to enlarge it.

Tip of the hat to our pal @BeerPoet who pointed us to these images at visualnews.com

Other kinds of nerds have discovered what beer geeks have known for a long time: Brewers yeast is an amazing little critter.  In the world of brewing, yeast is a major factor in the character and potency of a beer.  In the world of science, it is an industrious single-cell organism that is sometimes called upon to help humans unravel the underpinnings of life on Earth.

The most recent example of this comes from the University of Minnesota, where a couple of experimental evolution geeks (Post doc researcher William Ratcliff and his adviser Michael Travisano) were trying to figure out the coolest thing they could do in their lab. They didn’t have the resources to play around with the origins of life, so they decided the next best alternative was to explore the origins of multicellular life. 

Multicellular life isn’t a simple thing to create.  It took our primordial ancestors about three billion years to evolve from single-cell organisms, and billions more to morph into the collection of 100 trillion cells (with over 200 varieties working in concert) that makes up today’s average web-surfing American.  Of course with all the brain cells we burn on cable TV and alcohol, our cell count is probably closer to 90 trillion, but I digress. 

Ratcliff and Travisano weren’t looking to create anything as complex as a human.  Instead, they aimed to create primitive multicellular creatures, and decided brewers yeast was great place to start.  Brewers yeast lives a simple existence – it floats in fluid, eating sugar and budding off daughter cells who float away and in turn do the same thing.

William Ratcliff, Uber Nerd

Ratcliff and Travisano placed brewers yeast in flasks full of broth, which were shaken for a day and allowed to settle.  They then extracted a small sample of yeast from the bottom of the flask and put it in a fresh broth and repeated this process again and again.

By doing this, they isolated the cells that dropped the quickest, favoring the cells that were the most dense.  After a couple of weeks, they noticed that the yeast was sinking very fast and forming a cloudy layer at the bottom of the flasks.  When they looked at it under the microscope, they were greeted with snowflake-shaped clusters of multicellular yeast.  This wasn’t that a bunch of single-cell critters that were stuck together – these were bonafide multicellular organisms, each with hundreds of cells.  Brewers yeast managed to accomplish in a couple of weeks what took our single-cell ancestors billions of years to do.

When one of these cells was plucked off the organism and allowed to reproduce, its babies went right about the business of forming clusters of cells.  This showed that the organism had indeed mutated into a multicellular creature.  When allowed to grow to adulthood (which takes just a few hours), these new multicellular organisms would expand the arms of their snowflakes until they pressed together, breaking one away, which would then form into its own snowflake and repeat the process.

Ratcliff tells the New York Times that “Forming clusters isn’t a freaky yeast thing.” It is the way that many animals and plants began their climb to what we see today, so this is indeed a peek at how multicellular life got its start, with single cell organisms mutating through the process of natural selection.  In the case of this brewers yeast, the survivors were the critters at the bottom of the flask, in nature it was the ones who best responded to their environment and propagated successfully.

Ratcliff and company are still playing around with the evolution of yeast cells, but won’t say where they’re headed until they publish their results.  All Ratcliff would tell the Times is that, “We’re getting really interesting things happening now.”

This got me to thinking about what might be happening in the two carboys full of homebrew that have been sitting in my master bathroom tub for several months.  If Ratcliff and his colleagues got multicellular organisms to form a couple of weeks, I imagine by now my beer has opposable thumbs!

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Beer shipments in the U.S. slipped an estimated 1.4%, or 2.9 million barrels, from 2010 to 2011, according to recent newsletter published by Beer Marketer’s Insights.

Of course it was the Big Boys who took the hit, with Anheuser-Busch InBev shipments slipping 2.9% and MillerCoors seeing shipments fall 3%.  Imports didn’t fare any better, as shipments of Guinness fell 2.4% and Heineken dropped 3.9%.

Those are some pretty significant drops, and a sign that beer in general may be falling out of favor in the United States. 

According to BMI, the American beer industry must take action, and apparently they’re quite serious about it, because they broke out their marketing-speak handbooks:

“Big brewers need to regain drinking occasions taken by spirits over the last decade, especially among Millennials,” the group wrote in a recent blog post. “Consumers continue to face [a] plethora of new beverage choices.”

Oh those Millennials and their plethora of beverage choices for their drinking occasions! What’s a brewer to do?

Well, they could start by brewing better beer, like Sam Adams, whose shipments were up 8%, and Yeungling, who gained a whopping 16.9% in shipments over the past year.  This certainly doesn’t make up for the loss in overall sales volume beer has been experiencing, but it does show a trend towards things “better” than macro beers.

I can’t help but wonder if the rise of craft beer is hurting overall sales volume of The World’s Greatest Beverage.  I’m totally speculating here (rare, I know), but perhaps as “Millennials” ( A.K.A people born in the 80′s) have been introduced to craft beer, it’s made them realize that macro beers aren’t worth drinking. Because craft beers aren’t as widely available as macro lagers, people are skipping beer altogether and choosing distilled spirits or wine. In this way, craft beer is actually hurting beer sales, as it’s opening people’s eyes to the fact that the majority of beer available in American isn’t very good.

Certainly it sucks to see beer losing traction in the U.S. marketplace, but it’s also good to see Americans looking for something more interesting than light industrial lagers. We’ll have to see what happens to these numbers as craft beer continues to rise in popularity and, perhaps more importantly, availability.

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January 16 1920.  The Puritans have run wild with power and have control of the Government of the United States, The Congress, the Judicial Branch, and the White House are all occupied by people who think they know what is best for everyone else.

Today is the 92nd anniversary of Prohibition in the United States.  Never has a domestic policy been so flawed or backfired so badly as prohibition in our nation’s history.  Some may argue that the “War on Drugs” is equally as flawed, but I would argue that that policy makes more sense than prohibition ever did. Not only did prohibition make criminals out of everyday people it also spawned the biggest and largest organized crime wave in the history of this nation and the world.  Some can even argue that Prohibition created the drug problem this country has today, as once the country came to its senses and repealed this awful law, the infrastructure that was built around supplying alcohol to the masses then switched its focus to drugs and gambling.

Instead of dwelling on the dark times and all that was the result of this flawed logic  I’d like to raise a glass to one of the true poineers that pulled us out of the dark ages and rebuilt an industry.  Jim Beam, pictured above, pulled the stills out of mothballs and fired them back up, filling the rick houses with barrels and barrels of Jim Beam Bourbon.  He was a true pioneer and gave us back our sanity and the industry that we love so dearly around these parts.

Yes he is one of the founders of the Whiskey industry as it was pulling itself back together after it was systematically dismantled by the government.  I’d like to take a moment and salute the memory of a great American, Jim Beam.  Thank you sir for all your hard work and perseverance in returning this nation’s spirits industry back to its former glory.  Tonight I raise a glass of Jim Beam Devil’s Cut to the memory of a fine Kentucky Gentleman and a true American Pioneer,  Jim Beam.

-Don

Every once in a while, I’ll be heating up something in the microwave and wonder, “how come they haven’t invented the same thing for making stuff cold?”  Well it looks like I wasn’t alone in those thoughts, as Korean appliance powerhouse LG is adding a new feature to some of their high-end fridges – the Blast Chiller.

The Blast Chiller compartment can cool a 12 ounce can of beer from room temperature to a delightfully chilly 41 degrees in just four minutes.  It can do the same with two cans or a bottle of wine (or a bomber of beer) in eight minutes. The chiller blasts its target with jet-engine-level bursts of freezing air while the can is gently swirled to prevent the formation of ice crystals inside. 

This is the culmination of knowledge that LG acquired across the wide variety of appliances they manufacture. The chilling power is based on their air conditioner technology, and the swirling mechanic is from their experience building washing machines.  All in all, it’s a neat idea, but it this a silly gadget or a godsend?

At first blush I’d say it’s a godsend, but then I remembered I’m an adult who can manage my own beverages and who mostly prefers dark beers served at or near room temperature, so this is a feature I probably wouldn’t use much.  That puts it in “gadget” territory for me.  I’m also a little nutso about fridge real estate, and this little gizmo takes up enough space for 8 to 10 cans of Dale’s Pale Ale, which I’d rather have waiting for me in that spot, rather than waiting four minutes to chill just one.

All told, it’s been awhile since I’ve said, “I wish I had a microwave that can chill this beer,” so I’m gonna have to say the Blast Chiller is more novelty than must-have.  But then again, I’ll be shopping for a fridge in the next few months, and knowing my nerdy self as I do, you can bet I’ll probably try to steer my wife to the LG’s.

Now if they’d only make one of these things that dispensed hot bacon on demand…

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Here’s a video from LG with a nice animation about the technology.  Unfortunately it’s wrapped in one of the worse “lifestyle” commercials I’ve seen in a long, long time.  Unless you’re Sam Shields or a Packers fan, then you’ll probably think it’s awesome:

I imagine it’d be a lot of fun to hang around with Gary Busey for a few hours.  He’s nuts, sure, but his manic energy, awesome stories and larger-than-life character would make for an interesting evening indeed.

I also imagine I’d be happy to see him leave at the end of the night, after he’s shocked my psyche with his rapid fire intensity and his crazy anagrams.  He’s not the kind of guy you’d want around day in and day out.

My go-to Christmas brew, Troeg’s Mad Elf, is the Gary Busey of beers; a big character guest I love to see during the holidays, but one that eventually wears me out with its intensity; it packs an ABV of 11% and enough sugary sweetness to make you an honorary diabetic.

Now that the Christmas season is over, I’m in the mood for something more mellow, but still with lots of flavor.  The Seth Rogen of beers, if you will; a session beer that doesn’t scrimp on character. 

It’s been pretty difficult for me to find something that actually fits this bill, as most beers under 5.5% ABV (my personal ceiling for what constitutes a “session beer”) lack the flavor of boozier brews.

Then I remembered one beer from my past that surprised me with its combination of big character and low ABV: Troeg’s Pale Ale. I discovered this 5.3% ABV American pale ale pretty early on in my craft beer journey, using it as a stepping stone between Bass Ale and IPA’s.

Peter Kennedy from Simply Beer invited me to take part in a “Session Beer Shootout” podcast a few years ago, where everybody brought a beer under 5.5% ABV, and we duked it out to see whose beer was best.  Even though I was a craft beer noob at the time and was amongst dudes who really knew their stuff, I won the day with Troeg’s Pale Ale.  Everyone couldn’t believe how satisfying it was (and that the rookie won!).

There’s really nothing pale about Troeg’s Pale Ale, as it pours with a deep golden amber body and a decent (if short-lived) head. It packs enough of a citrus hop kick to grab your attention, and enough of a malt backbone to balance things out nicely.

The mouthfeel is a little lighter than something like a Dale’s Pale Ale, but it’s flavorful enough to make you think you’re drinking a beer that’s packing more than 5.3% ABV, which is a pretty neat trick.  The plus to the light mouthfeel is that you’re not bogged down after you’ve had one.

I’m happy that I’ve rediscovered this little gem and its rare balance of flavor and sessionability.  It’s definitely the Seth Rogen of beers, which is just the right thing as the holidays fade into memory.  Now I just gotta find the Jonah Hill, Paul Rudd and Michael Cera of beers.  A man can’t live on Seth alone!

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It’s pretty depressing to frequently visit this site and see the most negative threads among the most popular. This didn’t happen much ten years ago when craft beer had something like a 3 percent market share. Flash forward to today, and true indie craft beer now has a still-tiny but growing marketshare of just over 5 percent. Yet so many folks that post here still spend their time knocking down breweries that dare to grow. It’s like that old joke: “Nobody eats at that restaurant anymore, it’s too crowded.” Except the “restaurants” that people shit on here aren’t exactly juggernauts.

In fact, aside from Boston Beer, none of them have anything even close to half of one percent marketshare. The more that retailers, distributors, and large industrial brewers consolidate the more fragile the current growth momentum of the craft segment becomes. The more often the Beer Advocate community becomes a soap box for outing breweries for daring to grow beyond its insider ranks the more it will be marginalized in the movement to support, promote, and protect independent ,American, craft breweries.
It’s interesting how many posts that refer to Dogfish being over-rated include a caveat like “except for Palo…except for Immort…etc.” We all have different palettes which is why it’s a great thing that there are so many different beers. At Dogfish we’ve been focused on making “weird” beers since we opened and have taken our lumps for being stylistically indifferent since day one. I bet a lot of folks agree that beers like Punkin Ale (since 1995) , Immort Ale (wood aged smoked beer) since 1995, Chicory Stout (coffee stout) since 1995 , Raison D’être (Belgian brown) since 1996, , Indian Brown Ale (dark IPA) since 1997, and 90 Minute (DIPA) since 2000 don’t seem very weird anymore. That’s in large part because so many people who have been part of this community over the years championed them and helped us put them on the map.These beers, and all of our more recent releases like Palo Santo, Burton Baton, Bitches Brew continue to grow every year. We could have taken the easy way out and just sold the bejeezus out of 60 Minute to grow but we like to experiment and create and follow our own muse. Obviously there is an audience that appreciates this as we continue to grow.

We put no more “hype” or “expert marketing” behind our best selling beers than we do our occasionals. We only advertise in a few beer magazines and my wife Mariah oversees all of our twitter/Facebook/dogfish.com stuff. We have mostly grown by just sharing our beer with people who are into it (at our pub, great beer bars, beer dinners, and fests) and let them decide for themselves if they like it. If they do we hope they tell their friends about.

We hope a bunch of you that are going to EBF will stop by our booth and try some of the very unique new beers we are proudly bringing to market like Tweason’ale (a champagne-esque, gluten-free beer fermented with buckwheat honey and strawberries) and Noble Rot (a sort of saison brewed with Botrytis-infected Viognier Grape must). One of these beers is on the sweeter side and one is more sour. Knowing each of your palettes is unique you will probably prefer one over the other. That doesn’t mean the one you didn’t prefer sucked. And the breweries you don’t prefer but are growing don’t suck either. Respect Beer. The below was my favorite post thus far.

This thread is hilarious. Seriously, Bells, Founders, FFF, Surly, RR, DFH, Bruery, Avery, Cigar City, Mikkeller are all overrated?

Since I’m from Ohio, I’ll pile on and add Great Lakes, Hoppin Frog, and Brew Kettle to the list. Your welcome.

Hopefully soon we will have every craft brewery in the US on the list.

That’s a mouthful!  Here is to all the great people brewing all the beer out there today!  I love you all!  I may not like all your beer, but your ingenuity and integrity is infectious and makes Craft beer a very special place!  Here is to you!

-Don

So at $5 a can, there is opportunity and terror that I see.  My previous article discussed the terror in good detail, but there is opportunity here too.  Opportunity for scotch whiskey to make a real push into the spirits market!  To date if you paid less than $20 for a bottle of scotch whisky you were getting rotgut!  By all accounts this whisky is not too bad.  That is hardly a ringing endorsement, but whatya want for $5?

Here’s a thought you can use this for mixing drinks and at parties.  Or they make these things called bottles.  You could get one, and put the remainder in it.  I know, wild idea!  I wonder if this takes off if it might make the prices of scotch come down a bit too.  That wouldn’t be a bad thing in my mind.  I don’t think they can justify the prices they charge now anyway, not when you can get a really great bottle of bourbon for $25 and the nearest Scotch that would compare is more like $45.  This may infuse a little reality into the market.  So what are your thoughts?  Are you ready for Whiskey in a can?  Better yet, would you be ready for whiskey in a can if it were only $5?

-Don

An outfit called Research and Markets has just released a report tracking what folks have been saying about “popular” brands of beer across social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, etc., over the past 12 months.

What counts as a “popular” beer brand you ask?  Here’s the list used to generate the report: 

- Amstel
- Bud Light
- Budweiser
- Carlsberg
- Coors Light
- Corona
- Guinness
- Heineken
- Miller Lite
- PBR
- Red Stripe
- San Miguel
- Smithwick’s
- Stella Artois
- Yuengling

According to an abstract of the report on the company’s website (you didn’t think I was going to BUY IT, did you?!), impressions of these beer brands were mostly positive, which makes sense, as people generally like beer.  It also shows they didn’t get around to checking out places like the beer section of Reddit.  Those boys and girls are hardcore beer geeks, so I doubt Amstel would enjoy popular support amidst their ranks.

Overall, 13,595 opinions were identified, and those were shared 9,589,510 times.  77% were positive, which means Big Beer enjoyed 7,383,922 positive impression on social media last year, which in my opinion is several million too many.

Of all the brands above, the one that got the most love was Guinness, which enjoyed 82% positive feedback on social media over the past year.  While I could quickly list half a dozen better stouts than Guinness, I think it’s pretty cool that it came out on top, as it’s the only offering on the list that you can’t see through.  It’s nice to see a dark beer favored over light lagers and watery ales, if not in sales, then in the hearts of the twitterati.

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So with all this backlog why in the hell am I not drinking? Well, mostly because I don’t want to.  See this weekend was a bit of an anomaly.  My 17 year old had a basketball game Saturday night, so no drinking prior to it.  Then my oldest wanted to watch a Rush documentary (the band) that we wanted to watch together when we got home.  Now most people would think that a Rush Documentary would be a perfect opportunity to throw back a few pints, but it goes back to how my son and I view this band.  We LOVE Rush!  We were both perfectly focused and 100% engaged by this 2.5 hour documentary.  I know, were geeks!

Then Sunday had its own issues.  I typically don’t drink during the day, unless I go to Brewforia or out to lunch somewhere.  I just usually tea total during the day.  So night came around and the football games were over, Dinner was done, and it was time to dive into the challenge!  Then I get a call from our mother who is doing poorly with a bad hip and needs help.  So the remainder of the evening was spent figuring out who and how to get people to her to help her move.  She needs a hip replacement and has extremely limited mobility and to complicate things she is in the middle of moving from her home in Milwaukee to a new home in Royal Oak Michigan only 2 blocks away from my sister.  The intent of the move was good, but the timing of it sucks.

So that threw things into a tizzy for the remainder of the evening.  No drinky drinky for Don!  We’ll see about tonight during the NCAA National Championship.  Hopefully I can begin the challenge, or at least drink my growler!

How about you?  Was your luck better than mine?  Did you get to drink anything you had been anticipating or pining for?  Let us know in the comments.

-Don

See these 4 Nalgene Bottles contain four different whiskeys.  All are available from the Idaho Liquor Store and one is top shelf, one is bottom shelf, and the other two are middle of the road whiskeys.  They are all Bourbon Whiskey and I have been given two ounces of each one.

I’ll let them explain the rest of the challenge:

Now I’m really unclear to their intent.  Are they trying to make me flub up so they can mock me in the comments?  Nah, they will do that even if I don’t flub up.  Are they trying to prove a point that bourbon is very similar when you take off the labels?  I’m really not sure.  But I’m about to enter into the toughest challenge I’ve ever faced as a Whiskey guy.  I am intrigued that they said that the lower end offering would be considered Top shelf in most Idaho Bars.  Probably a Knob Creek or a Blantons.  That means that the Top Shelf stuff might be like an AH Hirsch or the like.  One thing is for sure I’m gonna get to try some pretty good bourbons this weekend!

How about you?  What are you going to be drinking this weekend?  Do you think you could do well with this Bourbon Whiskey Challenge? Wish me luck!

-Don