One final 'beer summit' post

I just read that craft beer was served at President Obama's "beer summit" Thursday.

Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates drank Samuel Adams Light. Good for him.

Cigar city draft lineup for 7/31

I'm late with this news, but Cigar City Brewing in Tampa is having a release party tonight for their Barrel Aged Big Sound Scotch Ale. In addition to Big Sound bottles, they will be offering a very cool draft lineup of some limited beers:

Coco Loco: Bolita Double Nut Brown Ale aged on Cuban espresso beans, coconut flakes and Peruvian cacao nibs. 9% ABV 

Barrel Aged 110K+OT Batch #2: An Imperial Stout dry hopped with Mt. Rainier hops and lightly aged on toasted Spanish Cedar then further matured in former bourbon oak barrels. 11.5% ABV 

Mocha Cubano: Our Maduro Oatmeal Brown Ale aged on Cuban espresso beans and Peruvian cacao. 5.5% ABV

East India Trader: Bolita Double Nut Brown Ale aged on flaked coconut and chai spices. 9% ABV

Coconut Bolita: Bolita Double Nut Brown Ale aged on flaked coconut. 9% ABV

Jai Alai India Pale Ale: An American style India Pale Ale brewed in homage to the original extreme sport, Jai Alai. 7.5% ABV

Maduro Oatmeal Brown Ale: An English style brown ale. Lots of flavor yet nice and sessionable. 5.5% ABV

And this time they will be offering growlers of the above beers, but only after 9 p.m.

Their tasting room is open from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. today.

Craft brewery reacts to President Obama's beer choice

As I posted earlier this week, the beer choices (Bud Light, Red Stripe and Blue Moon) for President Obama's "summit" have raised concerns in the craft beer world. Craft brewer Magic Hat out of Burlington, Vt., (beer geek aside: I visited them while on my honeymoon!) has issued a news release on the matter, as reported by BeerUtopia.com.

Magic Hat writes:

Craft Brewers the country over are chagrined by the President’s choice to consume a beer owned by a company based outside of America’s borders. Bud Light, owned by Belgium-based AB InBev, and Blue Moon, owned by London-based SAB MillerCoors, together control over 90% of the beer market in the United States. However, the United States boasts almost 1,500 craft brewers, the majority being made up of small Main Street Businesses that employ less than 50 people. In the humble opinions of Magic Hat and American Craft Brewers, it would be a strong show of support for American businesses for President Obama to embrace the free and diverse expression that comes with each American-made craft beer.

Magic Hat Brewing Company urges its thirsty nation to contact the White House directly at http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact to ask President Obama to drink American Craft Beer ...

 Let's hope it's not too late to change the beer menu at the White House to craft beer.

Thanks to Herald-Tribune Assistant Business Editor Gerard Walen for the story tip.

President Obama, please drink a craft beer

The New York Times (disclosure: I work for one of their newspapers) writes that Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Sgt. James Crowley of the Cambridge Police Department will be sharing a beer with President Obama on Thursday. It's an attempt to smooth out tensions over Gates' arrest. Here's what caught my eye:

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs promised Budweiser, the all-American king of beers, saying that that’s what Mr. Obama drank while at a recent baseball game.

Mr. President, may I humbly suggest you and your party drink a locally brewed craft beer instead of Budweiser?

A quick search of BeerAdvocate shows there are at least three brewpubs in Washington, D.C. If they sell beer to go, Obama could buy a growler of fresh, locally brewed beer that has much more flavor than Budweiser and isn't brewed with adjuncts like corn and rice. The local breweries may even brew organic beers using local ingredients, something I know Michelle Obama is fond of.

And if the brewpubs don't work out, there are plenty of great craft beers brewed in the Washington region that are sold in stores throughout the district.

What better way to stimulate the economy than by drinking craft beer brewed by a local small business?

Bigfoot barleywine on draft

Fellow BeerAdvocate member DoppleThis reports that the Mellow Mushroom in Citrus Park (map) has a keg of 6-month-old Sierra Nevada Bigfoot barleywine on tap. A barleywine is a strong ale and one style of beer than can be aged. Bigfoot can be aged for years.

Bigfoot is a monster of a beer: bitter, sweet and alcoholic. It's very agressive and will be a shock the first time you try it. I love it. It's one of my Top 10 beers. Sierra Nevada only releases it around the new year and dates each year's release on the bottle caps and labels to help those who age it. The beer also seems to vary slightly from year to year.

I prefer to drink Bigfoot fresh because that's when its huge hop flavors are the strongest. Over time the beer becomes more mellow and balanced, and who needs that?

My notes on the 2009 vintage:

Pours a deep copper in color with a sticky off-white head that leaves chunks of lace in my glass.

It's got that barleywine smell: Citrus hops mix with toffee and caramel notes and a hint of alcohol. Nice.

The taste is perfect. This is what I think of when I think barleywine. It's bitter and malty with lots of hop flavors and a nice warming finish. It is not just a bitter beer: This has depth.

The body is thick and smooth and almost chewy with its heft.

This is one of my most favorite beers. I could drink nothing but this for the rest of my life.

If you're in Citrus Park, check out the Mellow Mushroom and have a glass of Bigfoot.

Review: Leviathan (Imperial IPA)

I picked this up at Total Wine & More the other day: $3 a bottle. It's great to see more Harpoon brews in Florida. I thought we were fated to only get their hefeweizen and IPA.

Leviathan is a rotating release from Harpoon. Each iteration is a different extreme beer. They have also brewed a Baltic porter, strong pilsner and quadruple. This is the first Leviathan I've had.

My notes:

Pours a nice golden/copper in color with a big foamy off-white head.

Big citrus hop aroma.

The taste is sweet, bitter and hoppy. Surprise! This is a sweeter double IPA than most others. It is also more balanced: Instead of being a huge hop bomb, it's a large hop bomb. The sweet, almost sugary, flavors offset the bitterness.

The body is light but slick from the alcohol.

This is a fine beer, but at 10 percent, I'd only have one.

Review: Hop Stoopid

My co-worker Kat told me I needed to try this double IPA from Lagunitas since she knows how much I love Bell's Hopslam, which currently tied with Rogue's Imperial India Pale Ale as my No. 1 rated beer.

So when I was at Total Wine & More this week I picked up a 22-ounce bottle for $4.49, which is a great price. I am a sucker for hoppy beers.

I love this beer's name. The label description, which is weird but not the usual Lagunitas claptrap that makes absolutely no sense, seems to indicate that they used hop extracts.

My notes:

Pours a lovely copper in color with a big foamy off-white head.

The smell is all about the hops. Huge citrus notes. The only beer that smells hoppier is Bell's Hopslam, which smells just like Hop Stoopid, only stronger!

The taste is like the smell: Bitter and hoppy. Big, big citrus flavors mix with vegetable hop flavors. Little malt flavor. No balance. No problem.

The body is light, but not watery.

This is a great double IPA. A must-have for hopheads. Kat described it well: Hopslam light. And that's not derogatory.

Review: LongShot Cranberry Wit

This is the third of three beers in Samuel Adams' LongShot six-packs this year. As I've written before, LongShot beers are the winners of Sam Adams' annual homebrew competition.

I've been slacking on this review. I'm so late, it's probably not in stores anymore. I didn't see any at Total Wine & More on University Parkway the other day.

A witbier, or wheat beer, is similar to a German hefeweizen. Both beers are brewed with malted wheat, in addition to the regular malted barley. Witbiers are a Belgian style that also use spices like coriander and orange peel. German beers cannot use spice because of their famous purity law, the Reinheitsgebot, which prohibits the use of anything in beer other than water, malted grain, yeast and hops. I totally respect the German law, because it means you won't have junk like rice or corn put in your beer without your knowledge, but it prevents German brewers from making some really interesting beers with fruit, spices, honey, etc.

Wheat beers are almost always unfiltered and therefore cloudy. Yeast and other perfectly safe sediment will settle at the bottom of the bottle. You are supposed to pour two-thirds of the beer into a glass, then swirl the remaining beer in the bottle to stir up the compacted sediment, and finally pour that into the glass. Without the sediment, the typical wheat beer flavors are greatly subdued.

What are wheat beer flavors? Banana and clove, primarily. And these flavors don't come from bananas or cloves. Instead, they are esters (flavors) imparted by the yeast.

A lot of wheat beers in restaurants and bars are served with lemon or orange wedges. I avoid garnishes because the citric acid can kill the beer's head and garnishes mask the beer's flavor. Whether to garnish or not is a hot topic among beer geeks.

My tasting notes:

A cloudy straw-colored beer with a big, white foamy head. Lovely.

It has a spicy aroma of cranberries and earthy yeast.

The taste is lightly spicy and sweet from fruit flavors, yet it has the classic witbier esters of clove and banana. I also notice the grains of paradise that appear in other SA beers. It's very easy to drink.

This is my least favorite of the three LongShot beers this year. But that sounds a lot worse than it is. This is still a very good beer. It's light and fruity and refreshing. It's good for all the hot days here in Florida.

Like its two brethren, this beer should be added to Samuel Adams' regular lineup.

Deal or no deal?

A friend told me about a deal on beer at a local store the other day.

His news reminded me that sometimes deals on beer aren't deals at all. Occasionally beer is put on sale because it's old and past its prime. And while some strong beers can be aged, about 99.99 percent of beers are meant to be consumed within a couple of months after being brewed.

BeerAdvocate Magazine recently wrote about this topic. They have some tips to detect old beer.

The first is obvious: Check for a best-by or brewed-on date. For brewed-on dates, don't buy beer that's much more than three months old.

If beer doesn't have an easily-readable freshness date (I think all beer should), a clue that it's old is dust on the bottles.

New beers at Total Wine

I wrote earlier about Anderson Valley beers coming to the Sarasota Whole Foods. Today I went to Total Wine & More near Interstate 75 and they also are carrying the brewery's beers. I bought a six-pack of Hop Ottin' IPA.

There were some other news beers there, too: Stone Imperial Russian Stout, Sierra Nevada Kellerweis, Lagunitas Hop Stoopid and Harpoon Leviathan.

I've had the Stone beer before and it's good. The Harpoon, Lagunitas and Sierra Nevada brews are new to me. I bought some and will review them soon.

One of my favorite beers, Bison Organic IPA, was back on the shelf. (All links take you to BeerAdvocate's pages for each beer.)

It's easy to spend way too much money on beer these days.

World of Beer Sarasota-Manatee mini-update

Back in May I wrote about the World of Beer bar that's coming to University Park in August or September. Here's a map from their Web site:

I was in the neighborhood today and stopped by to check on their progress. They had more info in the window about what's coming: 30 taps, 500 beers. Fantastic. The inside was still a long ways from being completed, looked like they had dug a trench in the concrete for pipes and drains.

The window sign also said they are hiring and to visit www.wobusa.com/sarasota.html for more info and to apply.

Celebrate Independence Day with craft beer

I'll take the opportunity on the Fourth of July to remind everyone that July is American Beer Month. So while you're celebrating our independence this weekend, why not drink American beer, the same thing our founding fathers drank? And try a craft beer, something made by the little guy, not a giant multinational corporation.

For those beer drinkers out there who "only drink imports," I can guarantee you that the best beer brewed in the world is brewed here in the United States. Any import you like has an American counterpart that will be fresher than a beer that's been shipped across the ocean.

So have a great Independence Day, especially those of you who have to work -- I work at a newspaper and know what that's like.

I'll end with the final -- totally unrelated to beer -- sentence of the Declaration of Independence, where the signers, knowing full well that they had committed themselves and could not turn back, wrote:

And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

What I drank on my summer vacation

I said I'd write a post about my trip out West. With the long weekend, I can finally get around to it.

The West has lots of great craft beer, and Wyoming is no exception. Some of the craft beers I had there are Old Faithful Ale, Bitch Creek ESB (very good), Sweetgrass IPA, Moose Drool (a world-class brown ale brewed by Big Sky in Montana) and Red Lodge Pale Ale. It's nice to have craft beer available at almost every restaurant. We're not anywhere near that here in Florida.

After visiting Yellowstone National Park we drove south through Grand Teton National Park and stayed in Jackson, Wyo. There's a good brewpub there called Snake River Brewing. From my notes:

My wife and I came here on a Saturday night in early June. It was busy and a little loud, but that had to be expected. It's all nonsmoking, which is great.

As a hophead, I wish they had something hoppy, but the beers I had were very good. I had their OB-1 Organic Ale on cask, which was yummy. I also ordered a sample of their Backdraft Lager and their saison. Both were good.

My wife had their pesto and I had the SRB Cobb salad. Good food.

Our server, Matt, was quick and attentive.

Overall, this is a fine brewpub with more to offer than the standard pub fare and beer.

As a "Star Wars" geek I especially love the name of their organic beer. OB-1, Obi-Wan -- get it? Good stuff.

We also visited Squatters Pub Brewery in downtown Salt Lake City. Nice ambiance, but the food and the beers were so-so. The beer quality may be due to Utah's law requiring beer to be 3.2 percent alcohol or weaker, which is rather weak for beer. But there is one good thing about 3.2 percent beer: You can drink a lot more of it and not feel it!

I highly recommend going to Yellowstone and vicinity. That there's good craft beer there is simply icing on the cake.