beer NOLA

With the success of Abita’s Beer Dinners and Stein’s first one back in March, Martin Wine Cellar has jumped on the bandwagon and will be hosting their first beer dinner. Organized by Beer Portfolio Manager Jeremy Labadie, PJ Rosenberg and Keith Cox, the dinner will take place on Tuesday, June 17th at 6:30pm at the Metairie store location. Dan Shelton of Shelton Brothers, a beer importer based in Belchertown, Massachusetts will be in attendance as well. There are only about 8 tickets left, so if you wanna go, call Martin Wine Cellar at 504-896-7300 to reserve your tickets to the $50 all-inclusive dinner. The full five course menu complete with beer pairings is after the jump…
(more…)

It was great to go to the WYES Beer Tasting at its ol’ home at UNO Lakefront Arena. Sure the 2006 Tasting at the then deserted Riverwalk was pretty nice (sunny and spacious!), but last year’s Tasting at Generations Hall was horrible .. I swear in that overcrowded mess of a venue there were actual sections of pitch darkness in which they wedged in homebrewers to distribute their brews. But the Arena, while not exactly having great ambience, is spacious enough (just), and the circular layout means you’re never going the wrong way. My only wish (other than the aforementioned desire for more American craft/micro) is that WYES pushes this event out to 3 or even 4 hours. This year had huge turnout (over 3000 people!) and more brewers to boot. So please WYES, either make this event longer and make it a Tasting or keep it the current paltry two hours and turn it into a Binging. Anywho, on to the brews!

NOLA Brewing
I was looking forward to trying the brews from NOLA Brewing because it was the first public tasting of an entirely new and local brewery. The Brown and the Blonde were both very good, and I’m impressed I liked the Blonde at all since I usually don’t care for that style. Often times “Blonde” is just another name for a Golden or a limp ale that may as well be generic lager, so I’m glad their Blonde isn’t gutless. But like I said, that style’s not really my thing so I spent most of my time focusing on the Brown. It was different than I expected, it had a lighter, sharper, more effervescent mouthfeel to it than say a Brooklyn Brown Ale. I was also happy that unlike many Brown Ales out there, they didn’t decide to throw in nut flavorings or make it anything other than a Brown. So yeah, a nice, solid, surprisingly refreshing American Brown… well done guys! Of course I’ll have to reserve final judgement until this stuff is kegged and bottled.

(more…)

I wanted to wait until the right moment to talk about the WYES’ 25th Annual International Beer Tasting. When they first posted the announcement with date & location, there wasn’t a vendors list, so there wasn’t much to talk about. And then by the time they did post the vendor listing, well, I kinda forgot to check back .. my bad. So to start off, the event will be Saturday June 7th, from 6pm-8pm at UNO Lakefront Arena (head over to the WYES site for ticket info…)

The WYES event is kinda weird for a few reasons. I’m pretty sure that it’s the only beer “tasting” rather than beer fest. Never quite understood the title .. perhaps they’re just trying to class up beer by making it seem like a wine tasting? It’s also the only beer event I’ve ever been to, or heard of, where the majority of the beer present is provided by the local distributor rather than the brewery. Sure, everything that’s available for sale in the city will be there. However, it means there’s a major dearth of American craft and micro brews, mirroring store shelves in nola. So at the distributor booths, often the people hocking the beer don’t know much about good beer. When I ask “Can you tell me about this beer?” I want to hear more than “Well..uhh.. it’s a wheat beer .. from Belgium…” Thanks, I can read the bottle too, guy. But I’m not bitter, because the fest makes up for itself in a wide array of homebrewers. We don’t get eclectic beers from America’s most creative breweries, but we do get even crazier beers from locals, and as everyone knows, great inventions come out of people fiddling around in the garage or kitchen.

So with the silver anniversary of New Orleans’ only official beer fest (cause really, isn’t everyday a beer fest in this city?), I thought I’d prattle on a bit about what I’m looking forward to…

(more…)

When you combine a weekend with a beer related event, you’re already looking at a winning couple days, but when there’s TWO beer events going on, then it’s just a sign that god loves you and wants you to get drunk … and try some new beers.

Abita kicks off this weekend with another one of their Pub Crawls, this time in honor of Abita Wheat - the current seasonal beer. The Wheat is definitely the most quaffable of Abita’s brews, so the Wheat pub crawl is always my favorite, you can just pound through a dozen of them without even realizing you’ve been drinking at 4 bars for the last 6 hours.

As if that wasn’t good enough, the Whole Foods on Veterans is having their Summer Beer Tasting this weekend! Throughout the store there will be beer and food pairings, live music, give-aways, but most importantly FREE BEER!! Check it out on Saturday from Noon to 3pm

Check out the Abita Wheat Pub Crawl bar list after the jump…

(more…)

I’ve gotta admit upfront that I’m a real sucker for products with a great design behind their labeling, packaging, marketing, etc. So with that in mind, I’m really impressed with the whole aesthetic and branding behind BrewDog, a little brewery in Scotland.

Named for the brewmasters’s chocolate lab, and billed as “Beer for Punks,” this sorta seems like the craft beer for the same kinda indie punks that’d rock PBR. Despite the artisan-ness and only-a-year-old-ness of the brewery, there’s just something weathered and underground about them .. again, it’s probably just the label design.

As you can guess by now, these beers are now available in New Orleans at Martin’s Wine Cellar. Read on for the lineup of what we’re getting…

(more…)

I’ve always argued that what we lack in availability of beers from microbreweries from around the US, we make up for in beers from Europe.. specifically Belgium and England. In keeping with this trend, a slew of beers from these two drunken nations have recently dropped in on New Orleans.

While all of these beers are tasty and are worth a pint, a couple of these are real favorites of mine…

Young’s Double Chocolate Stout is an intense sweet stout from London with chocolate tones that are both over, under, and in the middle. It’s the chocolate milk shake of beers .. thick, creamy, malty, roasted, and damn right delicious. There’s also an interesting balancing act between the mild bitterness of the hops which break and give way to a mild sweetness from the malt; it happens every sip and I never get tired of it. This is one of those stouts, along with any of the Rogue stouts, that will convince non-stout drinkers that this genre of beer is neither defined nor dictated by Guinness. This is also one of the better beers for paring with dessert. Get it at Martin’s and Stein’s.

(more…)

 
The Abita Select Four Grain Dinner that I just posted about looks great, but I think this other Beer Dinner looks EVEN better. Dan Stein (Beer Geek and owner of Stein’s Deli), in association with Derek Lintern of Crescent City Homebrewers, Aaron Burgu (owner and chef of Patois), Kelly Picket and the staff of Stein’s Deli have created a dinner pairing some of the best beers you can buy in New Orleans with some of the best food you can eat in New Orleans.

The Dinner will take place on April 8th at Patois and will mark the 75th Anniversary of the End of Prohibition. The coolest thing about this dinner, is that not only will it be your standard beer and food pairing, but it will be incredibly educational AND the food will be cooked in beer, and made with beer ingredients. Things like hops, malt and unhopped wort will make their way into the recipe! Adventurous indeed. Check out the menu and pairings for the $90 (all-inclusive) Dinner after the jump…
(more…)

The only thing better than Beer, is a Beer Dinner. You get the best of both worlds, delicious beer with food paired around the beer to complement it (or is it the other way around?).

Abita continues their popular Abita Select Dinner Series on April 3rd at Dickie Brennan’s Steakhouse in New Orleans. The Select Dinner Series usually consists of an Abita being paired with a few courses, but more importanly, their latest Select brew is often paired with the main course. This time around Abita’s new Four Grain is being paired with an 8oz Rib Eye. I don’t have much information on the Abita Four Grain at the moment, obviously one of the grains will be barley .. I wonder what the other 3 could be? Is it just 4 different kinds of malt? Will they use the trendy new beer ingredient Sorghum? I’ll let you know as soon as I find out!

Everything looks great, including a Dessert paired with Abita Strawberry Harvest Lager which looks fantastic! Anywho, the menu for the $75 all-inclusive Dinner is after the jump.

(more…)

Sure, Georgia may have made it into the NCAA Tournament despite sucking all season and having to deal with a tornado and a double header.. but even more impressive than all that is Abita Turbodog’s entry and First Round win in Washington Post’s Beer Maddness; it’s like March Madness..but with beer!

Currently Turbodog is competing against Sam Adams Honey Porter in the Sweet Sixteen with a vote that’s almost completely split down the middle. Now I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that Sam Adams Honey Porter is a horrid drink, and Turbodog is better and should deserve your vote!

So head over to the Washington Post’s Beer Madness and vote often for Abita Turbodog and tell all your friends. You all have until March 22nd to send Turbodog into the Elite Eight.

The other beers in the Sweet Sixteen I like are: Ommegang Hennepin, Oxford Raspberry Wheat, Smuttynose Old Brown Dog, Brooklyn Lager, Raven Lager, Stone Pale Ale, and Troegs Hopback.

There’s something about aging a fluid in an oak barrel for a number of years that just makes it more awesome. And in the world of booze, just about everything that’s good and honest gets aged in an oak barrel by someone .. Whiskeys, rums, wines, etc. However beer is one of those things you never hear about getting aged.. but why not?

There’s been a growing trend in the past few years to take a beer and throw it in an oak barrel that was previously used to age some form of Whiskey. My first serious consumption of a serious attempt at oak aged beer was in Boston a couple years back when the Harpoon Brewery decided to take some of their 100 Barrel Series Barleywine and throw it in 4 different Bourbon casks: Jim Beam, Four Roses, Wild Turkey and Makers Mark. I was immediately hooked. You got the wonderful in your face slam and beer big taste of a Barleywine but with some of the more subtle flavors of a good Bourbon like vanilla, honey and peat.

It’s a pretty niche beverage .. after-all, Bourbon and Scotch drinkers usually can’t be bothered to drink beer, leaving it to a subset of craft beer geeks to drink the drink. So while I’ve had about six or seven Bourbon aged beers in the past couple years, I’ve never had one that was aged in a Scotch barrel. Most Scotches are aged in previously used Bourbon barrels .. so the difference in taste between Bourbon and Scotch should be pretty similar with a beer aged in Bourbon vs Scotch barrels: more earth and peaty flavors with a bit more of an astringent mouth feel.

So if you like beer, and you like Scotch, and you wanna see what would happen if the twain shall meet, then check out some of these new beers are are now available in New Orleans at Martin Wine Cellar and Stein’s Deli.

• Harviestoun Ola Dubh Special 12 Reserve
• Harviestoun Ola Dubh Special 16 Reserve
• Harviestoun Ola Dubh Special 30 Reserve
• J.W. Lees Harvest Ale (Aged in Calvados Casks)
• J.W. Lees Harvest Ale (Aged in Lagavulin Whiskey Casks)

The Harviestoun Ola Dubh series are all aged in Scotch barrels that were previously used to age Highland Park Scotch for the number of years indicated in the beer’s name. So that Special 12 Reserve should pickup some of the remaining sweeter and more vanilla-y flavors that you find in younger barrels, whereas the Special 30 Reserve should have a more earthy, oaky, peaty taste to it. There’s also the J.W. Lees Harvest Ale (a Barleywine style) aged in a Lagavulin (Scotch) barrel and a Calvados (Apple Brandy) barrel.

I haven’t had any of these yet, though I just picked up a bottle of the J.W. Lee Harvest Ale in Lagavulin cask and will be picking up one of the Harviestoun.