beer NOLA

 
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…
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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.

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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.

Just a quick note that Troegs’s current seasonal beer, the Nugget Nectar is now available at Martin Wine Cellar and Stein’s Deli. With a current A grade average among the 530 people that have reviewed it on BeerAdvocate, this is surely a beer you’ll want to check out.

It’s a pretty interesting concoction .. it’s got tons of hops and could be considered an Imperial IPA, but at the same time is sweet and malty enough to be an Amber. That’s pretty much how it goes down too; it tastes sweet, then bitter, then sweet again.Get it while it’s available. There are only 15 cases available in the entire city between these two stores.

If you’re like me, then every few weeks you wonder how long it’s been since you wrestled up a crew of friends and made the trek up to the Northshore to go on an Abita Brewery tour.

It was several months ago when this thought crossed my mind, and I got a group together and was all ready to go. I went to the Abita site and checked the Visit link for directions and then I saw it: a short message saying that tours were canceled while they renovated the brewery .. and there was no estimated time of completion.

Weeks and months passed with no change to this short and to the point note on their site… the year on the calendar ticked up a number .. Mardi Gras came and went … and still nothing. I was just about to give up hope, after all it had been nearly six months since the tours ended with nary an update when I decided to give the brewery a call to see what was up. My timing couldn’t have been more perfect. Without anymore storytelling, here’s the pertinent info:

Abita Brewery Tour Times

Wednesday - Friday @ 2pm
Saturdays @ 11am, 12pm and 1pm

I’m pretty impressed that they’ve added some weekday tours and added an extra timeslot to their Saturday tour.. it’s obvious that Abita keeps getting bigger and they keep adopting the practices of other regional craft breweries.

Welcome back Abita Tours, the only brewery tours in the area that actually serve beer on the premises.

Just a quick reminder that tonight is the Abita Red Ale Pub Crawl over in the Bywater.

Markey’s Bar / 640 Louisa St / 6pm-8pm (Registration)

Bud Rips / 900 Piety St / 8pm-9pm

Mimi’s in the Marigny / 2601 Royal St / 9pm-Till

Here’s constructed a Google Map with the bars which you can check out here.

I’m pretty interested in checking out Bud Rips. My buddy Cameron has this book called Obituary Cocktail by Kerri McCaffety about various great bars in the city. Here’s a quote from the book about Bud Rips, that Cameron was gracious enough to type out for me:

And at the intersection of Piety and Burgundy is Bud Rip’s bar, the Preservation Hall of New Orleans drinking culture. A cavernous corner storehouse with no sign outside contains one of the Ninth Ward’s hidden treasures. Unchanged for over a century, the interior is covered by the pressed tin of another time and whiskey and conversation flows generation after generation.

When he bought the bar his wife calls “a non-proft organization” in 1960, the rule was men only. Bud didn’t want couples arguing in his bar.

As always, the first 300 people to show up and register will get a free tshirt that you’ll eventually lose through your drunken stupor later in the night.

Oh and Kerri McCaffety has an Obituary Cocktail website, dedicated to the great bars of New Orleans. She even puts on meetups so that people can get together and check out these places.

If you need a beer made en masse in the New Orleans area, but you don’t feel like building a brewery, then Covington’s Heiner Brau has become the brewery to turn to. Sure, they make their own tasty beers (well except the Kolsh, but that’s just because I don’t like Kolsh), but they also do contact brewing for Zea, Big Easy/Tiger Town Beer, Dixie for a while, and various house beers for various local restaurants.

As a business, they’re the most diverse and interesting brewery in the New Orleans area and yet, they’ve never really offered tours since they started up a little over two years ago. Well that’s finally changed, as Heiner Brau now offers tours every Saturday at 10, 10:45 and 11:30am.

You get to tour the brewery, learn about their beer types, learn about the brewing process and the final packaging and distribution process. Sounds great, but there’s something pretty important missing from that list. For some reason, they’re not allowed to serve beer on the premises. So despite getting to learn all about their beers through words and pictures and intricate hand gestures, you don’t actually get to taste any of their beers.

One of the highlights, if not THE highlight of the Abita brewery tour is being able to taste their beers, right out a keg, made probably the day before and filled just a few feet away. It’s freshness you can’t get anywhere else … In fact, I swear I had a Purple Haze at the brewery once and saw raspberry pulp (or was it the seeds) in my cup! I’m glad Heiner Brau is finally offering tours. They have a great operation, an incredibly knowledgeable and talented Brewmaster, and are in a cool building in downtown Covington .. but I hope, for the sake of brewery tour goers everywhere, that they offer tastings just like Abita and every other brewery in the country (world?).

Available at Martin’s on March 7th, Monchshof Schwarzbier and Kapuziner Weisse will be available in 5 liter mini-kegs.

Schwarzbiers are a dark lager; they may look like a Guiness, but they’re actually pretty light in body despite the color of the beer. And obviously, the Weisse is a hefeweizen style beer which is very highly rated over at BeerAdvocate.

Although these are among the tastiest beers you can get in a mini-keg (at least locally), I have never won a battle against mini-kegs and have instead always had foamy beer all the counter and my shoes.

Originally an Abita Brewpub exclusive, Abita’s Strawberry Harvest Ale is back for another strawberry season! It’s kinda like their Purple Haze, but instead of raspberries it’s..surprise surprise.. Ponchatoula Strawberries.

It’s pretty easy to mess up a fruit beer, but Abita seems to be batting a thousand. It’s also a great site to see, walking into The Bulldog on a warm Spring afternoon and seeing almost everyone, men included, with a clutter of strawberry beer bottles in front of them.

Get it while it’s..cold? It wont be around for too long, selling out much faster last year than the year before.