beer NOLA

Originally slated for September at Chef Greg Sonnier’s Uptowner, the Oktoberfest Beer Dinner was going to be the third beer dinner this year co-hosted by Dan Stein (beer geek and proprietor of Stein’s Market & Deli). But then Gustav came, and Ike followed, and the dinner was pushed off to a then-undisclosed future date.

Now with October, and Oktoberfest, coming to an end, this beer dinner is now taking place this saturday, October 25th!

Before dinner begins, there will be a “cocktail hour” featuring beer from the soon to open NOLA Brewing Company. If that wasn’t enough of a perk aside from the delicious menu, rare (to New Orleans) beers will be given away as door prizes… like Deschutes Black Butte Porter, one of the best Porters I’ve ever had).

The full menu for the $75 (all-inclusive) beer dinner, as well as reservation information can be found after the jump… (more…)

On Wednesday, September 17th, fans of wine, beer and cheese met at Cork and Bottle to settle an argument: Which pairs better with cheese? Wine or beer? Conventional thinking would say that wine of course would be the winner.. There’s food and wine magazines, entire tomes written on the pairing, and shops dedicated to just the two products. But if you think about it, wine and cheese are often a catastrophe! While wine and cheese can get along from time to time, they don’t really go well together. Wine has enough acid as to block delicate flavors in cheese, and cheese has enough fat to block delicate flavors in wine. A bad or cheap wine can be helped out by cheese for this very reason; it blunts taste.

So how does beer work any better? The trifecta of low acidity, wider flavor gamut, and carbonation make it the perfect pairing for anything high in fat and delicate in flavor. To me, it’s the carbonation that makes beer win everytime… while your taste buds get bogged down by the fats in cheese, the bubbles in beer can break that up, while wine simply floats on top, and nukes any available taste bud left. This isn’t to say that there’s no such thing as a good wine and cheese pairing, nor is every beer and cheese pairing an outright winner. But to me, most of the time, the body and flavor of beer just works better with cheese.

Surprisingly, wine guy Jon Smith of Cork and Bottle (host of the event) started his introduction with this very concession and if that wasn’t enough, Richard Sutton of St. James Cheese further backed up beer’s often superiority in this pairing. At this point I realized that the tasting was going to be less of a showdown, and more of an eye opener. Everyone knows about the wine and cheese pairing, but how many people would wise up to good beer by the end of the night? (more…)

As Ike prepares to sprinkle and breeze on us all weekend, you can at least count on a couple of constants; Fall is approaching and with it, the Abita Fall Fest Pub Crawl. For the third time in as many years, the Fall Fest Pub Crawl takes place along the Tulane/Loyola bar route. While these certainly aren’t my favorite bars in town, Fall Fest is an enjoyable, easy to get into beer, and the Pub Crawl helps to introduce good beer to people at a young(er) age.

If you like Abita Amber, you’ll dig Fall Fest… same deal as last time, $1 per beer at each stop. Full bar list after the jump… (more…)

As I sat there watching an exciting 1st, bit of a 3rd, and 4th quarter of yesterday’s Saints/Bucs game, I noticed one commercial over and over. Being forcefully drilled into the viewer in a way that only one beer company can do, ads for Budweiser American Ale kept smacking me in the face during just about every commercial break.

What kept making me chuckle each time this commercial aired, however, is that they chose September 2008, just a couple months after being bought out by the Belgian/Brazilian juggernaut that is InBev, to launch a beer called American Ale. Whether it’s just bad timing, or them pandering to those that clung to Bud after Miller and Coors were bought out by foreign companies years ago is anyone’s guess. What’s next, Guinness American Stout? Stella Ameritois? Coronamerican?

So in response to the thousands of airings of the commercial during this football game and during all the rest of the season, here’s a list of actual American Ales you can get in New Orleans to drink while watching the Saints head to the Superbowl!
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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.

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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.

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