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Needless to say, I’m a big advocate of beer rather than wine ’round the Thanksgiving dinner table. And I’ve written about it at Thanksgiving time every year the blog’s been around (last year’s post here). And the fact remains, if you want to wax traditional this holiday, than wine has no place at the Thanksgiving feast. The Pilgrims, after all, drank tankards of ale with their meal. It’s even been suggested that the reason the colony ended up where it did was because the Pilgrims had run out of beer and needed to set up shop somewhere quickly so they could begin brewing more. William Bradford, the father of American Thanksgiving, is oft quoted as writing,

“We could not now take much time for further search [for an ideal destination,] our victuals being much spent, especially our beer.”

To that end, the folks at SeriousEats.com have come up with a list of what they believe to be the perfect beers for your Thanksgiving meal this year. While it’s definitely an article worth your time, I’ve personally only had a few of the brews on their list but it sounds like they did pretty extensive research (poor them) to whittle down the list and have very good reasons and explanations for choosing the beers they did. Their recommended Thanksgiving beers:

• Bière de Garde (Southhampton Brewery)
• French Style Country Ale (Two Brothers)
• Ashland Amber (Caldera Brewing)
• Singel Ale (Witkap Pater)
• Kerberos Tripel (Flying Dog)
• 2° Below (New Belgium)
• Frambozen (New Belgium)
• Levitation Ale (Stone Brewing)

Personally, I’ll be choosing a bottle of Allagash Fluxus ‘09 to accompany my Thanksgiving feast. The beer having been brewed with black pepper, sweet potatoes, I think it will compliment my meal nicely, provide a little bit of a palate-cleansing bite (from the black pepper) and enough backbone (from the malts and the yams, which add significant body) to stand up to the hearty Thanksgiving dishes. What beers will you be drinking this holiday?

This is a guest post by Russ Phillips — one half of TwinBeer.com (the only international beer blog run by identical twins). Check out his blog posts here and follow TwinBeer on Twitter @TwinBeer. If you’d like to contribute a guest post to BlogAboutBeer.com, please feel free to contact me.

Cranberry Lambic, two simple words that push the tongue out of any beer lover’s mouth. The fruitcake of beers, Cranberry Lambic is one of those beers that stay in the back of your fridge for way too long. Eventually you break down sometime in March and either pour it out or give it to an unsuspecting, non-beer drinking friend under the guise of it being a “not too bad fruit beer”. It truly is amazing that most of the beer drinking public is so unattached to this offering, especially after you consider that it will be celebrating its’20th birthday next year!

First brewed back in 1990, that’s right folks almost two decades ago, Cranberry Lambic is a regional take on an old Belgian style, only it’s not really. Lambics are traditionally fermented spontaneously by allowing the wild yeasts in the air to settle in the open fermentation tanks. Cranberry Lambic is fermented by having a Belgian-style yeast strain added to the wort at a scheduled time during the brewing process, which is the opposite of spontaneous if you ask me.

Sam Adams describes their Cranberry Lambic this way:

“A Belgian-style fruit beer that draws its flavor not just from the cranberries it is brewed with, but also from the unique fermentation character imparted by a rare wild yeast strain. The result is a flavor rich in fruitiness and reminiscent of cranberries, bananas, cloves, and nutmeg. The yeast fermentation also creates a slight sourness on the sides of the palate, a signature of the original Belgian lambics.”

If I had never had this beer, which I wish I could say is true, I’d probably say that it sounds pretty decent and I’d certainly give it a try. Unfortunately for poor old Cranberry Lambic, the word is out on how not-so-great it is so regardless of what the commercial descriptions says the populous says otherwise. Personally, I find it sickeningly sweet and undrinkable but that is just me…or is it. A simple search on the interweb brings up these classic quotes:

“Cranberry flavored urine, served as an alcoholic beverage. Made by Samuel Adams. Comes in holiday pack.” – Urban Dictionary

“If you’re going to call your beer a “lambic” at least make a true attempt to create a lambic. This is nothing more than a fruit beer, an unbalanced one and a very misleading beer. – Todd Alström of BeerAdvocate

If that isn’t enough, the two largest beer review sites (BeerAdvocate and ratebeer) have numbers that speak volumes on just how poor this beer is. Over at BeerAdvocate, after 757 reviews Cranberry Lambic has an average rating of C. This is the lowest average for any Sam Adams beer with over 4 reviews other than the mistake that was the 1790 Root Beer Brew from their Patriot Brew Collection (198 reviews with an average of C-). On RateBeer, after 934 ratings, it has an average of 2.5 out of 5. It falls into the 14% percentile which means it’s pretty much at the lower end of mediocrity. The people have spoken!

The saddest thing is that Cranberry Lambic is merely a “holiday” release and this means its only available a few months of the year and even at that it is only packaged in the Sam Adams Holiday Pack which only contains three bottles of the stuff! I feel for you Cranberry Lambic, I really do. You are the black licorice lovers of the beer world. To those that love it, you know who you are, I am sure you look forward to the holidays so that you can hit up all your friends for their leftover bottles. I say, go for it. You are doing the beer drinking populace a favor!

Cheers to you Sam Adams for almost twenty years of defying popular interest and brewing Cranberry Lambic. Either you’re still trying to get rid of bottles from the first year it was brewed or you truly don’t care what people have to say about your beer. Either way, I commend you for your stubbornness!

On a closing note, if all else fails and you’ve got some bottles of this in your fridge that your drain wouldn’t drink, you could always put your apron on and make some Cranberry Beer Bread! I found this recipe over at Democratic Underground:

Cranberry Beer Bread:
3 c flour
2 tsp baking powder
0.5 tsp salt
0.5 c sugar
3 tbsp vegetable oil
12 oz CRANBERRY LAMBIC
0.5 c dried cranberries

Preheat oven to 180ºC/350ºF and lightly grease a loaf pan.

In very large bowl, whisk together dry ingredients. Stir in cranberries. Make a well in the centre and add vegetable oil and beer. Stir just until no streaks of flour remain. Pour batter into prepared pan.

Bake 55-60 minutes, until top springs back when lightly pressed. Turn out of the pan and allow to cool on wire rack.

It really hadn’t hit me that the end of a decade, the first decade of the twenty-first century — one in which I graduated from high school (early in the decade) and college (late in the decade); one in which I turned twenty-one and one in which my love of Better Beer blossomed — is only a few weeks away. It’s really hard to believe.

Anyway, that’s neither here nor there. What’s more important is what made me realize that thought in the first place: the Paste Magazine 25 Best American Breweries of the Decade (2000-2009) list, which was released just a few days ago. I’ll let you read the entire list for yourself — which includes the location, incorporation date, editorial comments and staff favorite brew of each brewery — but I do have to say that I agree with just about the entire list. One which includes such important nods as Brooklyn (No. 23), Ommegang (No. 22), Stone Brewing (No. 20), Oskar Blues (No. 16), Rogue (No. 14), Bell’s (No. 11), Russian River (No. 7), and Victory (No. 4).

I’m sure that if I thought about it long enough, I would think of some breweries who deserve to be on the list and aren’t. And I might re-arrange the list a bit (of course it’s nothing more than a subjective list by the editorial staff at a mid-level Indie Mag, but still…), but the fact is that all of the breweries on the Paste list definitely deserve the nods they got.

Of course I must give great props to local favorite Allagash Brewing Co., who received the designation of the 2nd best American craft brewery of the decade (and the only Maine brewery on the list)! And naturally, to Dogfish Head Brewing Co. for their not surprising what-so-ever number one bid. Congratulations to all the breweries on the list, and keep up the great work as we enter the 2010’s. Cheers.

I’m just back from an exhausting five-day whirlwind trip through our Nation’s Capital where unfortunately my beer-buying opportunities were limited. Mostly because many of the craft beer stores I visited all had one major flaw in common: they didn’t sell individual 12 ounce bottles.

While most of the stores I visited had very good selections of beer I can’t find here in Maine — saw lots of Bells, Troegs, Oskar Blues, etc. that I wanted — none of the stores would let me break up a six pack for an individual bottle or even to create my own mix-a-six.

When traveling, I like to buy as many different brands of craft brew as I can — especially ones I can’t find at home — so I can try new beers, styles, breweries, etc. With limited trunk and wallet space, I’m not about to go out and buy 10 different six-packs of beer just to try new things. I would, however, buy 10 or 12 individual bottles of different beers in a heartbeat.

So why wasn’t I able to? Most of the liquor stores I’ve been to throughout New England will let you buy individual 12 oz bottles of beer (or at least from some of their stock, if not all of it) but this didn’t seem to be the case in D.C. — is it a city law that you can’t break up six packs, or just a dumb business practice? Wouldn’t it make more sense, from a business standpoint, to sell a dozen individual bottles to the I’m sure many beer-savvy travelers who come through the city with the same sentiment as I had than to lose my business all together? I don’t get it.

The world’s most expensive bottle of beer is heading to the auction block this weekend. And is expected to fetch a winning bid of anywhere from $4,000 to $8,000. A price which makes the cost of the Sam Adams Utopias look like chump change.

The bottle is a 62-years-old bottle of Lowenbrau which had been discovered (and signed) by a New Jersey firefighter in 1937 at the site of the historic Hindenburg disaster. The gentleman who was the Fire Chief in Matawan, N.J, at the time of the disaster recovered six bottles of Lowenbrau and a silver pitcher while cleaning up in the wake of the crash. He buried them in a nearby field when the area was sealed off and later dug them up,. giving five of the bottles to the members of his squad and keeping one and the pitcher for himself. According to ABC News,

The bottle, along with a silver-plated pitcher also discovered by fire Chief Leroy Smith at the scene of the disaster and estimated to fetch $17,000 to $22,000, is part of an auction of Hindenburg memorabilia going under the hammer on Saturday.

Scorch marks on both the bottle and the pitcher bear silent witness to the historic inferno.

“About 20 percent of the beer evaporated from the bottle. Some of the label is still intact and you can make out ‘Lowenbrau’ and ‘Munich.’ The label is heavily browned,” said Aldridge.

The heat from the fire caused the seams of the pitcher’s handle to pop, Aldridge said. The pitcher bears the logo of the Deutsche Zeppelin Reedrei airline that operated the famous Hindenburg.

Unfortunately, even if you shell out for the bottle of brew, you won’t be able to drink it. About 20% of the beer has already evaporated from the bottle and the liquid that remains is putrid and undrinkable. That being said, it’s still a great gift for the wealthy history buff who has everything…

[image via ABC News]

I need a haircut and a less goofy smile...

Unfortunately friend and Maine Beer Writers’ Guild booth-mate Josh at BrewsAndBooks.com beat me to the summary post — it’s taken me three days to recover — of this year’s Maine Brewers Festivals and he touched on everything I wanted to make a point of saying. I think the biggest single take-away from this year’s festival, though, was what a huge improvement it was over past years.

A combination of factors came into play in improving the festival – a larger variety of the state’s breweries so that there were more offerings than the normal English-style ales; a better floorplan (fewer non-beer-related booths) which resulted in more room to spread out and hang out when not in line for beer; and probably most importantly, an earlier start time for the evening session (which cut down on possible pre-gaming, so a lot fewer people arrived already trashed). All factors which came together to turn this once depressing brewfest — so much so that in 2007 Allagash actually threw their own party at the brewery the day of the festival to try and draw crowds away from the official festival — into an awesome time well worth the price of admission.

Running a booth was a lot of fun; we got to meet a lot of new and interesting people, talk a lot of beer, have a quiet place to hang out, get some great promotion for the blog(s) and the Writers’ Guild itself, and (probably because of the press passes) got us a whole lot of extra beers beyond our allotted tickets. Some of the beer highlights of the day were definitely having Bar Harbor Brewing’s Cadillac Mountain Stout of draught for the first time; a bourbon barrel-aged version of the Lake Trout Stout from Sebago Brewing; and of course the Spring Peeper Ale on draught from the Maine Beer Company (who I’m a big fan of, in case you couldn’t tell) – the beer which ran dry before anyone else’s at the festival (and 15 minutes faster in the 2nd session than the first).

So there you have it. If you’d like to see more news, reviews and photos from the Festival, check out the #mebrewfest hashtag, the MEBrewFest flickr page, Sam Cousins’ photo page, and the Maine Brewers Festival Facebook page. And I never thought I’d say this the last time I was there but I seriously can’t wait for next year’s festival. See you in 2010!

We’ve added a Flickr photostream of pictures from the #mebrewfest to www.flickr.com/photos/mebrewfest and you can see lots of fun twitpics from @shipyardbrewing and @seadogbrewing of the Maine Beer Writers Guild and Maine Brewers Guild table. And don’t forget to check out blogaboutbeer.com/mebrewfest for up-to-the-minute Tweets from everyone at the festival. And by all means, if you’re here (or going to be here) come say hi! Cheers.

Just a reminder that Josh (from brewsandbooks.com) and I are blogging, Tweeting and streaming live from the 2009 Maine Brewers Festival all day long today. If you’re going to be here, please be sure and stop by and say hi, or have any questions about beer you have answered. If you’re not here or are coming later and still want to be part of the action, you can keep track of all of the #mebrewfest talk on Twitter all day long in real-time at www.blogaboutbeer.com/mebrewfest. We’ll see you here!

Of course it’s always a treat to see local boys doing well, so I was pleased to hear the news this morning that Shipyard’s XXXX IPA (the third installment in the brewery’s four-beer-strong Puglsey Signature Series) recently won a silver medal at the Stockholm Beer and Whiskey Festival in the “Ale Modern Style 6% and Above” category. According to the Shipyard press release, the Stockholm Beer and Whiskey Festival is one of Europe’s largest trade and consumer shows and Shipyard was just one of ten U.S. breweries to medal at the festival.

As I have mentioned before, I am quite happy to see Shipyard working outside of their comfort zone a bit and pushing their own boundaries in the Pugsley Signature Series to produce something other than traditional English-style ales. And in my opinion the result has been four of the best beers the brewery has ever produced.

Along the same vein, the brewery has also announced the release of a small handful of bottles of the Pugsley Barleywine — the first beer in the Pugsley Series — which have been cellar aging for more than 10 months. The bottles, which will look like the original Barleywine 22 ounce bombers only with a gold “Cellar Aged” sticker on them, will be available at select locations across Maine and Florida through December (or while supplies last). Of the aged beer, Pugsley comments,

“As this beer has aged, the flavors have developed to become more complex.”

If you happen to spot any of the cellared Barleywine in the next few weeks, please leave a comment on this post as to where you saw it. It’ll be a fun little game of Where’s Waldo. And congrats to Shipyard for the on-going success of the Pugsley Series!

I’m really not sure how I missed this one when it first arrived but I discovered these videos yesterday and thought that they were so good, I wanted to make sure no one else missed them either.

Apparently the longer version of the first video embedded below served as the introduction to the keynote speech by Greg Koch, CEO of the Stone Brewing Co, at the 2009 Craft Brewers Conference in Boston, MA earlier this year. Since then, the video has become the focal point of IamaCraftBrewer.com and has made its way around Twitter and the rest of the social Interwebs. According to the site,

“I Am A Craft Brewer” is a collaborative video representing the camaraderie, character and integrity of the American Craft Brewing movement. Created by Greg Koch, CEO of the Stone Brewing Co. and Chris & Jared of Redtail Media…and more than 35 amazing craft brewers from all over the country. The video was shown to a packed audience of 1700 craft brewers and industry members at the 2009 Craft Brewers Conference as an introduction to Greg’s Keynote Speech entitled “Be Remarkable: Collaboration Ethics Camaraderie Passion.”

There are now 3 videos featured on the site itself, with links at the end of each video to a few more responses. The videos are the edited-down 3 minute version of the introduction video (seen below), a 4+ minute original version and Koch’s 46+ minute keynote address itself. And then there’s the other video I embedded below which is a response to the original introduction, which was produced by the same folks later in the summer.

The bottom of the homepage at IamaCraftBrewer.com says “A program is in development to include even more of America’s amazing craft brewers. Please stay tuned!” – from these videos alone, I can’t wait to see what it is. Do yourself a favor and watch at least these two videos if not all of them. They truly embody why this is such a great and such a fun industry to be a part of or a fan of. Watch them – they’ll leave you feeling warm & fuzzy and in need of a good brew. Enjoy and here’s to (better) beer!