11.25.10

Happy Thanksgiving

Posted in Fermentation Lounge at 12:44 am by Scott

The holidays are here, which means kicking back with friends and family for a few tasty beverages.  Or possibly escaping from friends and family for a few tasty beverages.  It’s up to you.  As always, we will be open for our normal hours throughout the Thanksgiving weekend.  In the spirit of the holiday, feel free to bring any leftovers or snacks in this weekend to share with everyone in the lounge.  Also, in recognition of our many staff and friends who are vegetarians, we have adopted a turkey via Farm Sanctuary. One lucky bird will live out his full life on one very big large happy farm.

Here is what is on tap as of Wednesday night:

  • Blue Point Rastafa Rye - Amber with grainy rye malt goodness.
  • Dogfish Head Olde School Barleywine - Seasonal and strong, in a very limited release.
  • Kronenbourg 1664 - Because sometimes we like it French.
  • Lagunitas Brown Shugga - A seasonal brown ale with a definitive addition of brown sugar.
  • Lagunitas Pils - Light and easy to drink pilsner from California.
  • Mad River Jamaica Red - An amber from California with a touch of malt sweetness.
  • North Coast Old Rasputin - An angry and mysterious imperial stout.
  • Red Brick Oatmeal Porter - We like porters in the winter.  What can I say?
  • Rogue Chipotle - Yep, it’s got chipotle peppers in it.  You will either love it or hate it.
  • Stone Vertical Epic 2010 - A one time brew from Stone, this starts as a Belgian tripel and is infused with white wine gape juices during fermentation.
  • Terrapin So Fresh & So Green, Green - Limited release wet hopped ale from Athens.
  • Tilburg’s Dutch Brown - One of our all time favorite brown ales.

In the cooler we have kegs of:

  • Abita Select ESB2 - Sort of an imperial ESB with strong bready malts.
  • Boulder Cold Hop - Our last keg of the year of the seasonal British-style IPA.
  • Cigar City Tocobaga - An imperial red ale with a big hop finish.
  • Dogfish Head Chicory Stout - These guys have a tv show or something.
  • Erie Smoked Bender - One part Scottish ale, and one part smoke beer.
  • Harpoon Glacier Harvest - From their 100 barrel series, wet hopped with Glacier hops.
  • High & Mighty Home for the Holidays - Brown ale meets saison thanks to some wild yeast.
  • Ommegang Adoration - Spicy winter dark Belgian ale.
  • Sierra Nevada Bigfoot - Colder weather calls for barleywines.
  • Sweetwater Happy Ending - Dense and hoppy imperial stout.
  • Tripel Karmeliet - A golden ale with light bready yeast notes, and just a touch of lighter fruits on the finish.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

11.18.10

Blue beer & Brewmasters

Posted in Fermentation Lounge at 4:39 pm by Scott

We are very happy to be partnering with Team Up for Diabetes this Sunday night.  We will be coloring some beers blue on Sunday and donating to them a portion of the proceeds from the entire evening.  You can also snack on some blue cupcakes from the Cake Shop.  The goal of Team Up for Diabetes is:

This mission of this FIRST Team Type 1 “indoor cycling marathon” fundraiser is to promote diabetes awareness and exercise as one particular way of taking control of diabetes and obesity (which can lead to Type 2 diabetes). The funds you donate or raise will provide diabetes camp scholarships for children to be educated about living with diabetes. The money you raise or donate is also for insulin and diabetic supplies to be delivered by the team as well as sent to Rwanda on behalf of Team Type 1 in concert with Rotarian Action Group for Diabetes support of the International Diabetes Federation’s Life for A Child Program in Rwanda.

So on Sunday you can help out diabetic children in Rwanda BY DRINKING BEER.  That is about as awesome as charity gets.

Not enough?  Then stick around that same night for our monthly Irish Music Gathering at 8:00 and then stay with us as we watch the debut of Brewmasters at 10:00.  The first episode is all about the creation of Dogfish Bitches Brew, a beer which infamously lasted less than thirty minutes at the lounge before we were sold out. We are thinking that we will tap our keg of Olde School Barleywine for the occasion.

Other notes for the week: Stoned & Lonesome String Band is back this Monday at 9:00, and The Zach Bartholomew Trio returns Tuesday at 9:00.  Fermentation Market continues to come together, and you can follow the progress here.  December 3 is still our target date to open.

Here is what is on tap as of Thursday night:

  • Cigar City Maduro Brown - An oatmeal brown ale from Tampa.
  • Fuller’s London Porter - The epitome of the style and the source of the modern interpretation of the porter.
  • Lagunitas Pils - Light and easy to drink pilsner from California.
  • Mad River Jamaica Red - An amber from California with a touch of malt sweetness.
  • Paulaner Hefeweisse - Another of our favorite classic German wheat beers.
  • Rogue Brutal IPA - Copped bodied body with moderate hops.
  • Rogue Double Chocolate - The imperial version of their regular chocolate stout.  Bitter chocolate, and lots of it.
  • Sierra Nevada Northern Hemisphere Harvest - A wet hopped IPA that brings in earthy and grassy characteristics from the hops.
  • Smuttynose Winter Ale - A belgian dubbel with the slightest hint of roast.
  • Stone Vertical Epic 2010 - A one time brew from Stone, this starts as a Belgian tripel and is infused with white wine gape juices during fermentation.
  • Wexford Irish Cream - An Irish pub ale pouring from the nitro tap.
  • Woodchuck Pear Cider - Sweet, sweet pears.

n the cooler we have kegs of:

  • Abita Select ESB2 - Sort of an imperial ESB with strong bready malts.
  • Dogfish Head Olde School Barleywine - Seasonal and strong, in a very limited release.
  • Kronenbourg 1664 - Because sometimes we like it French.
  • Lagunitas Brown Shugga - A seasonal brown ale with a definitive addition of brown sugar.
  • Ommegang Adoration - Spicy winter dark Belgian ale.
  • Red Brick Oatmeal Porter - We like porters in the winter.  What can I say?
  • Tilburg’s Dutch Brown - One of our all time favorite brown ales.
  • Tripel Karmeliet - A golden ale with light bready yeast notes, and just a touch of lighter fruits on the finish.

Cheers!

11.11.10

Let’s go to the market

Posted in Fermentation Lounge at 5:55 pm by Scott

Let me just cut to the chase here: Fermentation Market is on the corner of All Saints and Railroad (right next to Bread & Roses) and will open on December 3.  Our focus is going to be on craft beer and earthy-friendly wines.  Like the lounge, the market will have limited space so we will use it only to sell great and tasty things that we love and can be tricky to find.  Our initial inventory will be worked out in the next week or two and we will get that posted online as soon as we do.  We will also carve out a little home on the web for updates, but until we do you can keep track of us on Facebook.

Next week’s glass giveaway is the supremely cool Delirium Noel glass, featuring the pink elephants leading Santa’s sleigh.  We only have a few of these, but will supplement them with the regular Delirium glasses as well.  Some seasonal kegs have arrived this week including Stone Vertical Epic 2010, Sierra Nevada Northern Hemisphere Harvest, and Smuttynose Winter Ale.

Here is what is on tap as of Thursday evening:

  • Cigar City Bolita Brown - Imperial brown ale with layered malts and toasted caramels.
  • Erie Railbender - Scottish-style ale with a solid amber body and hint of dark caramel.
  • Fuller’s London Porter - The epitome of the style and the source of the modern interpretation of the porter.
  • Great Divide Hercules - A big double IPA that lives up to its name.
  • Great Divide Hibernation - A dark and sticky, very sweet seasonal release from Colorado.
  • Okocim OK - Our favorite lager.
  • Rogue Double Chocolate - The imperial version of their regular chocolate stout.  Bitter chocolate, and lots of it.
  • Stone Smoked Porter - It’s been too long!  Dark and delicious with a hint of smoked peat.
  • Stone Vertical Epic 2010 - A one time brew from Stone, this starts as a Belgian tripel and is infused with white wine gape juices during fermentation.
  • Victory Old Horizontal - The 2009 vintage of the well named barleywine.
  • Wexford Irish Cream - An Irish pub ale pouring from the nitro tap.
  • Wychwood Hobgoblin - Amazingly smooth brown ale

In the cooler we have kegs of:

  • Abita Select ESB2 - Sort of an imperial ESB wutg strong bready malts.
  • Delirium Noel - This is for next week’s glass night.  Such a tasty Christmas ale…
  • Dogfish Head Olde School Barleywine - Seasonal and strong, in a very limited release.
  • Rogue Brutal IPA - Copped bodied body with moderate hops.
  • Sierra Nevada Northern Hemisphere Harvest - A wet hopped IPA that brings in earthy and grassy characteristics from the hops.
  • Smuttynose Winter Ale - A belgian dubbel with the slightest hint of roast.
  • Tripel Karmeliet - A golden ale with light bready yeast notes, and just a touch of lighter fruits on the finish.
  • Woodchuck Pear Cider - We love you, you crazy cider drinkers.

Lots more coming about the store.

Cheers!

11.06.10

Walking the boundary

Posted in Fermentation Lounge at 12:35 pm by Scott

When you push boundaries, sometimes you can wind up on both sides of them.  Case in point: cask night.  First up was the honey ale with honeydew melon and cucumber in the cask.  The cask had a small filter in the tap designed to keep sediment and yeast from flowing into the beer.  It immediately clogged up with bits of the vegetables.  Chris and I devised an extremely clever solution that consisted of: sort of poking at it.  What we learned is that casks under pressure are quite unforgiving.  The beer didn’t began to flow or trickle as much as it erupted at us like a fire hose.  Fun fact: after the beer on my vest dried out, I was left covered in tiny flakes of melon and cucumber for the rest of the night.

Anyway, the cucumber was very strong in the first cask and it wound up being a bit polarizing.  Most people either loved or hated it, with little in between.  To be honest, I LOVE this response.  I would much rather you have a strong reaction to an intense flavor, whether you love or hate the flavor, that to serve something bland that you will immediately forget.  The thing about this brew is that even though it was polarizing, the flavor was exactly as the brewery intended.  So all was good.

The second cask was tapped a little after 9:00, and I know a lot of you were sticking around just to taste it.  It was Pecan Pie: Southern Pecan Ale with chocolate and maple syrup.  Tyler tapped it to a round of applause from the bar.  We took a sip and got a sinking feeling that all was not right.  Sort of like that feeling that you get when you realize that the exotic dancer that you hired might actually be a dude.  The cask had become oxidized and was sour.  If you like sour beers, you might have really enjoyed it.  However, the beer was not as the brewer intended and, after a quick talk with Patrick from Lazy Magnolia, we immediately stopped serving it.  These things happen…casks are done on an individual and rare basis, using very unusual ingredients, so occasionally something can go wrong.  Patrick, who is a super super cool guy and hung out all night long and talked beer with everyone, was understandable mortified and promised us that they will whip up something cool for us in the very near future.

Speaking of the near future, two of our casks are currently in the hands of the master craftsmen at Terrapin and they have carte blanche on filling them.  We eagerly await to find out what they make for us.

Cheers!

11.04.10

Pecan Pie and Vegetable Salad

Posted in Fermentation Lounge at 9:09 pm by Scott

It is cask time once again!  So, a while ago we sent off one of our casks to our good friends at Lazy Magnolia to get filled up with some tasty beer.  Due to a little brewery mixup, our cask got sent off to another bar (who probably wondered why their cask had a big “FL” on it…)  Anyway, the brewery got the empty cask back and felt so bad that not only did they fill it up for us, but filled up and shipped out one of their own personal casks as well.  It is, perhaps, important to mention at this time that when they asked us what beer we wanted in the cask, we asked simply that the brewmaster “be creative”.  Creative they certainly were, and they sent us two casks which they named:

  • Pecan Pie - Southern Pecan with additions of maple syrup and chocolate.
  • Vegetable Salad - Southern Gold Honey Ale with additions of cucumber and honeydew melon.

Most cask additions (hops excluded) usually involve an ingredient that contains sugar.  Yeast eats sugar and turns it into alcohol in a process that we lovingly call fermentation.  This secondary cask fermentation gives an extremely unique flavor profile to the beer.  On Friday, we will tap at least one of these casks.  If we sell out pretty quickly, then we will go ahead and tap the second.  All of our casks are tapped using gravity, so if you see the giant cask sitting on top of the bar then we still have some left.  Also, there will be a limited amount of free glasses.  Hooray!

Some super cool new bottled beers in, including: Terrapin So Fresh So Green Green, Stone Double Bastard, Stone Vertical Epic 09, Stone Vertical Epic 10, and Bell’s Hell Hath No Fury.  Also, Kung Fu Girl Riesling makes its long awaited return to the by-the-glass wine list.

Here is what is on tap as of Thursday night:

  • Blue Point Hoptical Illusion - IPA with a nice touch of malt.
  • Blue Point Toasted Lager - Just enough of a malt body to bring a nice flavor to a light style.\
  • Cigar City Jai Alai - Incredibly good IPA from Tampa.
  • Cigar City Jose Marti - Big roast coffee and a hop finish.
  • Erie Fallenbock - Part Oktoberfest and part doppelbock.
  • North Coast Red Seal - Lightly hopped amber ale out of California.
  • Rogue Dead Guy - Light amber maibock.
  • Smuttynose Pumpkin - Our final pumpkin keg of the year.
  • Victory Moonglow - A weizenbock from our good friends in Pennsylvania.
  • Victory Old Horizontal - The 2009 vintage of the well named barleywine.
  • Weihenstephan Hefeweisse - The classic German wheat ale.

In the cooler we have kegs of:

  • Cigar City Bolita Brown - Imperial brown ale with layered malts and toasted caramels.
  • Eria Railbender - Scottish-style ale with a solid amber body and hint of dark caramel.
  • Great Divide Hibernation - A dark and sticky, very sweet seasonal release from Colorado.
  • Lost Coast Tangerine Wheat - Our favorite fruit beer is back.
  • Stone Smoked Porter - It’s been too long!  Dark and delicious with a hint of smoked peat.
  • Terrapin Big Hoppy Monster - Imperial red ale with a nice dose of hops.
  • Terrapin So Fresh So Green Green - Limited release fresh hopped ale.

Cheers!