April 23, 2013
I’m usually not a big “Beer Fest” guy. While the chance to taste rare beers and rub elbows with brewery personnel always sound enticing, in practice the typical Beer Fest experience often doesn’t live up to the hype, for reasons we’ve laid out before. Given the choice, I’ll take a bottle-sharing session and conversation with good friends, or a trip to my favorite pub, over the bustle and stress of the typical festival. However, there was nowhere in the beer-consuming universe I would rather have been on Saturday than Release the Firkins, Pittsburgh’s first cask ale festival that kicked off the city’s second annual beer week.
THE BEER
The beer was uniformly excellent. One strength of the cask festival concept is that even familiar beers become new experiences when served from a firkin in the proper manner. I’ve had Bell’s Two Hearted Ale hundreds of times, perhaps thousands; on Saturday I got to taste as it does essentially straight from the fermenter. Another advantage compared to kegs is that breweries can use the vessels as randalls, dry-hopping or adding other ingredients right in the cask, making each firkin a potential one-off. Sure, you’ve had Founder’s Centennial, but the classic IPA served fresh off a double-dry hop is a different animal altogether. You’ve had Weyerbacher Merry Monks Trippel, but what about “Mojito-style” served on lime and mint? Some of the experimentation worked better than others, but it was all interesting and made every tap worth trying.
For me, unsurprisingly, the hoppy beers were the star of the show. I’ve stated my love for Fat Head’s Head Hunter at length, but as the brewery continues an expansion process, it can be difficult to find at the height of freshness around town. The Simcoe double-dry-hopped version at RtF was a perfect distillation of the complexity of this fruity, piney hop- with just a touch of that distinctive cat pee zest people love or hate. I love it, and along with many others returned multiple times to the busy Fat Head’s tap.
If hops aren’t your thing, there were options to suit every taste. The first cask upon entering the festival hall was New Holland’s Dragon’s Milk, which was extremely popular. I heard multiple festival-goers state they’d “never tried anything like it”. I love to witness craft beer conversions, and the New Holland table was a force for evangelism on Saturday. Other highlights from the darker side of the malty spectrum included Flying Dog’s Pearl Necklace Oyster Stout dry-hopped with CTZ and East End’s Chocolate Covered Cherry Stout. Smoked beer lovers had Fat Head’s Up in Smoke, and Pittsburgh’s own Arsenal brought a Centennial Hopped Cider that was absolutely delicious, and their Picket Bone Dry Cider that served as a nice palate-cleanser to the barrage of flavorful cask ales.
Read the rest of this entry »
5 Comments | 
Beer Culture, Beer Festivals, Beer Industry | Tagged: Cask ale, Firkin, Highmark Stadium, Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh Craft Beer Week, Release the Firkins | 
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Posted by Slouch Sixpack
April 10, 2013
“We’re doing this the right way.”
Hart Johnson, official Piper’s Pub bartender, Piper’s unofficial beer coordinator, and Secretary for Pittsburgh Craft Beer Week 2013, lays out his plans for the city’s first Real Ale Festival: “We’re not rolling the firkins down the hill that day and hoping for the best. Everything will be properly vented and served the way it’s supposed to be.”
The American craft beer scene often resembles The Blob- enveloping and co-opting brewing ingredients, styles, and techniques from all over the world. If it works and tastes good, someone will use it, from New Zealand hops to yeast gathered from a bottle of Rochefort 10. But cask ale served in the British tradition has been relatively slow to catch on at festivals and beer bars in the states. Why? To paraphrase Johnson, it’s a pain in the ass.
Compared to kegs, serving cask ales is a messy and time-consuming proposition. During conditioning, they must be kept be kept at 50-60 degrees and ideally served below 55. They must be handled with care and allowed to sit undisturbed for at least a day to allow the yeast to drop and form a layer of sediment. As any homebrewer knows, carbonating and conditioning in the bottle is an inexact science, and it is the same with cask ales. The level of carbonation in each firkin will vary, and brewers opt to add sufficient amounts of priming sugar to make sure the cask is carbonated enough- after all, over carbonation can be fixed by slowly venting the gas, but there is no cure for a firkin without enough fizz.
Read the rest of this entry »
6 Comments | Beer Culture, Beer Festivals | Tagged: Beer, Cask ale, Highmark Stadium, Pittsburgh Craft Beer Week, Real Ale | Permalink
Posted by Slouch Sixpack
April 8, 2013
Envision a store that treats beer like what it is- a perishable item that must be consumed at its peak of freshness, no different than produce, meat, or dairy products (minus the food-borne illness risks). Every item for sale in this store requires the producer to display the packaged-on date.
Just like at the grocery store, the most age-sensitive products are kept in coolers around the periphery- in this case the Pales Ales, IPA’s, and other beers that rely on fragile hop oils for flavor and aroma. No more breweries jockeying for sovereign shelf real estate through schwag and more nefarious means- these beers are grouped in coolers by packaged date: <30 days, <60 days, <90 days. Beyond 90 days these beers are relegated to a separate section of the store, where customers pay the discounted rates due of products past their best.
In the center of the store sit the beers that age with a little more dignity- the malty Stouts, Scotch Ales, styles of the Belgian persuasion. These too, on a more case-by-case basis, are sent to the discount shelf when the time is right. This decision is made by the proprietor, who cares about freshness as much as his most ardent consumer, and who instills this belief in his educated staff. Read the rest of this entry »
12 Comments | Beer Culture, Beer Industry | Tagged: Beer Store, Fresh Beer | Permalink
Posted by Slouch Sixpack
April 5, 2013
While enjoying a nice Southern California morning the other week, a conversation with a friend who had spent the last 7 years of his life living in China quickly turned from surfing to beer (as Aleheads conversations often do). We were discussing the burgeoning beer business and how it is gradually catching on in places that one does not usually associate with beer, such as Central America and Japan. I mentioned how cool it would be to be a “beer pioneer” in one of these places, sent by the hop gods to rescue a population from the bland, mass produced pale lager that had come to define their regions beer, earning the respect and admiration from locals and expats alike.
The conversation then went something like this:
Me: “I bet China would be an interesting place to open a craft brewery. I wonder if it would catch on, or how people would react to beers that are so drastically different from what they are used to.”
Friend: “Oh, they totally have those in China. They have for years.”
Read the rest of this entry »
10 Comments | Ale Factories, Beer Culture | Tagged: boxing cat brewery, China craft beer, china craft brewing | Permalink
Posted by Jimmy Hoppa
March 27, 2013
When discussing the greatest brewing states, the same names pop up each time: California, Oregon, and Colorado are on everyone’s list. Michigan and North Carolina continue to make strides. But a real dark horse candidate is Pennsylvania. Consider the following:
- ► A rich, arguably unrivaled brewing tradition and history.
- ► The best and most successful US-owned competitor to AB/InBev and Miller Coors mass-marketed lagers in Yuengling.
- ► Respected and award-winning regional players like Victory and Troegs.
- ► Entrenched micros that have been making great beer since the late 1900’s (Stoudts, Weyerbacher, Penn)
- ► Newcomers shaking up the production scene from all corners of the state (Tired Hands, Lavery, Helltown)
Throw in the (very) gradually loosening Blue Laws and vibrant beer weeks in the cultural capitals of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, and the state of brewing in Pennsylvania has never been brighter. Yet one area this Commonwealth falls short in comparison to other states is that of Prestige Beer. Hype. The White Whales of beer trading circles like Founders KBS, Deschutes Abyss, Cigar City Hunahpu, Three Floyds Dark Lord. Big, barrel-aged beers that throw the beer geeks in a tizzy.
Some may argue that this is not a bad thing. Perhaps there is too much hype in beer. But since I don’t live in Michigan, Oregon, Tampa, or Indiana I have little chance of finding these prestige beers on my local shelves. I do, however, live in Pennsylvania. So the greedy little child in me wants more, despite the plethora of great beer already available to me. I want the barrel-aged barleywines and stouts topping the RateBeer Best of Lists that my friends can’t get. I want to taunt them. I wants to hoards them, my preciousss…
Thus it was with great delight in late 2011 that I read about Victory’s foray into barrel aging with Dark Intrigue- the highly regarded Storm King Imperial Stout aged in bourbon barrels. Since then, I’ve been able to find and sample four of Victory’s barrel beer projects, with mixed results. Read the rest of this entry »
10 Comments | Beer Culture, Tasting Notes | Tagged: Barrel-aged Beers, Dark Intrigue, Oak Horizontal, Red Thunder, Victory Brewing, White Monkey | Permalink
Posted by Slouch Sixpack
March 15, 2013
It’s a drinking holiday, so you’re in. Clearly. THE MAN wants you to drink Bud Black Tie Something Something. Sentimentality says Guinness. But you have a fridge full of winter-strength beers, a few hours to kill, and a liver that just won’t quit. You’re an Alehead, goddammit. And you make your own rules. So, I ask, friends:
WHAT ARE YOUR DRINKING THIS WEEKEND?
11 Comments | Beer Culture, What are you drinking tonight?, WTF | Tagged: St. Patrick's Day, What are you drinking tonight? | Permalink
Posted by Slouch Sixpack
March 14, 2013
You may not remember the first time you used Google- it has become such an integral part of our lives and the way we use the Internet, sometimes it seems like it has always been with us- but I do. It was spring of 1999, in Goose’s room at 8 Webster Ave, Hanover NH. For all his foibles, Goose was always at the forefront of the latest and greatest in technology, before tech blogs even existed. He knew how to make web pages (which seemed at the time like wizardry) and he was great at finding music and other sorts of entertainment, too. His secret was Google. I remember seeing the minimalist screen on his monitor, a departure from the busy, cluttered search engine options like Lycos, Excite, Webcrawler, and AltaVista. And from the beginning, it just worked better than the others. This was just after the two Stanford grad students had moved their eight employee company and its servers out of their garage office, before they’d secured the venture capital that would start the company’s incredible growth.
I’ve been enamored with Google products ever since. Be it Gmail, Google Docs, and even Google Wave, I’ve always tried to get in as early as possible and been an advocate for their vision for an open web. There is no other company in the world that is so entwined with my existence or I identify with as strongly- which is why I felt such disappointment at the announcement that they are killing Google Reader, the company’s web and mobile RSS client that allows me to keep up with my favorite websites in one place.
RSS is a technology that pushes new posts from blogs like Aleheads out automatically. It lets me sift through a truly dizzying amount of beer-related content produced every day from bloggers all over the world. It is the backbone behind podcasting, which will slowly but surely kill radio and television as we know it.
Despite its simplicity and utility, the tech world has never been able to monetize RSS and so Reader is being put down more unceremoniously than Old Yeller. They want to push users over to Google+, the company’s social network that is a direct competitor to Facebook.
So far, this announcement among the blogosphere is going over like the proverbially turd in the punchbowl. And with good reason- the people who create all the content you waste your employer’s money reading all day utilize Google Reader to find the newest and most interesting stuff online. Despite the furor, I don’t expect petitions to change anything. The engineers that craft such elegant products have already crunched the numbers, and Reader’s time is at an end. For a company whose visions used to include organizing all the world’s information, focus on the user, and don’t be evil, I think they are making a tremendous mistake. There are other options for RSS readers, of course, but I’m sad to be unceremoniously dumped from the Google universe.
So what does this have to do with beer? Not much. But here are ten great beer blogs and websites I (used to) visit whenever they published new content through Google Reader: Read the rest of this entry »
4 Comments | A Series of Tubes, Beer Culture, Best/Worst, WTF | Tagged: Google Reader; Beer Writers; Beer Bloggers | Permalink
Posted by Slouch Sixpack
March 11, 2013
A bold take on a classic style. Colorado’s granddaddy brewpub releases an experimental beer that keeps up with the Crooked Staves and the TRiNiTYs of the world. Funny concept, hatched over brews, is taken to its absurd, fermented conclusion. Good feedback at GABF 2012. Hype. Visual professionals get involved. Staging, composition. Industrial, artisanal, agrarian. Slick Videos. Beer can and snifter side-by-side elevate and transcend the other; testicle grounds the image, a visceral reminder of the grass-to-glass process. Read the rest of this entry »
7 Comments | Beer Culture, WTF | Tagged: beer photos, Rocky Mountain Oyster Stout, Wynkoop | Permalink
Posted by Slouch Sixpack
March 8, 2013
Mmm…jellied eel.
Bags packed, Lady Jay leaves her crude, provincial homeland, where the sun never stops shining and ice-cold lager flows (and drinks) like water to quench the burn of mountains of extra-spicy chicken wings consumed in front of seemingly-endless football.
How will she survive in ye olde London-town? How many pints of warm ale, pots of jellied eels, and days of fog and rain can one woman slog through before returning home, soggy, pale, and malnourished? And what about the seemingly-endless football?
Stay tuned for the next installment of “An Alehead Abroad” for the answers.
3 Comments | Beer Culture, Travelogues | Tagged: London, Travel, Warm Beer | Permalink
Posted by Lady Jay
February 18, 2013
This beer is older than our last blog post. Not a good sign.
Late February is not the best time of year to live in the northeastern United States. Days are brutish and short. Weather conditions fluctuate wildly; winter storms Magnus and Nemo rain terror upon the morning commuters. You must shovel, and salt. Football is over for five months. Joe Flacco and Ray Lewis are national heroes. Dark times, indeed.
But all is not lost, for you are a beer drinker! February means Hopslam. It means Nugget Nectar and Palate Wrecker. It means bushels of Nugget, Simcoe, Citra, and Columbus packed into this year’s iterations of highly anticipated seasonal offerings from the nation’s best breweries. Depending where you live, these beers are snatched up by thirsty consumers within a few weeks, and often the very same day they are unloaded from the distributor’s truck. On the far coast, Vinnie and Natalie from Russian River feted by the California state legislature beneath the banner: Welcome! Pliny the Younger; hopped, fermented sugar water transcends beverage to become celebrated American institution!
It’s no secret that the utilization of flavor and aroma hops fuel the craft beer explosion in the US. According to RateBeer, nearly 1 of every 10 new beers introduced in 2012 was IPA. And why not? As a beer consumer, once you’ve acquired the taste, a hopbomb always sounds good. I’ve convinced myself that IPA is the ideal beer style to pair with sushi, Mexican food, and barbecue. Is this because the citric/ floral/ coniferous flavors match objectively with raw fish or rice and beans? Naw, I’ve just rationalized a way to enjoy my favorite beers with my favorite foods. I’m an inveterate hophead.
But once you’ve contracted the hoplust, you have a problem on your hands. When the largest grocer in Pittsburgh, Giant Eagle, finally circumvented draconian PA liquor laws through licensing and began to sell beer in stores, I was elated. GE entering the beer market presented Pennsylvania consumers with an economic option between distributors which sold affordable beer but only by the case, and the specialty bottle shops which sold singles and six-packs at dramatically inflated prices. So Giant Eagle’s prices were good, and the selection was surprisingly excellent. But a few years into the experiment, I’ve noticed a disappointing trend- a lot of old beer sitting on the shelves. And a lot of these are IPA’s.
Read the rest of this entry »
10 Comments | Ale Factories, Beer Culture | Tagged: Founders Brewing, Giant Eagle, HopSlam, India Pale Ale, Nugget Nectar, Old Beer, stale beer, Troegs, Victory Brewing | Permalink
Posted by Slouch Sixpack
August 23, 2012
Kid Carboy recently emailed the Aleheads group with a Reddit discussion in which a user received an invitation to the “ultra exclusive” Bruery Hoarders Society and felt that they had jumped the shark. The Kid felt that the Bruery was unnecessarily creating an even more exclusive circle within their already limited Bruery Reseve Society and in effect, further stratifying the value of their own releases. The Bruery Reserve Society is at it’s core, a subscription model that, in exchange for a $295 fee per year, provides not only privileges and swag exclusive to the brewery, but also specified allocations of certain releases from Bruery, including the hard to come by releases of Black Tuesday and Chocolate Rain. Membership also provides what is essentially an IPO for the Bruery releases for the year, a chance to buy first rights to the releases before they are available to the public. In a nutshell, you are paying a premium membership fee to get a few bottles of the really good stuff, plus the option to buy further limited quantities of said good stuff, stuff that that Joe Public will most likely never have the chance to purchase outside of a secondary market such as ebay or via a trade. You also get first right to refusal to renew your membership, as they are in limited quantity, but I believe they have increased the number of available slots each year.
Read the rest of this entry »
11 Comments | Ale Factories, Beer Culture, Beer Industry | Tagged: Beer Business | Permalink
Posted by Jimmy Hoppa
August 8, 2012
The most compelling and popular posts on this site often rely on utilizing robust online databases and forums such as Reddit/beer, RateBeer, and BeerAdvocate to glean information, lists, or conclusions about the continuing craft beer revolution. However, I’ve started a new job and haven’t posted in weeks. So rather than put in the work to produce something useful for you to read, I’ll just play the blogger card and throw out something apocryphal I’ve noticed in the past week: is it just me, or do you keep seeing strangers walking around wearing cool craft beer schwag like hats and shirts?
We started Aleheads a few years ago- a diaspora of beer loving friends forced through education, employment, and the winds of fate to live in isolation, relying on the blog as a public-facing outlet to take the place of (or rather, supplement) long-winded private emails about our love of good beer. Craft beer consumption in the US was below 3%, and outside your Portlands, Friscos, and Bostons of the world, great selection was hard to come by. Read the rest of this entry »
15 Comments | Beer Culture | Permalink
Posted by Slouch Sixpack
July 31, 2012
There are a few big, hot-button issues in the world of craft beer these days. There’s the “Can you still drink beer from former craft breweries owned by macro-brewers?” debate for instance, or the “What really qualifies as ‘session’ beer?” debate.* But the issue of craft beer reselling by non-brewers in the secondary market is the one that generates the most visceral reaction in me personally.
*Also known as “The Lew Bryson Debate.”
Yesterday, Beerpulse ran a story about beers from certain breweries like Cantillon and Hill Farmstead disappearing from eBay, signifying what may well be the first wave in craft beers being removed from the site entirely, with eBay finally recognizing and admitting to the world at large how ridiculous it was that folks claimed to be spending $100 or more to buy the “collectible bottle” of beer with no intent to consume its contents. It should go without saying that these kinds of sales will just move to other sites such as www.beerauctions.com, but in terms of overall volume, the loss of eBay as a place to unload the goods certainly seems as if it would put a dent in just how much beer is sold on the secondary market. It also means the loss of arguably the most secure and safe means of transaction.
Personally, I say “good on them” to the people making this decision. It was absurd to ever allow such resales with the reasoning of “Urrr, I’m only selling the collector’s bottle and the contents are incidental.” Looking completely past whether or not beer resale is “the right thing to do,” if you’re reading this I feel like you should at least concede the point that the eBay model was always stupid. Is there even one person out there who is buying up bottles of Dark Lord and Kate the Great just to stick them around the house like decorative urns? Find me this person. The only reason such a rationale was ever accepted by the website in the first place was that the folks at eBay clearly had a meeting where the company policy was determined to be ”Look, let’s just look past the illegality of licenseless people selling each other alcohol for as long as we can, k?” Read the rest of this entry »
26 Comments | Ale Factories, Beer Culture, Beer Industry | Tagged: beer on ebay, Cantillon, Hill Farmstead, reselling beer, secondary beer market | Permalink
Posted by Kid Carboy Jr.
June 28, 2012
Let’s face it, you NEVER have enough beer money available to buy all of the tasty suds you want. Craft beer is delicious, but it can also be a tad pricey. So you scrimp and save and splurge on the weekend…and an hour later, you’ve consumed everything you bought and are left sniffing the hop aromas from empty bottles and weeping.*
*What, you don’t do this? Am I alone here?
Well have no fear Alehead Nation! Doc and Barley are here to help you earn all of the beer money you need. If you follow our list below, you’ll practically be swimming in craft beer!*
*Note: Do NOT swim in craft beer. That’s just wasteful. Read the rest of this entry »
5 Comments | Beer 101, Beer Culture | Tagged: Beer Money, Craft Beer | Permalink
Posted by Barley McHops
June 21, 2012
This will soon exist. Seriously.
In her post decrying the stereotype of the craft beer drinker, Mother Gueuze describes the prototypical Alehead as “a man, perhaps in his thirties, usually with a beard and maybe even a pair of Ray-Bans.” While the majority of craft beer drinkers are indeed male, the scales are rapidly tipping thanks to female craft evangelists like Mother Gueuze and our newest Alehead, Lady Jay. As for Mother’s supposition that most Aleheads are in their thirties, I couldn’t even venture to guess how true that is. I know Aleheads in their 70s and their 20s and every decade in between. But yes, it’s probably true that a large percentage of craft beer geeks are in that mid-to-late 30s range where you still like to drink a few too many beers at night at the bar but have also earned enough liquid capital to afford some high-quality suds. I don’t know where the Ray-Bans quip came from. I think of Ray-Bans as being the domain of polo-wearing preppies who drink Manhattans at their country club. Perhaps Mother Gueuze is hanging out in the wrong beer bars… Read the rest of this entry »
10 Comments | Beer Culture, Beer Marketing | Tagged: Beards, Craft Beer, Craft Beerds, Fred Abercrombie, Rogue | Permalink
Posted by Barley McHops
June 19, 2012
Kid Carboy did a great post a few days ago about introducing people to craft beer. One part, of course, stuck out to me as the lady Alehead. Women and craft beer is a weird little paradox. I have seen both success and failure in trying to get my female friends into craft beer.
Let’s start with a little background:
There are two abnormal things about me as a craft beer lover: 1. I’m young and 2. I’m a girl.
When you picture the typical beer enthusiast, you see a man, perhaps in his thirties, usually with a beard and maybe even a pair of Ray-Bans. You don’t picture a short blond girl who looks like she’s 16 but is actually 22.
Read the rest of this entry »
33 Comments | Aleheads Dialogue, Beer Culture, Beer Marketing | Tagged: chick beer, lady alehead, Mother, rant, women and craft beer | Permalink
Posted by mothergueuze
June 14, 2012
The average Alehead prosetylizes.
Aleheads are, by their nature, an evangelical lot about their favorite beverage. As members of a small minority (and it still is the minority, despite the wonderful world of craft beer we exist in today), we are proud of our taste and our hobby, and I find that most Aleheads have a strong desire to share how much they enjoy beer with the other people they are close to.
The question, then, is what is the best way to actually go about introducing people who are not craft beer drinkers to better beer? What kind of beers should be used in order to expand the horizons of drinkers who may be initially skeptical? I don’t purport to know all of these answers, and you surely have strategies of your own (please share them in the comments), but these are some general guidelines that I have come to over the course of about five years of beer geekdom. And if you ask my friends and family, they’ll tell you that these have been some very effective introductions.
Naturally, this is completely dependent upon the personal tastes of the people you know, but for the sake of making these arguments, I’ve divided drinkers up into a few categories. I also introduce this rule: Always start off by asking “Okay, what do you like already?” You need to know what their general tastes are. Do they favor fruity drinks? Is this person a coffee addict who would get a kick out a similarly flavored stout? The more you know, the better you’ll do. And now, the categories.
Category 1: People who drink macro beer
I find that this is actually the easiest group of folks, on average, to introduce craft beer to if you compare them to people who “don’t like beer” entirely. The thing to remember about a macro drinker of Budweiser, Miller or Coors is that they’re used to things that are very bland, and extreme flavors can often be a turn-off. Hand one of these people your favorite IPA and they’ll probably scrunch up their face like they’re sucking on a lemon. It’s possible that something very strongly flavored might work on a few of them, but for the majority it comes as complete system shock. Read the rest of this entry »
7 Comments | Beer Culture | Tagged: beer culture | Permalink
Posted by Kid Carboy Jr.
June 4, 2012
The Birmingham craft beer scene has come a long way since I first moved to the Magic City in 2007. When I settled into town, the only Alabama-based craft brewery was Olde Towne, a Huntsville-based outfit which fizzled out last year. Beer over 6% ABV was illegal, breweries couldn’t have taprooms, and beer couldn’t be sold in bottles over 16 ounces.
Fast-forward to 2012 and the local craft culture has changed dramatically. Most of the backwards legislation has been eliminated or vastly improved. Birmingham now has four local breweries: Good People, Avondale, Cahaba, and the new kid on the block, Beer Engineers (plus a fifth brewery, Back Forty, in nearby Gadsden). And then there’s Huntsville. Located about 100 miles north of Birmingham, the Rocket City will soon be host to five breweries: Yellowhammer, Blue Pants, Straight to Ale, and the soon-to-open Salty Nut and Below the Radar (the latter will be the first brewpub in Alabama in many a year). Read the rest of this entry »
11 Comments | Beer Culture, Beer Festivals | Tagged: Avondale, Back Forty, Beer Engineers, Birmingham, Blue Pants, Cahaba, Free the Hops, Good People, Magic City Brewfest, Sloss Furnaces, Straight to Ale, Yellowhammer | Permalink
Posted by Barley McHops
May 24, 2012
There are certain cities that Aleheads speak of in hushed tones. Cities that have embraced craft beer culture and feature wonderful, local breweries, taprooms, beer festivals and more. These are the cities that Aleheads are proud to call home. Cities where groups of Aleheads make their pilgrimages to wallow in the craft beer revolution and imbibe a few too many tasty brews. San Diego, San Francisco, Boston, Denver, Chicago, Asheville, Seattle, Philly…these cities all have so much to offer a true Alehead.
But even the most rabid homer knows that one city towers above all others when it comes to craft beer. One city has made craft beer such an integral part of its culture that it has added “Beervana” as one of its many official nicknames. That city? Portland, Oregon. Read the rest of this entry »
13 Comments | Beer Culture, Travelogues | Tagged: Bailey's Taproom, Beervana, Belmont Station, cascade, Deschutes, Green Dragon Tavern, Hair of the Dog, Hopworks, Horse Brass Pub, Oregon, Portland | Permalink
Posted by Barley McHops
