It's the best six-can beer list in New Albany. Taco Steve is located in the rear of Destinations Booksellers at 604 East Spring Street, opposite the very nearly completed Breakwater apartment development.
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Showing posts with label canned beer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label canned beer. Show all posts
Thursday, October 13, 2016
Taco Steve has beer now. Tacos and beer. America.
It's the best six-can beer list in New Albany. Taco Steve is located in the rear of Destinations Booksellers at 604 East Spring Street, opposite the very nearly completed Breakwater apartment development.
Sunday, September 04, 2016
A glorious pushing of buttons: Rauchbier at Fort Hill Brewery in Easthampton MA.
Several years ago, when I was at peak NABC, we were approached by a local businessman who had purchased property in Starlight, very near Huber's Orchard, Vineyards and Winery and their rapidly growing Starlight Distillery.
To make a long story short, his idea was to build a German-influenced brewery up the road from Huber's, under the plausible theory that if hundreds of people are wiling to drive to Huber's for the day, they'd also stop at the brewery -- not only to buy take-away beer, but for the rural ambiance.
Nothing ever came of it, but now I've seen the real-world manifestation of what he envisioned. Clone this, drop it there. First, as noted at NAC ...
Eastern USA Road Trip 2016, Day 6: A trip to Gator's in Rhode Island.
After the excursion to Rhode Island to count coup with clams and beer, Ben drove directly to Fort Hill Brewery outside Easthampton. As the crow flies, the brewery is located only three or four miles from Ben's and Jen's house, but owing to the location of bridges on the Connecticut, it's a big 10-12 mile loop.
No matter, because I wasn't behind the wheel, and the point of the visit can be summarized by a single German compound word: Rauchbier.
Smoked beer.
When Ben first told me there was a brewery just a few miles away from his house that brewed Rauchbier all the year round, I started salivating. It was a gorgeous afternoon, and upon arrival, there was a musical duo playing inside, drinkers with picnic lunches spilling onto the front patio, and a mellow vibe overall.
I sampled a few of the house brews, drank a pint of Rauchbier and bought a case of mixed six packs to take back to Indiana. Every beer I tried was solid, even the spiced Doppelbock, and it strikes me that specializing in German styles is an idea too long ignored according to prevailing craft beer orthodoxy (even if Fort Hill offered Session IPA, too).
A final point of "wow" was on-premise six-pack pricing: $8 for six 12-oz cans. OF SMOKED LAGER ... or Märzen, or Hefeweizen ... and that's a steal given the quality.
At Fort Hill Brewery, we like to stand out. That's why we decided to use different colored tabs on our cans to identify our beers.
Red is for Red Flag
Black is for Rauch
Green is for King Mark
Blue is for Dopplebock
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Tuesday, November 10, 2015
Goodwood's launch party for canned Louisville Lager is Wednesday, November 11.
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| Photo credit: Joel Halbleib. |
There is an exhausting back story to the evolution of what is now known as the Goodwood Brewing Company, but this rambunctious tale falls outside the topic at hand.
We begin with the event.
Louisville Lager Can Launch Party
Join us at the taproom November 11, 2015 at 5:00 p.m. for a launch party. Be the first to purchase a Louisville Lager 6 pack of cans, straight from the line! These fresh cans will be on sale for $8 per 6 pack. Along with the purchase you will also receive 20% off all swag!
Goodwood's taproom is located at 636 E. Main Street in Louisville. As for Louisville Lager itself, note the description on the brewery's web site.
Louisville Lager
PUT GOOD WOOD ON IT
Goodwood Louisville Lager is the first and only beer brewed with 100% Kentucky-grown grains. And, in a tip of the cap to our Slugger-making neighbors downtown, white ash – common in baseball bats – is used to enhance brewing. This results in a light-bodied, perfectly balanced lager with a sweet finish delivered by those Kentucky grains.
4.2 ABV/35 IBU
Speaking as an exponent of localism, lager and session strength beers, permit me to liberally praise Goodwood's Louisville Lager. It uses regional barley. It's 4.2% and comes in a can. It tastes wonderful. The price point is reasonable. I'm not sure I can make the can launch party, but I'll be drinking a lot of this one. In fact, I've threatened to rehab my kegerator just so a sixth barrel of Louisville Lager might pour from it.
This said, and also speaking personally, the whole wood/barrel phenomenon is something I find meaningful only in small doses.
Our Philosophy ... Why take the extra time to wood-age beer? Why insist on the same pure, limestone water used to make bourbon? Well, here at Goodwood, we've come to believe that what's good for bourbon is even better for beer. Our extra steps are kind of an homage to this region's distilling legacy and to those old barrels out there that still have so much flavor left to give. Sip one of our freshly nuanced stouts, lagers or ales, and we believe you'll think so, too.
It's an occasional treat for me, nothing more. I appreciate the general idea, and understand why Goodwood has rebranded from top to bottom so as to secure a market niche. It's a power move, and I wish them well. As a professional curmudgeon, the shtick strikes me as just a tad contrived.
BUT THAT'S WHY THERE IS LOUISVILLE LAGER, ash "enhancement" aside. We needn't all adore the same icons.
My preference for the use of wood in beer is when you burn it and smoke the grain. I suggest Smoked Louisville Lager. It would be a very Spezial moment for me, please and thank you.
In closing, back to the taproom and another announcement.
Woodrow On The Radio: Wednesday Mid Week Happy Hour Kick Off
We will also be having our new weekly Wednesday spinning of wax with Woodrow On The Radio. Along with the launch of our Louisville Lager Cans we will be kicking off our "Wednesday Mid Week Happy Hour". Woodrow On The Radio is a personality from WFPK who will be rocking the vinyl for us every Wednesday from 5:00-10:00 p.m. in our newly remodeled taproom.
Goodwood's web site is here.
Thursday, December 09, 2010
Wednesday Weekly: "Micro-canning changes the game."
I often forget to reprint my columns for Food & Dining, which are not yet archived on-line, so allow me to rectify the oversight. The following (as originally submittted) appeared in F & D's second quarter 2010 edition.
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“You've likely never had great beer out of a can because so far, not much great beer has been put into a can. That's changing, and fast.”
--John Foyston, beer writer for The Oregonian
Fermentation is nature’s way, brewing is mankind’s art and science, and the ultimate success of these interrelated endeavors is determined by the individual consumer reaction to the beer resting in his or her hand.
In turn, the consumer’s approval depends in large measure on the sort of container that has been designed to deliver the liquid to a set of waiting lips in a way that assure optimal freshness and quality.
My own interest in beer containers admittedly is offbeat and selective, based less on scientific principle and technology and more on the attitude of the individual beer drinker, a state that reflects subconscious preferences, community psychologies and personal superstitions, all these combined into as many different forms as there are human beings to contrive and perpetuate them.
Many drinkers prefer draft beer, as dispensed into a glass or a cup. Others refer to themselves as “bottle babies,” refusing glassware and consuming beer directly from the bottle. In like fashion, millions of people drink directly from aluminum cans, simply popping the top, drinking the contents, feeling refreshed, and never thinking too much about it.
Perhaps owing to the expedience and informality of mass market bottled and canned beer, they have earned opprobrium of sorts from generations of radicalized beer aficionados, who have declared it utterly mistaken to drink straight from a bottle or a can because from either, the aroma so integral to taste is largely undetectable.
I know. I’m one of them.
But these same enthusiasts have deemed it entirely suitable to enjoy the contents of a bottle or can if properly decanted into an appropriate glass. Moreover, some times the very fact of a beer being bottle conditioned, or naturally carbonated in the bottle, is exalted as ideal and preferred. Even so, most cans apart from those with a nitro widget (Guinness, Boddington’s) generally have remained objects of suspicion.
Is there a coherent basis for this attitude, or is it merely totemic?
---
Clay Robinson surveys this scene, and knows exactly where he stands.
“I've had a love affair with cans since I was a young boy,” says Robinson, the founder of Sun King Brewing Company, a 2009 microbrewery start-up in Indianapolis. “Dave Colt (Sun King’s brewer) and I both had beer can collections as kids.”
Canning has been part of Sun King’s business plan since its inception, and the brewery began releasing canned Sunlight Cream Ale and Osiris Pale Ale in the spring of 2010. Robinson’s favorable impression of cans goes beyond his boyhood collectibles, to reinforcement experienced during travels to the state where craft canning began.
“I first had craft beer in a can six or seven years ago while visiting my sister in Colorado,” he explains. “Not surprisingly, it was Oskar Blues Dale's Pale Ale. I remember thinking, ‘Pale Ale in a can?’ Then I bought some just to see what it was all about. I was amazed at its freshness and depth of flavor, so from that point I was hooked.”
It’s a familiar story. In craft canning circles, the Oskar Blues brewery in Lyons, Colorado, functions nowadays as a combination of Fenway Park as Mecca for Red Sox fans, Robert Johnson’s recordings as templates for blues guitarists, and the Library of Congress to document enthusiasts. In 2002, Oskar Blues became the first American microbrewery to can its ale, two units at a time to begin, and entirely by hand. The reason: Canning lines intended for small scale craft usage had yet to be produced.
Sleek and efficient smaller canning lines soon followed, thanks not only to the pioneering, niche-defining entrepreneurial efforts of Oskar Blues, but as importantly, to the active intervention of the Ball Corporation and Cask Brewing Systems.
These two far larger companies began scaling the existing canning technology to microbrewery production capacities, making it possible, albeit it more expensive than bottling, to meet the demand of a restive market just awakening to the potential of canned craft beer in recyclable aluminum, which can be taken places where glass is prohibited, like beaches, outdoor preserves and sports venues.
“Save your money because it's not cheap to get into,” is Robinson’s advice to aspiring craft beer canners, but he adds in definitive tone: “We believe that cans are a superior vessel for the transportation of craft beer.”
Robinson has a strong argument.
Aluminum itself is odorless, flavorless, pliable, lightweight and impermeable by light. Higher levels of damaging oxygen can be displaced from a can during the canning process.
According to Robinson, “The seam is a perfect seal, and the canning process functions in a cap-on-foam manner that allows for the least amount of dissolved oxygen in the finished product, and of course, light can’t get through aluminum.”
---
It’s a factual, rational and largely irrefutable matter, and yet the decision still rests with the drinker. I asked Robinson how the cans have been received by the public, and his answer is emphatic.
“The response to our cans has been tremendous! We announced that we would be doing so about six months before it actually happened, and so we spent a lot of time engaged in conversations about the virtues of cans with the people who love our beer. That, coupled with a lot of positive press for cans nationwide, has really paved the way. Plus, cans are the first time Sun King has been available in a small package. Our fans are really excited about our new, highly portable container.”
---
There is a dynamic not unlike a pendulum that keeps time during these considerations of beer packaging and containers, swinging back in forth though history as advancements are made and human cultural standards evolve. Beer has been stored inside, or been poured into, a dizzying array of manmade objects culled from an equally wide range of materials.
Wood, stoneware, ceramic, glass, metal, and plastic; barrels, urns, vases, bottles, hogsheads, jugs and cans; and at each juncture, the objective has been the same: To maintain beer’s freshness during transport, and to see that it is consumed when freshest and best. Better ways come and go. At times, they return.
As Sun King’s Robinson implies, as the chosen container has become smaller, more easily reproduced and efficient, beer’s transportability has steadily been enhanced, and the experience of drinking beer inexorably removed from its point of origin in the brewery, far past a place where the brewer has control of his creation. For a brewpub, where most house beer is enjoyed on the premises, this means less. For a brewery dependent on distribution, packaging decisions are life and death.
Impressively, for Sun King and other small craft breweries to invest in the emerging technology of micro-canning, as expressed in the currency of an aluminum container that once symbolized lesser quality beer in the minds of an earlier, more militant generation of craft consumers, is to trust resoundingly in the ongoing youthful democratization of craft beer.
The can as a container serves to widen the range of craft’s market penetration, by taking it where it could not previously go. Micro-canning changes the game, both in terms of distribution logistics and perceptions. Beer drinkers will decant their cans into glassware when they are able, and rink straight from the can when they are not. Either way, they’ll be enjoying greater access to better beer. Let them decide.
As a romantic at heart, it is my preference to think of beer in terms both artistic and hedonistic, as liquid poetry and as metaphorical prose. Beer has been an integral part of human civilization from the very start, and its story fully justifies those flights of intoxicated fascination and smitten adoration that ensue when a few too many of the tale’s tasty chapters have been consumed in one setting. The reality is that craft beer in cans alters none of this romance, and costs not a single intangible in return for an expansion of the perimeter.
Clay Robinson’s final thought is instructive, and brings us full circle, back to the beginning: “Regardless of the package, the beer that it carries has to be good.”
Indeed. Look for excellent canned craft beers brewed by Sun King and other trendsetters, already in stock or coming very soon to a package store near you.
---
“You've likely never had great beer out of a can because so far, not much great beer has been put into a can. That's changing, and fast.”
--John Foyston, beer writer for The Oregonian
Fermentation is nature’s way, brewing is mankind’s art and science, and the ultimate success of these interrelated endeavors is determined by the individual consumer reaction to the beer resting in his or her hand.
In turn, the consumer’s approval depends in large measure on the sort of container that has been designed to deliver the liquid to a set of waiting lips in a way that assure optimal freshness and quality.
My own interest in beer containers admittedly is offbeat and selective, based less on scientific principle and technology and more on the attitude of the individual beer drinker, a state that reflects subconscious preferences, community psychologies and personal superstitions, all these combined into as many different forms as there are human beings to contrive and perpetuate them.
Many drinkers prefer draft beer, as dispensed into a glass or a cup. Others refer to themselves as “bottle babies,” refusing glassware and consuming beer directly from the bottle. In like fashion, millions of people drink directly from aluminum cans, simply popping the top, drinking the contents, feeling refreshed, and never thinking too much about it.
Perhaps owing to the expedience and informality of mass market bottled and canned beer, they have earned opprobrium of sorts from generations of radicalized beer aficionados, who have declared it utterly mistaken to drink straight from a bottle or a can because from either, the aroma so integral to taste is largely undetectable.
I know. I’m one of them.
But these same enthusiasts have deemed it entirely suitable to enjoy the contents of a bottle or can if properly decanted into an appropriate glass. Moreover, some times the very fact of a beer being bottle conditioned, or naturally carbonated in the bottle, is exalted as ideal and preferred. Even so, most cans apart from those with a nitro widget (Guinness, Boddington’s) generally have remained objects of suspicion.
Is there a coherent basis for this attitude, or is it merely totemic?
---
Clay Robinson surveys this scene, and knows exactly where he stands.
“I've had a love affair with cans since I was a young boy,” says Robinson, the founder of Sun King Brewing Company, a 2009 microbrewery start-up in Indianapolis. “Dave Colt (Sun King’s brewer) and I both had beer can collections as kids.”
Canning has been part of Sun King’s business plan since its inception, and the brewery began releasing canned Sunlight Cream Ale and Osiris Pale Ale in the spring of 2010. Robinson’s favorable impression of cans goes beyond his boyhood collectibles, to reinforcement experienced during travels to the state where craft canning began.
“I first had craft beer in a can six or seven years ago while visiting my sister in Colorado,” he explains. “Not surprisingly, it was Oskar Blues Dale's Pale Ale. I remember thinking, ‘Pale Ale in a can?’ Then I bought some just to see what it was all about. I was amazed at its freshness and depth of flavor, so from that point I was hooked.”
It’s a familiar story. In craft canning circles, the Oskar Blues brewery in Lyons, Colorado, functions nowadays as a combination of Fenway Park as Mecca for Red Sox fans, Robert Johnson’s recordings as templates for blues guitarists, and the Library of Congress to document enthusiasts. In 2002, Oskar Blues became the first American microbrewery to can its ale, two units at a time to begin, and entirely by hand. The reason: Canning lines intended for small scale craft usage had yet to be produced.
Sleek and efficient smaller canning lines soon followed, thanks not only to the pioneering, niche-defining entrepreneurial efforts of Oskar Blues, but as importantly, to the active intervention of the Ball Corporation and Cask Brewing Systems.
These two far larger companies began scaling the existing canning technology to microbrewery production capacities, making it possible, albeit it more expensive than bottling, to meet the demand of a restive market just awakening to the potential of canned craft beer in recyclable aluminum, which can be taken places where glass is prohibited, like beaches, outdoor preserves and sports venues.
“Save your money because it's not cheap to get into,” is Robinson’s advice to aspiring craft beer canners, but he adds in definitive tone: “We believe that cans are a superior vessel for the transportation of craft beer.”
Robinson has a strong argument.
Aluminum itself is odorless, flavorless, pliable, lightweight and impermeable by light. Higher levels of damaging oxygen can be displaced from a can during the canning process.
According to Robinson, “The seam is a perfect seal, and the canning process functions in a cap-on-foam manner that allows for the least amount of dissolved oxygen in the finished product, and of course, light can’t get through aluminum.”
---
It’s a factual, rational and largely irrefutable matter, and yet the decision still rests with the drinker. I asked Robinson how the cans have been received by the public, and his answer is emphatic.
“The response to our cans has been tremendous! We announced that we would be doing so about six months before it actually happened, and so we spent a lot of time engaged in conversations about the virtues of cans with the people who love our beer. That, coupled with a lot of positive press for cans nationwide, has really paved the way. Plus, cans are the first time Sun King has been available in a small package. Our fans are really excited about our new, highly portable container.”
---
There is a dynamic not unlike a pendulum that keeps time during these considerations of beer packaging and containers, swinging back in forth though history as advancements are made and human cultural standards evolve. Beer has been stored inside, or been poured into, a dizzying array of manmade objects culled from an equally wide range of materials.
Wood, stoneware, ceramic, glass, metal, and plastic; barrels, urns, vases, bottles, hogsheads, jugs and cans; and at each juncture, the objective has been the same: To maintain beer’s freshness during transport, and to see that it is consumed when freshest and best. Better ways come and go. At times, they return.
As Sun King’s Robinson implies, as the chosen container has become smaller, more easily reproduced and efficient, beer’s transportability has steadily been enhanced, and the experience of drinking beer inexorably removed from its point of origin in the brewery, far past a place where the brewer has control of his creation. For a brewpub, where most house beer is enjoyed on the premises, this means less. For a brewery dependent on distribution, packaging decisions are life and death.
Impressively, for Sun King and other small craft breweries to invest in the emerging technology of micro-canning, as expressed in the currency of an aluminum container that once symbolized lesser quality beer in the minds of an earlier, more militant generation of craft consumers, is to trust resoundingly in the ongoing youthful democratization of craft beer.
The can as a container serves to widen the range of craft’s market penetration, by taking it where it could not previously go. Micro-canning changes the game, both in terms of distribution logistics and perceptions. Beer drinkers will decant their cans into glassware when they are able, and rink straight from the can when they are not. Either way, they’ll be enjoying greater access to better beer. Let them decide.
As a romantic at heart, it is my preference to think of beer in terms both artistic and hedonistic, as liquid poetry and as metaphorical prose. Beer has been an integral part of human civilization from the very start, and its story fully justifies those flights of intoxicated fascination and smitten adoration that ensue when a few too many of the tale’s tasty chapters have been consumed in one setting. The reality is that craft beer in cans alters none of this romance, and costs not a single intangible in return for an expansion of the perimeter.
Clay Robinson’s final thought is instructive, and brings us full circle, back to the beginning: “Regardless of the package, the beer that it carries has to be good.”
Indeed. Look for excellent canned craft beers brewed by Sun King and other trendsetters, already in stock or coming very soon to a package store near you.
Saturday, May 15, 2010
Office Hours for Monday, May 17: Craft Cans.
My friend Todd just returned from California with a major haul of canned craft beer. Some of them are being reserved for use as photo material to accompany my column for the next issue of Food & Dining.
I'll have the remainder on hand this Monday in Prost for tasting during Office Hours.
I'll have the remainder on hand this Monday in Prost for tasting during Office Hours.
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