Dead Guy Ale, Rogue Brewery.: Dead Guy Ale labelOne of the best beers I have enjoyed in some time is Rogue's Dead Guy Ale. It is a traditional German Maibock style ale brewed in Newport, Oregon. The ale is a mellow brown beer with strong honey flavors and an easy finish. The label of the Dead Guy Ale is pretty cool too. Featuring a skeleton sitting on top of a barrel, the logo has been linked to the legendary jam band The Grateful Dead, although only coincidentally. The Rogue website recommends it with pork and smoky flavors, but I enjoy it with just about anything, but burgers and steaks and ribs are all good with a 22 ounce Dead Guy next to you. It's a great winter beer, but its light enough to squeak by on a hot summer day. Other brown ales can be a little rough tasting or too hoppy, but Dead Guy is the smoothest of all of them. This is not one of those crappy new start up microbreweries.

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Lambic beer is one of the oldest styles still being made. There are perhaps a dozen Belgian breweries still making traditional Lambic, and all of them are clustered in and around Brussels. Lambic is very closely associated with the Pajottenland region of Belgium, an area that is southwest of Brussels. The name Lambic is probably derived from a town in the region that has traditional associations with Lambic brewing; the town of Lambeek, or "Lime beck," which means lime stream or creek. Lambic is essentially a wheat beer, with malted barley and unmalted wheat; the hops are there largely as a preservative, rather than for flavor.

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The video linked above is a collaboration between the producer, Greg Koch, the CEO of the Stone Brewing Company and Jared of Redtail Meadia, and 35 or so craft beer brewers from all over the United States. It was sown at the 2009 Craft Brewers' conference. There's a line in the video where one of the brewers observes that a hundred years ago there were more than 3,000 craft brewers in the U. S. According to the Brewer's Association, there were 65 Regional Craft Breweries in the U. S. in 2008, 446 Microbreweries, and 990 Brewpubs for a total of 1,501 Craft Breweries.

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IPA or India Pale Ales historically were an attempt by British brewmasters to create a beer that could make the long sea-journey from Britain to India. Beer likes a fairly cool, fairly stable environment without a lot of movement or temperature fluctuation. Sailing vessels are not ideal beer-storage facilities. In order to increase the chances of the beer arriving on Indian shores in drinkable condition after roughly a hundred days at sea, British brewers tampered with the recipe for beer in an effort to come up with one that could make the trip around the Cape of Good Hope, and still be drinkable. The brewer assoicated with the final success was one George Hodgson of East London's Bow Brewery. He modified his otherwise fairly traditional Pale Ale recipe by incraesing the alcohol level, and by increasing the percentage of hops. Hops not only served to flavor the beer, as a natural astringent hops also helped to control the microscopic flora and fauna that might otherwise be a problem.

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Despite the idiocies of Saint Patrick's Day in the U.S. (by which I mean the consumption of green beer rather than blessed Guinness), and the over-enthusiastic endorsement of imbibing while Irish, there is a genuine, and historical, connection between Ireland and beer, or cuirm, in Old Irish. For one thing, there's a long and documented history of Irish brewing that is very legitimate. So legitimate, in fact, that beer laws occur in the medieval corpus of traditional Irish law known as the Senchus Mór, which was colloquially known as Cáin Padriac, or Patrick's Law, since the bodies of traditional Irish civil law and church law were said to have been combined and written down upon instructions from St.Patrick.

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My first ever stout was Guinness. I've loved it from the very first sip. I've had enough Guinness to be able to know for certain that it's not really as dark in color as you might think; it's really a very very dark amber, closer to red than black. And while it's not, technically, a meal in a glass, it really does seem like it ought to be. And it is very firmly fixed in the minds of Americans with Irish ancestry as one of the quintessential Irish totems. Although Guinness was originally Arthur Guinness' brewery, first in Leixlip, Ireland, then, in 1759, he moved to Dublin, and the St. James's Gate Brewery. Guinness is now one of the many breweries and distillers owned by Diageo PLC. One of Diageo's greatest assets is the St. James Gate Brewery—Arthur Guinness, way back in 1759, had the exceedingly good sense to sign a 900 year lease for the property.

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Full Sail brewery in Hood River, Oregon, is celebrating twenty-one years of brewing. Part of their celebration means that they're releasing a series of very limited, small batch, lagers. "Ltd" might stand for "limited," or, as the Full Sail site intimates, it might stand for "Live the Dream," their slogan. Their first release, cleverly numbered 01 on the label, is a reprise brew from the past when it earned two gold medals from the World Beer Championship.

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Kona's Pipeline Porter, seasonal beer that it was, has gone away. There's some suggestion that it will reappear next spring. I very much hope so. In the meantime, the Pipeline Porter slot in the store where I've been buying beer of late has been taken by six packs of Pyramid's Rollick Amber Lager. Pyramid began as a brew pub in but has now expanded to two breweries (Seattle, across from the Mariner's Safeco Field, and Berkeley, CA) and five pubs. In 2008 Pyramid Breweries won the mid-size Brewery of the Year award at the Great American Beer Festival—and three gold medals.

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Back in 1764 Sir Henry Meux was a London brewer with ambitions. He began with one brewery, and then fairly soon he proceeded to buy up other smaller breweries. One of those breweries was the Horse Shoe Brewery, at the junction of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street, in London. It was, in truth, not exactly unknown itself; its "black beer," a particularly strong porter, had some local fame, but the Horse Shoe was better known for its enormous vat system. On its roof were a number of very large beer vats. One of those was an immense porter vat. The vat was some 22 feet high and held 511 thousand liters of porter. It was so very large that in 1785 the London Times for April 1 mentioned the vat's construction:

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I might as well openly confess that I have a bawdy sense of humor. This is actually an asset for a writer, but it does occasionally create difficulties. For instance yesterday, my friend, on discovering that I had not as yet tried any of the Seattle microbrewery The Pike Brewing Company's brews suggested I should start with Pike's Kilt Lifter. Now, in certain forms of Scots vernacular, an attractive female is referred to as a "kilt lifter. This is, of course, a phrase with enormous bawdy potential. It is, moreover, a particularly appropriate name for Pike Brewing Company since the brewer began operations in the old LaSalle Hotel, which was, in its day, a particularly notorious (albeit luxurious) brothel. Thus Pike Brewing has tended to favor names like "Kilt Lifter," and "Naughty Nellie," in eponymous reference to the former madam of the brothel.

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