Since I wrote about stouts earlier in the week, I can only add – praise the engineers who developed the pub draft can! It may not be as good as draft, but it’s pretty darn close, and I can enjoy it in my living room (at least until we install that tap system I’ve been dreaming about for some time now).
As I understand it, the little widget in the pub draft can is basically a pressurized container which shoots a blast of nitrogen into the beer when the can is opened. It seems to have started with Guinness, but fortunately …read more

I was surfing for interesting things to report on while trying to decide on a beer to drink when I stumbled across this article about stout from the lesser of my two hometown papers. Fortunately for me, I have both Beamish and Murphy’s stout in the pub draft version in my basement right now, so as I write this I’m enjoying the former while looking forward to the latter.
The Beamish is a nice smooth drink, an Irish stout from Cork similar to those listed in the article. As with many well-known brands, the brewing company, Beamish and Crawford plc, has …read more

I haven’t done a recipe for a while, but how can you resist a brownie made with stout beer?!?
image from doriegreenspan.com, and another darn good looking recipe (albeit without beer) here

Last weekend I managed to finally make it to the new incarnation of the Dock Street brewpub, which is pretty pathetic considering I had planned to go when they first opened. For those who don’t know, Dock Street was a Philadelphia-based pioneer of micro-brewed beers back in the 80s, at one point vying with Sam Adams for tops in the market.
I have to say I was pleasantly surprised. I expected a slightly too slick and slightly too large brewpub along the lines of a Triumph or the former Dock Street locations in Center City Philadelphia. This one has a much …read more

Over the holidays we made a day trip out to Gettysburg, to get all of us out of the house and to give the kids a little something to look at. For those of you who’ve never been to Gettysburg, it’s a charming small town in the southern part of Pennsylvania, not all too far from the Mason Dixon line.
Trust me, this post does have something to do with beer. Before that, however, I want to mention that those of you who have an interest in seeing the battlefield at Gettysburg, really seeing it, should consider visiting on a …read more

In a brash but enviable crime, the BBC reports that a man managed to cart off over 36,000 pints of Guinness from the Guinness brewery in Dublin. And how did he manage this trick? Why, he drove a truck onto the brewery grounds, hooked up a fully loaded trailer, and then drove back off. They’ve since found the trailer – empty.
That must have been a helluva party.

There are a lot of blog contests in our food channel, but many of them don’t lend themselves to beer. One which does, and which is quite timely coming as it does after Halloween and before Thanksgiving, is this one from choclatebytes. And the question is … drumroll please … what chocolate product are you thankful for?
So easy, that one, it’s chocolate stout. Many chocolate stouts, such as Brooklyn’s Black Chocolate Stout, carry that moniker not because they contain chocolate, but because they use a dark malt which resembles chocolate. More sophisticated palates than mine also claim a certain cocoa …read more

So, I took the plunge at my local distributor and purchased a case entitled “Mountain Mixer,” which is a combination of different brews from the Left Hand Brewing company. I had praised Left Hand’s Oktoberfest in an earlier post, so when I saw the assortment case I couldn’t resist.
I’m not sure if there are different configurations in the miced case, but this one includes the Sawtooth Ale, Jackman’s Pale Ale, Black Jack Porter, and the Milk Stout. I’ve had one each of all of the beers except the Pale Ale, and my preliminary reaction is that the Sawtooth Ale is …read more