Some time ago a few friends and I did a head-to-head comparison of a number of lovely Munich Starkbiers in honor of the end of Lent, and the winner was – Korbinian!
I’ll write a little more about Starkbier later, but you should know that the traditional Munich Starkbiers are all named with names which end in -ator. Korbinian is an exception to this rule, and it isn’t even the beer its brewer, Weihenstephan, mentions with respect to the season known as the “fifth season.” For those of us who tasted it, the winner was clear.
My ranking of the beers we …read more

Ok, this is going to be the last gift post of the year, since if you don’t finish your Christmas shopping today you need to get off the computer and get to the store. Let’s face it, after today no one’s going to deliver anything you order in time for Christmas anyway, so it’s bricks and morter for anything you’ve got left.
The good news is that there’s one weekend to go before Christmas, so why not combine gift buying with a visit to your favorite microbrewery for some swag? For those of us around Philadelphia, that means the really cool …read more

So, I mentioned a wonderful beer I had at a party recently. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the beer I brought to the party, which was disappointing. More disappointing is that it was from Tröegs, a Pennsylvania brewery which usually brews very fine beers. In fact, Tröegs’ beers are so good that I’ve never once complained about their Mötley Crüe-esque misuse of the poor, unappreciated umlaut.
The beer in question is the brewery’s Sunshine Pils, which is billed a crisp, hoppy Pilsner. I like hoppy, crisp pilsners, but this didn’t really do it for me. There wasn’t all that much hop, and …read more