LAST WEEK, I urged you to build a home bar. It’s good for your soul.
What I forgot to mention is that, if your bar is not properly equipped and stocked for home parties this holiday season, your soul is damned. For deliverance, I turned to the Good Book, which is to say the newest edition of “Bartending for Dummies” … Read the rest
YOU’RE A GROWN-UP – it’s about time you had your own bar.
Not your kitchen counter. And not that folding card table you set up with a half-dozen bottles of cheap liquor whenever your buddies show up on poker night. I’m talking about a real bar, with running water and a beer fridge where you don’t have to make room … Read the rest
IF WE’RE living in the best of beer times – an unprecedented era of expansive choice, inventive styles and technological superiority – how do you explain the aberration that’s come to be called Pre-Pro?
Now, you can count me among the corps of traditionalists who hold it as an article of faith that older is better than new. I prefer … Read the rest
MUNICH’S OKTOBERFEST is either mankind’s lowest form of depravity, or its highest.
I’m just back from a few nights in the festival’s famed brewery tents – during which I enjoyed everything from too many liters of lager to the cacophony of a Bavarian folk band’s version of the White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army” – and I can’t decide.
I’m going … Read the rest
TROEGENATOR . . . Midas Touch . . . Pikeland Pils. They’re among the region’s most popular labels, boasting national reputations partly because of the medals they’ve won over the years at the annual Great American Beer Festival in Denver.
Now you can add another name to that list – one that is considerably more obscure: Saison Vautour.
The farmhouse … Read the rest
BEER, ACCORDING to the adage that has been attributed to Benjamin Franklin, “is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. ”
If that’s true, it was the product of an extensive lobbying effort.
No other pastime has more saints advocating on its behalf than beer drinking. A definitive list compiled by my beer-drinking associate Jay … Read the rest
THE SHORT POUR Film Fest, to be held this weekend at the Great American Beer Festival in Denver, owes a big debt to the inventors of Steadicam.
Despite imbibing ample, sudsy portions of their feature subject, dozens of film directors somehow managed to keep their cameras focused long enough to produce a watchable body of work. The festival, the first … Read the rest
THERE ARE many Americans who firmly believe it ain’t worth doin’ unless you can do it on a barstool.
And that includes speeding across the Bonneville Salt Flats.
Welcome to the world of barstool racing, a singularly American pursuit where men are men, and women are even faster.
It’s a curious subculture of gearheads who rig go-carts with barstools, then … Read the rest
THE OTHER DAY, a poker friend was complaining, “Sometimes I just want a normal, everyday beer. ”
“That’s why they make Coors,” I joked.
That went over like a lead balloon because this is a guy whose fridge is commonly stocked with Orval, a hoppy, slightly funky, $60-a-case ale made by Trappist monks in Belgium. For him, Coors or any … Read the rest
NEWS ITEM: For the first time since data have been compiled, Asia is the world’s No. 1 beer producer – bigger than Europe or North America – according to researchers at the Japanese brewing giant Kirin Holdings.
It’s time, I suppose, to welcome our new overlords.
The problem for those who’d like a taste, though, is that very few of … Read the rest