NanoBryg rss syndication » A Good Beer Blog » August 6, 2010

Feeds

6979 items (6979 unread) in 17 feeds

Breweries (1272 unread)

• Mikkel(ler)'s Blog (98 unread)
• GourmetBryggeriet (121 unread)
• Nyt fra Ølakademiet (1053 unread)

Bloggers (4258 unread)

• Hop Talk (1062 unread)
• Knut Albert's beer blog (851 unread)
• Hail the Ale! Beer Blog (102 unread)
• Pfiff! (165 unread)
• Hedonist Beer Jive (425 unread)
• Beer of the Trip! (25 unread)
• The Beer Tourist (32 unread)
• For The Love Of Beer (105 unread)
• Portland Beer Blog (93 unread)
• A Good Beer Blog (1398 unread)

Craftbrewers (1449 unread)

• Larsblog (68 unread)
• Dyrehavegaardsb (70 unread)
• The Champagne of Blogs (166 unread)
• The Brew Site (1145 unread)

A Good Beer Blog (2 unread)

• 

  Quebec: Joseph Bellarmin, M'Brasserie De L'Ile D'Orleans

  Posted: August 6th, 2010, 2:59am CEST by Alan McLeod

  I like the style of this brewery's labels and brew branding. They all have a folk arty drawing off of a local character from the past. My French is so poor that I can't tell the tale of Joe - but I do note "Houblonée a Froid" in that green circle, cold hopped. You can't really see it in the picture provided care of my dying camera. It's starting to look like art, isn't it? It's not another dead digital camera to join the pile. It's the art camera.

  This DIPA pours a deep orange amber with slow moving carbonation hinting at thickness. The head is rich creamy foam and froth. Heat, sweet herb and bready malt on the nose. In the mouth a bit of a surprise. Big but not huge. Sweet creamy with heat, grapefruit pith sweet malt and some very singular herbal notes. A bit burn at the end. Quite nutty with star anise as well. More of a semi-sub-DIPA than an IIPA. You know know what I mean?

  It gets some curious looks from RateBeerians perhaps from its sub-imperial reality but great respect from the BAers. Its a seasonal special for autumn but I am not sure that it's the autumn of 2009 or 2010. If it is a year old, it has held up very well even if that hint of star anise is not going to be everyone's favorite thing.

• 

  Oh, To Be In Moscow...

  Posted: August 6th, 2010, 1:53am CEST by Alan McLeod

  ...now that the heat wave's in full bloom:

  I walked outside this morning to find a gang of bare-chested fellows, with shaved heads, sweaty snouts, and stretchmarked potbellies, sitting on the guardrail near our doorway, guzzling beer and smoking, and for good measure, belching and swearing about the heat. Any walk around town reveals similar scenes: men have at times dispensed with much of their clothing, and carrying a beer (plus lit cigarette) is now de rigueur. This is legal: there's no law banning open containers of alcohol in Russia. Except that in Russia, beer hardly qualifies as alcohol. (Unless possibly it's that 12-proof brew marked krepkoye.) Beer is more like a training beverage. But vodka is considered alcohol, and thus possesses, many would point out, curative properties for whatever ails you. So fighting noxious heat with medicinal doses of vodka makes perfect sense. And I don't mean some dainty cocktail, like, say, a vodka collins. The idea of mixing vodka with anything except more vodka is an abomination. Why dilute the healing fun?

  I don't have any real point to saving the quotation from Jeffrey Tayler's article in The Atlantic other than to note what an excellent piece of drinks writing the article represents, including its harsh observation of the stupid waste that can accompany empty boozing. In Moscow - now.