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Upright Brewing in Portland stirs controversy with the new label for Four Play -- a sour saison that I'd love to taste at some point. Although now that I've seen the (NSFW) old label, it seems clear that they were actually trying to tone things down a bit. Well, I imagine a little scandal is good for sales, at least in the short term.

I got together with carl and Scott last Sunday to drink beer -- our first session of the year. We actually started off at the Big Time brewpub, where Scott finally got to taste the Saison Grisette, which is a very good saison that I've been drinking a lot of lately. Because of that I actually opted for the cask-conditioned Dark Days Black IPA, ( Read more... )

Jeff Alworth at Beervana reviews a new brew from Portland's Upright Brewing called Billy the Mountain. According to Alworth, it's their version of a traditional English old ale, which is a style I really like, and this one is aged in pinot barrels with brettanomyces clausenii (not to be confused with the brettanomyces bruxellensis used in Belgian ( Read more... )

Zak Avery, who runs a bottle shop in Leeds, posts a beer-year in review and makes three claims for the British beer market:

* British beer is on the up
* Belgian beer is on the wane
* American beer is on the verge of going stellar

In his Best-Of categories, his Best UK Brewery is the Kernel (a small brewery in London) and Best UK Bottled Beer is ( Read more... )

Had another beer session with Scott and carl last night. I didn't even dip into the stash I brought back from Belgium and Britain. Instead my contribution was three years of Big Time Old Wooly Barleywine -- 2007, 2008, and 2009. (The 2010 was released a couple of weeks ago.) Note to reverendjim: You might as well drink that bottle of 2009 now, because all ( Read more... )

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An interesting piece of brand dissection by Jeff Alworth at Beervana, inspired by a perhaps even more interesting dissection of the myth of malt liquor by Andrew Rosenblum at Accidental Blogger.