A Pint Half Full

Three of my good friends chipped in to sign me up to three months with the Rare Beer Club.  This privies me to 2 750 ml bottles of "rare" beer a month.  Stuff that I've never heard before brewed with ingredients that I have yet to fully experience in my craft beer journey.  How rare you ask?  Only a few thousand barrels of these beers are brewed and this club has bought half of the stock for its members.  How do I know?  The Club sends a newsletter along with each beer you receive describing, in excruciating detail, everything from the brewery's background, the thought process behind the beer, and tasting notes.  By the way, this newsletter is front and back, single spaced, 12 pt font.  Pretty intense.

I read through the newsletter for De Proef Brouwerij's (it's Belgian) Flemish Primitive Wild Ale 2008 Special Vintage Reserve and quickly became overwhelmed.  This beer was brewed back in 2008, using wild yeast and a mix of your typical beer ingredients (hops and malt) and gruit.  Gruit apparently is a mix of spices that was used in beer before hops were used for its aroma, flavor, and preservative nature.  What was I to expect?  This has been aging for a couple years, wild yeast at work in the bottle, with a strange mix of spices??  I had no idea.  I wasn't ready.  I popped the bottle...

Cherry blossoms are in full bloom here in DC.  They start blooming the end of March and die around the second week of April.  Aside from the flowers, I learned that Capitol City Brewery offers a Cherry Blossom Ale for these couple weeks.  After braving the crowds and viewing the blossoms, had some of it in the downtown location.  It is brewed with a belgian yeast and then allowed to infuse with some cherry puree giving it a unique, silky mouthfeel, and cherry-sugar sweetness balanced with hops.  Smooth, drinkable and light.  Go get some before it's too late!

I was browsing around my Netflix streaming library and saw the movie "Beer Wars" available for streaming.  I thought perhaps this movie was like "Beerfest", a comedy about a beer olympic competition.  Far from it, "Beer Wars" is a documentary about the beer industry in America, attempting to explain why the "Big Three" beer companies dominate the market and how difficult it is for smaller breweries to gain marketshare and bring their products to the masses.  The documentary pretty much demonizes the Anheuser-Busch, Miller, and Coors companies and makes you want to never buy or drink their products again.  It highlights Dogfish Head Brewing as an up and coming brewery trying to make its mark on the beer world and contrasts the passion of one man to the profit-scheming of corporations.   The director, Anat Baron, is pretty annoying as the narrator (see Michael Moore), admits that she is allergic to alcohol, and was the CEO of Mike's Hard Lemonade prior to making this movie (which knocked her credibility down a bit for me - that stuff is weak!).  However, it's a decent documentary, creating this David vs Goliath story and portraying the craft beer world with love and passion.  I did not like the extreme bias against and repeated hatred for the larger brewing companies (we get it!) and the following of one story line which seemed to contradict the agenda the movie was trying to promote.  Read on for more of my thoughts.