Hi again beer fans! Happy Friday! Come have a cold one.
This week's beer (and spirits) news came to my attention from a couple of real paper magazines. Shocking I know. Come past the orange gnocchi to see what I'm talking about.
last week Grainpaw mentioned the difficulty of working with some of his homebrew store customers who seem to know less than most about beer making but be reticent about their intentions. My response was: "tough issue since neither of you is legally supposed to be talking about making corn whisky."
Silly me. What did I see on the cover of the latest Mother Earth News? Artisan Home Distilling. It doesn't seem to bother the writer or the editor that it's completely illegal. [The story mentions that it's very rarely prosecuted unless you try to sell your hooch.] Unfortunately for Grainpaws's customers, the article isn't about corn squeezins, it's about turning his plum crop into eau de vie (or what in Eastern Europe they call slivovitz).
In local spirits news, I've reached peak lemon and will be making a batch of limoncello this weekend. This is an unquestionably legal product, not distilled but infused into purchased grain alcohol.
Beer-wise, I wanted to mention a new beer I heard about.
Usually, new craft beers come to my attention from Celebrator or Northwest Brewing News. Or maybe from word of mouth at the homebrew club, or maybe when I see them on the tap list at Harry's Hofbrau. Or from FNBB commenters.
When they try to grab my attention with an expensive ad in a national publication, such as the back cover of the most recent Rolling Stone, I know they aren't your ordinary craft beer. Actually I know they're no kind of craft beer; they are a new appendage of one of the huge corporate brewers.
The brew I'm referring to is called Third Shift Amber Lager, from an outfit labeled "Band of Brewers Company". You wouldn't know it from that site, but a quick google told me this is the newest "quality" beer offshoot of Coors.
Their slogan is "When Beer is your calling, you never clock out™". The concept seems to be the sort of faux blue collar feeling that's so popular for pickup truck ads. Color me unimpressed.
I splurged on some Duchesse de Bourgogne, after one of those I'll switch to Mission Street IPA. What are you drinking? Is anyone brewing?