Daily Beer Digest - 05.05.2011

Boston Beer Company (Samuel Adams) announced that its shipments were up 10% in the first quarter of 2011.

Founders line of 750mL releases -- the "Backstage Series" -- will start up this summer with the return of Blushing Monk, a Belgian-style beer with raspberries. Future beers will include some of the "one-off" beers from Founders' taproom, though there was no mention of any beers in particular. While CBS and Black Biscuit are not taproom-only, we can all hope those will be part of the series at some point.

Cigar City bottled Batch 4 of 110k+OT today. The beer will be a hoppy imperial amber.

Daily Beer Digest - 04.04.2011

Big news from Founders today: the brewery will begin releasing limited edition beers in 750mL bottles starting this summer. No word on exactly which beers as of yet.

Cigar City bottled its most-recent collaboration with Mikkeller today: Nielsbohrium. Greatbrewers.com indicates that this is a blend of Dirac and Bohr imperial sweet stouts with raisins, aged in rum barrels.

Tammy Tuck over at Young & Hungry has an initial primer on some of the events that will be happening during the week preceding SAVOR.

Allagash will soon be releasing a batch of spontaneously-fermented beers. They're also filling their koelschip today.

Captain Lawrence will be releasing Rosso Marrone Batch 3 on Saturday April 16. The new Barrel Select beers -- Series #2, Raspberry, and Cherry -- should hopefully be ready by July.

Firestone Abacus is soon to be known simply as Firestone Barley Wine.

Daily Beer Digest - 03.17.2011

It's St. Patrick's day and there seems to be plenty of debate over green beer and whether it's necessary to have Irish styles today. I plan on taking a middle-of-the-road approach with some GREEN Flash West Coast IPA.

On the heels of several announcements about Dark Lord Day, Three Floyds issued a "State of the Brewery" letter last night.

There continue to be an absolutely ridiculous number of threads on Beer Advocate about Founders KBS. For example, see here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. I think you get the point.

The BEER Act of 2011, which would reduce the taxes paid by small breweries and raise the production cap to be considered a small brewer, continues to pick up co-sponsors in the Senate.

cmstaten posted some very interesting links on cellaring conditions and evolving flavor profiles on Beer Advocate. The linked information comes from Stone's own Mitch Steele and Dr. Bill.

Dark Lord Day tickets will go on sale Saturday March 19 at 1 PM (see #4). I assume this is Central.

You can now vote in Round 2 of the Washington Post's Beer Madness 2011 bracket. Commentary on Round 1 can be found here.

DC Brau (@dcbrau) got its certificate of operation today, meaning that DC is even closer to finally having a production brewery.

Daily Beer Digest

Here is the first installment of Daily Beer Digest, which I hope will be a recurring event.

I had a few extra minutes this morning, so I added the dry hops to my Bitter Beer Face American Bitter, which I brewed on March 6. Thanks to all those on the Beer Advocate Homebrewing forum for helping out with this one. This was my first time adding dry hops in the carboy--rather than in the keg--with unwaxed dental floss used to hold the hop bag in suspension. The procedure was easy enough, and hopefully it yields good results.

Upland Lambics went on sale at 12:00 PM EDT this afternoon. This round Upland offered the Blackberry and Cherry Lambics with a limit of 1 per style per person at $20 per bottle. Amy and I were each lucky enough to grab an allocation of each style. Looking forward to it as the Blackberry is the only variety I haven't been able to try yet.

Deschutes has finalized expansion plans that will eventually result in a capacity increase of 105,000 barrels, responding to an increase in demand for their products. Good news has been coming from Deschutes lately, as they also recently announced that they'll be pasteurizing their beer that comes out of barrels after having infection issues with 2009 Abyss and 2009 Mirror Mirror. Amy and I were luckily spared with The Abyss, as none of our 6 bottles were infected. We're hoping for the same for the 3 bottles of Mirror Mirror I gave Amy for Christmas, as this it's one of her favorite beers. We opened one that was infection-free just after Christmas, so we're hoping that the rest are the same and have the refrigerated just to be safe.

The beer menu for SAVOR was announced. Overall, some very good things to try, though some breweries are a bit disappointing. I'd especially like to see Cigar City be a little bit more adventurous. I wasn't particularly pleased with them offering off-the-shelf bottled beers at this year's Night of the Funk, especially with the knowledge that I had passed on this year's Hunahpu's release and its crazy draft lineup in favor of the Night of the Funk / Extreme Beer Fest combo.

Hoosier Beer Geek put up an interview with Barnaby from Three Floyds, detailing some information about this year's Dark Lord Day. Judging by the picture in the post, this year's wax color with be yellow.

In other absolutely fantastic Three Floyds news, Zombie Dust (formerly Cenotaph) will apparently be released in six packs.

Founders' new bottling line is up and running.

Brew Your Own posted on article on reading malt specification sheets.

Alaskan Brewing will be headed to Minnesota starting in May. Great news for me, as now I should be able to order their beers when I make my online Surly purchases at France 44.

Founders Brewing -- Nemesis and The Barrel Cellar

This morning, KalamaBrew posted information about Founders Nemesis "2009," which is to be a maple-bourbon-barrel-aged wheatwine, clocking in at 12% alcohol and 70 IBU's. Also, KalamaBrew included an older video, which is a brief tour of the Founders Barrel Room.