Beer Snob

The writing of Will Siss


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What’s Brewing: Cavalry Brewing

Cavalry Brewing card

Mike McCreary, the owner/brewer at Cavalry Brewing in Oxford, Conn.

What are the latest developments you’re excited about at your brewery?

We have recently started distributing through New Jersey and hope to start distributing in Putnam and West Chester Counties in New York this summer.

Have you added any new beers to your lineup?
The X-Limited Edition changes all the time. Recently it was an English ESB with 6% ABV and 32 IBU’s.

What trends are you excited about in the craft beer world in general?
The expanding market share and the overall awareness of the beer drinking population is a great trend.

Is there anything you’d like to promote?
Ask your favorite bartender or local package store for a Connecticut beer. Something brewed and bottled in the state!

Interested in having a profile of your own? Email me at beer.snob@yahoo.com.


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Into the Lite, 1970-1973: “The Audacity of Hops” review (part 2)

Audacity of hops

What gives Tom Acitelli’s “The Audacity of Hops” a sense of structure is following the paths of innovators in the field of craft beer in the U.S. He isn’t satisfied with name-dropping. He wants to take you along for the ride with these dreamers and beer nerds.

He breaks his book up into tiny, biographical sips separated chronologically and geographically, beginning with 1965 in San Francisco.

I’ll focus in this installment on the segments that deal with 1970 in Davis, Calif. through to 1973 in Munich, Germany and Brooklyn, NY. Continue Reading →


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Head West, 1965: “The Audacity of Hops” review (part 1)

Audacity of hops

Tom Acitelli’s “The Audacity of Hops: The History of America’s Craft Beer Revolution” (Chicago Review Press Inc., 2013) contains such a thorough look at craft beer that I thought it deserved a review of several chapters. Here’s one of them:

Chapter 1: The Last Shall Be First, San Francisco 1965

Following a breezy introduction, which signals to the reader that this history was not going to be a dry tutorial but a story framed around the birth and adolescence of craft beer, Acitelli goes to what he believes to be the center of the modern age of independent brewing. He focuses on Anchor Steam Brewing, regarded among the drinkeratti as the link between the wild west of pre-Prohibition and Samuel Adams prominence.

He writes like a novelist, which appeals to me. Like a novelist, Acitelli develops characters the best he can. In this case, the lead character is Fritz Maytag, the grandson of the dishwasher magnate who turned his enjoyment of a pint of beer into a craft brewing legend. Continue Reading →


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Connecticut Beer Week is almost here

(A version of this column was published on May 8, 2013 in the Waterbury (Conn.) Republican-American.)

Spread the news far and wide: May 11-18 is “CT Beer Week.”

It’s basically a party that members of the Connecticut beer industry have decided to throw in honor of… itself.

The statewide event non-coincidentally coincides with the American Craft Beer Week. That’s the one that invented by the Brewers Association to promote the craft beer industry. By craft beer, we’re talking smaller than Budweiser, which basically has its week every week, with a special holiday on Super Bowl Sunday. Continue Reading →


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Shebeen good to me

shebeen board

I had a chance to attend an early opening of Wolcott’s Shebeen Brewing yesterday, along with an enthusiastic crowd of invited guests. The Wolcott brewery’s tasting room has undergone a strong refurbishing since I saw it a couple months ago.

As tasting rooms go, this one has a nice atmosphere. A standing bar for pourers on along one wall with six taps means easy access to generous shot glasses. A mural of a quaint, vaguely Irish street scene dominates another wall. There are a few tables for comfort. And the faux exposed beams gives it an old-world touch.

Shebeen mural

There’s an open house today from noon to five, so treat yourself to a dry, mellow Irish Pale or biting Black Hop IPA.

RELATED POST: Shebeen Brewing


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Connecticut wanderings: The Outer Space

A bar for the young

A bar for the young

There’s a time in most people’s lives that they realize their age and it scares them.

I think I had mine last night at The Outer Space in Hamden, Conn.

There’s this great definition I once heard for the word “cosmopolitan,” which was, “feeling like you belong, wherever you are.” Since post-college, I’ve considered myself cosmopolitan. Whether it’s a backyard barbecue, church, a fancy dinner, or even at a family reunion,  I feel comfortable.

This really applies when I’m in a bar. Since I’m usually there for the beer, any ambiance is gravy. I’ve been in my share of dives, but not for a while. While I wouldn’t label The Outer Space a “dive,” it was certainly the most “casual” bar I’ve been to in a while. Continue Reading →


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Bring on the spring

17_FEA_041713WS01

(A version of the following column was originally published in the Waterbury (Conn.) Republican-American on April 17, 2013.)

You want to garden, toss the baseball around and wear that cute tank top with the owl on it.

Mother Nature, however, has other plans. It’s rarely above 55 degrees, and your imagined April wonderland is populated by leafless trees and gray skies.

Just because the world outside is slow to bloom this year doesn’t mean you can’t launch a psychological spring with the help of some crisp, refreshing beers.

Brooklyn Brewery Pilsner

This is a take on a Czech style that’s a big more bold. Pilsners are supposed to have a nice sweetness in the background with a crispness and lightness that makes for easy drinking. It’s a lager (as opposed to an ale), which usually suggests that it will have a “clean” taste, as in nothing much to cloud your taste buds like bitterness. Continue Reading →


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Farmhouse brewery meets resistance

www.brooklynbrewery.com

Dan Moss. Photo from http://www.brooklynbrewery.com

A local Planning and Zoning meeting about the future of a possible brewery sounds boring.

The one I attended recently was certainly not.

The nascent, currently named Food Cycle Farm in Kent, Conn. is hoping to erect and run the first farmhouse brewery in the state. So far, it’s been able to help create the designation of a farmhouse brewery, but on this cold Thursday night, its founders needed to gain the special permit necessary from the commission to keep the arduous process of building and operating the brewery.

Not everyone at the public hearing, however, was a fan of the idea. Continue Reading →


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Gateway beers

Sean Masterson / For The Los Angeles Times

Sean Masterson / For The Los Angeles Times

Some of us craft beer lovers believe it’s part of our mission to convince the uninitiated to try (and by extension love) “our” brews and leave mass-market stuff behind.

There are the full-on evangelicals who push their ways into bar conversation just as the stranger patron has ordered a Coors Light. There are also the wise guys who need to make references to Budweiser being undrinkable, disgusting, etc. These are the ones that get labeled “beer snobs,” and not in the ironic way that I am.

In a recent article by John Verive for the Los Angeles Times, the author describes three craft beer styles that might “convert” the reader into being a beer lover.

This is a thoughtful method that beer bar bartenders know well. The patron asks for a Blue Moon. Bartender serves patron Blue Moon. The patron asks for another, but the bartender suggests they try a shotglass full of another beer… maybe it’s a Hoegaarden Original White Ale, or a Weihenstephaner.

For the bourbon drinker, beers like Kentucky Bourbon Barrel Ale might be a suggestion. White wine drinkers might go for the a beer that’s got pop like Allagash White.

Verive recommends the Kolsch as a gateway style, which is spot-on. Assuming the uninitiated in question has tried and tolerated beer that’s light and crisp, but can take more body than a pilsner. I thought that Verive’s choice of a saison was a bit off the mark, because farmhouse ales can be a bit too complex for tender palates.

It’s a well-written quick read, and I recommend it.