Beer School: I Smell Skunk!

Spring came early to the Northland! Sunday afternoon in Minneapolis was a delightfully sunny 64° degrees, a record and a full 25° above the average for the day. Only slight remnants of black snow remained in the back yard to remind one that it was still winter just a couple of days ago. After months [...]

Flat Earth Brewing Company: Building Their Own Little Universe in St. Paul

Flat Earth Brewing Company
Location: St. Paul, Minnesota
Established: 2007
Brewers: Owner/Brewmaster – Jeff Williamson, Brewer/Master of Infusion – Mike Elias
Production: 2008 – 800 bbl
Beers: Year Round – Belgian Pale Ale, Element 115 Lager, Cygnus X-1 Porter, Angry Planet Organic Pale Ale, Northwest Passage IPA.
Seasonals – Black Helicopter Coffee Stout, Winter Warlock Barleywine, Ovni Biere [...]

Brewing for a Cause: Social Entrepreneurship in the Beer Industry

Steve Koenemann’s recent HopPress article on Socially Responsible Beers got me thinking about the broad ethos of community engagement that exists in the brewing industry.  In addition to the examples mentioned in that article, there is another form of brewing philanthropy that has long intrigued me. In a trend that I will call “brewing for [...]

Brewing Sahti

My friend Mark recently stumbled on an article about Sahti, a primitive beer from Finland. Mark is a Brit who is married to a Fin. He and his wife came to the Minnesota just over a year ago from Finland. When I started Mark homebrewing last summer I warned him (and his wife) that the [...]

What’s So Funny ‘Bout Peace, Love and Understanding: Interrogating Collaborative Beers

In a recent post fellow Hoppress writer Mario Rubio noted that “collaboration is the new barrel-aging.” Indeed, collaborative brewing seems to be the next big thing in the craft beer industry. Breweries large and small, foreign and domestic, are combining their collective know-how to create brews ranging in style from barleywines to Belgians to browns, [...]

Minnesota Brewers Show Off At Winterfest 2010

You had to act fast if you wanted to attend this year’s Winterfest in St. Paul, Minnesota.  The event’s seven hundred tickets sold out in just eight minutes. Winterfest is an annual beer festival sponsored by the Minnesota Craft Brewers Guild, a trade organization representing Minnesota breweries and brewpubs. It is a showcase for all [...]

A Homebrewing Competition Revealed

Last week I judged eight flights at the Upper Mississippi Mashout homebrew competition in the Twin Cities of Minnesota (sadly no medals for me this year). In its nine years of existence the Mashout has grown into one of the largest homebrew competitions in the country. This year brought a record 930+ entries from brewers [...]

Beer Dabbler Showcase at the St. Paul Winter Carnival

St. Paul, Minnesota, January 23rd. Low clouds present a dull, gray overcast. The temperature is an unseasonably warm thirty-five degrees. Light rain falls and freezes on contact with the much colder ground, making every step treacherous and driving an exercise in white-knuckled prayer. While it’s not as cold as it should be for the season, [...]

Dave’s Brewfarm – Brewing Sustainably

Dave’s Brewfarm sits atop a ridge in the rolling rural landscape of western Wisconsin about sixty miles east of the Twin Cities. Standing there one feels far removed from everything. Wilson, Wisconsin, the nearest town, is home to only about 180 people. A big sign set with heavy timbers at the top of the drive [...]

Blended Beer Cocktails

A significant part of my holiday beer consumption this year consisted of what I will call blended beer cocktails. By this I mean two or more beers mixed together. Blending beers is nothing new. The blending of one, two, and three-year-old lambic into gueuze is an art in Belgium and porter is purported to have [...]