That glass in front of the picture. A brewery near us offered those at it’s last anniversary celebration. I had never seen beer glasses like that before.
Teku glasses, very trendy in crafty beer places. Not really sure of their merit personally but they look nice.
Just a different take on a beer snifter style glass. Although I’ve not used one that looks like that, I have about 4-5 other variations of them at the house. Similar to snifters for liquors, they are good for beers that benefit from concentrating the nose smells. Great for big stouts like pictured, as the aromas can concentrate much better than in something like a pint glass. Many are also smaller, since they are usually holding very high alcohol percentage beers.
That makes sense since they actually reminded me of wine glasses. We ended up with three of them.
That’s an awesome score!
We did have a craft beer chain here called TacoMac (strange name, but it’s part of their history.) At any rate, TacoMac is huge in the Atlanta area, not so much here in North Carolina. Every week they had one planned “pint night” when they would highlight a specific vendor, usually with some sort of tap takeover for several of their brews. Sometimes this was even a month long vendor highlight.
For many of those, the vendor would offer glassware if you ordered one of their beers. So whenever there was a great glass, I partook of as many as possible, for science of course.
My favorites out of that were nearly a full set of these:
I also have 1-3 of various other sizes and styles of snifters. They really come in handy for stouts, porters, sours, or anything where you want to smell the beer a little more than normal.
We were going to the brewery that gave away the glasses about once a month on “Take Home the Glass” night. You buy a pint and you get to keep the glass. Usually they charge $1 per pint more on those nights. The one style of glass we don’t have at this point is a snifter.
I got a bunch of the Teku glasses last Christmas (I think). I really like em - in addition to making the beer look really nice when you pour it, you can easily grab it by the stem and drink so you’re not warming up the beer when you hold it. Maybe that’s a first world problem but regardless, I didn’t have any real beer glasses prior to that and they fit the bill.
So the craft beer business is big enough in the area that there are now guys trying to grow hops instead of grapes. It will be interesting to see how that works out.
I remember driving from Eastern Oregon towards Portland on I84 several years ago and seeing these strange looking trellised plants growing in the distance. They turned out to be hops.
Well the real payout is the long timeline of a developed and universally praised patented hop. Good luck to them if they take that path, the timelines are long, and from what I understand, the risk is very high.
So, having enjoyed Deschutes quite a bit, I decided to give another mix pack of theirs a go. This one had the Black Butte Porter and Mirror Pond Pale Ale, but added Fresh Squeezed IPA and the Pacific Wonderland Lager.
Still high marks. I enjoyed both new ones. Deschutes is quickly carving a place as one of my favorites.
I love their Fresh Squeezed IPA. The Pinedrops IPA is a completely different style but it is great as well.
I have never seen the Pacific Wonderland Lager here. I have had and like the others in that pack.
They are quite solid. And benefiting greatly by the pickup by Anheuser Busch, since their distribution seems to be everywhere now.
I hope that remains true for you guys with Wicked Weed as well over time. Solid beers there, too.
Oooh, Pinedrops? Sounds awesome. I need to seek that one out.
My favorite Deschutes year-round IPA is Inversion - but my local beer places stopped carrying it because Fresh-Squeezed outsells in by a wide margin. Their Red Chair NWIPA is wonderful, but you’ll have to wait for next Spring.
Fresh Squeezed IPA is great. New Belgium has a tangerine one called Citradelic that I also like. And Payette Brewing has a Blood Orange IPA that I’ve been buying a lot of this summer, but I think they only distribute in the northwest.
We visited some family in Wisconsin who introduced us to Spotted Cow by New Glarus, a company that evidently makes a pretty big deal of the fact that they absolutely will not distribute outside of the state of Wisconsin. We tried it and were soundly underwhelmed, which our family members assured us was the correct response.
Over the weekend, I went to a local bar called Prost! in downtown Boise, which specializes in German and German-style beers, which I hadn’t really had very many of before. I tried a Fruh Kolsch, which was pretty alright – very light and subtly fruity. I also tried a Kristalweiss – I had never had a beer with banana flavor, but it wound up being balanced enough that it didn’t feel like too much.
A question for you fruity beer guys. When do these fruity beers stop being beers and become cocktails or shandies?
Technical answer? When they are mixed with another non-beer beverage to become something else, aka a shandy.
Honest answer? When your girlfriend specifically asks to drink all of yours.
Yeah, as far as I know, most of what I consider a fruity beer is, in fact, beer – it’s just brewed with different stuff in the mix. I make a distinction between those and drinks that are mixed after the fact.
Not that there’s anything wrong with those – I’m no purist. One of my favorite things is the Stiegl Grapefruit Radler, a 2% ABV, 40-60 beer-soda mix. It’s delicious, but I wouldn’t give it to someone and say “Hey, try this beer.”
Well I would argue that a Sour is not a beer, but it actually is. I just can’t drink them. I have found a Mango IPA I like from Barrelhouse Brewing, but something like that is basically a 1 beer event on a hot day.
The first actual craft beer I ever had was a raspberry ale made by some brewery on the Oregon Coast, some 30 years ago.
Supposedly this one’s a beer, but it sure doesn’t taste much like one to me. Almost a hard soda.
Way too sweet for me, but the lady friends like it. I’ve mixed it half-and-half with OJ and it makes a pretty decent drink that way.
I kinda feel the same about Not Your Father’s Root Beer. Same brewery. Way too sweet for me.