Results tagged “beeradvocate”

Chocolate and beer. What would the world do without the Belgians? To celebrate their accomplishments in at least one of those categories, people will be flocking to The Return of the Belgian Beer Fest next weekend, October 16th and 17th.

The weather may be bad for sunbathing, but it’s always good weather for drinking beer! Several events are slated for July in the New England area that will properly celebrate the beverage.

We’ve been living a carefree, tax-free lifestyle in the world of liquor for a while now. That all could change soon. Lawmakers finalizing the 2010 budget are proposing a hefty tax on alcohol. They have raised the general sales tax from 5% to 6.25% and are now applying that to the sale of all beer, wine, and alcohol sold in stores.

It’s summer time and you know what that means: beer festivals sprouting up all over the place. In the next two weeks you can join BeerAdvocate at their always-amazing American Craft Beer Fest, visit the Harpoon Brewery, or ride your bike over to Redbones.

Next week the annual Craft Brewers Conference comes to Boston. This means nearly 2,600 people in the brewpub or brewery businesses descend upon the city to learn about brewing and share information about craft beer. This means a lot of lecturing, schmoozing, and, what else…? Oh, yeah: drinking.

A few beer events coming up that you don’t want to miss:

In light of the fact that there are only 22 shopping days left until Christmas, here are a few ideas for the beer lover on your list. First, as you know, we love beer books. And books make a great gift. Consider anything the late, great Michael Jackson wrote or even the book of what we like to term “beernography,” The Beer Book. BeerBooks.com is a great place to get ideas and is organized neatly so you can distinguish histories from homebrewing guides or from beer appreciation guides.

Every time this Bostonist sits down with a porter or a stout, eyebrows rise in surprise all around her. Is that little girl taking on that big dark beer all by herself? Does she really like strong beers like that? Does she know that's going straight to her hips? Is that a porter of some kind... or a Guinness?

 

Belgium is a beautiful country. It brings us chocolate, freedom fries, waffles, and a weird molecule sculpture. It brings us the intoxicating idea of the European Union, and the even more intoxicating beverage known as beer. We had the opportunity to savor the incredibly diverse and complex varieties of beer at Saturday’s little Belgium-in-Boston, Beer Advocate’s Belgian Beer Festival.

              

Bostonist made it to the Night of the Funk at this year's Belgian Beer Fest.

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[Tickets, $40-50]

We’d just like to remind you of how lucky you are to be living in New England. Why, you ask? If it’s not the weather, the traffic, or the football team, whatever could it be? Well, the beer, naturally. For whatever reason—possibly the weather and the traffic—New England has a high concentration of amazing breweries and brew pubs. You can hardly finish a drunken stagger without falling over one.

The Weekly Dig just unveiled its new website design. Anything would have been an improvement over the crappy, sluggish site the Weekly Dig had before. You could go make a grilled-cheese sandwich and eat it in the time it took for a page to load.

On the heels of the Boston 375 Colonial Ale, brewed in the tradition of beers crafted back when Boston was founded the Boston Beer Company, maker of Samuel Adams beer, will soon launch a new pack of beers called the Brewer Patriot Collection. The four included are the Traditional Ginger Honey Ale, James Madison Dark Wheat Ale (we've also heard described as a red wheat), George Washington Porter, and the 1790 Root Beer Brew. The George Washington Porter is brewed with the same molasses that was used in the Boston 375 but is decidedly darker in color and richer in flavor.

"I keep seeing the word 'hoppy' and misreading it as 'happy,'" says one of our drinking companions, leafing through the NERAX beer list. "You're not misreading," Bostonist replies, between sips of Bishop's Farewell. Our first pint at the New England Real Ale Exhibition is golden, fruity, and, in the end, bitter.