AHA Homebrew Rally in ATL - Jul 12

This @HomebrewAssoc event will be hosted by @MondayNight.  

Monday Night Brewing Company of Atlanta, GA is inviting all local homebrewers to an American Homebrewers Association (AHA) Rally on Sunday, July 12!

Join us at Monday Night Brewing Company!

- Enjoy Monday Night beer samples
- Learn about hops during an educational presentation from Monday Night brewers
- Take home a Rally-exclusive gift from the AHA
- Meet Monday Night brewers and staff
- Take a VIP brewery tour
- Mingle with local homebrewers
- Win great prizes from the AHA and Monday Night

AHA Rallies are free to current AHA members. Non-members can join now, or sign up onsite at a discounted member rate. Save time and fill out a membership form in advance to bring with you to the Rally. Don’t forget to RSVP to help us properly prepare for the event.

See you there!!

Atlanta Cask Ale Tasting - Jan 24!

So, who's up for 40+ casks of ale?? Brewtopia, @5SeasonsBrewing, & @TacoMacPrado host the Atlanta Cask Ale Tasting on January 24, 2015 from 3-6pm.   For $44-tax you can:

• Sample 40+ rare, cask-conditioned real ales from the USA and UK!
• Take home a free Monday Night Brewing souvenir pint glass!
• Experience one of the Southeast's most highly regarded craft beer events!
• Delectable food from 5 Seasons and Taco Mac will be on sale!
• Vote for "People's Choice" award!

Last year's event, hosted by Georgia beer advocate and Brewtopia's Owen Ogletree, featured 38 casks of ale.  The offerings were headlined by Uinta's Hop Notch, dry-hopped with Cascade and Galaxy and then cask-hopped with whole leaf Amarillo; and 5 Seasons Prado's All Good, a robust porter aged in the finest Heaven Hill Bourbon barrel, and then casked with sugar a Belgian yeast.

Owen Ogletree

However the People's Choice award went to Hole in Juanita Mexican Mazurt, an ale brewed with Mexican coffee, organic Peruvian coca Nibs, Vermont grade-B maple syrup, Madagascar vanilla, Georgia wild flower honey and numerous varieties of Mexican peppers, then casked on Tequila-soaked charred American oak.  This year will add some UK casks to the mix as well!

So what are you waiting for??  Treat yourself for Christmas and go buy your tickets!

If you don't, you might miss all this caskiness!

Abita, Beavertown (UK), Boulder, Brooklyn, Copper Creek, Cherry Street, Creature Comforts, Dark Star (UK), Eagle Creek, Five Seasons, Green Flash, Heavy Seas, Hobsons (UK), Ilkley (UK), Jailhouse, Jekyll, Left Hand, Mazurt, Max Lager's, Monday Night, Moon River, Mother Earth, New Belgium, O'dempsey's, Old Speckled Hen (UK), Omaha Brewing, Oskar Blues, Red Brick, Red Hare, Rahr & Sons, Second Self, Service Brewing, Sierra Nevada, Southbound, Starr Hill, Sweetwater, Terrapin, Thomas Creek, Three Taverns, Twain's, Wild Heaven, Wrecking Bar, Yes Face....

 

Ponce de Leon Beer Festival

This Saturday, @PonceBeerFest will be held at the Yaarab Shrine in Atlanta.

$35 for General Admission, $45 for VIP.  Doors open at 1pm, though VIP tix will get you in at 12 noon.

"With this festival we look to accomplish bringing out these new styles to the public and enlighten people on styles of beer. We would also like to surprise the beer lovers out there with new brews that they have not experienced. For example, many breweries are making a one off beer not available to the public yet. We are trying to keep it in a more intimate feeling with only allowing 1500 people in at the door. We feel this will be able to give the attendees more room to move around and try each beer selection.
The 2014 event will be an amazing experience in taste and sound being held on November 15th 2014 from 12:00 pm to 6:00 pm."

This will be a very regional festival with the following breweries available to General Admission:

If you buy a VIP ticket, you will also have access to some special brews from the following:

Ticket prices will increase on the day of the festival, and part of the proceeds will go to support the Children's Hospital.

Enjoy!

Brewing for Gold!

3 Georgia breweries medaled at 2014's Great American Beer Festival! Gold for @MondayNight, Bronze for @creaturebeer & @CEBC_Sav.

From Creative Loafing Atlanta:

Each year since 1982, beer geeks have made their annual pilgrimage to Denver, piling into the Colorado Convention Center by the thousands for the Great American Beer Festival. There, they spend three days sampling beers from all over the country...

Also each year, GABF judges award gold, silver, and bronze medals to beers sorted by various styles. This year, more than 200 judges tasted and evaluated more than 5,500 different brews across 90 categories.... Three Georgia breweries brought 2014 medals back to the Peach State:

* Savannah's Coastal Empire Beer Co. won bronze in the Herb and Spice Beer category for its Dawn Patrol Breakfast Stout.

* Athens' Creature Comforts Brewing Co. won bronze in the American Style Brett Beer category for its Curiosity No. 2.

* Atlanta's Monday Night Brewing won gold in the Wood and Barrel-Aged Beer category for its Bourbon Barrel Drafty Kilt.

All three breweries are first-time GABF winners. Three is the most medals Georgia's won at GABF, and that's happened five times now: 2014, 2011, 2009, 2002, and 2000. This year marks the first GABF since 2007 where SweetWater or Terrapin didn't bring home a medal.

Congrats to all three, and here's to Georgia winning a few more next year!

Augusta Nerdfest..errr...Beerfest!

@TheMetroSpirit has a great interview with reps from 4 Georgia craft breweries coming to Saturday's Augusta Beerfest.

Nerdfest
Its official name is Augusta Beerfest, but craft beer is serious business

If you think those who work for craft brewing companies are rock stars, they are....But if craft brewery employees are part rock star, they’re equal parts marching band geek.

Recently Metro Spirit sat down for a conversation about being small craft brewers in the south with Jonathan Parker of Jekyll Brewing in Alpharetta, Wes Sessoms of Red Hare Brewing Company in Marietta, Josh Kirssin of Monday Night Brewing in Atlanta and JJ Mercurio of Eagle Creek Brewing Company in Statesboro.

Here is a sampling:

"JK: I think the coolest part of beerfests is taking your domestic drinker and putting him out of his environment that he’s not comfortable with and testing his palate, see what he’s comfortable with and trying to figure out really what it is, because I was a domestic beer drinker when I went to Georgia Southern.

JJ Mercurio: I still am!

WS: Personally, when I go to beer festivals I start to treat it like a wine tasting. I have a restaurant background and we would do these wine tastings and you start with the whites and move on to the reds. Everyone’s got a lighter beer, a pale ale or a lager, so you start there and gear up to those high alcohol and those bigger flavors as you go on throughout the day so you’re not starting off with something like an imperial IPA that’s going to wreck your palate.

MS: Why IPAs? You all have one, right?
JK: Every brewery has an IPA.

JJM: We don’t. We have a pale ale. And I’ve given it to the nerdiest of the nerdy beer nerds and they thought it was an IPA. Nope. It’s a pale ale.

WS: There’s an emerging style between all of our breweries of an East Coast or a Southern IPA. It’s not as dark, it’s not as heavy of an IPA and that’s the thing that I have tried to tell people more recently, you know, don’t compare us or any of our IPAs to a Stone or a Lagunitas or any of these West Coast breweries because it’s a completely different environment. It’s hot here in the summertime. You can’t have an 8 percent, hoppy, dank IPA. That’s just not refreshing, so the one thing that all of us do is that style, more of an emerging, Southern style."

But the best part to read was this:

"MS: What will you be offering at Augusta Beerfest?

JP: Three regular styles and two specialty casks.

WS: The same for us; three regular styles and two specialty casks.

JK: Five and a specialty cask.

JJM: Two and two specialty casks.

WS: The cool thing about specialty casks is you’re not going to find that beer anywhere else. It’s just for this event. The beauty of it is that it’s super rare and super special; you gotta be there to have it. The downside is if you really, really like it you’re never going to see it again."

And that people is what beerfests should be about. Widening your beer experience, and tasting cool new things (i.e. specialty casks!) you may never see again.  Chances are, if you are going to the later session, you won't see those specialty casks...sorry!

Floating the Mainstream in New Bottles

@SweetwaterBrew intros cool new bottles embossed with logo, mantra, and a river scene.

Additionally, Sweetwater is introducing bottle conditioning into their lineup.  Here is their infographic on how it works...

T. Mac Daddy

Ever enlightened to beer in the ATL, @alesharpton gives us the 411 on @MondayNight & @tacomac's new brew, T. Mac Daddy Porter!

Alas....no Taco Macs here in the CSRA...

Atlanta Beer Envy: Part II

This past Monday I was fortunate enough to be invited by 'Beer Me Augusta' on a trip to the Atlanta area to visit a couple of up and coming Georgia breweries.  Our second stop after lunch was to the corporate cubicle escapees at Atlanta's Monday Night Brewing.

Situated in an awesome space near downtown Atlanta, Monday Night encourages all it's fans to cast off their ties, and tie one on. And that is just what we did! 

 "We spent almost 5 years perfecting our Eye Patch Ale and Drafty Kilt Scotch Ale before bringing them to market. Years of minor tweaks, arguments over hop profiles, and experiments with different brands of base malts are poured into every glass that we brew. In the summer of 2012 we launched our 3rd offering, Fu Manbrew, which won Bronze in the US Beer Open in its first month.

The appropriately bearded brewmeister, Duck, gave us a quick tour of the generous brewhouse, where they are not yet brewing to capacity, but as they gain wider distribution in Georgia, and perhaps neighboring states, the brewhouse will no doubt become a round-the-clock operation.  (Too many commas?)

Duck working his comedy routine

Black Tie fermenting

Afterwards in the cavernous garage of a tasting room, Josh tended the taps I got to try my first taste of their Fu ManBrew Belgian-style wit.  Along with their regular Blind Pirate DIPA, Drafty Kilt Scotch Ale, and Eye Patch IPA, I got to try their limited "mythical, mysterious" Serrano Eye Patch IPA.  Very nice with just a bit of pepper-bite on the tail end. 

This huge tasting room is also set up for some great outdoor action as well, but the roll-up doors on the bar stayed closed as it was just too darn cold.  I hate this Global Warming!

I am a giant fan of the Monday Night Brewery, and have been following their development online as they built out this space.  So I was excited to finally get to visit and see why they are having so much success.   I am also glad that Monday Night is a growing brand in the Augusta area, as I see more bottles on shelves and tie-shaped tap handles behind many bars.  If you don't have it where you are, ask your bartender to request it.  Let's make these guys brew 7 days a week! ;-)

Just to finish things off, here is a video of the MNB backstory and ethos.  Cheers!

Mega-Flight of Georgia Craft Beer

Leon's Full Service (@LeonsDecatur) is serving a mean flight of local Georgia brews!   Good on 'em!

They could easily double that for a Georgia mega-flight by adding the following: Red Hare, Blue Tarp, O'Dempseys, Wrecking Bar, Macon Beer Co, Wild Heaven, Coastal Empire, Moon River, and Southbound.

That would be quite an offering for a watering hole with gumption.  Order the Georgia Mega-Flight®, and get a free cab ride home...

Georgia Beer Rising

@CL_Atlanta & @austinlouisray recently provided at great run-down of up & coming Georgia craft breweries.

Georgia Brewery Watch
14 new breweries to look forward to in 2014

One year ago almost to the day, Creative Loafing devoted its cover to the many in-progress craft breweries and brewpubs cropping up in and around Atlanta. Of the eight forthcoming beer makers highlighted in that piece, four — Jekyll, Three Taverns, Eventide, and Reformation — have opened. By CL's count, at least 14 are currently in the works this year. Will they all introduce beer to the market in 2014? Not likely. But the crowded pack represents a continuing upward trend that shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon.

 The article includes a nice overview of some great additions to metro ATL's embarrassment of brewing riches, including the previously profiled Southern Brewing Company, and some intriguing  ideas like Geer Beer and Slice & Pint.  With regard to the latter, pizza and beer sound good to me.  Any chance they would want to open a second one in the CSRA?

It looks like I may have to convince the wife to take some more side trips to the ATL....

Living in a No Brew Zone!

Thanks to the @GaBrewersGuild, one can conveniently see where all of the state's craft breweries are located.

Of course there is a cluster in the Atlanta region, as one might expect.  But what about Georgia's second biggest city, Augusta?  Well....Augusta sits smack dab in the middle of a "No Brew Zone".

While the aforementioned Aiken Brewing Company and brewpub is about an hour away in South Carolina.  But on the Georgia side of the border Augusta residents have to travel at least 90 minutes (and not in a direct route) just to find the closest craft brewery.  And the plethora of locations around Atlanta can be up to 3 hours away, making any visit a long day trip, or an overnight venture.

Yep, it sucks living in the 'No Brew Zone'....

Coming Soon: 1st Annual Georgia Craft Beer Festival

@GaBrewersGuild and @RedBrickBrewing have announced the 1st Annual Georgia Craft Beer Festival to be held on March 22nd at Red Brick.

Red Brick is hosting an unprecedented festival which aims to gather all currently operational Georgia breweries under one banner for a day of celebrating our local craft beer culture. The VIP area will feature 12 specially crafted beers, each one by a different participating brewery. There will also be food trucks and some of the best local live music that Atlanta has to offer. The event will benefit the Georgia Craft Brewers' Guild (insert anything here that you want to say about the guild).

Tickets will go on sale on Jan 24th.

Eventide Rising

Atlanta welcomes @EventideBrewing, and adds to its embarrassment of Craft Brewing riches!

Atlanta brewery launches first beers 

On Jan. 7, Eventide released its first two beers, an a American Pale Ale and a Kölsch Style Ale, at Six Feet Under in Grant Park.

The Atlanta-based craft beer company was formed in 2011 by Nathan Cowan, Haley Cowan and Geoffrey Williams after the three met at Georgia Southern University in 2001. Mathew Sweezey, the company’s vice president of marketing, was introduced to group though a mutual friend of Cowan.The company started with a bank roll of less than $200,000 after the group took out second mortgages on their homes, along with investments from friends and family, to raise the capital, Sweezey said.

“We love and pride ourselves in that the roots of Eventide Brewing stem from a homebrewing project,” Sweezey said. “We aren’t trying to compete with the other breweries in Atlanta because we are more of a neighborhood brewery.”

I can't wait to visit!  My next visit to Atlanta is going to be pretty crammed full of brewery tours...

Coming Soon: Secret Stash Bash!

 On Mar 1st, @5SeasonsBrewing and @TacoMacPrado will be hosting the "Secret Stash Bash" at their locations on Atlanta's north side.

What is a "Stash Bash" you ask, since like me you might live in Craft Beer Purgatory?  Imagine a metric buttload of great craft brewers descending on your town (not Augusta of course) with their "stash" of brews that you can't get anywhere else?

What is the opposite of Purgatory?  That's right....Heaven!




Stolen from their website here are the details:

If you are a Craft Beer aficionado, and that description hasn't hooked you already, then check out the list of breweries:

5 Seasons Brewing Company

Allagash

Ass Kisser Ales

Anderson Valley

Artisinal Imports

Avery

Belukus

Bell's Brewing

Blue Point

Brooklyn Brewery

Boulevard

Burnt Hickory

Clown Shoes

Dogfish Head Ales

Duck Rabbit Brewery

Finches Beer Co.

Founders

Green Flash

Highland Brewing Company

Jail House Brewing

Jeckyl Brewing

Lagunitas Brewing

Left Hand Brewing

Merchant du Vin

Monday Night Brewing

Mother Earth Brewing

New Belgium Brewing

New Holland Brewing

Odempsey's Beer to Die For

Oskar Blues

Red Brick Brewery

Red Hare Brewing

Rogue Ales

Sierra Nevada

Stone Brewing

Sweetwater Brewing

Terrapin Beer

Three Taverns

Victory Brewing

Wetten Importers

Wild Haven Beers

Given that these guys will not be serving up their run of the mill distribution, I think my liver has cried Uncle already....

Christmas Libation!

Some Festive Ale by @SweetWaterBrew

To be followed by Fillets on the grill, with some homebrewed Chocolate Peanut Butter Stout!!

Will We See It Here?

@CigarCityBeer is one of the more prolific craft breweries in the southeast.  But you can you find its many different products in Augusta?

If you know where to look, you can find some six-packs of their flagship Jai Alai IPA in some bottle shops (Toast, Beverage Outlet, Woody's).  But I have yet to see it on tap anywhere.  There has even been a select amount of their Southern Slice (collaboration with Athen's Terrapin Beer), as well as bombers of its Black Ash lager (collaboration with Atlanta's Max Lager's).

One can only hope that this is a sign of things to come.  Hunahpu, perhaps???

In the mean time, I hope that the recent distribution of Hopped on the High Seas Caribbean IPA might actually send a case or two to the Augusta area.

Pleasepleaseplease...

SweetWater 420 Fest - 2014

It looks like April is shaping up to be quite a good month for beer lovers in Georgia.

In addition to the 19th Annual Classic City Brew Fest in Athens on April 13th, Atlanta will be hosting the 10th Anniversary SweetWater 420 Fest between April 18-20.


(2013 420 Fest)

This year's rendition will take place in Centennial Olympic Park, with a large line-up of musical talent for entertainment.  Unlike previous years, the 420 Fest will use tickets, rather than $5 wristbands.  New prices will include a 3-Day Weekend Pass for $14, and a 3-Day VIP Pass for $135.  However early-bird tickets are on sale now for $14.20 and $85 respectively.  One day passes will only be sold day-of, for $10.  Buy your tickets here.

“With this year being our 10th anniversary, we really wanted to dig deeper and bring fans more of the SweetWater experience,” said Director of Marketing for SweetWater Brewery Steve Farace. “We’ve worked hard throughout the last decade as the festival has evolved since its inception, and this year we’re continuing to differentiate our lineup as our new home in Centennial Olympic Park gives us a bigger playground to stretch our out legs in.”

Enjoy!

Hat Tip: Brewbound