AGS Tap Takeover - 20 Nov

Next Thursday @MotherEarthBrew will do a tap takeover at @beeskneestapas!  

That is all!

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!

Get on the Brew Bus Gus!

According to @drinkblogrepeat, @ColumbiaBrewBus hits the streets of SC's capital on Nov. 7th!

"The Capital City’s first brewery tour business gets rolling this Friday, Nov. 7, as the Columbia Brew Bus begins its weekly tours of Columbia’s breweries.

[...]

During a preview tour Sunday, Nov. 2, the Brew Bus staff gave an idea of what each of the weekly trips will be like. The rotation of the breweries will change, but the bus will take riders to Swamp Cabbage, River Rat and Conquest where they’ll have the chance to try 24 oz. of beer at each brewery..."

It will be nice to now have a "Brews Cruise" as it were a little closer to the CSRA than Atlanta.  If we wanted to do one here in Augusta we would have to go to our one main growler outlet, and a number of top homebrewers houses....

For more information on the Columbia Brew Bus, check out their website at columbiabrewbus.com!

A photo posted by Columbia Brew Bus (@columbiabrewbus) on Oct 10, 2014 at 12:06pm PDT

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!

AGS Tap Takeover! Sep 25

UPDATE!  I JUST NOTICED I GOT THE DATE WRONG.  THE TAKEOVER WILL BE ON THURSDAY THE 25TH!
 
Join @JekyllBrewing at 5pm in downtown AGS for a Tap Takeover @BeesKneesTapas. Word is they will even be bringing their Hoot'n 'n Holler'n DIPA to the party.

Amongst the beer geeks I talked to after the Augusta Beerfest, this was the consensus best of show.  And in my opinion was every bit the equal of the highly rated Citrus Ninja from @Westbrookbeer.

Stay tuned for future Tap Takeovers at Bees Knees:

October 30th  -  Eagle Creek Brewing (Statesboro, GA)
November 20th  -  Mother Earth Brewing (Kinston, NC)
December 18th  -  Founders Brewing (Grand Rapids, MI)

Follow the Peach State Ale Trail

Drink local and get the Beer Buzz on the @GAAleTrail!

Started in July, Georgia's new source for "Craft Beer news, reviews, events, & tours" is just getting rolling.

Like other examples of 'Ale Trails' around the country (see Asheville Ale Trail for a great example), the Peach State Ale Trail looks to become the go to resource for the enjoyment of all things beer in Georgia.

PSAT will highlight the Georgia Beer Buzz, profiles of local craft breweries, overviews of beer tours around the state, as well as a future section to display a "directory of restaurants, beer bars, growler stations, and bottle shops in the Peach State."

Definitely bookmark 'em and follow 'em on Twitter to keep ahead of news for your craft beer needs!

Poplar Creek Brewing Arrives!

Augusta now has a local homebrew supply store! Grains, Hops, Yeast, and more...

Saturday marked the opening of Poplar Creek Brewing (PCB) on South Belair in Martinez.  As the CSRA's first homebrew storefront in a long while, it was not surprising to see brewers inside shopping before the doors even officially opened.

If you have ever run out of an ingredient, or forget to order yeast, you understand the value of having a local place you can run to on the quick.  Owner Wylie and his wife understand this, saw the local need, and took the entrepreneurial plunge.

Owner Wylie (L), suffering my poor photographic skills

Although just getting started, PCB offers everything from the aforementioned grains (bulk or measured and crushed on site), hops (40+ varieties), and yeast (20+ varieties of Wyeast), to brewing and kegging equipment, and extract kits and ingredients.

Brewers lined up early!

So if you are a CSRA homebrewer, I highly encourage you to stop by and support this new local business the next time you are planning to brew.  PCB can be found at 212 S. Belair Rd in Martinez, right next door to Azteca Maya.

Beer Trading Made Easy

thebeerexchange.io

@BeerExchangeApp, the first web app dedicated to craft beer trading. 

Augusta beer lovers, have you ever wanted to get your hands on a beer made somewhere else in this great country, but is not sold here in Beer Purgatory?

Well, look no further than the online convenience of The Beer Exchange.  BEX is the product of Mark Iafrate from Charlotte, NC.  Mark is also a co-host (and fall guy) on the wildly entertaining Craft Beercast, a weekly podcast out of the Queen City by a bunch of guys who don't know how good they have it. ;-)

But to get back to the topic at hand....  

You live in Augusta, but you really want to try Heady Topper or Pliny the Elder.  Top rated craft beers that you will never see sold here locally, since they are never distributed outside their own region.  BEX will allow you to search out and find other beer lovers around the nation who possess those beers that you desire, and then set up a trade with them.  The only "catch" is that you need to have a beer "For Trade" that the other party is "In Search Of".

For instance, above is an example of a trade of a bottle of Terrapin's White Chocolate Moo-Hoo for a can of Alchemist's Heady Topper.  Not a bad deal, if you ask me.

Again, the "catch" is that you need to have beers that others around the country won't have access to.  Think Terrapin's various Liquid Bliss, Side Project, Wake-n-Bake, or Moo-Hoo releases.  Sweetwater's Dank Tank Series.  Westbrook Mexican Cake.  Three Taverns Quasimodo or Theophan The Recluse.  Well, you get the idea.  To land those "whales" that you would never otherwise get to try, you need to be able to offer something exclusive from our region in return.

BEX's Most Sought After Beers

If this sounds like something you'd might like to try, head over to TheBeerExchange.io and sign up.  Then go out and start building your southeastern beer cellar.  Good luck!

Augusta Beerfest Special Offer!

@GravityGrowlers is offering a special deal for those dressed appropriately at the Augusta Beerfest: 

"Hey Folks, we are really excited for Augusta's first beer festival. From the sound of it, the attendance is going to be great, and that should really help elevate Augusta on the Georgia craft beer map. For anyone who is unsure about going, please do. Supporting events like this only increases the likelihood more craft beer related events will happen in the future. There are lots of reasons Augusta, with its population and resources, should be an active venue for craft beer enthusiasts, so vote with your dollars and support stuff like this!

We have a fun promo for those attending. If you have one of our shirts and wear it to the festival, take a picture of you wearing it...show us the pic next week and get 20% off of any 64oz growler fill. If you don't have a shirt, get one!! We just reduced the prices!"

So get your butts over to 341 Furys Ferry Rd in Martinez tomorrow and get yourself a shirt!

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!