Beer

If we had to describe lambic beers in one word, we’d probably go with “funky.” Yes, funky! This beer has a little something extra over those other beers, making every bottle unique and incredibly fun to drink…Most commercial beers are made with carefully selected strains of yeast, but brewers of lambic beers leave things up to chance. Belgian lambic beers are left in open vats where wild yeast and bacterias are allowed to take up residence.

The other day we had a question about beer cheese soup; now here’s one on cooking with pale ale. In our most recent Open Thread, reggiesoang asks:Is there any dish that could be cooked with pale ale? Brown ale is usually the choice for cooking, but since I have a lot of pale ale left that needs to be used (or drank), I wonder if I can use pale ale the same way I use brown ale in like BBQ sauce or chili (best time for a nice pot of chili). Help!

Keep these easy hacks in mind all summer long.

A week after brewing our first batch of beer1. The End Goal – It’s not completely necessary to transfer the beer into another container at this point. Some sources say that the beer can start to develop off-flavors from the dead yeast or evaporate too much due to the bigger surface area. We think the primary advantage is that your fermentation bucket is then freed up to brew another batch of beer!2.

Can you tell whether this photo is of a porter or a stout? We can’t! These are both dark beers with a similar range of malty, roasted, and bittersweet flavors. They also both have a reputation for being fairly heavy and for making us feel quite toasty while sipping them. So is there any difference at all between a porter and a stout?This mystery has bothered us for quite some time, so we dove into research and discovered some interesting facts!

This beer is absolutely unlike anything else we’ve ever tasted. In fact, when we first tried it a few years ago, we hated it! But now that our taste in beer has grown up a bit, we decided to give this spicy, fruity beer another shot.Beer Details – Golden Monkey from Victory Brewing Company in Downington, Pennsylvania. This is a Belgian-style tripel ale, meaning that it is brewed with triple the amount of malts typical of Belgian ales. (9.

When we’re standing in front of a wall of beer at the store, we often have trouble remembering our dopplebocks from our imperial stouts and our pilsners from our pale ales. As much for our benefit as for yours, we wanted to do a few round-ups of common beer styles for handy reference. First up: lagers!Lagers are on one branch of the beer family tree, with ales on the other. Lager beers are made with a particular kind of yeast that ferments at cooler temperatures than ale yeast.

For years, the Sam Adams spring seasonal has been a white ale – a very tasty white ale, we might add. This year, the brewery decided to change things up on us and they’ve put a Czech-style pilsner in their spring spot instead. Say what?! Let’s see how this “Noble Pils” stacks up, shall we?Beer Details: Noble Pils from Sam Adams/Boston Beer Company in Boston, Massachusetts.

For such a geographically small country, Belgium sports quite an impressive number of beer styles – and delicious ones at that! Belgian beers are primarily ales (as opposed to lagers) with a heavy emphasis on malts and a lot of fruity yeast flavors. What’s your favorite style?

Browse through the beer section of any well-stocked store and you’ll notice the word “imperial” showing up in front of many of your favorite beers: imperial stout, imperial pale ale, imperial pilsner and who knows what else. That word might actually mean something different than you think!The term “imperial” was used in the 1800’s for beer (usually stout) that was brewed in England but then shipped to Russia – specifically the imperial court of Russia!

We’re probably going to catch some heat for saying this, but we find it infinitely easier to pair food with beer than with wine. Between the roasted malts and the herbal hops, craft brews have so many nuances of flavor that it seems like there’s gotta be something in there that you can match to your dinner. Here’s where to start!The very first rule of pairing beer and food is that anything goes. Seriously!

Will a beer left sealed in the bottle ever expire? The short answer is yes. But the longer answer is that it depends. Confused? You’re not alone.The life of a beer doesn’t end once it’s finished fermenting and is sealed into bottles. Like wine, beer continues to age and change over time. They’re at their peak of freshness and flavor the first few months after bottling, but then things slowly decline.

If you like your beers bitter, hoppy, and crisp, the family of pale ales is the place to go. Curious what makes a pale ale pale? Or an India pale ale distinct? You have questions, and we have answers.You can think of these beers as a spectrum with more mild pale ales on one end and aggressively-hopped double IPAs on the other. There is a lot of variation within the spectrum and an exception to every rule, of course, but you can follow this as a general rule of thumb.

This beer has become our talisman for warmer weather. It’s everything we love about summery IPAs: namely, a hop-tastic brew with a sturdy backbone of toasted malts. We’re convinced that as long as we sip it, winter will continue its fade into distant memory. Think it will work?Beer Details: India Pale Ale from Lagunitas Brewing Company, Petaluma, CA (IPA, 6.2% ABV)Appearance: This ale pours a very clearn golden-honey color.

Now, we’re not trying to get into a “Which is better: beer or wine?” debate here. It’s just that we believe that there are some beers that you steadfast wine drinkers out there might really enjoy. Call them cross-over beers. As in, they cross the line between beer and wine. As in, come on over and we’ll pour you a pint.These beer styles draw on many of the same flavor profiles as our favorite wines: robust, fruity, and spicy; crisp, tart, and dry.

Ever fall in love with a beer, only to discover that it’s a “seasonal” not to be seen again for another year?It can seem cruel for a brewery to hook us on a delicious beer and then snatch it away again, but they have some good reasons for doing so.Back before refrigeration and shipping made it possible to lager beers in the hot summer months and save fresh hops through the winter, some beers were seasonal by virtue of what was available.

Back in college, being handed a foamy beer was cause for exasperated eye-rolling. But glance through any beer review these days, and you’ll see effusive odes to creamy heads of foam and the delicate lacing they leave behind. What gives? The foamy head on a glass of beer offers a few different things for our beer-drinking experience. For starters, each one of those little bubbles is carrying a puff of aroma.

Growing up, I would always laugh at my dad after he drank a beer or a glass of wine. He is Thai-Chinese and even one drink makes his face turn bright red. “You’re red!” I’d say, pointing and laughing. It never stopped being funny.Until the first time I drank alcohol. My face turned beet-red and felt feverishly hot. It wasn’t funny at all.

Too much beer is hardly a bad problem to have, but there are times when, yes, you open a bottle and realize you can’t finish it. This often happens to me when I open large 750 mL bottles of specialty (and quite often very alcoholic) beers. Unless I open it with friends, it’s just too much for one sitting. I used to worry that the leftover would go to waste, but now I just save it for later.I first realized that beer could be saved when I started buying growlers from a local brew pub.

Q: We recently had a 2-day power outage and I’m wondering if the beer left in my fridge is safe or not. I can’t find a definitive answer online – please help!Sent by DanielleEditor: Yes! Your beer is just fine! You can chill it again and drink happy. The alcohol in the beer prevents anything nasty from growing, and cooling it down again won’t adversely affect flavor. (“Skunked” beer is usually a result of exposure to light or really extreme temperature swings.

We’re not talking beer with a salt rim on the glass, but beer actually brewed with salt. Intentionally. It’s called gose, and although the style has been around for centuries, it might just be the new big thing.Gose comes from the German side of the sour beer family, a branch quite distinct from from Belgium’s famous lambics and gueuzes.

There is no denying the satisfaction inherent in popping the cap off a beer at the end of a long day and swigging straight from the bottle. But. Pouring that frosty cold beer into a pint glass has its own rewards. Perhaps you’ve been turned off to this notion after hearing a beer geek friend expound one too many times on the subject, but give me a chance to persuade you. If you love craft beer, pour it in a glass.

When I first started brewing beer at home, I was a five-gallon girl — much like most new homebrewers. It’s just what you do. But there were drawbacks almost immediately. Brewing this much beer meant clearing out a precious coat closet for storing carboys and bottles, always having a buddy on hand to help lift the heavy (and hot!

Just like bacon is the gateway meat, Blue Moon seems to be the introductory brew for those just starting to dip their toes into the waters of craft beers. And although Blue Moon has big-name financial backing (it’s owned by MillerCoors), it’s emblematic of a light and citrusy style of ale that’s been brewed in Europe for centuries.

The minute we moved into our new house, which came complete with a coveted basement refrigerator, I took a cue from what I saw at the bars and threw a couple of pint glasses in the freezer. It became a habit to grab a frozen glass as we pulled a bottle from the fridge for drinking on the back porch. But as I learned more about beer serving and tasting over the past few years, I wondered if I might be doing something wrong by keeping my glasses icy cold. Was I revealing myself as an amateur?

Yuengling, as you all darn well know, is America’s oldest brewery. And if you grew up in Pennsylvania as I did, its flagship brew was likely one of the first to pass your lips. If you grew up with Yuengling and love it, but want to branch out a little, here are five more beers to try. As a Bucknell University alum of a certain age, I spent many nights at the Bull Run Inn (aka “The Bar”) downing $4 pitchers of Yuengling and savoring its easy-drinking smoothness.

So you’ve been trying more beer lately—not just the brands that you see on commercials that tout things like “crisp and cold from a mountain stream!” or “beer for tonight’s party, man!” but beers that say things like “double Imperial hopped in a barrel” on their labels. And sure, they taste great, but what the heck do all those words mean?

Some craft beer labels are works of art. Others read like scientific formulas. At the store, on bar menus, and online, acronyms like SRM are moving from the province of the professional and the homebrewer to the everyday beer enthusiast. “These numbers can be meaningless gibberish until you calibrate yourself to what they mean,” says Randy Mosher, author of Tasting Beer.

We’ve already discussed the fact that the color of a beer isn’t always an accurate indicator of its taste, but we can make some sweeping generalizations about what we’re drinking based on looks alone: pale beers like German and American pilsners will be crisp and clean; amber beers like doppelbocks and brown ales will be caramelly and sweet; and dark, near-black beers like Guinness and other stouts will be rich and roasty.

If you’ve been shying away from buying brews in larger bottles, here are five reasons to think big when it comes to beer. Many brewers use a larger bottle style because they want to capture the nuanced flavors of bottle conditioning. Heck, it’s how some of the best Belgian beers have been made for centuries, and it’s only appropriate if you’re an American brewer creating a Belgian-style ale to do the same.

Today’s topic: I introduce the beer we’ll be brewing — and talk about why we chose this one. The Kitchn’s Beer School: 20 lessons, 7 assignments to brew your first 1-gallon batch of beer. Sign up & see all the assignments! The Kitchn’s Beer School Hello, Beer School students! We’ve answered some essential questions people have before they brew beer and covered the basic timeline for brewing it at home.

Today’s topic: A rundown of the basic ingredients you’ll need to brew a 1-gallon batch of beer The Kitchn’s Beer School: 20 lessons, 7 assignments to brew your first 1-gallon batch of beer. Sign up & see all the assignments! The Kitchn’s Beer School All right — what do you need to get this beer going? All beer is made with just four base ingredients: malts, water, hops, and yeast.

Today’s topic: An overview of the four stages of your brew day The Kitchn’s Beer School: 20 lessons, 7 assignments to brew your first 1-gallon batch of beer. Sign up & see all the assignments! The Kitchn’s Beer School This week in Beer School, we’re focusing on the actual brewing of a batch of beer — that is to say, how we turn a few pounds of dry grains into fresh, fermentable beer wort.

Today’s topic: Detailed look at the mash step of brewing beer The Kitchn’s Beer School: 20 lessons, 7 assignments to brew your first 1-gallon batch of beer. Sign up & see all the assignments! The Kitchn’s Beer School Every batch of all-grain beer starts right here, with the mash. This is where we take the dry, cracked grains, combine them with some warm water, and make the malty, sugar-filled liquid that will be the base for our homebrew.

Today’s topic: Detailed look at how to sparge the mash and separate the sugary beer wort. The Kitchn’s Beer School: 20 lessons, 7 assignments to brew your first 1-gallon batch of beer. Sign up & see all the assignments! The Kitchn’s Beer School After the mash, the next major part in the beer-making process is separating out the sweet liquid we’ve made and sparging the mashed grains.

Today’s topic: Detailed look at boiling the wort and adding hops. The Kitchn’s Beer School: 20 lessons, 7 assignments to brew your first 1-gallon batch of beer. Sign up & see all the assignments! The Kitchn’s Beer School By this point in the brew day, we have finished making the base of our beer — the sugary wort — and now it’s time to introduce some other flavors. This happens in the form of those tiny, very aromatic, rather pungent hop pellets.

Today’s topic: Detailed look at cooling the wort and adding the yeast. The Kitchn’s Beer School: 20 lessons, 7 assignments to brew your first 1-gallon batch of beer. Sign up & see all the assignments! The Kitchn’s Beer School After mashing the grains, making our wort, and then adding the hops, there’s really only one thing left to do in the beer-making process: add the yeast.

Today’s topic: What’s happening during the primary fermentation The Kitchn’s Beer School: 20 lessons, 7 assignments to brew your first 1-gallon batch of beer. Sign up & see all the assignments! The Kitchn’s Beer School By this point — a day or two after your brew day — you should start seeing bubbles popping up through the water in your airlock.

Today’s topic: How to be a polite, considerate homebrewer The Kitchn’s Beer School: 20 lessons, 7 assignments to brew your first 1-gallon batch of beer. Sign up & see all the assignments! The Kitchn’s Beer School Let’s take a break from our big homebrewing discussions today and talk about something that doesn’t always come up: the etiquette of brewing beer at home.

Today’s topic: Finding the best spot in your house to stash your fermenting beer The Kitchn’s Beer School: 20 lessons, 7 assignments to brew your first 1-gallon batch of beer. Sign up & see all the assignments! The Kitchn’s Beer School You want to stash your fermenting beer somewhere out of the way so you’re not constantly tripping over it, but where it’s still accessible so you can get to it when you need to.

Today’s topic: Learn how to siphon beer from one container to another. The Kitchn’s Beer School: 20 lessons, 7 assignments to brew your first 1-gallon batch of beer. Sign up & see all the assignments! The Kitchn’s Beer School Of all the steps of brewing beer, I actually think it’s siphoning that really trips people up, at least to begin with. It seems so simple — we’re just transferring beer from one container to another using a rubber hose. Easy-peasy.

Today’s assignment: Transfer your beer from the primary to the secondary. The Kitchn’s Beer School: 20 lessons, 7 assignments to brew your first 1-gallon batch of beer. Sign up & see all the assignments! The Kitchn’s Beer School In the last few days, you probably noticed the bubbles in the airlock getting slower and less frequent — a sure sign that the first stage of active fermentation is winding down.

Today’s topic: Understand what’s happening to your beer right now The Kitchn’s Beer School: 20 lessons, 7 assignments to brew your first 1-gallon batch of beer. Sign up & see all the assignments! The Kitchn’s Beer School With the first exciting week of active fermentation behind us, it might look like nothing is happening in your beer — but looks can be deceiving. The next few weeks are a quiet, but important, time for our freshly made homebrew.

Today’s topic: All the easy ways you can tweak a homebrew recipe The Kitchn’s Beer School: 20 lessons, 7 assignments to brew your first 1-gallon batch of beer. Sign up & see all the assignments! The Kitchn’s Beer School With your first batch of homebrew still waiting to be bottled and a now-empty fermentation bucket staring you down, perhaps you’re contemplating … doing another homebrew? I fully support this plan!

Today’s topic: How homebrews go from flat to fizzy The Kitchn’s Beer School: 20 lessons, 7 assignments to brew your first 1-gallon batch of beer. Sign up & see all the assignments! The Kitchn’s Beer School Beer’s refreshing fizziness is at least half of what we love about it, and right now, I’m sorry to say it — your homebrew has none. Zero fizz. It’s flatter than a can of soda left out after a party. But we’re going to change all that.

Today’s topic: A walk-through of the whole bottling process from start to finish. The Kitchn’s Beer School: 20 lessons, 7 assignments to brew your first 1-gallon batch of beer. Sign up & see all the assignments! The Kitchn’s Beer School If you’ve been following along with our Beer School timeline, you’ll still be a little more than a week away from bottling your first batch at this point.

Today’s topic: How to figure out what went wrong with your beer The Kitchn’s Beer School: 20 lessons, 7 assignments to brew your first 1-gallon batch of beer. Sign up & see all the assignments! The Kitchn’s Beer School Even the most experienced, gifted, and diligent homebrewer still occasionally gets a bum bottle. It happens. And when it does, it’s useful to take a few minutes to try and figure out what went wrong — and how to avoid it next time.

Today’s topic: A few ideas for passing the time until your homebrew is ready. The Kitchn’s Beer School: 20 lessons, 7 assignments to brew your first 1-gallon batch of beer. Sign up & see all the assignments! The Kitchn’s Beer School One more week until your beer will be ready to bottle, and another few weeks after that until it’s ready to drink — how can we make that time pass more swiftly? Well, one answer is obvious: Make another batch of beer!

Today’s topic: What’s going on inside the bottle right now, plus 5 amber ales to try while you wait The Kitchn’s Beer School: 20 lessons, 7 assignments to brew your first 1-gallon batch of beer. Sign up & see all the assignments! The Kitchn’s Beer School One more week to go until your beer is ready to drink! Are you feeling tempted to sample a bottle a little early? Totally understandable.

Today’s topic: Taste your finished homebrew The Kitchn’s Beer School: 20 lessons, 7 assignments to brew your first 1-gallon batch of beer. Sign up & see all the assignments! The Kitchn’s Beer School Today is the day! Your homebrew is finally ready to be tasted.

Today’s topic: Bottle your beer The Kitchn’s Beer School: 20 lessons, 7 assignments to brew your first 1-gallon batch of beer. Sign up & see all the assignments! The Kitchn’s Beer School In the past three weeks, your homebrew has gone from raw grains to sugary wort to actual beer — all that’s left to do is bottle it up. Let’s get to it!

I’m a big fan of ginger drinks, especially since I love that fiery, spicy kick ginger adds. My refrigerator always contains ginger ale or ginger beer. But what is the difference between the two? And is ginger beer actually beer (and therefore alcoholic)? Ginger beer was originally an alcoholic brew made from fermenting ginger, sugar, and water, although most commercial ginger beers nowadays are non-alcoholic. Ginger ale is a non-alcoholic, sweetened, ginger-flavored soft drink.

When you are a self-professed booze-hound and a baker at heart, it is almost too easy to incorporate flavorful alcohol into everything from weeknight dinners to luscious birthday cakes. Honestly, though, I’ve made more than a few mistakes along the way when trying to add the smoky sweetness of bourbon to dinner or the dry sweetness of Champagne into cake.

My sister went to college at Tulane University in New Orleans. Each summer she’d come home bragging about the Ponchatoula Strawberry Festival, a weekend-long, mystical-sounding party of music, games, rides, and, of course, strawberries. I was always envious of this celebration, but on the plus side I have her to thank for learning about what is now one of my very favorite parts of strawberry season: strawberry beer, specifically Abita Strawberry Harvest Lager.

Maybe it’s the rising popularity of craft beer, the fact that my partner is an aspiring hops farmer and brewer, or the simple truth that I am a broke millennial, but when it comes time to chose, I always pick beer over wine. I even (gasp!) think you should leave the wine corked and drink beer instead with your steak dinners.

If there was ever a time to put a seasonal, boo-zy spin on the beloved ice cream float, it is right now. Grab your favorite pumpkin beer along with some ice cream, and consider this your invitation to skip the PSL in favor of something a bit more festive. If you love beer and ice cream separately, but the thought of them together leaves you slightly skeptical, let me reassure you that not only does this duo work, but it’s also an exquisitely delicious treat.

The fizzy bite of beer makes it a useful ingredient in your cooking. We love bringing it to our favorite dishes in fall and winter, but we keep a few key tips in mind to get the most out of its flavor. Here’s what you need to know for better cooking with beer. When using beer in marinades, brines, vinaigrettes, and even lightly cooked dips, be sure to balance beer’s bite to avoid it overwhelming the recipe.

Of all the alcoholic beverage options out there, beer is probably the best at quelling the heat and quenching chile-induced thirst. For starters, beer tends to be fairly low alcohol — five to seven percent ABV compared to 10 to 15 percent for wine and 40 percent for spirits. Carbonation also helps remove the fiery heat of capsaicin from the palate. But not all beers are created equal — just like not all spicy foods are created equal.

We all have those friends who pigeonhole themselves into the beer-drinking category. Maybe they had a bad first wine experience, or perhaps they haven’t even started to explore the world of wine yet. I say, “Why choose sides?” Choosing a wine style similar to the style of beer you enjoy is a good way to make the transition. Finding a good wine match for a beer-lover is all about pairing weight, texture, and notes — like fruit, herbs, and earth.

Have you ever heard that alcohol doesn’t freeze, and wondered why? Well, it’s actually a common misconception that alcohol doesn’t freeze. Alcohol does freeze, just not at the temperatures that home freezers are kept at. Here’s what it takes to freeze alcohol solid. Ethanol, the alcohol found in beer, wine, and liquors, has a melting point of -114ºC (-173ºF).