From flickr user Stu Seeger

We’re not even from Mississippi, but we want people to have access to quality beer.  But apparently, Mississippi’s Lt. Gov. Phil Bryant and state Sen. Dean Kirby think people should be stuck with beer that’s less than 5%, the lowest in the nation.

We know not just how badly this affects the people who want good beer, but how badly it affects people who want to make good beer. Take, for example, Mississippi’s lone craft brewery, Lazy Magnolia Brewing Co.

Leslie Henderson, who co-owns Lazy Magnolia Brewery with her husband, Mark, said if the alcohol content ceiling was raised to 8 percent, it would mean a sizable jump in her sales because she could add to her product line of gourmet and craft beer, whose alcohol content by weight hovers in the range of 7 percent and 8 percent.

“I would estimate our business would have been approximately 25 percent greater (the past year), which is on the order of about $750,000, just in revenue. I would say at least 50 percent of that goes to pay some sort of taxes. That’s a lot of tax dollars that are lost.

“There are existing customers that want (craft beer) from us, but we can’t produce it for them. Most of our sales by percentage, particularly because we’re in five states, are outside of Mississippi. It has certainly held us back as far as expansion goes,” she said.

Seems easy, right?  Get with the times, up your alcohol content to something reasonable, then profit.  So why is Lt. Gov. Phil Bryant, Sen. Dean Kirby,  and the Mississippi legislature acting outright nonsensical?

“We’re rather resigned to defeat at this point,” Henderson said. “It’s frustrating, especially when all we want to do is create jobs in Mississippi and give more money to the state. We’re not coming to Jackson asking for anything. We’re begging them to let us give them more money. I think they really need my money.”

Butch Bailey, a Hattiesburg forester who serves as president of Raise Your Pints, shares Baria’s and Henderson’s frustration with the legislation being lost in the anxiety of election-year politics.

“No one’s ever given me a good reason why we should not pass it,” he said. “‘It’s an election year.’ That’s all I ever hear, but there’s never an explanation behind it. My response as a citizen of Mississippi is I think they should stand up and do the right thing. Stop worrying so much about your political bosses or your party bosses and the tough election. Do the right thing for the state that will raise revenue.”

This is completely absurd.  Why are they holding this up?  What mythical votes do they think they’re going to loose from keeping good beer out of Mississippi?

“If you go to places like Oregon and Colorado, it’s treated the way fine wine is. These are gourmet products, and there are thousands and thousands of Mississippians who enjoy it the same way and travel out of state to buy it. We want to buy it here. To get that, we have to remove this ban.”

Bailey said about a third of all beer styles are banned in Mississippi as well as 70 percent of the top-rated beers in the world.

“We don’t think that’s fair. They’re legal in almost every other country, and in 49 out of 50 states. So it’s basically Mississippi and Saudi Arabia that ban these products.

“We think Mississippians are mature and intelligent enough to make the same choice people in Alabama and Louisiana and Tennessee can make.

“This isn’t anything radical. We’re not going away until we get this done. This is a commonsense, win-win situation for everybody involved. We’ll fight until this happens,” Bailey said.

So here’s what you can do right now — as in this minute.

You can email Dean Kirby and tell him to stop being irrational at dkirby@senate.ms.gov, or you can call him at 601-359-3246.

As for Lt. Gov. Phil Bryant, who apparently has his sights set on the Governor’s office, you can call him at 601-359-3200.  Do it now — they need to know this isn’t right.

From flickr user davehunt82

Remember the book/movie Jurassic Park, where scientists managed to extract dinosaur DNA from mosquitoes trapped in amber that was millions of years old?  They cloned the dinosaurs, opened a zoo of sorts, and then all hell broke loose, leaving us with the message that we should just probably not do anything like that in real life?

Well, one California scientist has done that anyway, but not with dino DNA.  He did it with yeast.   Then, as any rational person would do when they find themselves with some extra yeast, he brewed beer with it.

Fossil Fuels Brewing Co. has used Cano’s initial extraction of yeast to grow a much larger batch that fills a warehouse in Northern California used in the beer-making process.

“Our main beer is a wheat beer, and we also have a pale ale, but we’re really working on others, including an amber ale and an Oktoberfest,” Cano said.

Of those beers popular in the mainstream market, Cano compares the taste most closely to that of Blue Moon.

Despite initial skepticism from some about the taste the beer would produce, Cano says the flavor turned out surprisingly good and unique.

Critics have described the taste as one with lots of spice, resembling cloves, along with tinges of ginger and pineapple.

It’s a really interesting experiment.  If I can ever get to California, it’s definitely on my list of things to try.

From flickr user OpenEye

Draft Magazine set out on a seemingly impossible but completely worthwhile mission as they tried to narrow down the 100 best beer bars in America for 2011.  They didn’t try to rank-order them, because, if you’re sitting in Dallas, who cares if #1 is in Cleveland if you’ve got #13 right down the street?

The list isn’t perfect, but it is probably reflective of the better-than-average beer bars in your area, if not the best.  In Washington, DC, for example, it lists the Brickskeller, a very old institution that pre-dates the modern craft beer movement, but one that was fatally flawed.   The joke in the DC beer world was that they had a list thousands of beers long, but it took you five tries to get a beer you actually wanted –  it was so bad, the waitresses would actually ask for your top three choices.  Then they shut down and recently re-opened under new management, while their sister bar, RFD, which is far more competent, didn’t even make the list.

So, with a large grain of salt, if you’re headed to Dallas or Portland or LA or Boston or DC or anywhere else for business or pleasure, it’s a good guide.  But if you’re looking toward your own neighborhood, trust me, you already know better.

Check it out, and we’d love to hear how accurate you think it is when it comes to your town.

From flickr user Lord Jim

We’ve talked before about how beer is good for you and good for society, but is it responsible for society itself?  Maybe, according to archeologists.

Some archaeologists have said that there is a possibility that beer may have helped lead to the rise of civilization.

Their argument is that Stone Age farmers were domesticating cereals not so much to fill their stomachs but to lighten their heads, by turning the grains intobeer.

Signs that people went to great lengths to obtain grains despite the hard work needed to make them edible, plus the knowledge that feasts were important community-building gatherings, support the idea that cereal grains were being turned into beer, said archaeologist Brian Hayden at Simon Fraser University in Canada.

It’s not so much the drinking that led to civilization as it is brewing.  So homebrewers take pride.

Beeramisu (Credit Billy at A Table for Two)

I recently came across this recipe for Beeramisu, a beer-centric take on the classic Italian desert.  Not our standard post, but beer is a growing and increasingly used  ingredient for all sorts of cooking, and re-thinking tiramisu is a particularly interesting way to use it.

To make the beeramisu, it is suggested to coffee or chocolate stout. I struggled to find any boutique stout where I live, so I just used Guinness Stout mixed in with strong espresso. I got coffee, and I got stout, but one more flavour is missing in my Beeramisu, is the booze! I love my tiramisu with a boozy kick linger in the mouth on every spoonful. Usually I use Amaretto, which gives it another layer of almond flavour to the combination. Coffee liquor like Bailey’s is also another good option which gives the Tiramisu an even creamier texture.

Full recipie is below, but be sure to check out the writeup at A Table for Two.

Read the rest of this entry »

Sam Adams behind the scenes (Daniel Terdiman/CNET)

CNet reporter Daniel Terdiman recently took a trip through the Sam Adams Brewery and wrote up a nice overview of how everything works.  Most of it is remedial stuff if you’ve followed brewing at all, or even toured a brewery yourself.

Either way, worth the read.  Also be sure to check out the photo gallery.

Great clip of Conan drinking beer with reviewer Michael Jackson (not the one that you first thought of).

From Flickr user Arnisto.com

TV had a lot of hit an misses — see: Arrested Development, the best show ever made but still canceled — but Fox is working on a brewery sitcom:

Fox is stirring up “Strange Brew” with a pilot order to a multicamera pilot from “Will & Grace” creators David Kohan and Max Mutchnick.

The project, from Warner Bros. TV where the Emmy-winning duo is based, is set at a family-owned brewery.

Via beernews.org.

From Flickr user Matt Niemi

The Brewers Association released the 2009 craft beer sales figures today, and if you’re reading this site, you shouldn’t be surprised.

The Brewers Association, the trade association that tabulates production statistics for US breweries, today released 2009 data on the U.S. craft brewing industry. In a year when other brewers saw a slowdown in sales, small and independent craft brewers saw sales dollars increase 10.3 percent and volume increase 7.2 percent over 2008, representing a growth of 613,992 barrels equal to roughly 8.5 million cases.

Great news.  The more it sells, the easier it’ll be to find and enjoy.