From The White House

We wrote Friday about the White House’s choice of craft beer for President Obama’s Super Bowl party.  As it turns out, there was more than just craft beer on the menu — there was also a homebrew, an unknown style of ale brewed with White House honey.

According to ABC News..

Listed along with Hinterland Pale Ale & Amber Ale from Wisconsin and Yuengling Lager and Light from Pennsylvania was Honey Ale…from the White House.

The First Lady’s office confirms that the White House chefs made one batch of beer using about a pound of honey from the First Lady’s honey hive, on the South Lawn of the White House.

The chefs used the traditional methods to brew the beer, and the First Lady’s office confirms that the Obamas paid for the equipment.

The batch was made so that the nearly 200 Super Bowl guests – from members of Congress to celebrities like J-Lo — could sample the new beer.

I would absolutely love to see the White House homebrew setup.  Is it full grain, partial mash, or extract?  5 gallon batches?  What kind of gadgets does it include — immersion or counter-flow chiller, temperature controllers?  Which chef also serves as the official White House brewer?  Whatever the case, homebrewing has come a long way since Jimmy Carter got things started in 1979.

From flickr user Seansie

Hinterland Brewery from Green Bay, Wisconsin is the lucky guest at this Sunday’s White House Super Bowl party.  The small brewery recently learned that two of their beers are going to be served at the presidential event.

President Barack Obama’s party will include beer from Hinterland Brewery in Green Bay . Several cases of pale ale and amber ale have been shipped to Washington in time for the big game.

Hinterland owner Bill Tressler calls the opportunity “real cool.” He says it’ll be nice to get some feedback — hopefully positive.

Head brewer Joe Karls says it’s exciting to brew beer for a president. He and Tressler say the honor is a feather in their cap.

Really great to see Presidential recognition of good beer.

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 ebatty

When we last wrote about Colorado’s new governor-elect, John Hickenlooper, we noted that he was also a known craft brewer and founder of the Denver-area Wynkoop brewery.  At the time, Wynkoop was debating on what type of beer to brew in honor of the new governor.

Well, they got brewing, and with Hickenlooper’s swearing in taking place tomorrow, and the long list of inaugural festivities that go along with it, Wynkoop has tapped a unique brown ale/winter warmer — Inaugurale.

Hickenlooper’s Inaugurale is a cross between a hearty brown ale and a winter warmer. Neither too malty nor too hoppy, the beer is a reach-across-the-aisle creation perfect for the current political climate in Colorado and the US. It is about 6.8 % ABV.

The beer is made with all Colorado-grown base malts and a wealth of specialty grains. These grains include golden naked oats, honey malt, crystal malt and black patent and chocolate malt. These grains give the beer extra layers of body and flavors of toasted and roasted malt, caramel and nuts.

The beer gets extra heft and complexity from an addition of Colorado beet sugar. The sugar doubles as recognition that no one in Colorado could beat John in the election. (Ba dump bump.)

Not content with just having a special inaugural beer celebrating their old boss, Wynkoop has decided to make a delivery to the official inaugural event via horse and carriage.

Not only is the Wynkoop Brewing Company making a special beer to commemorate brewery co-founder John Hickenlooper’s gubernatorial inauguration party on Tuesday, it will deliver that beer, Hickelooper’s Inaugurale, via horse and carriage.

The party, which is being held at the Fillmore auditorium, will feature beers from the Wynkoop and sixteen other Colorado craft brewers (for the entire list, look below), as well as Rock Bottom, Anheuser-Busch and MillerCoors.

We’re looking for great things from a governor with the sense to brew good beer.

(And sorry for the longer-than-expected break. It was a slow beer news week, we’ve been hard at work on a major new part of the site, and we were too busy watching college football while we still could. But we’re back, and we’ll have a couple of exciting new announcements over the next month or so, in part because we took some time off. )

Tampa ABC affiliate WFTS ran a great story about Cigar City Brewery’s uphill fight against big distributors in Florida.  It’s a fight that involves big business and members of Congress all trying to shut them out of the market in the Tampa area.

From flickr user paulwansen

It’s sort of fitting that this would happen in Colorado: John Hickenlooper, mayor of Denver, won the race for governor last week.  Hickenlooper is also known as the founder of Wynkoop Brewing Co., a Denver-based brewpub.

To celebrate, Wynkoop will be toasting the Governor-elect with a specially-brewed inaugural beer.

Wynkoop Brewing Co. is making special beer to celebrate the inauguration of Gov.-elect John Hickenlooper, who co-founded the Lower Downtown microbrewery in 1988.

So what kind of beer befits the quirky incoming Democrat?

“I’m waiting to get all the details from him about what beer he likes best,” said Andy Brown, head brewer at the Wynkoop.

Regardless of your political persuasion, a brewer/governor is certainly good for beer policy, and great for the craft beer cause.