From flickr user Schlusselbein2007

As we head into the last week before Christmas, Sam Calagione from Dogfish wrote up a guide to help beer lovers merge the holiday menu and beer list in the best possible way.

To his credit, it’s not an artcile about how to best pair Dogfish beers with food — he mentions the ever-popular Troegs’ Troegenator, Avery’s White Rascal, Russian River’s Pliny the Elder, and New Belgium’s Fat Tire, along with others.

Broken down into cheeses, meats, shellfish, seafood, and chocolate, it’s a nice list, which should help you make the next week even better.

From flickr user Paul-W

For those who love to home brew, Popular Mechanics compiled their top 10 homebrewing recipes and put them online.  There seem to be some great beers in there, and it starts with a must-brew beer from Sam Calagione.

We posted Sam’s recipe for Blood Orange Hefeweizen below, but be sure to check out all ten — there’s a nice recipe for a traditional British ale, and another German classic if you’re looking to get outside the American craft beer movement (which most homebrewers start from).

Blood Orange Hefeweizen

Extract Recipe

Beer Style: Hefeweizen with blood orange flavoring
Batch Size: 5 gallons
Original Gravity: 1.050
Final Gravity: 1.012
Bitterness: 17 IBU
Boiling Time: 65 minutes
Color: 12 SRM
Alcohol: 4.8% ABV

Ingredients

6.6 lbs. Light Liquid Wheat Malt Extract
4 medium size blood oranges
0.5 oz. Hallertau Hop Pellets (4.5% AA) boiled 60 minutes
1 oz. Saaz Hop Pellet (4.3% AA) boiled 20 minutes
0.5 oz. Hallertau Hop Pellets (4.5% AA) boiled 10 minutes
Wyeast 3068 or 3638 or White Labs WLP 300 or 380

Directions

Boil and add hop additions according to the schedule above. Peel the blood oranges and separate sections of fruit. Discard half the peels. Cut the remainder of peels and fruit sections into small pieces. Use a grater as you only want part of the rind. The white will add extreme bitterness. Heat fruit and peels in a half gallon of water to 160F and then turn off heat. Let the fruit steep as it cools. Cool the wort and steeping fruit to 70-75F and add to fermenter.

Fermentation

Pitch your yeast and fermet for about 10 days at 70-75F.

From flickr user Bernt Rostad

If you’ve been trying to watch the new Dogfish Head reality TV show Brew Masters, you’ve really had to want it.  So far, the show has aired at different times for each episode.  This week is no different.

Tune in tomorrow, Thursday, December 9, for the next episode.  It’s been surprisingly good so far.  It’s been educational (had you ever heard of Chicha before?) and engaging.  Here’s to hoping it finds a permanent time, and a permanent home.

From Discovery

We wrote about it when it was announced, but now it’s here:  Discovery’s new reality show, “Brew Masters,” will make its debut at 10pm on Sunday.

The star of Discovery Channel’s new series “Brew Masters” says people in his craft beer industry are “proudly promiscuous.”

With their products, he means.

“We encourage beer drinkers to check out their competitors’ beers,” said Sam Calagione, founder of the Dogfish Head Brewery in Delaware, as he sat at a restaurant table with a nearly drained pint of a Brooklyn-made lager in front of him.

Discovery is hoping that the same public food fascination that “Cake Boss” and similar series have tapped into will spill over into the craft brewing industry. Its “Brew Masters” series premieres Sunday at 10 p.m.

Check it out when it airs and be sure to let us know what you think.

Dogfish Head Chateau Jiahu (Brad Horn/NPR)

NPR’s All Things Considered recently covered the release of Chateau Jiahu, Dogfish Head’s newest beer using an ancient recipe.

Dogfish Head brewery is known for making exotic beer with ingredients like crystallized ginger or water from Antarctica, so it might not sound surprising that one of its recent creations is a brew flavored simply by grapes and flowers. It’s not the recipe that makes this beer so special; it’s where that recipe was found: a Neolithic burial site in China.

Chateau Jiahu is a time capsule from 7,000 B.C., but to hear Dogfish Head owner Sam Calagione talk about what beer was actually like back then, it’s not the kind of thing that makes you say “Hey, pass me another ice-cold ancient ale!”

NPR posted a worthwhile radio segment, including an interview with Sam Calagione.

We’re a few days late with the news, but Iron Chef Mario Batali is teaming up with brewers from Dogfish in what seems to be a high-end take on the classic brewpub.

The rooftop bar and restaurant will house a copper-clad brewing system. The idea is to create an artisanal, old world Italian craft brewery that just happens to be located on a rooftop in Manhattan, says Dogfish Heads Sam Calagione. The four brewers are working together on recipes for Eatalys house beers. Those beers will feature Italian and American ingredients. The beers will be unpasteurized, unfiltered, naturally carbonated, and hand-pulled through traditional beer engines for the most authentic and pure presentation. The four individual brewers will also occasionally brew beers under their own names on site. The rooftop restaurant project will pair artisanal rustic, homemade beers with the artisanal, rustic cooking of Chef Mario Batali. Additional Italian and American regional craft beers will be served both at the rooftop bar and within the downstairs restaurants.

The concept sounds brilliant.  One common complaint of brewpubs is that both the food and beer can end up very average, and the idea that a high-profile New York restaurant would take the concept and try to perfect it could be exactly the model future brewpub owners emulate.  Dogfish already owns a restaurant in Delaware, and there’s what looks to be the beginnings of Dogfish Head a brewpub chain developing around Washington, DC.

If the Batali/Dogfish concept works, it would be a welcome change to the standard, predictable brewpub menu — a few burgers, maybe some chicken wings, a steak, so on.  There’s nothing wrong with any of those things, but brewpubs too often fit a boring mold with uninventive food and average, but usually not bad, beer.  Raising the bar on the idea of what a brewpub is and can be is commendable.