Searching for the line between "hobby" and "obsession"

All Things Beer

Ho ho holidays

Excuses, excuses, excuses. I’ve been busy over the past few weeks. Here’s a brief re-cap:

12/14 — I got to tour the inner workings of Target Field. In a beer-related twist, we learned they have these keg rooms located throughout the bowels of the building and big thick conglomerates of tap lines that lead floors above to thirsty baseball fans above that will never relive 1987 or 1991 again. Hahaha that was mean… but true.

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Cellar update, fall 2011

I have an uncle that lives in San Francisco. He was in town last summer and we got to talking about beer (weird, right?). He mentioned he had some Pliny the Elder (voted #1 beer in the country for the third year in a row by Zymurgy magazine) in his fridge he didn’t plan on drinking and that he would send it to me. Months later, just when I thought he’d forgotten, sure enough it shows up at my front door. Six bottles! I don’t think I’ve been so beer-happy ever. What a nice guy.

I’m trying to drink the Plinies in short order, as the bottles warn you not to age the stuff lest it looses it’s bright hop flavor, but I just can’t bring myself to gulp them down very fast. I’ll probably make my way through them by January or so. They just look so god damn good next to the rest of my growing collection. Surly Smoke, Darkness (2010-2011), Five, Dogfish Head World Wide Stout, Palo Santo Marron and a few others (along with cases and cases of homebrew). (more…)


Casanova Bottle Shop

What better way to spend a dreary, cold Sunday afternoon than a quick drive from the Twin Cities across the border to Hudson, Wisconsin to do some serious bottle shopping?

“March Madness,” you say? Please. Beer IS my March Madness. At this point in the blog post, I’d probably write something about how awful Minnesota Gopher Basketball is this year… if I cared.

Once I figured out the wife was going to be gone for a good chunk of the day Sunday, I shot a text over to beer-lover / brewing buddy / some might say “enabler” Cristof to see if he had some time to drive to Hudson with me to pick up some Dogfish Head and New Glarus 1) because those breweries don’t distribute to MN and 2) because it feels good to buy alcohol on Sunday when you can’t here. Separation of church and state, anyone??? C’mon let’s get rid of this antiquated law please. It’s 2011 for firkins sake. “The future.” Welcome. Thanks.

If there's a heaven...

Moving on…

I’d heard good things about Casanova‘s selection, so we stopped there to check it out. Yep, very impressed. We weren’t the only ones who had made the journey. A few guys from North Dakota who were in the Cities for the weekend asked for my opinion on which local brews they should try. This definitely made me feel less crazy for driving across state lines to buy expensive craft beer on a Sunday. (more…)


Brewing TV

This show BrewingTV was pretty influential in cementing my interest in brewing. I really dig the way the hosts JakeBrewingTV Keeler and Michael Dawson combine light homebrewing tutorials with brewery tours and discussions with big names in homebrewing and microbrewing circles. It’s nice to have a fellow homebrewer, Chip Walton behind the camera shooting and editing the episodes as well.

For a while last summer they were outputting an episode every Friday but had to scale back to every other Friday in the fall. I’m sure they all have real jobs to attend to. Do yourself a favor and check the show out at the link provided.