Fuck Guinness Time. It’s five o’clock on Friday, and that’s Rodenbach time as far as I’m concerned. I’m about to crack a frosty Flemish red, and I thought I’d share this funky old vintage Rodenbach sign I recently found on the Belgian brewer’s Facebook page:
And here’s my very own Rodenbach Grand Cru:
This is the first beer I’ve had this week, so I’m really looking forward to it. Happy Friday, errybuddy. Cheers, sláinte, proost, santé and all that good stuff.
UBN
While bottling a batch of my UBN Big Dipper Belgian-style double IPA (UBN BDIPA) last weekend at Barleycorn’s Craft Brew in Natick, Mass., I spotted this amusing “Beeriodic Table” poster. It’s a beery take on the scientific Periodic Table of Elements.
From Beeriodic.com, where you can purchase your own Beeriodic Table post for $11.50 (plus shipping):
“This authentic marriage of general chemistry and zymurgy (brewing) is intended to be delightfully entertaining. Even if you aren’t a science or beer drinking type, you might still find the poster intriguing. It serves as a classy addition to most any wall, and it could quite possibly be the perfect gift idea!
“Each of the 112 blocks comprising the poster showcases the ‘science’ (elemental information) along with the ‘suds’ (a beer’s information) by pairing a specific beer to a specific element.”
A Beeriodic Table poster could make a nice addition to man cave, barroom or other drinking spot. Something tells me my girl wouldn’t appreciate it if purchased one and hung it in our tiny apartment though.
UBN
“There is nothing for a case of nerves like a case of beer.” – Joan Goldstein
I have no idea who Ms. Goldstein is, and Google wasn’t particularly helpful in finding out. But I like her style. I don’t totally agree with this quote, and I can think of a few other chemical and pharmaceutical fixes for ragged nerves that may top beer. But personally, I prefer the beer—especially if it’s Heady Topper. On a snowy Tuesday evening after a long day of alternating between shoveling and sitting in front of a computer monitor, I really need a beer to calm my nerves. Or 24 of them.
UBN
Image via Reddit
Short’s Brewing Co. booth at EBF 2013
…Short’s Brewing Co. of Bellaire, Michigan! Congrats Shorts on having the strangest and most unappealing names for beers at this year’s Extreme Beer Fest (EBF) in Boston!
Craft brewers are typically laidback, quirky types. The names they give their beers are frequently creative, unique, amusing and sometimes even offensive. Many of the names are designed to reflect qualities of the beers and help make drinkers remember them. Others are just fucking odd.
I attended the 2013 EBF last weekend, and I had almost as much fun reading all the beer names as I did drinking the brews. (Check out some scenes from this year’s EBF here.) Some of my favorite names: Evil Twin’s Justin Blåbær, a Berliner Wiessebier with blueberries (blåbær is the Danish word for blueberry); The Alchemist’s fantastic Heady Topper double IPA (love me some Heady); Allagash’s De Molen Smoke & Beards tripel; The Bruery’s Sour in the Rye sour ale; and Firestone Walker’s FW Barrelworks Wild Weisse Berliner Weissbier.
But one particular brewery’s names caught my eye at EBF—for all the wrong reasons. Short’s Brewing offered more different beers than any other brewery at EBF, and about half of them sported names that immediately turned me off. In fact, I didn’t try a single one of Short’s beers.
There was Sweet Taters, an American Brown Ale; Stray Cat Street Fighting for the Devil, an old ale; Bloody Beer, a fruit/vegetable beer; Short’s Keylime Pie and, quite possibly the worst name for a beer I have ever heard: Ben’s Asthma, a Russian imperial stout.
Before you drop a comment to let me know what an asshole I am for putting Short’s on the spot, I want to clarify two things: 1) I am well aware that I am an asshole; and 2) this post is really meant in jest. I have nothing against Short’s or its beers. I just don’t like the names. I didn’t skip Short’s beers because I don’t like their names. I skipped them because I’ve already tried most of them. Okay, I haven’t tried Ben’s Asthma, but I honestly have no desire to drink a beer named after a breathing condition.
Ribbing aside, Short’s makes some quality brew. I’m particularly fond of its Huma Lupa Licious IPA, and it’s unique The Soft Parade strong ale with a shitload of berries is also worth a try if that’s your thing.
UBN
Conventional blog wisdom suggests that people want to feel like they know the writers they read. I have no idea why. Writers are idiots. And bloggers suck. Trust me. I know. You can’t really know someone without seeing what they look like. Well, I guess you can, but you’ll always be curious about appearance. So I decided to share a self portrait. And what better way to get one than with a shitty cell phone camera and a dirty bathroom mirror, just like all the fools on Instagram do. Ladies, gentlemen and everyone in between, I give you my Urban Beer Nerd self portrait.
UBN
“After water and tea, beer is the third most popular drink in the world.” – Garrett Oliver, in the preface to the 2011 Oxford Companion to Beer. (Oliver is the brewmaster at The Brooklyn Brewery.)
Interesting factoid. But the above image, taken last year outside of Bukowski Tavern in Cambridge, Mass., sums up my feelings on the subject.
UBN
I hate the goddamn Harlem Shake. I don’t even really know what it is, and I can’t bring myself to research the subject to find out. But it’s everywhere right now. And I fucking hate it. This video is my personal, Boston-beer-nerd take on the Harlem Shake.
UBN
“Give my people plenty of beer, good beer and cheap beer, and you will have no revolution among them” – Queen Alexandrina Victoria
Yeah. Says the overfed, Alfred-Hitchcock-looking former queen of the United Kingdom, who just happens to have a frosty, fresh bottle of Pliny in front of her. You keep the cheap beer, Vicky, give us lowly folk the good beer, and we’ll try to avoid revolt. Deal? (I’m not making any promises though.)
UBN
Image (sans Pliny bottle) via kingsacademy.com
I’m so thankful it is Friday night and I can put an abnormally-shitty workweek behind me. I’m thankful tomorrow is Saturday and I have nothing to do but watch Red Sox spring-training baseball. I’m thankful I don’t have to travel anywhere in the coming weeks, and I’m thankful my marvelous girlfriend is sitting next to me, writing her own shit as I write this. And I’m thankful for craft beer and the people who make it.
You won’t find too many overtly positive posts on this blog; I’m not a positive person, in general. But sometimes you have to be thankful for the little things. My beer glass truly runneth over. Literally.
UBN
KegWorks.com, an online purveyor of “home and professional draft beer equipment, bartending tools, premium cocktail ingredients and novelty items, as well as high quality commercial restaurant and bar supplies and equipment,” recently built a big-ass wall of bottle caps in its New York office.
It took the company just under two months. Forty-three staffers—who apparently had nothing better to do—helped position the caps. The wall takes up roughly 459 square feet of space. KegWorks used about 60,000 bottles caps, most of which were sent in from customers and brewers. (The first cap stuck was from Dogfish Head and the last was from Harpoon.) Magnetic sheeting was applied to the wall before the bottle caps, and the magnets hold the caps in place.
I admit, the wall looks pretty cool. But the beer-snob in me sees lots of caps from shitty beers like Labatt Blue Light and Molson Canadian. That would piss me off every time I walked by. I guess the company is getting some publicity out of the wall—it made a fancy YouTube video, after all.
I can’t help but wonder just how many man-hours were wasted over two months sticking fucking bottle caps to a wall. And what happens if you accidently bump into the wall and shift a bunch of the caps? Spend another day repositioning them? Ah, time well spent.
UBN
