Nora McGunnigle

Press Street Station is holding a Thursday night supper series this month, and the one on October 29 will be an Oktoberfest themed dinner with German food. The menu looks awesome (see below) and you can go here to make a reservation on the hour (5pm, 6pm, 7pm, and 8pm.) The folks at Press Street originally wanted me to come try the food and make some recommendations that Press Street could make for people to bring with them - Press Street is still BYOB. It didn't work out to do that, but Patrick Hunter, resident beer geek at Brady's Wine Warehous e took a look at the menu and made some pretty spot on recommendations.

On the heels of a laughably ridiculously ignorant article that appeared in The Advocate this week (I'll get a little more into detail with that later), my Facebook thread (on which I posted the link to the journalistic travesty) had a very interesting discussion about what counts as a brewery? I realized that I've been segregating brewpubs from my number and I don't think that was right. I think that if you brew beer and legally sell it to people in Louisiana, that should be considered a Louisiana brewery. Therefore, we should count Crescent City Brewhouse, The Old Rail Brewing Company, and, yes, Gordon Biersch, which is a franchise chain but does brew every drop of beer it sells on site. Locally. In New Orleans. The brewers there are talented and work hard. The lines are getting so blurred, more and more each day. Courtyard is a very unique beer business model for the area. Broken Wheel is a brewery added to an existing restaurant so it's now a brewpub (but wa

Taps at the Wayfare So, one of the things I'm lucky enough to do is experience a pretty wide variety of beer and food pairings with local and national craft breweries (and occasionally some international ones too). I think that this has honed my palate over the years to appreciate the interplay between different food flavor profiles and the diversity of flavors that comes from beer's malt, hops, alcohol content, and thousands of other chemical compounds and interactions. It takes practice, and I've been fortunate enough to have the opportunity to practice a lot. A specific opportunity recently came my way with the Wayfare restaurant on Freret, who reached out to me to pair a beer with one of their dishes. I chose Great Raft's Provisions and Traditions 3, an oak-aged Marzen style. It was a bit of a gimme, given that it was created in partnership with Chef Drake Leonards at Luke, and was therefore very food friendly. I headed to the Wayfare and ordered an insan

I've been continuing my beer dinner shenanigans this month, and I don't really need to bore you with the details, but I've noticed an interesting trend the last couple dinners I went to, where I've sat with a table of people who I don't know and aren't in the beer world. I had a great time talking to new people not only about the beer we're drinking together but also the beer scene in New Orleans and Louisiana. It's like doing craft beer outreach on an individual level. I love it! It's like evangelizing, spreading the good news about something I really believe in.