Nora McGunnigle

... Go crazy? Don't mind if I do! I kid! Although ACBW was a very busy week and I got pretty tired by the end of it, everything was so much fun. Great beers, great people, great general vibe. Yesterday's Grand Tasting at the Avenue Pub was the showcase event of the week, and I think Polly and her amazing staff pulled off a high quality and smooth running event.

Stayed in for Christmas Eve- Tom doesn't feel great and we certainly have enough beer on hand to keep ourselves happy. I made a particularly delicious spinach lasagna and we cracked open a couple of beers to celebrate the season. Samuel Smith's Winter Warmer (2011-12 vintage).  I have such a soft spot for the SS Warmer. I still recall a Thanksgiving several years ago when a friend also visiting family in CT stopped by our hotel room with a bottle of seriously vintage SS Winter Warmers.  Not because he collected them or anything, he just wandered into a gas station selling them for cheap 'cause they were old.  He loved the Winter Warmers and scooped up pretty much the rest of the stock. God, they aged great. But I digress!  The Samuel Smith Winter Warmer is on the list of the Anchor Christmas and Sierra Nevada Celebration that I look forward to every holiday season. For a winter beer, it pours out quite light- a dark gold, which is somewhat unusual.  But it's ...

So Tom and I had the opportunity to go investigate a brand spanking new brewery that is currently gathering resources and money and investors, etc. So the brewery, 40 Arpent, which right now is a guy named Michael, hosted this free tasting at a bar called The Rusty Nail, which I think is a really great idea. Got me excited about the stuff he's brewing.  He had a lager that was really quite phenomenal and a "Red Beans & Rice" beer that he hopes can be his flagship beer, and with some refining, I think it can be.  (The beer is actually called Keltic Kajun, but due to my irrational annoyance with spelling things unnecessarily with a "K" I will likely always refer to it as Red Beans & Rice beer.) His dunkleweizen and stout are also beers to be reckoned with. Anyway, an unexpectedly fun and informative evening with unexpectedly delicious beer. Michael was very busy making the rounds but was a great sport in answering all my various questions and I just love...

Literally, in Mississippi, it is illegal to: 1) homebrew and 2) sell or serve beer with a ABW of over 5%.  So for the second year, the homebrew competition held at the Keg & Barrel in Hattiesburg is technically illegal and all organizers, brewers, judges, and attendees are outlaws IN THE EYES OF THE MISSISSIPPI LAW! Spoiler alert: we did not get arrested.  Much to the dismay of the Beer Buddha .  Maybe next year, Jeremy! We did, however, have an awesome time. David Graves and his Brew Cart! (check him out at thebrewcart.com) Brewers' Village! Tom and I drove up on Saturday morning and got to the  Keg & Barrel  at around 10am, per John Neal's request.  We kicked back with Jeremy and met some of the folks from  Lazy Magnolia  Brewery and  Raise Your Pints , a grassroots non-profit lobbying group to overturn the drastic and archaic beer laws in the state. After some wandering around and meeting folks, the awesome judging...

Bought this at Cork & Barrel a couple months ago, I think during American Craft Beer Week. Finally cracked it open tonight after a few cask ales at the Avenue Pub, while listening to TMBG's Flood. I was very unsure what to expect with a coffee IPA. Not really the style you expect to go with a coffee infusion, and I was intrigued. It was a tasty and interesting IPA. Poured a pale orange with a nice head- a few fingers' worth. I did not get any coffee flavor really, though. The finish had that tannic, acidic coffee aftertaste, but no actual coffee flavor. Odd. But I don't want to complain, because the Tomahawk hops gave the beer an excellent piney, citrus, pineapple aroma and bitterness. The specific bitterness of these hops added to the coffee-esque overall impression of the taste. It was good, but I don't know if I'd ever attribute coffee to it as a flavor or overtone. I mean, read the above- I'm REALLY stretching to give it any coffee relevance. Like...

Hooray, the culmination of New Orleans' ACBW celebration occurred yesterday with the Avenue Pub's Super Saturday beer tasting. $20 got you a ticket for 12 4-oz samples, with the opportunity for up to three bonus pours if you could produce receipts from other ACBW events. Which, of course, we could. So 15 pours! Let me see if I can remember what I had... NOLA Sorachi Dry Hopped Blonde NOLA Citra Dry Hopped Blonde NOLA Amarillo Dry Hopped Blonde NOLA Centennial Dry Hopped Blonde NOLA Cascade Dry Hopped Blonde Rogue Dad's Little Helper Black IPA (on cask) Brooklyn Cuvee de Noire Rogue John John Whiskey Barrel Aged Dead Guy Ale Stone Highway 78 (Green Flash/Pizza Port Collaboration) Red Brick Dog Days Hoppy Heffe Rogue Capt. Sig's Northwestern Deadliest Ale Abita Abbey Ale (on cask) Moylan's ESB (on nitro) Brooklyn EIPA (on cask) Moylander Imperial IPA My thoughts: I just loved the entire NOLA hop variety vertical, served over 2 different ACBW sessions. Listening t...

So, for the Wednesday night tasting at the Avenue Pub, things got ramped up in honor of American Craft Beer Week. 10 different beers from teeny tiny breweries were available to sample - 6 samples for $18. The breweries represented: Saint Somewhere in Tarpon Springs, Florida. According to Polly's tasting notes, "The brewer, Bob Sylvester, was a long time homebrewer that started selling his stuff a few years back; I'm pretty certain he still has a "day job" Jolly Pumpkin out of Dexter, Michigan. They focus on using open fermentation, which provides a theme of general funk and sourness in their beers. Delicious funk. Dieu De Ciel , a brasserie/brewpub in Montreal, with some amazing beers. They are... not American, but they are definitely "nano" and I believe that they've sent some great stuff to the Avenue Pub and offered to do so again, and this is not the kind of beer you say no to. (this is just the impression I got, though. I might be mak...

As part of American Craft Beer Week, Jeremy aka Beer Buddha of Cork & Barrel hosted a beer tasting which featured some new beers on the New Orleans scene. Squatters Brewery is in Salt Lake City and Cork & Barrel had several beers on hand to sample. The first beer we tried was actually not from Squatters, but was from a partner brewery in Salt Lake City. It was a blond ale in a teeny tiny bottles (7 oz) called Little Slammers brewed and bottled by Wasatch . It was your pretty standard golden/blonde ale, nice refreshing cold beer on hot day. And you can like carry it in your pocket! Moving on: Hells Keep, a Belgian Strong Pale Ale. This was very drinkable with Belgian yeast flavors and fruit/spice notes. Not hoppy, most of the flavor came from the yeast characteristics. Easy drinking. The Hells Keep is one of Squatters' Reserve Series beers, as is the next one we tried, the Outer Darkness, a Russian Imperial Stout. Ooh, tasty. A bit lighter mouthfeel and flavor ...

The Avenue Pub hosted a Sierra Nevada tasting to celebrate the release of the only 2 (small) kegs of it in Louisiana. No other bars have it, and it's not in bottles here either. Apparently Texas didn't get any at all! You know what this means, right? THAT I AM SUPER EXTRA COOL! Anyway, enough of that, although I am willing to discuss that fact at length at a later time. The Hoptimum was the grand finale in a SN tasting that started with the 2011 Bigfoot Barleywine, the 30th Anniversary Grand Cru, the 30th Anniversary Fritz & Ken's Ale, Torpedo, and finally, the Hoptimum. While it was driving me somewhat crazy to wait so long, once I tried it, the finish made sense- as an Imperial IPA, that was palate-blowing. Delicious, but quite overwhelming. OK, the beers: the 2011 Barleywine. Eh. It was fine, but too fresh. Usually "beer" plus "fresh" equals optimum drinking experience, but in my opinion, the opposite is true for barleywines. Unaged barle...

This week has included a lot of beer as well as a lot of cocktails. Um, and wine. And work! Wednesday, we attended a Brooklyn Brewery tasting at The Avenue. Mike Vitale, the first employee hired by Steve Hindy and Tom Potter as a sales person back in the earliest days of the company, came to talk about Brooklyn's beers. We were running a little late, so we missed some of his discussion about the history. But that was OK, since we'd both read Hindy and Potter's book: "Beer School: Bottling Success at the Brooklyn Brewery" which goes into all that. I recommend it for any beer lover- though slightly technical about the nuts and bolts about brewing and business. We were able to get 4 (out of 8 available) samples. I had (in this order): Black Ops, their Russian Imperial Stout, which they are very cute about "disavowing knowledge" of. It was good. It's bottled flat and then re-fermented in the bottle with Champagne yeast, and then aged in bourbon ba...