Nora McGunnigle

This lady is dressed up in her finest birthday Fräulein wear (at NOOT), your argument is invalid. Well, cats and kittens, it's been a crazy few weeks. After Louisiana Craft Brewers Week, I attended the National Beer Wholesalers Association's annual conference and then flew out to Denver to check out GABF. You can read a brief overview of those two events here , and I've got some photos of GABF up on Tumblr here . Scott Wood at Courtyard Brewery, set to open this week

I've been to my share of high end beer dinners over the years. It was Will Meyers and the chefs at Cambridge Brewing Company that showed me how perfectly and skillfully beers could be paired with food. When we visited Northern California and had lunch at the esteemed French Laundry, our sommelier picked a great pairing of beers to complement Thomas Keller's food. When we moved to New Orleans, we enjoyed beer dinners at Donald Link's Calcasieu and Nathanial Zimet's Boucherie. They've all been great, and I've learned something important about beer and food at each one. I have never been to a beer dinner like the one I attended this past Thursday night at Coquette. When Jeff Schwartz, bar manager of Coquette, told me that when he and Chef Michael Stoltzfus sat down to plan the menu for the beer dinner, he realized that although beer can do almost anything wine can do and bette r , forcing a beer dinner into the wine dinner format does a disservice to how fu...

Awesome post, over at my other blog! Go read all about Boucherie's beer dinner pairings with the Swedish beers.  It was good times. Man, I love those beers. Also, Boucherie. It's a winning situation all around. WINNING!

Avenue Pub management had a great method to help customers order the beers and the bartenders to understand them- they put the list and tasting notes together pairing each beer with a number, so you could just go up and order a Number Nine or Seven, or whatnot. Brilliant! (especially as the day/night went on) Funny story on Friday night- I wanted to order a bitter and a stout, but Eileen heard it as a bitter and a SOUR, so I got the Bedarö Bitter and the Cantillon Mamouche. I laughed and asked her to also pour me a stout. I'd wanted to drink the bitter while letting the Nynäshamns Sotholmen Extra Stout come up to temp, but I ended up drinking the bitter and the Mamouche. Stout was excellent by the time I got to it though. I cannot say enough good things about the Nynäshamns Bötet Barley Wine. It truly was the best barleywine I've ever had. It was a serious revelation. I loved the Nynäshamns Bedarö Bitter and the Oppigårds Amarillo Spring Ale like crazy too. Tom loved, as I...

Got this email from the Avenue Pub (recall, I saw a letter in Offbeat a while back alluding to this).  Hooray!  Mark your calendar...for... Narke, Nils Oscar, Nynäshamns Ångbryggeri & Oppigarde Beer event. The Kindness of Strangers Swedish beer event January 21st, 2012 In April of last year I met the owner of a very famous beer bar in Sweden. Stene loves New Orleans and wanted to throw a Mardi Gras party at his bar in Stockholm. Working with Shelton Bros we figured out a way to ship kegs of Abita and NOLA to Sweden. The idea was that they would be filled with Swedish beer and then returned to the Pub. Those kegs are on their way back to us now and we have scheduled the event for Saturday Jan 21st. what I didnt expect was the beers Stene would choose to send us. More than a few have never been in the US before and there is little chance they will return. The Stormskaporter is surely one of the most coveted imperial stouts in the world. It's made in tiny batches and ...