Nora McGunnigle

This week was a bit of a quiet one on the beer front - getting back in the swing of things at the Day Job took it out of me when it came to matters of craft beer. Hopefully all that will balance out soon. I've got a few exciting things in the works, and I'm very much looking forward to talking with brewers, restaurateurs, and other local beer enthusiasts and writing about them! Last week, me and a few other craft beer lovers met to discuss ideas and strategies around promoting craft beer in New Orleans and Louisiana. We were warmly welcomed by Ancora , which is a Neopolitan pizza/farm-to-table Italian restaurant on Freret Street, whose management loves craft beer and curates their 6 taps carefully to bring a diverse list of excellent craft beer to their customers. The management also kindly permitted us to bring bottles of beer that cannot be purchased in Louisiana to share, which is super cool of them. Note: one idea (and I'll discuss this in a future post about our Chri...

Green Flash has a new collaboration with Brasserie St-Feuillien called Friendship Brew an "ale brewed with spices." We picked up a 4-pack at the Breaux Mart (long the unheralded supplier of randomly awesome craft beer) and tried it after we came home from sampling the Vertical Epic beers. It's a black saison, and is something else! The American hop profile and dark roasty malts work beautifully with the Belgian yeast and spices... I'm not sure how to describe it, but it's like a balance of these 4 divergent flavor profiles that actually works. I don't know how or why it works, because it could easily be a total trainwreck, but it's an interesting and unique beer that I could just enjoy all day long. And at 5.7% ABV, it packs much less a punch you might expect with these characteristics.  Interesting- looking at some of the reviews, there seems to be an issue with menthol/herbal notes, which I don't get at all.  The herbs I get aren't min...