BeerAdvocate & Zymurgy

Two shitty magazine “reviews” for the price of one, can this site get any better?

BeerAdvocate Magazine Volume II Issue V

First BA. I probably received this magazine about a month ago, oh well. I’m going to jump right to the 9 Steps to Beerdom (typically my favorite part of this whole magazine), this time on Joe Short founder and brewmaster of Short’s Brewing Company. I have never heard of Short’s Brewing Company, but a little poking around on BA showed them to be quite popular and adventurous, sounds right up my alley. Joe is young, I’d guess mid-twenties. He started homebrewing at 19 while in college, finished school, and went the route of opening his own brewpub and now in the works of opening a full production brewery. One of the beers they describe that he makes is basically a Bloody Mary built on a beer base, sounds almost disgusting yet still more interesting. There was an article in their Innovations section talking about a system I have seen before called the Table Tender. Basically what this is is a multi-tap beer tower that is at each table at a restaurant. No more need for the waitress to bring you a beer, no more waiting, just more drinking. It’s similar to when you go to one of those chain “Italian” restaurants and they give you the jug of wine and it’s your job to keep track of how many glasses you’ve had. Except with the Table Tender it is electronically counted per ounce, so if you spill a lot you get charged extra, but also if you only want a half glass more, that’s all you need to pay for. Hopefully you don’t get stuck at a table with only BudMillerCoors taps . . . And just now, as I flipped through this magazine, I realized I didn’t read a whole section :oops:, it looks really good, it’s titled Out of the Bottle and into the Pan and it is interviews with about six of the top beer chefs around, I’ll have to make sure I go back and finish that one, sorry.

 Zymurgy May/June 2008

Also, I just finished (I think) the most recent issue of Zymurgy. It’s funny, with these two covers next to each other it’s nice that BA has a larger version of the cover available, the quality looks much nicer next to the Zymurgy cover, oh well. Hey, page 24 we hit something worth mentioning, an article called Oak’s Balancing Act (didn’t one of these rags just do an article on oak?). This was written pretty well with some tips and recipes thrown in, but really without too much new information. Also there was a second article Roll Out the Barrel which included a pretty good description on how to care for and maintain a barrel if you should ever get your hands on one. Actually, I have been offered a double-used bourbon barrel twice (meaning will not impart too much oak or bourbon flavor anymore) for free, but they are 55 gallons plus extra beer to top it up with, so let’s say 60 gallons. That’s 12 batches for me. So that would be 12 straight days of brewing or 6 days of double-sessions (like 10-12 hour days). Doesn’t sound like fun anymore. Next there was an article on Saisons called A Seaison for Every Season which was interesting but a little beer-geekie in references. The cool thing is the guy that wrote it posts a lot of his recipes, so there are a lot of tried Saison recipes available to start with. And finally they closed their Last Drop section with an article called Philly Pours it On which is a very short recount of Philly Beer Week written by a Colorado writer, makes sense to you? Me neither. Basically he wastes a quarter of the article bashing Philly and their claim to be the Best Beer-Drinking City in America, and tries to humorously (though it wasn’t funny) wrap things up again by bringing the topic back up. I think he missed the mark on this one. Oh well, it was nice to see Philly mentioned.

2 Responses to “BeerAdvocate & Zymurgy”

  1. Jim L Says:

    That Bloody Mary/beer combo sounds a lot like Bud’s Chelada – Bud, tomato juice, and clam juice.

  2. Brian Says:

    Jim – that is exactly what I was thinking, and then I thought, I sure hope it doesn’t taste like it!

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