Recent Results tagged “drinkinginboston”
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Drinking in Boston: 1001 Beers
Okay, here’s one: you’re on a deserted island and can only have five beers with you. What would they be? A book coming out may do little more than frustrate you with your choices, but it also could be a helpful reference: 1001 Beers You Must Taste Before You Die by Adrian Tierney-Jones We can’t decide if the title is urging you to try all these beers while you’ve got the time or assuring...
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Drinking in Boston: The "St." Stands for Stout
Remember what you drank last St. Patty’s Day? No? That’s distressing but not surprising. Odds are, though, that if you weren’t guzzling something “lite” dyed green, you were having yourself a stout. What kind of stout, do you suppose? For Guinness is not the only one out there; in fact, it’s not even the only Irish example. But first, what makes a stout? They are easily recognizable from their dark brown to black opaque...
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Drinking in Boston: Sips of Spring
The optimists among us smile as the wintry mix pelts them in the face and say, “Spring is just around the corner! Can’t you smell it in the air?” The pessimists among us pull the covers closer and vow not to emerge from our bedrooms until June. May we suggest a middle ground? Spring beers! A way to celebrate the upcoming season and simultaneously drown your wintry woes. The award for springiest-looking beer goes...
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Drinking in Boston: Beer is for Lovers
You could give her roses or chocolates or diamonds, but that’s all been done before. This Valentine’s Day, go with a girl’s true best friend: chocolate beer. Below is a sampling of some chocolate beers we tried. Oh, it was a struggle. We first tried Young’s Double Chocolate Stout, a sweet stout with an abv of 5.2%. This beer is as dark as they come. In fact, it’s completely opaque, with a thin brown...
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Drinking in Boston: The Beer Bowl
The Super Bowl is a grueling game. It’s one of grit, strength, cunning, and above all, endurance. What we mean is, it’s a long game to get through even if you’re playing in it, but if you’re on the sidelines drinking for hours it may be even more of a trick to be standing at the end. Here is where picking the perfect beer comes into play. What you really need is a good...
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Drinking in Boston: Wintry Events
When the weather vacillates between vicious snowstorms, chilling
rainstorms, and frigid days of skating down the sidewalk, there's only
one thing we want to do: hibernate. Unfortunately, the real world
beckons, and we must trudge on. Here are a few events in the next
few weeks to get you out of the house.
The first is tonight’s barleywine festival at the Cambridge Brewing
Company. Hit up the CBC tonight at 5pm for Barleywine...
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Drinking in Boston: Barely Wine?
Next Thursday the Cambridge Brewing Company is putting on a Barleywine Festival. Ten of brewmaster Will Meyers’ barleywines will be available, two on cask. The brews are different vintages and expressions of the Arquebus and Blunderbuss barleywines. They will also have a tapas menu paired to the beers including such intriguing delights as coffee rubbed lamb lollipops and pomegranate marinated quail. So that’s the festival part of it, but what about the barleywine part?...
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Drinking in Boston: Snobbery
Here at the Bostonist Beer Drinking Department, we have occasionally been accused of being beer snobs. At first we were offended, the word “snob” having something of a derogatory connotation. But we eventually decided to embrace it; after all, part of being a snob involves knowing your subject well. (Naturally an incentive to becoming a snob is all the taste tests.) There is no reason to dumb yourself down or hide your knowledge of...
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Drinking in Boston: Jingle Beers, Jingle Beers!
It’s that holly jolly, manicky panicky time of year again. At this point, with just less than a week to finish up your holiday shopping, it’s a little late to be puttering about on the Internet. But have no fear, there are other options when buying for the beer lover on your Secret Santa list. First and foremost, there is the option of going to an actual physical store to buy something (gasp!). Number...
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Drinking in Boston: Warm from the Inside Out
As it spits a mix of snow and sleet and rain outside, we realize it is well into the Winter Warmer and Winter Ale season. So, what’s keeping us warm this time of year? Old Jubilation, Avery Brewing’s Winter Ale, is an English Strong Ale. Its beautiful ruby color hints at its toasty nutmeg spiciness. In fact, the beer is quite spicy, considering no spices are actually used, just five malts. Definitely wintry, but...
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Drinking in Boston: Pairing Beer
Tired of trying to guess which wine goes with which dish? Afraid you’re not going to impress the guests? This year really impress them by pairing the right beer with the right dish. Or maybe the right dish with the beer, depending on your priorities. Daria Labinsky and Stan Hieronymus of BeerTravelers.com maintain that you must strive for balance in the pairing. First decide what style beer you would like to try and then...
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Drinking in Boston: Bring on the Belgians
You can’t beat a nice strong Belgian beer on a cold winter night. Then again, you can’t beat it on a hot sweaty summer day, either. Some would have it that you can’t beat a Belgian beer period. But what exactly are they referring to when they say “Belgian?” Terms like Trappist ale and abbey beer are tossed about as popular synonyms for “Belgian.” While the terms are related to Belgian beer in some...
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Drinking in Boston: That's What She Said
Women and craft beer. Are they mutually exclusive? Is the world of craft beer a man’s world? If not, why does it seem so few women participate in it? [Must the "fairer" sex be limited to cocktails? --Ed.] A few years ago, this Bostonist wrote a piece in The Weekly Dig about why girls should drink beer and why beer should not be thought as a dude-only drink. The article got many virulent responses,...
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Drinking in Boston: What Beer Are You?
Ever been afraid that you’re being judged by what kind of beer you’re drinking? Ever judge others based on what they’re drinking? Of course you have. Well now one market research company, Mindset Media, thinks they have cracked the code on beer drinkers’ personalities. An article in Ad Age earlier this week shared some of the company’s thought provoking, or perhaps just provoking, findings. More interesting than the article itself was the long string...
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Drinking in Boston: Beer Epiphanies
When was your first time? And where? We all have a story. When was the first time you sipped a beer, held the glass up to the light reverentially, and said, “I kind of like this stuff”? Drinking in Boston’s survey of beer lovers last week also included this question: What changed your beer-drinking life? And then, what beer are you drinking now? For several of the surveyed, the change from decent beer to...
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Drinking in Boston: High Life or the Good Life
What is good? And who says so? How bad is bad? Drinking in Boston performed a quick survey of several beer lovers last week to see what the good beer drinker’s position was on several key beer questions. This week we’ll look at “good” beer versus “bad” beer. Many of the surveyed beer lovers associated bad beer with mass produced, faceless major US breweries. One thought was that “if the motive is craft more...
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Drinking in Boston: Belgian Beer Fest
Chocolate and beer. What would the world do without the Belgians? To celebrate their accomplishments in at least one of those categories, people will be flocking to The Return of the Belgian Beer Fest next weekend, October 16th and 17th. Unfortunately for those of us slow on the draw, Night of the Funk on Friday the 16th is already sold out (we made it last year). There are two sessions on Saturday, however, and...
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Drinking in Boston: In the Pumpkin Patch
What can you find more of around Halloween than girls in slutty-nun costumes? Pumpkin beers. They can’t all be good, though; only one can be king of the pumpkins. Here at Bostonist we tried a small selection of the beers in search of the best. A few pumpkin brews didn’t taste much like pumpkin at all; however, this didn’t necessarily make them bad beers, just not pumpkin beers. Saranac Pumpkin Ale, for instance, greets...
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Drinking in Boston: Happy Birthday Guinness!
Today is an special and important day for anyone who enjoys a good pour of Guinness. It is the 250th anniversary of the day Arthur Guinness signed the lease on the St. James’s Gate brewery in Dublin. 1759: that’s a lot of beer. Celebration of the day now dubbed “Arthur’s Day” will naturally begin in Dublin but will spread across the world to cities as far flung as Lagos, Yaoundé, and Kuala Lumpur. More...
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Drinking in Boston: Get Wet
Two new beers have been developed recently, both involving the word wet. One is wet hopped, the other, well, has been spit in. To satisfy curiosity, the spit in your beer will be that of Sam Calagione, the founder of Dogfish Head Craft Brewed Ales. His goal is not revenge upon all the doubters and naysayers he’s encountered in his life, but rather the reproduction of a traditional Latin American corn beer, chicha. The...
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Drinking in Boston: Oktoberfest and Other Harvest Beers
Nip in the air, colors on the leaves, new television episodes on the tube: all in a bottle! Yes, it’s time for harvest ales and Oktoberfests. Again, we at Bostonist sacrificed a whole evening to test some of this season’s offerings. These are the results. We were told that Hofbräu Oktoberfest is one of the oldest Oktoberfest beers still brewed. Too bad opening it releases that skunky, green bottle smell. Past that it’s a...
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Drinking in Boston: Comfort Beer
You walk into a bar. You’ve never been there and you’re unfamiliar with its beer list. In fact (like many bars) it doesn’t even have a beer list, so you’re forced to walk close to the bar and squint at the (possibly many) taps. What do you choose? The bartender is impatient and wants an answer now. Your friends have all ordered complicated cocktails, but you just want something simple. Something reliable. So you...
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Drinking in Boston: Adventures in Home Brewing, Malts
We here at Bostonist, in an effort to save pennies and look really cool, are about to begin brewing our own beer. To do this right we’ve been studying up. So today’s lesson: malt. One thing we knew already: that malt is barley or wheat kept wet enough to sprout before kiln drying and grinding it. What we didn’t know was that different kinds of malts used to brew different kinds of beer are...
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Drinking in Boston: Goes Green
In the past few years it has become very fashionable to “go green.” Though this movement may have recently become more trendy than altruistic, Bostonist admires people’s attempts to rescue our planet and tried a few organic beers to honor this development. All the beers we sampled were USDA certified organic, meaning they measured up to a rigorous set of regulations regarding the definition of organic beer. We first tried an amber ale from...
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Drinking in Boston: Fruity Brews
Fruit beers: people either love them or steer away from them like they were wearing a Yankee’s jersey. We here at Bostonist wondered if there was any middle ground; any beers that both camps would like. So we swallowed our pride, put aside our prejudices, and sacrificed an evening to trying a mixed sixer of fruit beer. Here are the results: As promised Great Divide’s Wild Raspberry Ale is ruby red. Its taste lives...
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Drinking in Boston: Summer Beer and the Living is Easy
You’re sitting on the back porch, beer in hand, beads of condensation rolling down its sides. It’s warm outside, very, and you wipe the sweat off your forehead. You take a long swig. It’s a summer beer: light and refreshing and everything you need for a steamy summer afternoon. In Boston the temperature got up near hot the last few days, so we thought we could finally talk about summer beers. Breweries in the...
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Drinking in Boston: Beery July Events
The weather may be bad for sunbathing, but it’s always good weather for drinking beer! Several events are slated for July in the New England area that will properly celebrate the beverage. Tonight Amstel Light comes to Boston on their nationwide tour, Amsterdam Live. At Parris Hall in the Faneuil Hall Market, Amstel is promoting their beer: “One Dam Good Bier.” (Groan.) But the event itself is modeled after Amsterdam’s “Melkweg,” a nightclub “featuring...
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Drinking in Boston: American Craft Beer Fest Recap
The huge room teemed with beer lovers. Some displayed their love on their chest with a T-shirt from a favorite brewery. Others showed their dedication through their clipboards and spreadsheets with columns for aroma, taste, and feel. Everyone was out for a good time and for good beer, both of which were to be found. They also were all in search of the perfect brew. In the battle for best beer of the ACBF,...
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Drinking in Boston: Calling All Dogfish Heads!
Attention all Dogfish Head fans! Tonight Redbones is putting on a Dogfish extravaganza: 10 kegs and one cask on tap! That’s a lot of Dogfish. The event will be held in the Underbones bar, with a cash bar and free appetizers from 5 to 7 pm. It’s being billed as a “pre-fest” to the American Craft Beer Fest this weekend. And don’t worry if you can’t make the party; there will be Dogfish Head...
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Drinking in Boston: New Tax On Alcohol
We’ve been living a carefree, tax-free lifestyle in the world of liquor for a while now. That all could change soon. Lawmakers finalizing the 2010 budget are proposing a hefty tax on alcohol. They have raised the general sales tax from 5% to 6.25% and are now applying that to the sale of all beer, wine, and alcohol sold in stores. On one hand, the money from the tax is being sanctioned for a good...
