About: Like many people who grew up in the Mid-Atlantic, Yuengling holds a very special place in my heart. But much like our love of good cheesesteaks and Wawa, there’s just something about our Yuengling fever that seems to get lost in translation. What’s so special about it anyway? Well, whether you grew up in Yuengling country or not, chances are you may know that Yuengling is the oldest American-owned brewery operating today. Opened in 1829 by German emigrant David G. Yuengling in Pottsville, PA, the Yuengling brewery survived Prohibition by brewing non-alcoholic “near beer” and opening a dairy to supplement their income. The brewery is still owned and operated by the family to this day.

Review: It’s hard for me to be objective about this beer, but I’ll do my best. It pours a beautiful medium-amber color with good carbonation but very little smell. It’s got clean, biscuity cereal grain flavors; it’s low on hops and well balanced. Even using my most stringent beer-criteria, I really can’t find much to criticize here. Traditional lagers are frequently a fairly uncomplicated beer style, and this is no exception. But it’s flavorful, delicious, refreshing – everything about it rubs me the right way. Is the most amazing beer in the world? Or even the best and most perfect incarnation of a lager? Probably not. But is it a great beer for a lazy afternoon? At 4.4 % ABV and a price pretty close to Miller and Bud, it might be the perfect beer for a lazy afternoon – especially in the Mid-Atlantic, where Yuengling will always be king. It’s as American apple pie, baseball, and well, beer. Rumor has it, it’s even President Obama’s favorite brew. What’s more American than that?

In a nutshell: Boulevard continues to please with complex interesting beers, it’s a sweet beer with a great malt character.

Review: The beer pours an amazing brown red, with a healthy head that stays throughout. this isn’t an incredibly aromatic beer. The beer is sweet, fruity sweet. It is probably the date in the beer that does that, and there is a great malt character to it as well.  It does however come off a little boozy with the 10.5% ABV. Still, the body is light, a little syrupy but overall on the lighter side. In the end it’s a beer I would try again in the mix pack but not my personal favorite style.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars.

About: Michigan’s Jolly Pumpkin is perhaps best known for their American take on traditional Belgian and French styles like saisons and bière de garde. Jolly Pumpkin is also known for a characteristic tart-ness of many of their beers, and those of us who love sours are big fans of their work. Much of that characteristic flavor comes not only from their yeasts but from their particular aging process – all of Jolly Pumpkin’s beers are matured in oak barrels before being re-yeasted and left to bottle-condition.

Billed as a Dark Farmhouse Ale, the Bam Noire asserts that it’s ”Dedicated to the dark side.” Let’s find out.

In a Nut Shell: Jolly Pumpkin’s Bam Noire is a bit tart, a bit dark, and a bit unbalanced – but still worth a taste. 

Review: Coming in at 4.3% ABV, the Bam Noire pours a cloudy chocolate color and is highly carbonated (maybe even a little too carbonated.) The smell is mostly muddled alcohol with a hint of fruit, but that fails to do justice to the flavor that follows. There are plenty of higher-toned tart yeast and fruit flavors, contrasted with nutty and dark malt flavors – like you might find in a brown ale. However, the contrast here feels a little too strong, with representations of the lighter and darker flavors and not enough in the middle to round it out. But though the flavor feels a little unbalanced, this beer is still highly refreshing, with plenty to enjoy about it. This might make a nice pairing for a cheese and fruit plate, where stronger flavors could help to bring out new tastes in the beer.

Rating: 3 out of 5

About this beer: Scotland’s Brewdog is one of the most intimidating craft beer companies around. They make the world’s strongest beer, The End of History. (41% ABV) They aren’t just known for making crazy high ABV beers alone, they also have an incredibly wide range of non-coma inducing goodness. For this beer review I choose to step away from the relative safety of trying their highly regarded IPA (Punk IPA) and chose to drink something a bit more eclectic. Having never tasted one of Brewdog’s brews before I decided to go with Dogma, which is a strong ale made with honey, kola nut, poppy seed, and guarana.

In a nutshell: This beer was a tasty experiment that left me pleased. While I didn’t find all of the flavors I was hoping for the honey aftertaste made it incredibly drinkable and something worth buying again.

Review: The beer poured an incredibly dark amber color, with a sweet head that was retained throughout the drink. It had honey notes in the smell that left a wonderful honey after taste. The beer had a full body and great consistency, with a very bready malt backbone but the sweetness from the honey overtook the other tastes, I didn’t get kola nut, poppy seed or guarana. (Or I wasn’t looking in the right places.) The beer was overall incredibly refreshing and pleasant to drink. With how sweet it was It’s good for a pint or two but not something I could drink all night.

3 out of 5: Worth a Try.

About The Beer: The Pretty Things Beer and Ale Project have taken the east coast by storm, and they don’t seem to be letting up any time soon. Helmed by husband and wife team, Dann Paquette and Martha Holley-Paquette, Pretty Things has gained attention in part because of their status in the growing “gypsy brewing” movement, and in larger part because of their phenomenally creative beers. However, the genius behind Pretty Things lies not only in the beers they produce, but in their whimsical-yet-frank approach to the beer industry. Their labels are adorned with vested Rabbits and mustachioed Barleycorns, they’re steeped in lore and fun and poetry. According to their site:

These beers are for fun, not for display! Our beers are not precious jewels, they are happy peasants! Their motto is ‘Good Time Artisanal Beers’: hold them to it!

Pretty Things’ flagship beer, Jack D’Or – “Jack of Gold”, a character who embodies “the soul of beer” -  has become a Boston staple. And for good reason. Labeled a “Saison Americain” this brew blends classic saison elements with a healthy dose of hops and a splash of champagne yeast to make a sublimely unique and very “pretty” beer.

In a nutshell: A perfect beer for the summer, but Pretty Things’ Jack D’Or gets a gold star from us at any time of year.

Review: This beer pours as gold and tastes as playfully delicious as the name and the label would lead you to believe. There’s a bitter edge to Jack D’Or, but that bitterness is elegantly balanced by a host of other sensations. There’s an edge of sweetness, a smack of pepper, a tart bite, and a champagne dryness. All these flavors mix and play – you can almost imagine them dancing around in your mouth, each moving to the center, then back to the periphery, blending seamlessly with one another as they cross and flow. As it warms up to room temperature (porch temperature, backyard temperature, or just bar temperature) the flavor mellows, and some of that bitter quality dissipates, giving more room to the sweeter tones. This beer is delicate, imaginative, and well worth the time of any true lover of beer.

Rating: 5 out of 5

About the beer:

Craft beer is all about options. With the rise in popularity of higher alcohol craft beers some are turning their interests towards other options in the form of an up and coming category in the craft beer community – session beer. Awareness over the session style of brewing has risen over the last two years with many American breweries creating some tremendous crafted ales, all of which carrying significantly lower ABVs than the stereotypical craft ale.

The term “session” finds it’s origins in the UK and refers to the allowable drinking periods that were imposed on production workers during World War I. The licensed sessions were 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. and 7 to 11 p.m. Workers would find a beer that they could adequately quench their thirst with during these restrictive “sessions” that were imposed by the government without getting legally drunk.

With this groundswell of awareness and rich history to live up to, enter Notch Session Ale, an independently brewed ale which is the brain child of Notch brewer and founder Chris Lohring. In collaboration with his friends at Ipswich Ale Brewery of Ipswich, MA, Chris is brewing low-gravity American style session beers that pack immense amounts of robustness and flavor without heavy alcohol content.

In A Nutshell:

While it’s certainly not the most exciting ale you’ll ever try the Notch Session Ale is both incredibly drinkable and high flavored.

Beeriety Review:

The first time most of the Beeriety crew had heard about Notch Brewing was when they showcased their lineup this past October at the Boston Lobster Party. In my mind the term “high flavor ” has always been synonymous with higher ABV. High in flavor, while being short on the alcohol, feels almost like something most craft beer enthusiasts and homebrewers would scratch their head about.

After finishing the first bottle of the Notch American Session ale I was overly impressed with how much flavor this beer had while staying true to the lower ABV style. Exceptionally soft and malty, this ale also comes away with a mouthful of hops, leaving a long and pleasant after taste. While describing the beer to a friend I likened it to a Sam Adams Boston Lager, which we are both pretty familiar with flavor profile wise, but with significantly less hops.

Beeriety Rating:

3 out of 5: Worth A Try

What are you drinking? Try a Notch Session Ale this week and tell us what else you’re drinking. Tag your Twitter updates, Tumblr posts and Flickr photos of your Beer of the Week with the #mybeer hashtag to tell us what you’re drinking!

On Tuesday the Beeriety team joined some great folks for a lovely evening at The Haven, Boston’s premiere Scottish Pub. It was a fun evening with great beer and great conversation and everyone seemed to enjoy themselves. The highlight of the night was the Haven’s own Special 70 session ale brewed by Notch brewery, which debuted just last week. It’s another great brew by the folks over at Notch, who’ve yet to produce a beer I haven’t enjoyed. The Special 70 was featured in a flight of four ales that folks were able to buy during the event-

Fraoch Heather Ale from Williams Brothers 5.0% ABV – Herbal ale made with heather & sweet gale

Innis & Gunn Rum Cask 7.4% ABV – Rum Cask aged pale ale Edinburgh

The Haven Special 70 4.1% ABV – Scottish Session Ale with subtle hints of caramel

Belhaven Stout 7% ABV – Classic Scottish ale from the town of Dunbar

As a way of saying thank you to all our fans who came out to see us we also had several raffle prizes to hand out, including beer and glasses from both Innis & Gunn and Williams Brothers. Thanks to everyone who came out. If you weren’t able to make it, don’t worry; we’ll be doing more events in the future.

Today’s post come courtesy of our newest contributor Justin!

Last weekend Beer Advocate hosted their annual Extreme Beer Festival in Boston. This is easily one of the most popular beer festivals in New England, with both days selling out within hours of being on sale. They showcased over 150 different beers from brewers all over the country.

The Friday night event “Night of the Barrels,” was focused primarily on barrel aged beers. The process is done to add subtle notes to beer and help them with aging. Local (and personal) favorites Pretty Things Beer and Ale Project was the star of the barrel night for me with their Plum Quad Baby Tree. The overt sweetness of the beer was so toned down that it made it something that I could sit and sip all day.  Short’s Brewing from Michigan blew me away with their Whiskey Sour beer. It was as strange and beautiful as it sounds.

Saturdays focus was on extreme beers. What classifies as an extreme beer? There is such a variety of strange and wonderful examples of extreme from last night like the crazy high alcohol content in Sam Adam’s Utopias ( staggering 24% alcohol) or strange brewing techniques, like Haverhill Brewery’s Fire and Weiss which used burnt wood in the brewing process. It pretty much tasted like smoke, not to be confused with Stone’s two pepper beers from the barrel night, Crime and Punishment, both tasted like burning. Extreme could be Dogfish Head‘s use of the Randall, a filtering system that runs the beers through tubes to enhance the flavor like their Worldwide Stout run through J.P Licks coffee beans, which was amazing. There was also Dark Horse from Michigan that was serving their UberBoober barleywine that was made with baby formula through a breast pump.

Probably the most interesting part of this was Beer Advocate founders Jason and Todd Alström challenged brewers to make low alcohol extreme beers, this is part of the reason there was such an onslaught of magical strange beers. With this festival done the fine people at Beer Advocate have cemented their reputation as throwing one of the best and unique fests in the country. Now it’s time to start thinking about the American Craft Beer Fest in June.

About the beer:

Released in early 2010, the Sam Adams Latitude 48 IPA is a unique IPA brewed with a blend of hops from German, English, and American growing regions located close to the 48th latitude, widely considered the the “hop belt” of the Northern Hemisphere. While the Sam Adams gang has tip-toed around the American IPA style, this new release by the brewery, who have previously only brewed one other now-discontinued IPA, jumps right into the conversation with a 6% ABV and hoppy authority. Originally available in the 2010 Sam Adams summer styles mix pack, the Latitude 48 IPA now comes in six pack and draft offerings where available.

In A Nutshell:

Extremely drinkable and balanced for an American IPA, but ultimately disappointing hop snobs. Beeriety 3 out of 5: Worth A Try!

Beeriety Review:

Keeping with the tradition of the American IPA offerings, Sam Adams has managed to brew something new and interesting with the Latitude 48. The beer is both malty and hoppy while also leaving a slightly bitter aftertaste. While the Latitude 48 is hoppier than the Sam Adam Lager it also shows a lot of restraint in its balanced approach by not overpowering the drinker with a mouthful of bitter hops.

IPA fans are some of the most vocal craft beer fans around. In my experience they know exactly what they want from a hop profile and aren’t afraid to be vocal about it. I’m by no means a hop snob, but when I’m enjoying an IPA I want to make sure it’s a beer that reminds me of what I’m drinking, leaving a distinctive mouthfeel of hops along the way. While the the Latitude 48 IPA offered a notable amount of bitterness, I found myself wanting just a bit more bite in this beer. But that didn’t stop me from sampling more than just one bottle to make sure I hadn’t missed anything.

Surprisingly, this brew was a crowd-pleaser at our latest Beeriety homebrew project session this past weekend, getting some favorable nods from some of the self-identified “hopheads” in the crew. Sam Adams has managed to brew a solid American IPA with the Latitude 48, but there are frankly other breweries doing a lot more creative and interesting things in this genre.

Beeriety Rating:

3 out of 5: Worth A Try

What are you drinking? Try a Sam Adams Latitude 48 this week and tell us what else you’re drinking. Tag your Twitter updates, Tumblr posts and Flickr photos of your Beer of the Week with the #mybeer hashtag to tell us what you’re drinking!

Here at Beeriety, we’re very interested in the role of women within the craft beer community – as brewers, drinkers, and (in my case) writers. That’s why we’re so excited about a forthcoming project entitled For the Love of Beer, a documentary that highlights the female members of the thriving Pacific Northwest beer community as they make their mark within a largely male-dominated field.

However, like most passion-projects, this one is heavy on heart and low on cash. For the past year and a half, filmmaker Alison Grayson has been working to put all of the pieces of the project together. Now, on the verge of completing principal photography, she’s hoping to raise the necessary funds to finish the film, distribute it, and possibly enter it into some festivals. To help make this happen, Alison has set up a Kickstarter site and is offering free copies, acknowledgment in the film’s credits and/or website, and lots of other incentives to spur support.

I got in touch with Alison and asked her a few questions about her project, her own interactions with the world of craft beer, and the beers that helped make her who she is today:

What got you started on this project? Was there a specific person or event that made you think about documenting the role(s) of women within the larger craft beer community?

Have you met with any major setbacks, discouragements, or obstacles (other than financial) in making this piece a reality?

What are your ultimate goals for the project? What would you like this film to say, accomplish, do? What would like someone to take away from it?

What beer (or brewery) first got you interested in craft beer?

What is one of your favorite beers (or favorite breweries) today? Why?

When can people expect to see a finished product and where might they look for it?

To  watch a short preview of the film and learn more about donating head over to their Kickstarter page!