Sours, Trucks and a place to stay: Beer news roundup

There was plenty going on in beer this week including a trade show that featured some of our local craft beer among other regional beers in a designated craft beer section which, I think, does a lot for the area. Booze and wine were kind of spread out, but Craft Beer was concentrated, as kind of a way of distinguishing it from regular beer.

Revelation props

If you haven’t been, this small brewery in Rehoboth (no, another one) has been making a lot of noise for the last year or so. This month they announced a collaboration with long time gluten-free beer pros, Ghostfish. So although I usually take a pass, it looks as if there’s at least one more pint of gluten-free beer in my future. Let’s see what happens.

Ghostfish and Revelation Collaborate on Gluten-Free Sour Beer

Two craft breweries, Seattle’s Ghostfish and Delaware’s Revelation, are announcing the release of a big collaboration: a gluten-free sour beer. Ghostfish focuses on totally gluten-free beer and, to be honest, they’ve been killing it, having won three medals in the past two years at the Great American Beer Festival.

Distributor fight

In this Op Ed the head of the distributors association doesn’t get to the part where reducing mandatory expansion hurts small, independent craft breweries. What I do know is that the breweries around here generally have to pay sales people to look out for their interests in the way distributors are unable. I can see someone who already has a large staff going out there investing in trucks, especially when shelf space is on the line.

KENT: A handful of brewers seek special legislative treatment

In a highly-competitive beer industry with more than 5,000 U.S. beer companies, a handful of N.C. brewers now want to stack the deck in their favor at the expense of everyone else. Their legislative initiative to radically increase self-distribution is unfair, anti-competitive and creates an unlevel playing field when it comes to interstate commerce.

Food trends continue

My working theory is that since craft beer is both less expensive by the glass for both mid-end restaurants and diners, restaurants perfer to serve and pair. I could be wrong, but I’m going to keep looking at it through this lens.

Hottest trend in foodservice? Craft beer – Food In Canada

Toronto – Restaurants Canada’s annual Canadian Chef Survey reveals that craft beer is the number-1 hot trend in foodservice – for the third year in a row. Restaurants Canada polls chefs across the country. Here is the full list of picks: 1. Craft beer/microbrews 2. Food smoking 3. Charcuterie/house-cured meats 4.

Welcome to the Hotel Columbus, Ohio

It doesn’t quite have the same ring. This feels to me more like a place you brag about have been than a place you go to on purpose. That is, many of the blogs are billing it as a beer Disneyland, which feels gross. However, if I were in Columbus on business, it would be a cool place to stay. It just is that the notion of hotel room beer immersion seems counterintuitive to the communal aspect of craft beer.

This Hotel Is Paradise For Beer Nerds

BrewDog is building an outlandish new resort

Homebrew FAQ

Doug answers questions from the shop each week at the top of the show. Since last week’s show went off the rails a bit, this week’s tip and or trick is how to bottle carbonate lagers. If you want to know when the show starts, I tweet it out from the Beer With Strangers twitter account (where we also do a live tasting each week at noon-ish.

Cooking with Beer

Next week I will debut my first cooking with beer attempt. This weekend I’ll prepare a little Crab salad seasoned with an IPA. Or maybe not. But I’m inspired by this to go to work.

Tsunami Burger Recipe

Here is an over-the-top sandwich using tuna and crab. I’ve prepared this dish at a couple of restaurants where it was huge with the beer drinkers. The bitterness of an IPA seemed to be the consensus among the drinkers to counter the sweetness in the crab and the fat from the crab salad.