Last week I spent a great afternoon with “Farmer Dave” Anderson at Dave’s Brewfarm across the river in Wilson, Wisconsin. The brewfarm is a true farmhouse brewery, a live/work space with living quarters upstairs and the “labrewatory” downstairs. One of the great things about this new brewery is the way sustainability has been built into the business. Wind generation and geothermal heating and cooling is just a part of the overall picture.

I’ve written about this aspect of the Brewfarm business this week on the Hop Press at Ratebeer.com. Check it out.

My latest post on the Ratebeer Hop Press.

A significant part of my holiday beer consumption this year consisted of what I will call blended beer cocktails. By this I mean two or more beers mixed together. Blending beers is nothing new. The blending of one, two, and three-year-old lambic into gueuze is an art in Belgium and porter is purported to have originated from a blend of mild and stale beers called three threads. Even now, craft brewers like Southern Tier in New York use blending to create new beers, as exemplified by Gemini, a 50/50 blend of their Un*earthly and Hoppe double IPAs and a beer that gives new meaning to the phrase “more than the sum of its parts.” Read More…