BeerProfiler

North Coast Grand Cru: Sweet but dangerous.

American Craft Beer Week kicked off Monday and fine watering holes throughout the city are celebrating with rare keg tappings and tastings. Design District gastropub and beer-nerd destination the Meddlesome Moth is creating special dishes each night this week to complement its beer offerings.

Tuesday night the Moth presented Grand Cru from North Coast Brewing Company out of Fort Bragg, California. The special-edition ale is brewed with Belgian yeast and agave nectar and aged in bourbon barrels. It pours a bright golden orange, with a light fizzy head and an intensely sweet aroma of apples and honey. It's sweeter than I expected with virtually no bitterness, and there's definitely a boozy bite in there to remind you it's 12.5 percent ABV.

That high alcohol content that's so prevalent amongst craft beers gets me every time -- one glass of Grand Cru and I was toasted.

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Planning a trip to Las Vegas soon where you'll surely create your own version of The Hangover? Or have a nasty track record of hitting it hard the first night of vacation only to ruin subsequent days where even the smell of booze trips your gag reflex? (Rookie.)

As our sister pub OCWeekly recently reported, should you find yourself in that predicament, you can now wave down the Hangover Heaven bus. Founded and developed by Dr. Jason Burke, an anesthesiologist with over ten years of OR and ICU experience, this method for relieving hangovers is "based on his own research and real-life experience treating patients during and after surgery."

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Miller Lite

See also: Rejected Miller Lite Delivery Systems
Miller Lite has introduced a new Punch Top Can to increase airflow to your drink hole, "reducing glug and resulting in an improved, smoother pour." Which actually translates to faster times for shotgunning.

The small indenture on the top of the can be opened by various instruments, like say a small stick off the ground, a neighbor's fancy fake nail, a claw from a stray cat, a golf tee, or even as Miller Lite suggests, a dollar bill -- a fiver if you're a high-roller. Nickels won't work, however.

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Lauren Drewes Daniels

Eater reported the other day that Jason Kosmas, Marquee Grill beverage director, co-owner of Employees Only in NYC and author of two books, is now dabbling in showbiz. Kosmas confirms there's a possible show in the making.

"It's basically a travel show," Kosmas says, "where we go to a city and learn about the local scene and what they do differently, then bring together a couple bartenders to go against each other in a competition."

Sounds like an awful job. Traveling the country to explore unique watering holes. Sampling the goods. Poor kid.

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Flickr

Yesterday Robert Wilonsky over at the Dallas Morning News (that feels like putting a shoe on the wrong foot) reported on a fast-tracked code issue aimed at easing restrictions on Dallas microbreweries. As it stands now, these small independent brewers are relegated to "heavy industrial" zones and in order to operate are required to obtain a special use permit, which can be tedious and costly to acquire.

Permits and zoning for microbreweries previously hadn't been an issue because there weren't any. But within the past year we've seen the birth of Deep Ellum Brewing Company, Peticolas and, now, Four Corners Brewing Company. All of this is good for the city, and whereas city code usually means more restrictions, in this case addressing the issue could help clear the path and make things easier for start-ups.

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HellaWella Beeramid (Illustration: Liam Gooley)

With St. Patty's Day behind us and spring break in the books, summer is just around the corner, which means it's time to get serious about our curvy figures. One of the worst offenders to the best of all diet plans is alcohol. Not only for the calories within each glass, but also for the progressive lack of self-restraint once consumed.

To help with the effort, HellaWella, a health and fitness site, has developed a chart that compares the calories, carbohydrates and percent of alcohol for 55 popular beers.

What's nice about the chart is that it allows us to measure efficiency. Sure, you could have a Budweiser Select for just 55 calories, but with just 2.4% alcohol, you'd get a better buzz from a 5-Hour Energy shot. Therein lies the challenge: the boozy part is what packs the most calories and, unfortunately, it's a sliding scale (up).

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This Saturday, March 10, Sigel's at 3209 N. Fitzhugh St. is hosting TexasFest, a thirst-quenching celebration of Texas craft beer, spirits and wine from 1-4 p.m. Reps from about 20 different Texas breweries, distilleries and wineries will all be there with samples and smart answers to your all your burning questions.

For this event, Sigel's has scored an exclusive on 20 cases of Dreamcrusher Double Rye IPA (9.7 percent ABV and 100+ IBUs) from Deep Ellum Brewing Co. This is the eighth beer from this young brewery and was released just last week. DEBC told me today that they're already almost out of kegs and bottled up only a limited amount.

Sigel's will have 24 Texas beers from the likes of Rahr and Sons, Spoetzl, Real Ale, St Arnold and Ziegenbock.

There will also be more than a dozen gins, rums, vodkas and whiskeys including Rebecca Creek Whiskey, Roxor gin (Dripping Springs), Treaty Oak Platinum rum, Pecan Street rum, Tito's and Deep Eddy vodka. Check the Sigel's site for a complete list.

Texas Coffee School

Oddfellows' Cupping Class

Tom Vincent of Texas Coffee School takes the business of grinding beans to a new level. And, yes, he actually has a school in Arlington. But he also regularly holds class at places like Oddfellows and The Original Pancake House in Addison.

He got into the brew business several years ago while working in Charlotte, where he attended a class at Counter Culture Coffee. For the next two years, he attended almost every event the shop held, then in 2008 he moved to Texas and began working as a coffee consultant. He and his coffee school were recently featured in the Arlington Citizen-Journal, if you're interested in the complete story.

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Deep Ellum Brewing Company

Roger and Jeanatta West of Liberty Dairy Farm pick up their first load of spent grains from Aaron Baxter and Drew Huerter of DEBC.

My extent of beer knowledge is limited. I know that I like it on occasion. I know that Jesse Hughey knows a lot. I know that there is new stuff popping up all the time. And I know that if you want to be a brew master, you should grow a fuzzy beard.

But one thing I didn't know anything about was "spent grains." Turns out, after part of the brewing process, breweries are left with a remnants of the used grains. And instead of just tossing them out, there are several ways to repurpose them, the most popular being as cattle feed.

I spoke with Aaron Baxter at Deep Ellum Brewing Company, who after many phone calls found a taker for their grains in Roger and Jeanatta West. They own the Liberty Dairy Farm east of Denison and are part of a co-op for Dairy Farmers of America.

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​Lakewood Brewing Company is nipping at the heels of Peticolas Brewing Company and Deep Ellum Brewing Co. to be the third Dallas-area beer maker, but it's not the only start-up on the way.

According to its Facebook page, Reunion Brewing Company last week signed a lease for a space in the Design District, and was recently approved by Kickstarter for a fundraising campaign. You can read the origin story here, but in a nutshell, Reunion is the project of three friends (Jack Sparks, Brent Thompson and Kat Stevens) who met during temporary bartending jobs and then reunited when Thompson and Stevens began homebrewing and called Sparks, who was working as brewmaster at Saya Beer in Bolivia.
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