Friday, June 27, 2014
Thursday, June 26, 2014
Friday, June 6, 2014
You won’t believe this one weird trick they used to fly beer to the D-Day troops in Normandy
Normandy, 70 years ago, and one of the biggest concerns of the British troops who have made it over the channel, survived the landings and pushed out into the bocage against bitter German resistance is not the V1 flying bomb blitz threatening their families back home, nor the continued failure to capture the port of Cherbourg – but the lack of beer in the bridgehead. On 20 June 1944, two weeks after D-Day, Reuter’s special correspondent with the Allied Forces in France wrote to newspapers in the UK that all that was available in the newly liberated estaminets a few miles inland from the beaches was cider, “and it is pretty watery stuff. I saw a British private wistfully order a pint of mild and bitter: but the glass he sat down with contained the eternal cider.”
Tangmere, Sussex, July 1944: in front of a Spitfire IX of 332 (Norwegian)…View original 4,055 more words
Thursday, June 5, 2014
Monday, June 2, 2014
Five Fantastic Flemish Sour Ales
A few months ago, I wrote a post spotlighting my favorite sour beers. That post has since become one of the most popular entries on this blog—based on page views—because a whole lot of people apparently search Google for “sour beer” and “the best sour beers.”
Many different styles of sour beer exist today, but my single favorite style is the Flemish or Flanders sour red/brown ale.
If you’re unfamiliar with the style it consists of Belgian red or brown ales aged in oak for long periods of time, sometimes multiple years, and then typically blended with “younger” beer of the same style to balance the acidic, sour flavor.
From the Oxford Companion to Beer:
“Oak aging allows lactic fermentation to occur and some additional conditioning by slowly working yeasts, turning the beer slightly sour like neatly aged wine, though many varieties [of Flemish/Flanders aged ales] are later softened…
View original 362 more words
