Beer and Book Pairing!

Do you pour a snifter of Old Rasputin before cracking open Anna Karenina? Do you long for a crisp rye pale ale with your Mark Twain? Do you pop open a cold Bud Light while thumbing through the Yellow Pages?

Well then you are way weirder than I thought. And this event is clearly for you!

Free Beer Tour pairs novels from three badass writers with equally badass selections from Lagunitas Brewing Company. I’m thinking there will be much literary beer cross-conversation. Just think - when you catch me saying something pretentious like “it was aggressively bitter upfront, but the denouement was surprisingly subtle and it had a very clean finish” you won’t know what the hell I’m talking about!

Cicerones, this is the final frontier. What greater challenge exists than pairing great beer with great literary works? I don’t know. I guess I’ll let you know when I’m contemplating Neo-Dadaism while sipping gingerly on a Ballantine tallboy.

Twitter: 1 Santa: 0

Look what arrived in the mail today! A gift from my awesome friend Brandon, who apparently ordered it yesterday when I tweeted about it!

The Naked Pint is a survey of all things beer: from styles to flavor profiles to pairing to homebrewing. It’s penned by two well-respected cicerones from LA who also happen to be ladies. And if there’s one thing I’m for, it’s women in the beer industry in a non-cleavage-bearing role.

In fact, I’m so excited about this read that I’m pretty sure I can excuse the blatant thematic sexualization and the goofy typeface they chose for the body text.

Life and Limb and Limb and Life

Is this the age of The Collaborative Beer?

All the cool kids are doing it, and none so fervently as Dogfish Head.

Seriously, they’ve bedded all the big guns: Avery, Allagash, Russian River, Lost Abbey… okay, that was for one beer. But even little pistols like BeerAdvocate and Cambridge Brewing have gotten a piece of the Dogfish action.

But will Dogfish know how to handle a seasoned Craft cougar like Sierra Nevada?

Bostonians have only to wait until Friday, when Sierra Nevada and Dogfish Head’s little-known love child, Life & Limb, pours for the first time, side by side with its brother, Limb & Life, from the taps at Cambridge Common.

Life & Limb is a strong dark beer brewed with all manner of tree saps, boasting a formidable 10% ABV and 50 IBUs. I’m guessing it’ll be heavy bodied, rich and malty, with a moderate hop backbone. Limb & Life, however, is a “small beer” made by sparging the mash of its predecessor. (Just like Anchor Small) It’s kind of like making a second pot of coffee out of the grounds you used this morning, only less gross. And with booze. The result is a lighter-bodied, sessionable beer with a much more doable 5% ABV.

But this is mostly conjecture - based on the penumbra of a description I found on the Life & Limb website - which is beautiful, by the way (see if you can spot the Dogfish dogfish and the Sierra scroll on the homepage!). I’ll be sure to post a full review after imbibing on Friday.

In any case, if what comes of this collaborative trend is delicious, interesting new beer with a hybrid vigor all its own, then by all means, let this outbreeding enhancement continue, unbridled, until a race of superbeers evolves and takes over the world!

So Come with Me and We’ll Go See the Big Rock Candy Mountain…

Ah, paradise. Where the Hobo is Lord!

Speculation has been rampant amongst tattered itinerant beer tramps: Lord Hobo, a mythical 40 tap beer bar owned by Daniel Lanigan (of Moan & Dove fame, and less impressively The Other Side) may in fact be opening at the site of the old B-Side in Cambridge. At some point. Maybe.

Thanks to Andy Crouch’sbeerscribe.comwe are now one step closer to… uncertainty.

Perhaps more importantly, Brother Crouch has also graciously supplied a link to the nascentmenuwhich includes such mystery items as “Pretty Things we’ll see” and “Dogfish Head surprise,” but all in all looks pretty freaking awesome, everybody.

And the food… oh man. If they can pull this off, a choir of angels will descend from hobo heaven to sing its praises. Lord Hobo has the potential to rival Allston gastropub (and my current favorite),Deep Ellum. And the fact that they intend to offer chips and curry might just put them over the edge. This is a standard pub fare that no Boston beer bar seems to understand should be a mandatory menu item (unless you countStone’s Public Housein Ashland).

So we have the who, the what, the where, and the why. We’re just waiting on the when, Lord Hobo. We don’t care about the how.

In the Big Rock Candy Mountains you never change your socks
And the little streams of alcohol come a-trickling down the rocks
The brakemen have to tip their hats and the railroad bulls are blind
There’s a lake of stew and of whiskey too
You can paddle all around ‘em in a big canoe
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains

I’ll see you all this coming fall in the Big Rock Candy Mountains