Troegs Contest Update - Triple the Prizes!

I hope everyone has been taking photos of some awesome Troegs beer! We've already received quite a few submissions, but if you've been putting it off I just want to remind you that you only have another week to get your entries in. I also wanted to make an exciting announcement and clarify a few things.

So as you have seen, this contest will be in the hands of the Facebook fans of Troegs as the winner will be determined by the most Likes received. However, I have decided to donate TWO more prizes for TWO additional winners bringing the grand total to three. Here's how it's going to work:

People's Choice - This is what we already outlined, Troegs will choose their ten favorite photos and the one with the most likes wins the Nugget Nectar Prize Pack.

Brewer's Choice - Troegs will select their favorite photo and I will send the winner a Troegs glass, magnet and keychain.

Best in Beertography - I will pick my favorite submission and send them a Troegs t-shirt.

Ok, now to clarify a few lingering questions:

• You must email your submissions to beertography@gmail.com to be considered. 
• You can enter as many photos as you'd like.
• The photo needs to feature Troegs in some way in order to be considered. In the original post I said it needed to feature Troegs Brewery which may have been confusing. We accept any entries involving Troegs beer, the brewery, logo, etc. 

Got it? Now there are three ways to win, so go get your camera now and get to taking some Troegs Beertography! Go on, get!

Beer It Forward Update - Package #1 Lands and Brings Casualty #1

Hey folks just wanted to give those of you following the Beer It Forward a brief update. The first package has landed at Target #1, Robert from Charleston, SC. Unfortunately, we had a casualty in shipment and a bottle of Southern Tier Choklat was lost. These things happen, but at least it's a reminder that good packing is necessary. Although I think I probably packed the box with just a bit too much beer (or maybe we just had a disgruntled FedEx employee somewhere along the line), I avoided having FedEx return the package to me because the beer was kept from leaking through the box by the double trash bags holding all of the beer. Huzzah!

Now Robert's going to select someone else from our participant list and send them a box of beer, and then they will do the same and so on. Remember, you don't want to let your target know that they're next, we want it to be a surprise!

Here's what I sent to Robert (L to R):

1 x 16oz. Sixpoint Righteous Rye
1 x 16oz. Sixpoint Bengali Tiger
1 x 12oz. Sixpoint Resin
1 x 12oz. Weyerbacher Insanity
1 x 12oz. Ithaca Flower Power
1 x 12oz. Brooklyn Black Chocolate Stout
1 x 12oz. 2009 Brooklyn Monster Ale
1 x 12oz. Weyerbacher Old Heathen Imp. Stout
1 x 12oz. Weyerbacher Double Simcoe IPA

and of course the ill-fated 22oz. Southern Tier Choklat.

Troegs Beertography Contest

I'm proud to announce the next official Beertography Contest featuring Troegs Brewery from Hershey, PA! To coincide with the release of the immensely popular Nugget Nectar this coming Tuesday February 21st, the fine folks at Troegs have graciously agreed to sponsor the latest in our series of beer photo contests.

If you've seen our other contests, then you already know exactly how this works. Get out there and take some beertography of Troegs great beers and send the photos my way. The brewery will then select their top ten favorite entries, post them to their Facebook page and the public will decide the winner via the Like button. The photo that gets the most Likes on Facebook will receive an NNPP or a Nugget Nectar Prize Pack! We will accept entries for this contest from today, Thursday February 16th until 11:59pm on Thursday March 1st.

fresh Nugget Nectar coming off the bottling line!

So at this point you're probably salivating over getting your hands/tastebuds on some Nugget Nectar. The brewery itself will be releasing this fantastic brew on Tuesday February 21st, and I'll be paying them a visit! Why don't you come down as well? Some of you may even have Monday off due to President's Day, so why not take Tuesday and make a four-day weekend out of it?

The brewery's General Store, Tasting Room and Self-Guided Tours will be operating on their normal schedule (11am-7pm) on Tuesday and you'll be able to score Nugget Nectar straight from the source and even get a bite to eat. I know I'll be doing just that.

Troegs is located at:
200 East Hersheypark Dr.
Hershey, PA 17033
(717) 534-1297 x102

Rules:

1. All submissions must be emailed to beertography@gmail.com with the subject line Beertography Contest before 11:59pm on Thursday March 1st.
2. All photo submissions must somehow feature Troegs Brewery in order to be considered. We're looking for a combination of most creative along with best photography here.
3. Winner will be determined by Likes on Troegs's Facebook Page.

Please Note: Your photo submission does NOT have to feature Nugget Nectar. It can feature any of the Troegs beers, although if you're anything like me you'll be purchasing some NN within the next 2 weeks anyway!

Any questions? Feel free to email me. Good luck!

This Week's Featured #beertography

Founders CBS by @lyfords

Cutters Empire Imperial Stout by @cscudder

Southern Tier 2XIPA by @Hepcat75

Craft Beer Bottle Cap Magnets by @LeGitBrewing

This week I've condensed our #beertography of the day into one post to make for easy viewing. Here are four of my favorites photos received via Twitter in the last week or two. 
If you would like to have your photos featured on the site, all you have to do is tag your tweet with #beertography and/or mention me @beertography. I'll comb through and select my favorites for posting on the site. Cheers!

Beer For Beasts Close to Sell Out

Meet Jens. Jens is a beast.

For those of you that have been lollygagging, your ship is about to sail. As of press time, the day session of Sixpoint & BeerAdvocate's Beer For Beasts animal charity event is 100% sold out and only 261 tickets remain for the evening session. GET ON IT! As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I had the unique opportunity to help brew one of the 40 beers that will make a one-time ever appearance at this fest, so as you can imagine I'm very excited about attending and sampling what we made. Last year was a good time so I'm sure this year will be even better.  I'll be attending the day session, so please be sure to say hi.

Today's photo of the magnificent beast known as Jens was submitted by my good buddy Mikey Santoro, who along with his roommates are about the biggest fan of the Sixpoint nanokegs out there. Cheers!

Beer for Beasts will be held on Saturday, March 31, 2012, at The Bell House (149 7th Street), located in the Gowanus section of Brooklyn in New York City. All proceeds to benefit The Humane Society of New York City. Last year's Beer for Beasts raised nearly $30,000 to directly aid the better treatment of animals. Purchase tickets here.

Dogfish Head Night at Barcade Jersey City

This past Thursday night, the Jersey City incarnation of Barcade hosted Dogfish Head Night with craft beer rockstar Sam Calagione in attendance. As you can imagine, this event was packed to the gills with beer aficionados of all varieties hoping to be able to share a toast with the man behind the fish.



Barcade brought out some fine Dogfish beers from their stash for this event including 2009 Fort, 2009 Burton Baton and 2009 Theobroma. Not to mention the always crowd-pleasing 120 Minute IPA and the brand-new limited offering Noble Rot, a near fifty-fifty mix of beer & wine and my favorite of the night. Unfortunately for some who came later in the night, kegs were kicking as early as 7:30pm including the Noble Rot and 120. People drink good beer quickly? Shocker.



The New Jersey Craft Beer crew get a photo with the maven himself. (L to R: Brian, Os, some dude named Sam, Marek, Heather, Dan, myself)



Sam made a brief but impassioned speech about raising our glasses to all of the craft brewers out there that have made nights like that possible. He's really quite the wordsmith and you can see why he's attained the rock star status that he has. Plus, the beers are pretty fine.

The Get Real Aporkalypse Beer & Food Festival

Saturday February 25th, Get Real presents yet another fantastic sounding festival at the 404 Space in New York City. For those that have attended previous incarnations, you can expect more of the same amazing beers. Get Real started off as a festival dedicated to cask beer, but has recently expanded into all things delicious, be it food or drink. This time around obviously the focus will be on pork. But that's not to say that beer will be ignored by any means! Here are the details:

10 Hogs, 10 Chefs + tons of Craft Beer & Local Wine

Also featuring some of Get Real NY's local talent: homebrewers & their suds! 

Enjoy delicious, top-quality pigs prepared in many different styles by an all-star lineup of some of New York's finest chefs. Wash it all down with more than 50 different craft beers, 15+ cask ales, and local wines in a fun atmosphere.

There will be 2 sessions: 1-4pm and 5-8pm for $60. If you want the VIP treatment, you get an extra hour early admission and it will run you $80. You can purchase tickets here.

Ticket sales have been flying so if you haven't purchased yet, I'd advise doing so very soon. It's not a huge festival so capacity is very limited.

Now if you've read this far, you get a bonus. Get Real's twitter account has been whetting followers' appetites with sneak previews of what beers will be pouring at the fest, and the lineup is getting more and more intriguing by the day. Take a look at some of the beers they'll be tapping:

Brooklyn Brewery – Mary’s Maple, Sorachi Ace, Dry Irish Stout
Kelso – Rye-aged Rauchbier, Industrial IPA w/ Nelson Sauvin Hops in CASK!
Oskar Blues – Deviant Dale’s
Captain Lawrence – Golden Delicious (cask)
Lagunitas – Imperial Red (only keg in NYC)
Founders – Canadian Breakfast Stout
The Bronx Brewery – Pale Ale, Bourbon Barrel Aged Pale Ale
Dogfish Head – Noble Rot
Sixpoint – Resin, Ich Bin Kein Berliner Weisse
Cigar City - Hotter Than Helles
Avery - Hog Heaven, Piglet in Purgatory

Are you sold yet? Look at that list. I know I'll be there.

Beer It Forward Participant List

So I've gone through and selected the participants for our first ever Beer It Forward and I think this is going to be a blast. Apologies to those that I did not include, but as expected we were a bit heavy on the East Coast representation so I had to randomly select some people to trim it down. Originally I was going to only pick 8 people for this, but I'm going with 12 instead since I got a nice response.

If you need a review of the rules, check out my original post. Here are our participants:

East
(me) John Kleinchester - Jersey City, NJ
Stephen L. - Bellmawr, NJ
James S. - Portland, ME
Marek K. - Riverdale, NJ

Central
Eric S. - Detroit, MI
Billy E. - Springfield, MO
Joe L. - Northern Kentucky / Cincinnati, OH

South
Robert D. - Charleston, SC
Win B. - Raleigh, NC
Brian M. - Ashburn, VA
Joel M. - Asheboro, NC
Johnny S. - Austin, TX

West
Mike B. - San Diego, CA

You'll all be receiving an email with an invite to a google document that will be used for tracking who's received a box. Email me at beertography@gmail.com with your mailing addresses and let's get this train goin!

Cheers!

Manhattan's Newest Beer Bar - New York Beer Company

The name may at first give you the impression that a new brewery has sprung up in midtown Manhattan, but in reality what you have is the city's newest beer bar.

The Beer Stock Market ticker waits to be activated.

Located at 321 W. 44th St., the bar promises to have a good percentage of their 40 taps flowing with local breweries' suds (while still placating the BudMillerCoors crowd), but with an interesting twist. Beer prices will be based on demand. This could create an interesting situation where perhaps a pint of Bud Light could potentially be more expensive than a local craft brew. It'll all depend on the clientele. The centerpiece of the bar as you can see above is a homage to the NY Stock Exchange, complete with working ticker. There is where you will find your beer prices as they constantly fluctuate, much like the real thing down on Wall Street. They're shooting for a late February or Early March open and promise a full American dinner menu complete with a pizza oven for an authentic New York slice.



I've worked in Times Square for almost seven years now and watched Manhattan's bar scene evolve toward a craft beer focus. Yet somehow, Times Square and neighboring Hell's Kitchen have remained somewhat overlooked. Although there have been some minor additions to the Midtown craft beer scene, New York Beer Company hopes to become the destination spot.

Check out NYBC's Facebook Page and Twitter account for more updates.

Don't Cry Over Spilled Beer

This was a photo I took a few weeks ago of a tasty whiskey-barrel aged homebrew that just couldn't stay in the glass. Was there a temptation to lap it off of the counter? Yes. Did I succumb to that temptation? No comment. But spilling beer is the worst, especially when it's a really good tasting one.

If you would like to have your photos featured on the site, please email them to beertography@gmail.com. Or if you're on the go, you can tag your tweet with #beertography and/or mention me @beertography.

The Oskar Blues Ordeal: The Best Thing I Did in 2011

Oskar Blues giant can, Home Made Liquids & Solids - Longmont, CO

This past September I made my first ever pilgrimage to the Great American Beer Festival in Denver, Colorado. It was a great time, but one specific excursion came away as easily the most fun and the most memorable. It's called the Oskar Blues Ordeal, and what an ordeal it is. To this day, I still think back to this little day trip out of Denver and wish I could repeat it. That's saying a lot considering how much is going on in and around Denver GABF weekend.

our chariot for the day

So the gist of the trip was as follows: Meet at Falling Rock in Downtown Denver (if you've been to GABF, you've been to Falling Rock - it's the epicenter of everything craft beer that weekend) and a bus will take you to 4 awesome Oskar Blues locations. Sounds promising enough, Oskar Blues is great. Why not do it? Wait a second, there's going to be unlimited cans of all of Oskar Blues beers throughout the entire trip? Are you kidding me? Alright then. Accompanied by four long-time friends, we gladly accepted the challenge.



The first stop was at Oskar Blues Grill & Brew in Lyons. This was where OB first started brewing their tasty beers. In fact, they still brew there, but more in a small-batch capacity compared to their production facility which we'll see later. The meet-up time at Falling Rock was a painful 8:30am after attending the Thursday evening GABF session, so needless to say we were hungry by the time we arrived in Lyons.



So, naturally we were drinking beer by 10am! Basically we arrived at the Grill and were welcomed by the staff offering us a huge pile of breakfast burritos accompanied by a bin of OB cans. This was a great start to the day, and I just reminded myself that it was 12pm back East.

the burritos were phenomenal, and a Mama's Little Yella Pils was the perfect pairing

After we finished our burritos, we were treated to a tour of the original brewing facility at the Lyons location by one of the brewers who gave us OB's whole history. Then we were treated to something very, very special.

Jeff & Josh enjoy Deviant Dale's

After the tour was complete, the brewer poured for each of a small glass of Deviant Dale's. This was the first time I had heard of this malevolent creation, but it will be hitting store shelves in can form in NYC this Monday (2/6). And it was amazing. Dale's Pale Ale is one of my favorite go-to beers, but this was just ramped up a bit in all flavor departments. Do yourself a favor and make sure you pick some of this up when it comes out. Did I mention it was amazing?



We continued on with our can sampling after we were done with our Deviant Dale's, trying to take our time with deliciously strong beers like the GUBNA above. It's no easy task.

almost as cool as our ride

cold canned beers everywhere!

the last sip of Deviant Dale's

After the grill, the bus transported us to the next stop, the Oskar Blues Hops & Heifers Farm just outside of Longmont. This was one part of the tour that I thought would be okay, but it turned out to be the apex of the entire year in beer for me. Our entire tour group of 35 or so people loaded onto 2 tractors and made our way down to the farm itself nestled at the bottom of a gently sloping hill.



Here we encountered COWS!!!! Here's the info from OB themselves: "The farm currently grazes 100% Oskar Blues raised Black Angus cattle that are part of the sustainable model at the Hops & Heifers farm. In addition, The ranch hosts 3,500 hop plants across 2 acres. The hopyard menu includes Centennial, Columbus, Nugget, Chinook, Willamette, Mt.Hood, Cascade and Sterling"

As a person who believes in organic sustainable food, I was delighted by this. That said, I'm never too comfortable staring my lunch in the eye, but it was great to see happy cows with plenty of room to graze. I was already in heaven and we hadn't even seen the hops yet.

Ian enjoys a non-Deviant Dale's while being transported to the hops via tractor

This here was the pinnacle of beer awesomeness. The tractor dropped us off at the hop growing portion of the farm and they told us how the hops had recently been harvested. Bummer. But then... they told us that those hops had been put into a beer, and it was on tap. TO DRINK. RIGHT THERE!



The beer was called HGH (Home Grown Hops) and we got to enjoy it while meandering through the hop bines. Everything sort of came together. Sustainability. Great tasting, hoppy beer. Beautiful weather. A perfect storm of awesomeness.

Tim, elated to be amongst the hops

Hop Bines reaching toward the Colorado sky

Jeff, myself, Ian, Josh

if you had to grab a pint of HGH for the road, wouldn't you garnish it with a hop?

Sour Cherry Ten FIDY

Our next stop was Home Made Liquids & Solids in Longmont for lunch. Unfortunately we didn't take many photos here outside of the one above and the first photo in this post, but it basically entailed getting a buffet lunch and 2 rounds of beers. This was much needed after a good amount of beers and the food was delicious.



The final stop on this whirlwind tour was OB's production brewery and the Tasty Weasel tap room. After seeing so much small-scale brewing, it was almost overwhelming how gigantic their canning facility actually is.

heh.

watch the Yella fly by.

that....is a lot.. of Dale's.

TEN FIDY!

By this point we were of course quite exhausted, but still had a great and informative tour of their grand brewing facility. We gathered around a table in the Tasty Weasel tap room and discussed the unbelievably awesome day we'd just experienced. I'm pretty sure this was the point when we all said we'd come back and do it again in 2012.



Special thanks to Brittany Dern from Oskar Blues who made this awesome trip possible. Here's to hoping that 2012 brings another awesome experience like 2011 did.

Heady Topper

Today's post features one of the most sought after cans of beer in recent memory, The Alchemist's Heady Topper. This photo was submitted by Kyle Park of Hops and Circumstance, so thanks Kyle!

For those of you unfamiliar with Heady Topper, it's forged all the way up in Northern Vermont. Waterbury to be specific. The Alchemist started as a restaurant/brewpub in downtown Waterbury, but unfortunately in August of last year, Hurricane Irene flooded them and the business was totaled. On the brighter side, The Alchemist was already a few weeks away from opening a canning line just up the road when Irene hit. So now, if you're willing to travel to Vermont, the only place it's distributed, you can get your hands on 4 packs of Heady Topper at the new canning facility.

I had the chance to visit The Alchemist just a few months before Irene took them out, and it was one of the best beer experiences I've ever had. The owners, Jen & John Kimmich were among the nicest people I've encountered in my beer travels and even let us see the basement brewery which later came to be overcome with flood waters from the hurricane. I'd wish them luck in their canning operation, but just based on trade buzz and how many people I know who have taken or are planning on taking the long trip to Waterbury just to bring home some Heady, i'd say they're doing just fine.

If you would like to have your photos featured on the site, please email them to beertography@gmail.com. Or if you're on the go, you can tag your tweet with #beertography and/or mention me @beertography.