Month: April 2014

It’s our annual Sour Beer Dinner. Five-courses of spring market freshness paired with lambics, gueuzes and bretts.

It’s our favorite time of year when we get to “ramp” up our sour beer inventory. Beginning tonight through next Tuesday, we’ll have plenty of opportunities for you to pucker up and enjoy a delicious line-up of lambics, gueuzes and bretts.

This evening (Tuesday, April 23 – happy Earth Day!), we’ll have one of our famous Industry Nights, whereby brewers, reps, and industry insiders congregate, answer your questions, share their love of great craft beer, and keep the pints flowing! We’ll have sours/spring seasonals from Allagash, Shelton Brothers, Crooked Stave, Peekskill and The Other Half, among others.

And be sure to get your tickets for next week’s April Sours beer dinner (on sale here).  Five courses from locally-source markets, farms and fisheries. Beers that will be served include the finest lineup of sours:

Crooked Stave from Colorado
Cantillon Gueze-Lambic
Trois Dames from Switzerland Grand Dames Flemish Red
The Commons Brewery (Portland, OR) Flemish Kiss

Paired with a special menu of spring farm highlights, including:

Hudson Valley Duck
Ramps from the Hudson valley
Scallops from Long Island
Grits sourced from the Finger Lakes region
Strawberry-Rhubarb Cobbler from upstate

Plus we’ll have pay-as-you-go spring menu and sour beer options all week (and if you want to balance your palate, be sure to join us for the Educated IPA Blind Tasting on Saturday).

This weekend we’re taking a serious look—er, taste—at some widely available commercial craft beers in a quest to find the best widely-available IPA. With nearly every craft brewer in America seeking the quintessential hop rush, we wondered if the label factors in to how we perceive taste. Thus, the Educated IPA Blind Tasting was born!

Jimmy’s No. 43 owner Jimmy Carbone notes, “There are may ways to judge beer. Around the country—and at Jimmy’s No. 43—BJCP (Beer Judge Certification Program) courses are taught to discern flavors and styles based on the BJCP style guide. We wanted to create a blind tasting and judge IPAs based only on taste, to find out how the commercially available IPAs stack up against those hard-to-find beers.”

While we won’t be sneaking in any Pliny or Heady Topper, we will have an extensive list of IPAs from Sam Adams, Sierra Nevada, Bell’s, Smuttynose, Lagunitas, Victory and many others.

Day One (Friday, April 25) of the Educated IPA event is an invitation-only professional judging with a panel of esteemed judges, who will conduct a blind tasting of 10 IPAs. Judges include beer writers (e.g. Justin Kennedy, Paul Sullivan), food bloggers (e.g. Chris Schonberger), and some of New York City’s favorite beer bar owners (Ed Berestecki, Jimmy Carbone), among other special guests. The judges will blind taste the 10 entries and vote on the best example of the style (based on BJCP style guidelines). The IPAs will be judged from specialty IPA glassware courtesy of Spiegelau/Riedel. The winner will be announced during the Public Tasting on Day Two!

Day Two (Saturday April 26) offers the public to “be the judge” with a ticketed event (get them here) that includes the same 10 IPAs, plus food and “swag” giveaways from industry reps. Certified Cicerone Ross Shepard will teach you how to properly taste and judge an IPA. You’ll be making “Educated” judgments, with a list of breweries whose beers are entered, as well as a description of the hops used in the entries.

The Saturday event begins at 4 p.m., but we’ll have pay-as-you-go options from noon. Come and mingle and get your hop on with two days of Educated IPA tastings.

TRAVIS TESTING ONE DOLLAR TICKET

We hope you’ve enjoyed our regular updates about Liquid Lent. We’ve had a lot of fun reading about others who are foregoing food for beer during a season where you can “drink like a Monk.” Now as Lent draws to a close, we’ll be serving up a terrific list of beers on draft and in the bottle starting tomorrow (Friday-Sunday).

In addition, we’ll open at noon on Saturday (April 12th) for a pay-as-you-go celebration of the “Monk’s Trail,” with a ticketed guided tasting at 4 p.m. For two hours, you can drink with owner and Beer Sessions Radio™ host Jimmy Carbone at this sit-down tasting of 20+ beers that will include some rare bottle selections from the Jimmy’s No. 43 cellar.

Among the beers we will have throughout the weekend and at the ticketed tasting:

• Classic Belgians and Trappists (e.g. Rochefort 8,10; Westmalle Dubbel, Triple; Achel Brown; La Trappe; Orval; Vicaris Triple; Duvel Triple Hop; D’Chouffe Houblon Chouffe; Andechs Dunkelweiss)
• Rare Belgians (Het Nest Ace of Spades Saison, Hof Ten Dormaal/Stillwater collaboration “Bronze Age,” Blaugies Saison d’Épeautre, De La Senne Taras Boulba)
• Plus Belgian-style and sours from the USA and Switzerland (Crooked Stave Surette, Vielle Saison; Brouwerij West Triple from Los Angeles; The Commons Brewery Flemish Kiss, Urban Farmhouse from Portland, OR; Stillwater Brontide, Folklore; Trois Dames Grand Dame Oud Bruin Flemish Red from Switzerland; Jolly Pumpkin Bam Biere from Michigan
• Plus Food choices of charcuterie, bacon, cheese, mini-cheeseburger sliders, cheese plates and other brunch offerings