After 2 months, we finally had our Beer Blogger Brewoff tasting.  It was amazing the quality and variety of beer made from such a simple 5.5% abv stout.  I applaud Aaron, Derek, Erik, Joseph and Nate for coming through with some very creative and tasty beers. With all our beers brewed, mailed, and ready to be consumed; six of us got together on a Skype conference and had a virtual tasting.  It was extremely cool to share these beers while we were spread all over the country, although it felt like we were all in the same room.

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I came up with this idea a couple months back.  I’m not entirely sure what dark unused part of my brain it was spawned from, but has been warmly received from the Beer Blogger’s I’ve approached about it.  Basically the idea stemmed from seeing my fellow bloggers tweeting about brewing beer.  It seems to me, you get a deeper understanding of beer when you make your own. But I digress, since I’ve been doing the Beer Brawl™ podcasts, reviewing beers, and brewing them, I thought it would be fun to combine it all together!  So, I enlisted the help of some beer bloggers you probably know…

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We are proud to announce the start of the Simply Beer Club in conjunction with Amanti Vino in Montclair NJ.  Our inaugural tasting will be on Nov 7th.  These tasting are going to be a great way to experience some unique beer.  We will be selecting a style of Beer or Brewery and 4-6 beers that fit the genre and discussing them. For our first tasting on Nov 7th, we will be sampling 6 stouts that cover the gamut of the style.  We will also have John Hoyos of Hunterdon Brewing Co. as a special guest to give us some industry insight on these beers. (more…)

On June 28th my buddy Rich and I went to our second beer tasting sponsored by the Draught Board 15 at the Gaslight Brewery in South Orange NJ.  The first tasting was with Brooklyn Brewery, a great event, lots of good beer (Local 1&2, Brooklyn-Schneider, Dark Matter, and Black Ops), knowledgeable rep, and lots of swag.  Rich and I thought we were going to be in for another great event, especially since I also have enjoyed many good  Stone beers lately, Cali-Belgie and the Double Bastard Ale. 

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Our 16th Beer Brawl, was the first one on the road and probably the one I was looking forward to the most.  Beside being on the road in a new location with a new friend of Simply Beer, I really wanted to drink this line up of Bourbon/Whiskey/Scotch aged Imperial Stouts.  The beers in Beer Brawl 16 were all Imperial Stouts, either American Imperial or Russian Imperial. 

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This week we switched things up a bit and focused on a Brewer rather then a particular style of beer.  For this Beer Brawl, we choose to focus on Mikkeller beers.  Mikkel Borg Bjergsø is a ‘gipsy-brewer’, who brews at different breweries in Denmark, Norway, Germany and the United States.  Each beer that is made is unique and may only be a one time limited release.

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