It’s not every day you get to attend the release dinner for an amazing collaborative beer.  When I heard about the Life & Limb collaboration beer  between Dogfish Head and Sierra Nevada and their east coast release dinner was going to be 20 minutes away, I had to get there.  But what could make an evening of amazing beer, great food, and new friends better?  A one on one interview with the man who has turned extreme beer into a household name, Sam Calagione.

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This Beer Brawl™ comes courtesy of John Hoyos of Hunterdon Brewing.  John selected out 6 Esoteric Italian Beers from his portfolio and brought them for us to sample at Montclair New Jersey’s Amanti Vino.  Having only had Peroni before, I was looking forward to seeing and tasting some unique Italian beers and hopefully bring a couple of new names for listeners of Simply Beer to try out.

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This week we took another trip up to Boonton NJ and met up with Kevin and Mike Malavarca from the Liquor Outlet and Wine Cellar.  This is Kevin’s second appearance on our Beer Brawl and this time he selected the theme of our show, Obscure Lagers.  Kevin describes this as, lagers which are new to market, difficult to find, limited production, or just plain obscure.  Regardless of the who, what, where, or why, we are always down to drink some beer and hopefully open up more reads/listeners to different styles of beer!

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A couple weeks ago I was at an Allagash tasting, it has inspired me to do this weeks Beer Brawl™.  I really enjoyed all the beer that I had at the Iron Monkey tasting, so I wanted to share that experience with you.

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I figured this being our 20th Beer Brawl™, we should step it up a notch, being an anniversary of sorts.  This week, with that in mind, we took the Beer Brawl™ on the road to Amanti Vino in Montclair NJ.  Amanti Vino specializes in selling Artisinal Wine and Craft Beer.  Having attended several events at Amanti Vino, I knew they had a nice space to record in.  The Beer Manager, Travis Glohs is a huge beer lover and was excited to help us out, what we ended up with is the Barleywine Beer Brawl™. (more…)

To date, this was the one I was looking forward to the most.  All the previous podcast we’ve done, we have been sampling the beers either by bottles or cans, but for this Beer Brawl we have the luxury of Draft.  If you are familiar with Andy’s Corner Bar or your local Beer Bar, Andy’s rotates through the taps quite frequently.  With the rotation, we basically were going into this Beer Brawl blind, not really knowing what we would be drinking.

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