My wife and I are on a quest to find her 10 beers over the next 3 months that she can enjoy! We have found very few beers that she has enjoyed. But on this one fun filled night, I hit a grand slam or at least figured out how to introduce new beer to my wife. Granted there will still be beer she doesn’t like, but with some good food and in this case good family I have a leg up. With my beer adventurous in-laws, good food, and some great beer, I think I might have figured it out. (more…)

It’s not very often in a beer blogger’s world that you come across a group of beers like this to sample.  For this podcast I was lucky enough to get several of Allagash’s Coolship beers and Russian River Beatification.  All of these beers have one thing in common, they all are products of nature, spontaneous fermentation.  What does that mean?  Well, most beers are fermented with cultured yeast strains, these beers where exposed to their environment and left to the divine power of what ever little bugs were around.

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Shhh… I change the name.  These podcasts are really no longer about several beers fighting it out to see which is best.  That concept has just become way to subjective for me.  Frankly, I love giving my opinion, but want folks to try the beers them selves and form their own opinions.  So from here on out no more Beer Brawls, just Simply Beer Podcast and with the line up of beer we have for this podcast cast, it wouldn’t be fair to have these beers brawling. 6 totally unique, über rare, and individual beers.

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Sours are my newest beer love.  I can’t drink enough of them and I really haven’t found any don’t like, but I sure have found some that I love.  My next sour is Russian River’s Consecration Batch 003, that I acquired in a recent beer trade.  While still a very small brewery in Santa Rosa California, they have developed in a premeir leader in Sour and Barrel aged beers in the United States.  So it is only fitting that I try some!

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If you have been around craft beer for any amount of time and like IPA’s, I’m sure you have heard of Russian River’s Pliny the Elder.  This Russian Rivers Double IPA has a diehard following of hard core hop heads.  I would consider myself a hardcore hop head, but living in the North East, we don’t get any Russian River beers including Pliny the Elder.  Since I wanted to try this beer and see what the hype was, I traded beer with a guy in Southern California.

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Of Course Russian River does not distribute in New Jersey, bummer!  So in order to get the Russian River Blind Pig IPA, I was fortunate to have a fellow beer connoisseur in California who couldn’t get Allagash Beer.  So I sent him some Allagash Beer and he sent me some Russian River and New Belgium Beers.  This review is a result of beer lovers working together to help one another enjoy, taste, and appreciate beer from other regions of the country.

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