As we prepare for our wedding, we’ve put the Good Bottle on hiatus. A hiatus from the very few and periodic posts, I know.
We have acquired some very unusual and potentially tasty beers in the last year and we look forward to sharing them with our readers.
Cheers!
Hi! We are excited that you have chosen to accompany us on our collective quest for happy beer.
We will begin regular posts, starting with a more complete welcome, next week. For now, we have posted some sketches of reviews and essays that we’ve been working on. We realize that’s not very professional, but we’re not very professional.
Check back soon and we will begin our blog toward liquid happiness.
Track Town Honey Orange Wheat Ale
On our drive back from a ski vacation at Winter Park, we got a tip about a can’t-miss liquor store in the suburbs of Denver. We took a detour around 470 and popped into Tipsy’s Liquor World (can there be a better name for a liquor store?) at 10:00 am and got back in the car with $250 worth of single bottles not found in Missouri or Kansas. Thanks for the tip, Randy!
The first of these “Colorado beers” that we cracked open is actually an Oregon beer. Track Town Honey Orange Wheat Ale is brewed by Rogue under the Eugene City Brewery label and features a worn track cleat on the painted bottle. Our first impressions were lackluster, and it didn’t really improve from there. I am guessing this beer is made for summer guzzling and general refreshment, because I don’t see much else it has going for it. Read more »
Upstream Brewing, Omaha NE
We took a little trip over the three day weekend to Omaha. It’s only three hours from KC, we’d never been there, we found a coupon for a great discount at a nice hotel, and we heard they had a good zoo. We packed our bags and off we went. Unfortunately, that weekend was the beginning of a bad cold that I’m still fighting. Cough, cough. So during our entire stay there, we went to only one drinking establishment, and I had only sips of Jim’s beers.
On Sunday evening, we walked from our hotel to the Old Market area for dinner at Upstream Brewery. Jim’s sister and brother-in-law had gone last year and recommended it to us. I thought it was worth a bar review, even though I didn’t get to enjoy the brews much. Read more »
Rogue Hazelnut Brown Nectar
Last summer, I took my first trip to the Northwest. I wanted to go somewhere where I could camp and hike and Jim wanted to go somewhere where he could drink lots of delicious beers that can’t be found in Kansas City. We settled on a week-long tour of Portland and Seattle. We wanted to arrange our trip to put us in Portland during the Oregon Brewers’ Festival in late July, which happened to be the same weekend as my 10-year high school reunion. It was really not a tough decision to make. Read more »
My heart of Brookside
Charlie Hooper’s Bar and Grill, in the Brookside neighborhood of Kansas City, is near and dear to our hearts. It was the favorite bar of each of us even before we had met. Our first date was there. The food is good, as is the beer selection. It has a nice neighborhood feeling, and the staff is (usually) friendly. We felt it was a good place to start our blog. Read more »
Duchesse de Bourgogne
Everyone needs a happy beer. Just like everyone needs a happy place–somewhere to run to when everything seems to be going wrong. Happy beers immediately make you smile. Anxiety and worry melt away, and for one glass, all is right with the world.
You can tell when someone has found his happy beer. The moment the beer hits his lips, his eyes close, and all the muscles on his face relax. As the beer is swallowed, any tension in the body has been relieved, and a sense of calm has overtaken him. A deep, calming exhale is followed by an eyes-closed smile. Read more »
For homebrews, we will also employ a blind tasting. Each of us, or a third party, will serve the homebrew along side a commercial beer brewed in the same style. This way we won’t be giving ourselves too much credit for our own creations.
When we review a homebrew, we will be using the Beer Judge Certification Forms. Now, neither of us is a certified beer judge, but we feel their form is an excellent guide to evaluating a beer and its characteristics. You can see and download their form from the competition page of their website (the form is a PDF under Beer Scoresheet), but a quick overview of the points is below. Read more »
When we review commercial beer, we will be using the Beer Judge Certification Forms. Now, neither of us is a certified beer judge, but we feel their form is an excellent guide to evaluating a beer and its characteristics. You can see and download their form from the competition page of their website (the form is a PDF under Beer Scoresheet), but a quick overview of the points is below. Read more »