Apple Ice Wine on a beer site? While we focus on beer those of you who have been following us for a while know we love featuring great local products and this happens to be one of them. We were introduced to Still River Winery's Apfel Eis by a friend of ours. We've had regular ice wines before, many of which have been a bit sweet for us, but we were intrigued by Apfel Eis Ice Wine.

So what is Apple Ice wine? Good question; Still River Winery separates out the frozen water crystals from ice cold pressed cider and then slow ferments the remaining cider at cold temperatures over a few months. The result? A really interesting and delicious ice wine. We shared a bottle with a group of friends after dinner one night and were really impressed.

The nose is full of crisp apples, a slight hint of tartness and a nice mellow sweetness. Wile some ice wines can be cloyingly sweet we were surprised by the balanced sweetness. The flavor of the apples is extremely complex and each sip is almost it's own unique experience. The alcohol is nicely tempered by the sweetness making this very easy to enjoy. 

Having had regular ice wine martinis before we thought we'd try and Apple Ice Wine version. We did a simple 50/50 mix of vodka and Apfel Eis Apple Ice Wine. The result...delicious! There's not doubt that this wine is sweet, making it more of a dessert drink for us, but in a martini this drink becomes something new, something we could definitely drink at dinner or just out for drinks. While we didn't try it, we think it might be even better with a splash of cranberry. 

And for any beer drinkers out there still a little puzzled, we already make our own hard cider, and Apple Wine isn't that far off! Give this wine a shot, we think you'll like it.

For more info check out Still River Winery's site: Still River Winery

The Official Beer of St. Patrick's Day has always seemed to be Guinness Draught Irish Dry Stout. Well we wanted to see if we could find a better beer for this holiday's festivities. Obviously, it needs to be a stout. You must be able to drink it all day without getting too intoxicated or too full. After all, nobody likes the drunk kid and you don't want to be too full to eat the corned beef and cabbage dinner (at least you don't want to be too full to eat it at our party, it's delicious). Given this criteria, we're about to answer the question: Is Guinness the Best St. Patrick's Day Beer? We'll start with the benchmark:

We review its competition below after the jump...

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Hi Craft Beer Drinkers!

As you may have noticed, the site is in the middle of a bit of a redesign. We were hoping to unveil this when it was 100% complete but unfortunately we were forced to release our new look early (and less than completed) due to some server and host issues. Basically, our growth estimates turned out to be a little conservative and more of you have been coming every day (we know, it's a good problem to have). We've known we had to do some back-end upgrades for a while and these are tied directly to the redesign.  We just thought we had more time. Our choices were to either do the release early and a little unfinished or to shut down the site for a longer time. We chose to keep the site up and running!

So we thank you for bearing with us during this time. We promise we have some really cool things planned in this redesign and it's going to end up way better than the old look. So, until it's done, we hope you can tolerate our mid-renovation look.

As always, thanks for reading!
Jeff & Devon
Founders
DrinkCraftBeer.com

On Monday, March 1, 2009 I got out of bed at 6am. I proceeded to dig my car out of more than a foot of snow, with more still falling, so that I could drive an hour from downtown Boston to Plymouth, MA… only the drive took me two hours as I inched along at 25 mph on a 65 mph highway. You may ask, “Why the early morning? Why drive through a dangerous blizzard when the governor has told all non-essential workers to stay home?” Well, on this day I was going to Mayflower Brewing Company to brew with Matthew Steinberg, Director of Brewing Operations, so that I could see what a day in the life of a professional brewer is really like. The first thing I learned is that brewers can’t work from home. Also, in most cases, nobody can fill in for you. Beer has to be brewed and packaged, so you have to brave the elements and get to work. Have you ever had to drive two hours in a blizzard because you HAD to get a batch of homebrew done? 

To go back to the beginning for a second, this is a story I’ve been toying with for a few months now. I love to homebrew and have definitely thought, “Wouldn’t it be great to brew for a living?” I know a lot of my homebrewing friends have had the same thought as well. I mean, think about it… what do you do when you homebrew? Sit around in the backyard with some friends. Drink a few beers, either homebrewed or craft brewed. Maybe barbecue? Enjoy the weather while you mash, sparge, boil and cool. There’s a lot of downtime and it’s a great way to spend a relaxing weekend day. Imagine doing that 5 days per week AND getting paid for it?! I figured this vision was way too good to be true, so I asked Matt Steinberg if I could come spend a day at Mayflower and shadow him. I wanted to get the real story. You know what I learned? If it sounds too good to be true, it is. For ease of reading, and to prove my point, I’ve broken the story down into the normal steps of homebrewing.

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