Saturday, June 13, 2009

Breaking News: Dogfish Head to Brew More Crazy Crap


This article in Scientific American says that Dogfish Head is brewing a "new" beer that reproduces a 9,000-year old Chinese recipe for a fermented wine-like beverage. Not only is that not new, it's been on the shelves for the last couple of years (it's called Chateau Jiahu, and I'm sure you've seen it. Not really beer, but I like it a lot.) Of more newsworthy import are these next paragraphs: 

Next week, the brewery will be bottling up the first large batch of Sah’tea for the general public—a modern update on a ninth-century Finnish beverage. In the fall, The New Yorker documented the intricate research and preparation that went into making the beer, which was first offered on tap at the brewery in May. In short, brewmasters carmelize wort on white hot river rocks, ferment it with German Weizen yeast, then toss on Finnish berries and a blend of spices to jazz up this rye-based beverage.  Reviewers at the BeerAdvocate universally praised Sah'tea, comparing it to a fruity hefeweizen.  One user munched on calamari as he downed a pint and described the combo as “a near euphoric experience."

And Dogfish is also bringing back one of their more unusual forays into alcohol-infused time travel. Called Theobroma, this cocoa-based brew was hatched from a chemical analysis of 3,200-year-old pottery fragments from the Cradle of Chocolate, the Ulua Valley in Honduras. Archaeologist John Henderson at Cornell University first described the beverage in 2007 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, pushing the first use of the chocolate plant back by 600 years. Dogfish first sold Theobroma in May 2008, and the next batch—made from a blend of cocoa, honey, chilies, and annatto—will be on shelves and in taps in July.  The chocolate beer was apparently too sweet for Evan at The Full Pint, who writes that it contained “a ton and a half of sugary sweetness” with “an insane amount of gooeyness left behind on the roof of your mouth."

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