Results tagged “threefloyds”

        

Sunday night marked the first of Stephanie Izard’s Wandering Goat dinners, a series of “traveling dinners” that lead up to the opening of her new restaurant, The Drunken Goat, this coming winter. Tickets sold out in a matter of minutes but the lucky ones that got them were told the dinner would be at “Roger’s House.” Turns out Roger is Stephanie’s friend Roger Herring, chef/owner of Socca in Lakeview. We arrived at a large town home and shown to the spacious backyard, filled with friends, food lovers, and a notable goat piñata that we imagined was filled with truffle infused bacon mousse. (It was never cracked open so we will never know.) Three Floyd’s Alpha King and Gumballhead were on tap and an array of red and white Australian wines were offered as well.

The DarkLord Days of recent years have devolved into a litany of disappointed beer fans either leaving without bottles of Three Floyd's prized Russian Imperial Stout, or being so desperate for it that they purchase bottles from some of Northwest Indiana's brightest trade school dropouts for at least three times the $15 selling price set by the brewery. The golden ticket sale announced by the brewery was a step in the right direction to give those who truly wanted the beer an opportunity to buy it. Still, it was only a matter of time before golden tickets started popping up on Craigslist and online auctions.

   

Collaborative ales between breweries are nothing new. It's a wonderful chance for two (or more) breweries to put their heads together and give their customers something truly special. Collaborative Evil and Bison's annual Reunion ales are good examples. Meanwhile, Larry Bell and Dirk Naudts are hard at work with their planned Bell's/De Proef collaboration later this year.

As of 4:23 a.m., the golden tickets for this year's DarkLord Day (April 25) at Three Floyds Brewery are now on sale. The brewery implemented the ticket system as a means to get as much DarkLord to the people who actually want to drink it, instead of buying scalped bottles in the parking lot.

              

Last night Mindy Segal brought together some of the best chefs in the city to celebrate Hot Chocolate's fourth anniversary with a $100 per person dinner to benefit Share Our Strength, a non-profit that works with local food banks, restaurants and community groups to combat hunger at home. Segal is the chair of Share Our Strength's "Taste of the Nation" event, scheduled for August 13 at Ravenswood Billboard Factory (Full disclosure: this Chicagoist staffer is also on the event committee).

Now this is a recipe for a fantasy weekend: a road trip with Stephanie Izard to Three Floyds brewery and brewpub. [The Tasty Life]

Isn't that a thing of beauty? The only thing more beautiful than a growler is one full of beer.

We need to post some corrections to tomorrow's Dogfloydapalooza event at Bottom Lounge. Both Dogfish Head's Sam Calagione and Nick Floyd of Three Floyds will be on hand tomorrow night. Their collaborative ale, Popskull, however, will not.

Sam Calagione of Dogfish Head and Three Floyds' Nick Floyd are two of the more extreme brewmasters working today. So when the two of them decided to collaborate on an experimental ale, the mind boggles at what they could create.

  

This week, we hopefully compare tasting notes. Two weeks back we wrote about a sampling of Moloko, a milk stout brewed by Three Floyds, that was happening at Smallbar in Wicker Park. Milk stouts are typically made with lactose sugar; the resultant brew is sticky sweet.

If you want to have an informed opinion on what we've already selected as "Beer of the Week" in a couple weeks, head to Smallbar (2049 W. Division) this evening from 9-12. They'll be serving Three Floyds Moloko, a sweet stout, on draft.

We've got a Taste of Chicago preview for you later. In the meantime, here are some things around town to check out in the coming days.

Beer is made from four ingredients: water, malt, yeast and hops. It's the hops that provides bite and spice to the mix. Hops also help preserve beer, making it last longer. Back in the days when the sun never set on the British Empire, brewers working in India would add extra hops to their English bitter in order to survive the trip home around the south African Cape Horn and ensure its drinkability when it arrived home. This is how the India Pale Ale style earned its name.

We had our gripes about DarkLord Day, to be certain. But there were some good things about heading down to Munster and waiting for four hours in line with nothing to show for it except a farmer tan. For beer lovers it means getting to hang around with your own for a day, sampling from folks' private collections. At times, the combination of beer and the crowd made DarkLord Day resemble "Heavy Metal Parking Lot" (thanks, Lauren, for that reference).

For Three Floyds fanatics, it's the equivalent of a high holy day. DarkLord Day is the one day of the year where the venerable Munster, Indiana brewery releases their highly anticipated Russian Imperial Stout. Craft beer fans from around the world travel to either buy or barter from their personal collections for a bottle of the prized beer. Fans of good ales get to meet each other, sample each others wares, and get to put actual faces to online avatars.

The results from the biennial World Beer Cup (held this year in classy San Diego) are up. Goose Island represented yet again, earning silver medals for "#12" (English-style summer ale) and Matilda (Belgian- and French-style ale).

This week we look east to Burlington, Vermont. Vermont is home to Ben & Jerry's (yeah!), Phish (ugh!) and the Magic Hat Brewing Company. We've been fans of Magic Hat for quite a while, owing to their inventive brews and off-beat sense of humor, both reminiscent of Three Floyds.

when we made it a Unibroue weekend a couple weekends ago, we were floored by the quality of their 2002 Quelque Chose ale. Prior to either of the dinners we attended we thought we had tasted practically everything Unibroue had to offer.

As the old saying goes, "Leave 'em wanting more." So we shall by wrapping up this "BotW" for 2006 on a high note, with the beer that we consider the best we've tasted this year.

If you don't like hoppy beers, just scroll past — this week's installment isn't for you. Just trust us on this. It's been a solid thirty minutes since we drained the bomber of Three Floyd's Fantabulous Resplendence X Anniversary Ale (known only as "X" from here on out), and the spice from the hops is still lingering in the back of our mouth. Speaking honestly here, we feel as though we've been intubated by ale....

This year's edition of the Great American Beer Festival is in the books, and Illinois breweries racked up an impressive 16 medals. Both Pabst (their corporate headquarters are in suburban Woodridge, so they qualified as an Illinois beer company) and Goose Island took home four medals each. Pabst earned respective gold and silver medals for Lone Star and Old Style (American-style cream ale or lager), and repeated the feat for Old Milwaukee Light and PBR...

Rather than go out to participate in last Sunday's national toast to Michael Jackson, we decided to stay at home and raise a glass in honor of the "Beer Hunter." Earlier that afternoon we finished the remaining bottles of Goose Island Harvest Ale during that debacle of a Bears game and were left with a varied selection in the fridge — a couple brews from Three Floyds, a bottle of Unibroue 16, two cans of...

Like the circle of life, this week we revisit Warrenville's Two Brothers Brewing Company nearly a year to the day that we featured their Prairie Path Ale in this column. This time around, they've got something special for us.

It's been nearly six months since Bell's Beer founder Larry Bell pulled his product from the Illinois market in a dispute with distributors over the Beer Industry Fair Dealing Act of 1982. Readers will remember that that specific law, enacted at the time to protect distributors from the loss of a giant beer account on the level of Anheuser-Busch or Miller should they decide to move to greener pastures, doesn't give mid-level craft breweries like...

It wasn't our intention at the beginning of the month to feature three stouts in succession, although the timing, in hindsight, turned out to be fortuitous. Thick beers, particularly stouts, are a great way to keep one from freezing his ass off when the world around him is sent headfirst into a deep freeze. Besides, we're close enough to St. Patrick's Day to have our appetite whetted for a good pint of stout. Additonally, Goose Island Clybourn's annual "stoutfest" makes a perfect cap for a busy weekend on the go. We end February with a truly devastating selection from Munster, Indiana's supreme Kings of Hops.