Happy Cinco de Mayo!

The Bruery will celebrate its 1st Anniversary on Saturday, May 16. Excerpt from the blog post about the beers available at the event:

“In addition to our year-round offerings, we’ll be releasing Papier, our anniversary ale. Papier is a Belgian-style Old Ale layered with complex flavors of dark fruit, vanilla, oak, and burnt sugar. This robust ale weighs in at 14.5% ABV and we think it’s the perfect beer to mark our first big milestone.

We’ll also be pouring Levud’s, which was our very first batch, as well as Melange #1, Humulus Ambre, Cuvee Juene, White Zin, and yes, for all you Melange lovers, #3 will be making an appearance!”

Russian River Empirical 7

It looks like there is a new draft beer on the way from Santa Rosa. This comes via Joe T at RateBeer: “This is the brettified version of the excellent saison I tried a couple weeks ago. Empirical 7 was available at the Legendary Boonville Beer Fest.

Vinnie Cilurzo from Russian River says that this is the first beer in an Empirical series that’s being made for broad American distribution to the Publican National Committee (PNC), an ad hoc group of the nation’s finest bar/pub owners. It’s called 7 because the beer is 7% alcohol by volume.”

Brewdog How to Disappear Completely

The brewery posted about it a couple weeks ago on its blog but I thought I’d share in case you missed it. Very much an experiment (brewery wasn’t going for balance nor drinkability on this one):

“How to Disappear Completely, Is my favourite Radiohead song. Now, it is also our most extreme beer to date. Weighing in at just 3.5% ABV but loaded with more hops per barrel than any other beer we have ever made. It is jam-packed with 2 of our favourite hops – Columbus and Centennial. It has 198 (yes one hundred and ninety eight) theoretical IBUs. It was mash-hopped and first wort hopped just for good measure. Oh and dry-hopped to hell too.”

It will be bottled but not sure yet if it would come to the States; it is a one-off batch.

Ninkasi Brewing

The brewery affirmed its seasonal schedule for later this year on Twitter. Sleigh’r will come out late fall or winter and Oatis will be bottled in January 2010 for a winter release. Too far away for me to think about winter beers again. Just enjoying the perfect spring weather until the dog days of summer arrive…

News and Notes: I tweeted about this recently though The Brewers’ Association has taken it up a notch and issued an action alert on the recently passed New York bottle bill. The bill “could dramatically affect your access to the craft beers made by small breweries all across the country.” Boston Beer Co. has recently said that it will dramatically increase prices on its beers in the state while Yuengling threatened to pull out its beers altogether … Odell Brewing decided on the style of its previously mentioned Twitter Brew: “The Schwarzbier will be 7% ABV and have a solid serving of dark roasted malt for its body.” … Shipyard Brewing fine-tuned its timeline for the release of XXXX IPA: “Look for it on shelves and on draft by May 15. Available at the Shipyard Gift Shop (86 Newbury St., Portland, Maine) now!” … Lastly, if you like “decadent” beer things, Stone Brewing posted up Flickr photos of its beer and chocolate tasting.