The Great Beer Search 2013

     The most time consuming, but interesting “research” I have done for this year’s Thanksgiving 2.6 was finding the correct beers to serve our guests. Germany is the beer capital of Europe to most people (I prefer Belgian beers in general). Trying to find a selection of beer that represents a wide variety of the German beer styles has been rough this year. Especially tough because of the state I live in. We have some of the more archaic beer laws in the U.S. and that means I have to do a lot of extra running around to find the brands and even the quantity I want. Join me as I recount some of the “highlights” of the Great Beer Search. 

     The very first step to finding German beer is to research the German beer. Most of the beer that is popular and readily available in America is of the lager style. I knew I was going to have a lot of American ales at TH2 so I decided to focus on some of the major German styles. I wanted beer that fit into 4 categories: 1. Brewed in Germany, 2. Under $4 a bottle, 3. Not made by AB-Inbev or SAB Miller, 4.Tastes good to me and 2 other people I know. With my guidelines in hand I could start my quest. I started at the local Wegmans. I had an easy time finding the dunkel,hefe-weiss, marzen, and doppelbock. I realize this is not a full list of all lager style beers. TH2 isn’t a large enough operation for that yet. I picked styles that are different enough from one another and that had strong enough flavor to cut through all of the food. The difficulty I ran across was in finding the final German beer. . . the pilsner. The simplest and most straight-forward beer style, what a pain this turned into. Most of you know that Budweiser, Coors, and Miller’s most popular beer styles are pilsners. They do not taste very good. They are an Americanized version of the traditional pilsner. I wanted to find a German version that really showed the differences. Using my 4 guidelines I had several choices that were readily available to me, Bitburger, Weihenstephaner and Hofbrau. Hofbrau is the easy answer here. It is the cheapest, always available and fairly well known. Bitburger is the middle ground, a bit cheaper, a bit harder to find and middle of the road in taste. Weihenstephaner is a bit tougher based mostly on cost and it’s a bit tougher to find in a case or 12-pack form. I decided based on taste. I hope that the Weihenstephaner is enjoyed by the crowd at TH2. Pilsner is such a light flavor I will be telling the guests to try it first if they are going to taste multiple styles.  

     On to the American beer! I thought I had a great plan, little did I know how many different places I would have to go or how I could have saved myself a lot of trouble. Like a lot of the population in my area of the U.S. that enjoys an alcoholic beverage or two, I started my search for beer by crossing the state line. We had a wedding to go to that was out of state, so we combined the wedding with a jaunt over to Total Wine and More. The goal was to pick up 10-12 of the beers needed for TH2. I have no issue with purchasing the higher ABV (alcohol by volume) beer because I have a very dry basement to store them in until December. I found 3 of the 12 I wanted. Since I found so few on this first trip I knew I’d have to try their other location at a later date. So much for one-stop shopping. Around a month later I ran down to the closer location of Total Wine and was hoping to pick up the remaining 9 beers. It wasn’t meant to be because I found 2 of the 9. Not once, but I was twice burned by the neighboring state’s beer store. 

     After that second trip down the highway to buy beer I decided to forgo all of that business and stick to the 2-3 stores really close to my house. I would have to pay more, but I’d be home for dinner after the shopping at least. I know I talk up my local Wegmans a lot, but when I saw the quantities of the supposedly harder-to-find seasonal beers they have, I knew I could find virtually everything I needed there. So over the last 4 weeks I have picked up all but 3 of the beers I need. I am waiting to purchase the pilsner and hefe-weiss because they come in clear bottles and they are low (relatively) in alcohol, so they won’t store all that well. The final beer I need is Founders Brewery Backwoods Bastard which doesn’t come out for a few more weeks. Thankfully, I’m very close to having the most complicated and painful beer shopping experience I have ever been a part of. I learned a lot from this though. Next year I will make a single trip to the larger Total Wine. It will be in late September, right as the Oktoberfests, and pumpkin seasonals are making their first appearances. If I do not find the entire list of items I will not make a return trip. I will happily go to Wegmans and the closest beer distributor to my home. This should be a happy process, not one that causes heartache. 

     Don’t forget to check out the FINISHED BEER menu. If you fancy yourself a beer aficionado and are coming to TH2.6, I would highly recommend getting there very early in the day.

  

*You will notice that there won't be any IPA (India Pale Ale) or Pale Ales on the beer menu. There are two very good reasons for that. 1.Both styles are very bitter, especially the West Coast versions. They can be so bitter as to corrupt your taste buds for anything except an even more bitter beer/food. I want everyone to taste all of the food as it was intended. 2. I am not a huge fan of excessively hoppy beer. If there is an IPA or Pale Ale that fits the theme of a future TH2, then there will be some on the menu.