In Support of Small in print

March 19, 2012 1 Comment

We love nips, it’s true. We love nips, we do. But where did this love of nips come from? The roots are a little opaque, but we first vocalized (or blogized) this affinity on All About Beer’s blog, Beer Soup. Click here to see where it began, then click the Next button at the end to jump from Pt. I to Pt. II, then again to Pt. III. The editors, in their infinite wisdom, allowed us to adapt the three-part blog into a bona fide feature story.

In keeping with the notion that smaller is sometimes better, despite our tendency to overwrite, we vowed to keep all WeLoveNips.com posts to 250 words or less. We may have failed once or twice. But the story allowed us to expound on our argument for nips and other smaller, responsible packaging sizes and include many industry voices on their past, current, and future usage, to the tune of some 3,800 words. Oh wait, it looks like the tasting notes of a few available nips was left out….We smell four future posts as a result!

If you subscribe to AAB, flip to page 36 of the May issue. If you don’t, go to your nearest well-stocked news stand and buy it. (Or, y’know, wait a while for it to show up online.) In the meantime, here’s what the spread looks like:

From the table of contents

Filed under Craft beer, Published nips

How much mead can you really drink?

March 12, 2012 Leave a comment

Sometimes when you're drinking big beers, you want a li'l mead. Photo: B. Yaeger

I like most mead. I just don’t like drinking a ton of it. Does anyone? I bet not even the RenFaire folks–who are eternally tethered to the drink in an UnFair depiction of who the only people who actually drink it are–drink it copiously. I think even 12 oz. would exceed my limit.

So it’s great that, at a recent bottle share of sorts, a Michigander brought a nip from his home state. Kuhnhenn is a brewery and winery…and meadery. The nip in question was their Meritage Pyment. There are many mead styles, many of which are simply fermented water-honey-yeast, but a pyment is mead blended with wine grapes or in this case, various house red wines, then aged in an oak barrel. Kuhnhenn also makes a line of single-hopped meads that even devout IPA fans could get down with. I just don’t know if they could handle more than 187 mL at a time.

 

Filed under Big yet sessionable, Non-beer fun, To nip or not to nip Tagged with , , ,

We Love Magnums

February 28, 2012 Leave a comment

Brewer Jason McAdam gets his nip, er, magnum on. Photo: Samurai Artist

One of the beauties of nip bottles is that they let you enjoy the exact right amount of strong beer when you’re simply partaking of a high gravity beer by yourself.  You don’t always have a ton of friends around when you wanna break into a tasty, coveted brew. But when you do have your buds around, why offer up a puny bomber? Go big or go friendless. That’s why, for the right, rare occasions, impress your mates with a 1.5L magnum. Pop into Burnside Brewing today for their ultra rare release (only 100 magnums) of Neptune’s Wrath, a 10.2% “Imperial Strong Ale with Oyster Liquor and Lemon Peel.” (Not for those with shellfish allergies or aversions to bivalves.)

At 1,500 mL, that’s almost 8 nips in one.

Filed under Best value, Craft beer, To nip or not to nip Tagged with ,

A Good Nip Blog

February 20, 2012 Leave a comment

 

Love that we now know nips are 9 dimes tall (photo: A. McLeod?)

A Good Beer Blog‘s Alan McLeod recently posited on some “beer words (that) need more use.” The words?

  • Acrid
  • Drain
  • Heat
  • Lick(ing)
  • Water(y)

And two more that particularly stand out, one of them being “vom” which I honestly hadn’t heard before. If you don’t know from vom…it is not hard to figure out. But for our purposes, the one we love best, naturally, is nip. McLeod defines a nip as “the appropriate size for beer of 9% and more. Sounds like when you drain one quick around the corner when no one is watching.” Incidentally, his reviewed nip of choice is Anchor’s Old Foghorn. In typical fashion, meaning he busts out some of the best descriptors for beers we’ve had the pleasure of reading, he says the first American craft barleywine tastes like “Leathersweet Mennonite apple butter.”

Filed under Big yet sessionable, Craft beer, Published nips, To nip or not to nip Tagged with , , , ,

Sanbitter: Soft apéritif

February 1, 2012 Leave a comment

Puny aperitif. Photo: B. Yaeger

Apéritifs are generally served before a meal “to stimulate appetite” or something. The classic is Campari, maybe cut with sparkling mineral water. So no surprise those crafty, gastronomic Italians created a non-alcoholic version, Red Sanbitter, and since it hails from the land of the cutest little bottles, it naturally comes in a 100 mL bottle. Yes, ~3.5 oz. Which is fine since this stuff tastes like sucking on a grapefruit rind!

When it comes to beer, the best way to enjoy it as with meals. Or friends. Or better yet: with friends over a meal. I have a bottle of 24% ABV  Samuel Adams Utopias (when it retails for $200, don’t call it Sam). It’s richer than an oil tycoon and is generally enjoyed as an after-dinner drink, a digestif if you will. The ornate bottles are 24 ounces.

Utopiasicolo.

Our vote: it should come in 100 mL bottles. That’s 1/7th the size, and it should retail for $30, just like a snifter of the fine sherry or Cognac it resembles. And they can call it Samuele Adamo Utopias!

Filed under Big yet sessionable, Craft beer, Nips around the world, Non-beer fun Tagged with , , , ,

10cL

January 31, 2012 Leave a comment

Fonefan the Ratebeerian

Jan Bolvig, way, way better known among RateBeerians (members of the online beer geek community RateBeer.com) as Fonefan drinks as much beer as possible. He has well over 23,000 beer reviews to his nom-de-beer, making him the most prolific rater. As such, he actually drinks as little beer as possible.

To clarify, in order to get through so gosh darn many beers (known in the community as ticking, which I covered in All About Beer), Jan & his Danish cohorts drink uber tiny quantities of each. The try 20-30 new beers in a single night. Sampling 200 over a dedicated weekend isn’t unheard of. To quaff whole servings, 30 cL or more, would, well, let’s just here his quote:

Normal in the Copenhagen tastings is approximately 4-5 centiliters (cL) since they are many people sharing a bottle. At tasings hosted by me we try to get minimum 5-10 cL of each beer. Other tastings it can be 10-20 cL. But the thing about sample size is  just a matter of how focused you are.

There you have it, if in slightly broken English, professional, devoted beer drinkers drink on average 10 cL (about 3 oz.) per beer. Almost makes a whole nip (19 cL) seem super-sized.

Filed under Craft beer, Nips around the world, To nip or not to nip Tagged with , ,

NipMongers

January 22, 2012 Leave a comment

Blvd Tank 7 Farmhouse Ale in 25 & 12 oz bottles

I know I love nips. I love when I hear I’m not alone. I popped into BeerMongers yesterday where I saw The Oregonian’s beer columnist John Foyston and the bottle shop’s co-founder Sean Campbell, and promptly discovered that I’m not alone. We love nips. Not just 7oz bottles, but all smaller, more responsible packaging.

I bought two beers: Fifty Fifty Eclipse (Brewmaster’s Grand Cru version in the copper wax) at 9.5% ABV and Boulevard Tank 7 Farmhouse Ale at 8%. The coveted 22-oz bomber of Russian Imperial Stout cost me $25.35 (five-six bucks cheaper than Belmont Station’s selling it for). Most people think of Tank 7 as coming in a 750-mL bottle–which it does–as part of Blvd’s Smokestack Series for specialty beers. But around Christmastime, they put out a four-pack sampler in 12-oz bottles dubbed Little Smokies. Because BeerMongers sells everything as singles, Sean broke ‘em up and sells the 12-oz bottle of Tank 7 right below the cork finished wine bottle. The price difference? Get this: $4.25 and $11.80, respectively. Same fantastic farmhouse ale, but at 35 cents an ounce for the single-serve bottle, but 46 cents an ounce for the fancy-looking one. Not only do you save $3 by buying two of the 12-oz bottles, but it makes it way more practical to enjoy a beer like this–that is so versatile it goes with practically anything you’re having for dinner.

The larger format bottle may sit around waiting for the right moment. That’s exactly what will happen with that bottle of Eclipse, which both John and Sean echoed. It’s one of the most amazing beers on the planet, but when will we actually pull the trigger on bottles like these? Not to mention, the brewery literally released SEVEN iterations of it this year, matured in various brandy, rye, and bourbon barrels. It’d cost you almost $200 to buy just one of each. Who the hell’s gonna do that? Especially since the only proper way to appreciate the nuances between them is to open them simultaneously for a parallel-tasting. Hey Fifty-Fifty, if Blvd could sell half-bottles at under half price, we’d love to see this series released in bottles one-third size at a “full” one-third price.

Filed under Best value, Big yet sessionable, Craft beer Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Big Eddy, small price (Or: nips, snobs, and schnitts)

January 22, 2012 Leave a comment

Schnitts of Leinies (Photo: B. Yaeger)

Back when I met with Jake Leinenkugel (and his wife, Peggy, and his father, Bill, R.I.P.) at his brewery in Chippewa Falls, WI, we discussed issues like brewing big beers as well as selling them at big prices. As the second oldest brewery in the country (behind family-owned Yuengling), despite being owned by MillerCoors and shoehorned into its subsidiary Tenth & Blake, Jake is still the main man in the main office in Chippewa. As one of MillerCoors’s primary entrees in the craft beer segment (alongside Terrapin Brewing, which is now owns a minority share of), Leinies ventures away from its core German-style beers like lagers, Weisses, and bocks (heck, even its popular Summer Shandy is practically the same as the Radlers popular in Germany) and into stuff like one of the beer-geekiest styles, Russian Imperial Stout.

In certain markets you can find 4-packs of Big Eddy RIS at a very reasonable price point of about $11. Compare this to, say, Oskar Blues Ten Fidy, which retails for around $17 per 4-pack. Awesomer still, Tenth & Black/Leinie’s kindly sent us a couple whiskey-aged iterations bottled in bona fide NIPS.

Let’s look back at that aforementioned discussion, as an excerpt from my book:

Peg raised the issue that “beer is for the common person. It crosses all economic boundaries…”

“At the same time,” I countered, “one of the things that you see are some crazy styles and very expensive beer out there. Thirty or more dollars a bottle. Would it be safe to guess that you would not put out a beer for that niche?”

 “Personally, I would love to brew a beer that good and worthy of that amount of money,” said Jake surprisingly. “I don’t think we would really do it because it’s not something that would fit in with our consumer profile, or our brand positioning. Some of those brews aren’t very drinkable for the masses. Some microbreweries are making something very eclectic and pricing it at what I call ‘the snob range.’”

Just then, Bill re-entered saying, “Let me interject something. I just went out and had just a schnitt of Sunset Wheat and this was about the fourth time that I’ve tried it.”

There ya have it. The folks in (or near) Milwaukee find a way to put some Leinie’s beer “that good” on the shelves and avoid “the snob range.” And Bill, who had been the fourth generation to captain the brewery, championed responsible portions of beer such as schnitts. Here’s to you, Bill.

Is WeLoveSchnitts.com taken?,

Brian

Filed under Best value, Big yet sessionable, Craft beer Tagged with , , , , ,

Fermented Bottle Rant

January 14, 2012 Leave a comment

From nip to not (photo: B Yaeger)

Michael over at The Mad Fermentationist does one of my favorite blogs. Yeah, there’s lots of awesome homebrew recipes from clones–why break the bank buying Lost Abbey Cable Car when you can brew your own?–to funky stuff: Neo Kvass Imperial Sourdough, anyone? But he’s also got great ideas (rants) and vocalizes them well. Well, blogizes them well.

So imagine our delight when he posted about craft beer bottle sizes a short while ago.

Can craft brewers please stop with the bombers and 750s of strong beers?

…Instead of seeing a per ounce savings the large format bottles are often more than twice as expensive as their smaller counterparts.

…When I am buying a beer I haven’t had before, or one that sounds weird/experimental I’d rather buy as little of it as possible (which is why it is great that some beer bars sell sampler sizes). I’d love to see more breweries putting their weird beer into smaller bottles (7 oz nips would be perfect)

Preach on, Mad Fermentationist, preach on.

Filed under Published nips, To nip or not to nip Tagged with

Stubby no more

January 14, 2012 1 Comment

I love nips

 

Allow us to pause from our focus on smaller bottles and portions of beer to celebrate something else miniature: baby Izzy Parker Yaeger (and yes, you can call him I.P.Yae). Trust us, if anyone loves nips, it’s this guy!

Filed under Half Pint, Non-beer fun Tagged with

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