Cask & Vine’s What’s On Tap: Matt Gallagher from the Portsmouth Brewery.  Also Featuring JT Thompson from Smuttnose Brewery

The Portsmouth Brewery, New Hampshire’s original brewpub, has been serving great food and outstanding handcrafted beers in a friendly, lively atmosphere since 1991.

We’re open seven days a week, from 11:30am till 12:25 at night (except Thanksgiving and Christmas – that’s when we go home and put our feet up). Our kitchen is open till 11pm on weeknights, till 12:25am on Friday and Saturday nights.

We love to host large groups and private functions. If you are planning a function of your own, check out our function menus or drop us a note and ask how can accommodate your party.

Portsmouth Brewery: Website | Facebook | Twitter

Bert’s Better Beers’ Draft Pick(s) of the Week:

1. Citra Saison

 

2. Viena Lager

 

Listen for our review!

Kettle to Keg’s In the Kettle: We talk Brett Beers!

Ale Communications:

1. For Benedictine Monks, The Joy Of Making Albums And Beer

“The monastic life is very plain and ordinary,” says Father Cassian Folsom, the founder and prior of the Monks of Norcia, ensconced in the St. Benedict Monastery in central Italy. “You get up, and you pray, and you do your work and go to bed and then the next day you do the same thing.”

A large portion of the monks’ daily routine is singing. “We chant the Divine Office and the Mass every day,” Folsom tells NPR’s Scott Simon. “And if you put all of those moments together it takes about five hours a day. Three hundred sixty-five days a year.”

Now the monks have cut an album, Benedicta: Marian Chant from Norcia. It will likely do well on the charts, as many Gregorian chant recordings before them have, beginning in 1994 with the surprise hit album Chant. That was from another group of Benedictine monks, at the monastery of Santo Domingo de Silos, in Spain; the album has reportedly sold nearly six million copies. For Folsom, he’s just hoping people are moved by the beauty and peaceful quality of the music on Benedicta. READ MORE

 

2. The beer giant SABMiller is swallowing one of London’s best-loved craft brewers

Don’t say they didn’t warn you. After unveiling somewhat lackluster quarterly results earlier this week, the beer giant SABMiller said an uptick of takeover activity in the brewing sector was, er, brewing.

London-based SABMiller drinks group approached its Dutch rival Heineken last year, but was rebuffed. The Anglo-South African company is also thought to be considering a full buyout of France’s Castel, in which it already holds a minority stake. Meanwhile, rumors that Anheuser-Busch InBev could launch a mega-bid for SABMiller continue to swirl.

But the big beer news today is that SABMiller has reached no further than across the Thames for its latest acquisition. The company is taking over the Meantime Brewery Company, of Greenwich, for an undisclosed sum. READ MORE

3. Caution Brewing Employee Openly Criticizes Evil Twin Brewing’s Pricing

(Brooklyn,NY) – We just caught a controversial post on Evil Twin Brewing’s Facebook. They posted a long winded letter from Chris Klein of CAUTION BREWING in Colorado, criticizing Evil Twin’s product pricing as well as other brewer’s products. Read on, and share your thoughts in the comment section. “

“We might have our most unhappy customer to date. Chris Klein of Colorado Brewery Caution Brewing Company send us a not-so-collegial email: READ MORE

4. Showdown! New England-style IPAs

Ever since Heady Topper took the beer world by storm a few years ago, it seems all the major breweries have been trying to imitate it (to varying degrees of success). I’ve noticed that whenever I drink an IPA or DIPA from a New England-based brewery, there is usually a Heady-ish quality to the beer. They tend to have a huge tropical fruit and herbal aroma with a spicy/grassy/earthy taste and strong bitterness. I eventually started referring to these types of beers as “New England-style IPAs.” But that’s not to say I find them uncreative or derivative – hey, a good beer is a good beer even if it’s trendy or faddish. READ MORE

Jukebox: Soundtrack to a Rainy Day by Monkey Knife Fight

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