With any luck, the new 21st Amendment canned beer will be available by the 4th of July weekend. Initially, they’ll be test marketing the cans in all Beverages & more stores, but will also continue to be available at the brewpub. After a three-month test, assuming all goes according to plan, then they’ll be rolled out in all area stores.

 
The 21st Amendment IPA, now renamed Live Free or Die IPA.

And the Watermelon Wheat, now renamed Hell or High Watermelon.

After the announcement of New Belgium cans, I e-mailed their P.R. person, Alicia, and they hadn’t yet gotten around to taking photos of the new cans yet. She just got the photo today and now we can all see what the new Fat Tire cans will look like.

Last summer, Labatt USA moved its headquarters from Connecticut to Buffalo, New York. The Associated Press is reporting that Labatt USA has now added a buffalo to their beer label to reflect their new business location. “Labatt USA President Glen Walter hand-delivered a case of the newly labeled beer to Mayor Byron Brown Thursday. In exchange, Brown proclaimed Thursday ‘Labatt USA Day.’” I can’t find an image of the new label anywhere, but I’m curious to see what it looks like. Is it a blue buffalo?

There’s been a rumor floating around about this for some time now, but today New Belgium Brewing in Fort Collins, Colorado has made it official. Beginning this summer, they will be offering their popular Fat Tire Amber Ale in cans. As the 9th largest brewery in America, this will make them the largest microbrewery to put their beer in cans to date.

From the press release:

New Belgium, known for its commitment to quality and sustainability, will begin distributing a short run of cans in June, just when concerts, camping trips and other outdoor activities are in full swing.

“Introducing cans was a natural choice given that they are outdoor-friendly, light for transport and readily recyclable,” said Bryan Simpson, spokesperson for New Belgium. “In addition to the lighter carbon footprint, Fat Tire can now travel to places where glass is not an option.”

Distributing cans will continue to help lessen New Belgium’s footprint by saving fuel during transport to other states by lightening the weight of the trucks. New Belgium has begun this process by using biodiesel in its Ft. Collins distribution trucks and in the trucks used during the Tour de Fat traveling events.

The cans, which are 100% recyclable, will feature Fat Tire’s original watercolor artwork. And for those beer lovers worried about Fat Tire’s taste changing in the can, fear not.

“We took a unique can-conditioning approach and its flavor was not compromised in any way,” added Simpson. “We ran a series of tests using our friends at Oskar Blues canning line and there was virtually no flavor differential.”

April Fool’s Day is a great time for a laugh. I usually get a few good pranks. Greg Koch from Stone Brewing often has a good one. So far, this is my favorite one today.

After five years of great fun and success with our Canned Beer Apocalypse, we’re changing our packaging to glass bottles.   “Cans, schmans,” says Oskar Blues founder Dale Katechis. “It’s time we…..   Happy April Fools Day.   Foolishly,   Marty Jones Oskar Blues Brewery

If you saw my last post, about a Czech Ornithologist suggesting a correlation between beer consumption and academic output among his peers, you may have noticed my little joke at the end about him drinking only beer with birds on the label. I knew there were plenty of dogs on beer labels (I recall Stephen Beaumont doing an article about that several years ago, which I helped with infinitesimally by putting together a list of ones I knew about). Then there was Session #7 hosted by Rick Lyke, The Brew Zoo: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5 and Part 6, where animals of all stripes were found lurking on beer labels.

So I did a little search to see if I could find out if indeed there were a lot of labels with birds on them, and I found more than I bargained for. First, there’s this online collection of Birds on Beer Labels, which features scans of quite a few, including Mendocino’s Red Tail Ale. But then I came across this: The International Bird Beer Label Association, a 15-year old group dedicated to documenting beer labels with birds on them! The IBBLA, as of November of last year, has 296 confirmed sightings of birds on beer labels plus three homebrew labels and three more beers with a bird in the name, but no corresponding image on the label. They’re all listed on their checklist, and a few scans are up on the Species Photos page. The group’s slogan is “Fostering An Appreciation For Birds and Brew.” Talk about a niche hobby. I’m speechless.

The award-winning Flosmoor Station Brewery in Flossmoor, Illinois will be introducing three of their beers, Station Master American Wheat Ale, Pullman Brown Ale, and I.P.A., in 22 oz. bottles. The
new bottles will be available beginning April 5.

From the press release:

Brewmaster Matt Van Wyk, and brewer Andrew Mason will be on hand to dole out their award winning beers. Station Master Wheat is an American Wheat Ale made with 45% wheat and a dab of honey malt for complexity and color and topped with Amarillo hops for a citrusy aroma. Pullman Brown is a rich, robust, chestnut-colored ale that uses eight malts, toasted oats, and a dollop of blackstrap molasses, for a smooth and creamy taste and texture. Pullman Brown is Flossmoor’s most award winning beer, garnering nine awards between the Great American Beer Festival and the World Beer Cup. I.P.A. is a rotating one-off that we brew to suit the season, the weather, or just our mood on that given day. We do it to enjoy the fun of brewing hoppy beers with recipes that are never the same twice, unless we want it to be!

It’s not perhaps the worst thing about being blind, but it would be problematic to figure out exactly what’s inside that can of beer you just picked up if you can’t read the label. According to the Inventor Spot, Kirin Brewing has solved this dilemma by putting braille on the top of their beer cans. The braille on the cans apparently spell out “alcohol” on some and “Kirin Beer” on others. But until more breweries take up the cause, all anyone will be able to distinguish is Kirin from everything else. And what if you prefer a bottle? Oh, well, it’s the thought that counts, right?
 

A custom label maker has on their website a map of the United States with a beer label for each state. For instance, California is Firestone Walker and Oregon is Full Sail. How many can you name? Some are hard to see and some are obscure choices, but it was a fun exercise. Click on the map for a larger view and the answers.
 

It seems like there’s been a number of brewers taking the next bog step into packaging, and the latest one comes from Mantorville, Minnesota, a small town southeast of Minneapolis and not to far from the border of Iowa. Mantorville Brewing was founded in 1995 and, according to a story in their local Post-Bulletin, has had a difficult road to production. But now the Stagecoach Amber Ale, named for stagecoach stop that is a part of the small town’s history, has started to be delivered to local retailers throughout the area.

To continue the impromptu beer label theme to today’s posts, here are the mock-ups for new labels for five of Boscos regular beers, which I got last week along with the new brewery pictures my friend Chuck sent me. I think they’re pretty cool looking. I like the simple retro look to them. They remind me of vintage travel posters from the 1920-30s. What do you think?

If you’re a beer lover, I imagine Mississippi must not be the best place to live. During the last thirty years, while most of the rest of the country was discovering craft beer with wild abandon, less than a half-dozen microbreweries or brewpubs have opened. Of those, only two are left. And one of those, Kershenstine Diamond, is a contract brewery that makes their beer elsewhere in the Midwest. So that leaves just one brewery currently brewing in the entire state.

That brewery, Lazy Magnolia, is located in Kiln, Mississippi, which perhaps more famous as the hometown of Brett Favre, quarterback of the Green Bay Packers. They have also recently become the first brewery in the state to produce bottled beer with the release of their Southern Pecan, a nut brown ale, in six-packs. In fact, it’s the first time since Prohibition that bottled beer has been brewed and bottled in Mississippi. From an article in a local newspaper, the Clarion Ledger: There’s just one issue. “They’re having problems keeping up with demand. They’ve got people really wanting the product,” distributor Frank Drennan of Capital City Beverages said. “On the bottling, they’re in the learning process. They’re trying to make sure they’re doing it correctly.” Lazy Magnolia brewmaster and co-founder Leslie Henderson said bigger fermentation tanks will arrive in April. They will triple the brewery’s output to more than 30,000 gallons a month. By mid year, she hopes to be bottling 5,000 cases a month, up from about 700 now. “We knew all along if we were successful, we would have to bottle. We decided to do draft only at first to see if there was a market. By the time we started bottling, the demand for it was so crazy we could not keep up,” Henderson, a chemical engineer from the Winston County area, said.

The brewery sits alongside the airport runway in Kiln, a Hurricane Katrina-ravaged town of 2,000 on the Gulf Coast. The company’s warehouse building is nondescript to the point of invisibility, the kind of place you pass three times before realizing it’s occupied.

But two of the beers crafted there took podium finishes at the 2006 Beer World Cup. Lazy Magnolia’s brands hold cult status with shaggy young men and middle-aged lawyers in dim roadside bars throughout Mississippi, Alabama and the Florida panhandle. Henderson plans to expand to Tennessee and south Louisiana this year.

I’m sure it will be some time before we see this beer in California, but I certainly applaud their efforts in being a pioneer in their own state. Well done.