Got a six pack of Chicago-based Two Brothers Dog Days; it's a summer lager.

It's pretty decent; nothing special, nothing notable, just a decent lager beer. No major flaws, but no major benefits.

Sam Adams makes a brewers patriot collection 4 pack. It's all based on colonial era recipes and contains a ginger ale, porter, root beer and dark wheat beer. It's $10 for four 12 ounce bottles, but they're really very interesting beers (make no mistake, the ginger ale is ginger ALE and the root beer is root BEER). Of the bunch, the ginger ale and the dark wheat were both outstanding, the porter was very interesting and root beer was poured down the sink. I inspected the porter and I've never seen so much suspended particulate in anything I've drank, hefeweizen's included. It was quite good, though. The root beer was just too much... something. Something bad. I don't remember what (it's been a week or two), but I just couldn't do it. Too much root and not enough beer, even if the alcohol content suggested otherwise. The ginger ale was smooth and vaguely gingery and very good. The dark wheat was strikingly similar to modern wheat beers. Of the 4, I'd buy the dark wheat as a 6 pack if they'd only market it that way and I'd drink the ginger ale on occasion. The porter was good, but I'd get Fuller's instead.

Chunky beers are my favorites. In my opinion filtering is one of those innovations that should have been avoided by beer manufacturers. It's grain fermented by trillions of microscopic organisms, you're not supposed to be able to see through it damnit.

Those beers all sound good. I haven't seen that set around, but I'll keep an eye out and grab it if I see it.

Sounds like you should have lived in the middle ages. Daily ration for workers and soldiers was about 5 litres of unfiltered beer.

I'm amazed any buildings made in the middle ages are still standing. Considering how drunk the builders were.

Yeah, crazy Romans.

Ancient Greeks had the idea that wine was a divine drink, so they preferred wine over beer. And whatever the Greeks did, Romans wanted to do too, only better. You can still see the effect Romans had. The area that was Roman Empire is still mostly known for it's wines, not beers. I mean, have you ever heard of Italian, French, Spanish, Portugese or Greek beer ?-) I was sailing in Greece last year, and the only beers you could find on the most remote islands was beers like carlsberg or heineken. Seems like Kaubel found some Italian one, but that has to be an exception.

Same here. One of the best things about a good wheat is that it's unfiltered.

Seriously -- Heineken and Amstel Light are basically the official beers of Greece. They're everywhere, from the biggest Athens tourist trap to the smallest Aegean hole in the wall. You could do worse, granted, but it's kind of silly given how much good beer they could be importing from within the EU. :(

That reminds me of the near-disaster of the past world cup, where Budweiser attempted to purchase exclusive beer rights at all of the stadiums. The german's threatened to boycott the cup. Smart people.

From what I've heard through the grapevine, drunkenness was a pretty common state of being for people in the middle ages in general. Until a certain point they hadn't yet really realized that boiling water gets rid of harmful stuff, and so water in general was seen as something that could cause cholera and a whole host of other diseases. Alcohol served as a disinfectant in these drinks, although it probably kept life nasty, brutish, and short in other respects.

I'm sure that the perpetual drunken haze also kept down every feudal lord's favorite thing--the organized rebellion. According to Firefly (I'm sorry, my history is picked up by odds and ends :)), the ancient Egyptians also used to give their slaves a sort of beery mixture to eat/drink. Kept the Jews enslaved for a good long while. 8)

Anyway, back into lurking for me, I'm no beer connoiseur.

Ugh, sucks... Well no, I'm kinda jealous, I can not count the number of times I have gone to a baseball(hockey/football/insert other arena type event) game to find that the regular beer was Bud, the 'premium' beer was Miller, the beers were at least $6 - $10 bucks a cup, and peanuts were 5 bucks for a 1/2 lb bag. I have been moved close to tears at times.

At least at -most- restaurants the selections are a thousand times better or I would probably never eat out.

I'm going to the local brew shop today... a brew shop is like a beer shop, but only if you're willing to do some work and wait a month... to talk to a more experienced brewer (and to get some more ingredients) about my first batch of homebrew. It's a honey brown ale and it didn't quite turn out. Since it was my first batch I didn't cool it enough before I pitched my yeast. I blame that on Papazian partially since he doesn't write much about chilling and on my wife partially since she was rushing me to go eat lunch. So I pitched my yeast while the wort was much too much warm and 48 hours later I didn't have fermentation. This seemed very strange, so I went to the brew shop, talked to the experienced brewer and pitched another packet of yeast. Fermentation picked up quickly and everything went along its merry way. Two weeks later I bottled and a week after that (last night) I tried a bottle. As soon as I opened the bottle it started to foam over. I poured a glass and half the glass was head. I let it settle down and poured the rest and tried it. It had a sharp, bitter taste that definitely doesn't belong in a brown ale. My current hypothesis based on some homebrewer's faqs is too much yeast. I pitched the extra package and I think it may have been too much. My best solution is to let it condition longer (much longer, possibly) and hope the sharpness tones down, but I really don't know if that will work. Any other homebrewers have any thoughts or advice?

In commercial news, I had the New Belgium 2 degrees brew last night, also. It was bad, but I wasn't a fan. I very likely was tainted by the homebrew I had, but it seemed hoppier than I like. I would have liked it far more if I had a pile of gingerbread cookies to go with it, I think.