Craft Beer Collective

NC Brewers & Music Festival

“A celebration of North Carolina Brewing and Real Music”
On May 12, 2012, come enjoy a ten hour day of fun in beautiful and historic open farmland, complete with seven great bands and tons of North Carolina’s finest craft brews. You’ll be privy to all the hand crafted ales and lagers you can savor!

Advance tickets: http://ncbrewsmusic.com/

Featuring: over three hours of free tasting, a day packed full of great music, food, merchandise, children’s activities, beer education, and a chance to learn about and interact with area non-profits.

NCBMF is presented by Historic Rural Hill, a non-profit and historic site in Huntersville, NC that provides educational field trips and cultural events throughout the calendar year. All proceeds from NCBMF will go towards the preservation and advancement of Historic Rural Hill and its mission

BREWERS: Highland Brewing Company, NoDa Brewing, Birdsong Brewing, Four Friends Brewing, The Duck Rabbit Craft Brewery, Lonerider Brewing, Big Boss Brewing, Natty Greene’s Brewing, Ass Clown Brewery, Triple C Brewing Company, Westbend Vineyards and Brew House, Kind Beers, Heist Brewing, Catawba Valley Brewing Company, Foothills Brewery, Cottonwood Ales, Carolina Beer Company, Red Oak Brewery, Free Range Brewing, Carolina Brewery, New Belgium Brewing

BANDS: Steep Canyon Rangers, Ryan Montbleau Band, Larry Keel and Natural Bridge, The Black Lillies, Sol Driven Train, Old Man Markley, BIG Something

Queen City Brewers Festival

The Queen City Brewers Festival (QCBF) IS Charlotte on Tap. Premiering at the Neighborhood Theatre (511 E. 36th Street, Charlotte, NC, 28205), on Saturday, February 4, 2012, QCBF is exclusive to the Charlotte-area breweries that are putting the Queen City on the craft beer map. The event will feature a diverse selection of beer styles and flavors to taste and learn about from official brewery representatives. With Charlotte’s craft beer market exploding in recent years, the goal of this event is to spotlight the city’s emerging craft breweries and to bring awareness to the event’s nonprofit host, Partners for Parks, a nonprofit, nonpartisan foundation that seeks to promote and enhance parks, recreation and open space in neighborhoods throughout Mecklenburg County and the surrounding area.

More than thirty craft beers will be on hand with each brewery showcasing its full lineup of beers. Brewers are encouraged to bring one “super” flavor or style of beer especially for QCBF, as the event takes place the day before the Super Bowl.

QCBF will partner with Charlotte-based food vendors, and guests will also enjoy live music.

Tickets will be $20 & go on sale Monday, November 21st

http://qcbrewfest.com/
http://qcbrewfest.com/breweries/

North Carolina Beer Reviews

Here are some recent North Carolina (and one NC by way of SC) brew reviews found on the interwebs! Please visit the sources links for full reviews:

DUCK RABBIT BALTIC PORTER
Baltic Porter, The Duck-Rabbit Craft Brewery, about $12 per six pack: Our favorite North Carolina beer. This one grabs you by the collar from first sip to last with a complex blend of dark fruits and chocolate. It’s very sweet and very malty, with an acidic finish. It’ll be available later this month on shelves in Charlotte.

Found at Charlotte Observer

BIG BOSS HARVEST TIME PUMPKIN ALE
In October I bought a six pack of Big Boss Beer’s Harvest Time Ale. I drank one of them and I immediately realized that this was a very, very special kind of beer. I had already been planning my trip to the Beer Bloggers Conference in November and so I made sure to pack 2 to share with other beer drinkers at the conference. After the conference I even managed to share two bottles with peers I met there. That left me with one, fantastic and slightly aged, bottle of beer.

Read all: Durham Beer Examiner

DUCK RABBIT WEE HEAVY SCOTCH ALE
I’m a big fan of their Brown Ale and Milk Stout but this Scotch Ale just doesn’t cut it with me. Though full of whiskey barrel flavor and beautiful dark amber hue, this is just too sweet with little kick. It’s more congac than single malt. If this were the test batch there would be cause for optimism. I know I’m in the minority with this appraisal, but I expect a much more brutal impact from a Scotch Ale.

From The Pint Glass

KIND BEERS BELGIAN RED
The aroma of this is more ale than Belgian-style, giving even more complexity to this beer. Your nose expects a slightly citric bitter, yet you experience a sharp Hefe. Its wild.

This is not a senses-destroying ale. This is one of the most complex and enticing beers I’ve tried. You will discover taste sections of your tongue you never knew you had.

From The Pint Glass

OLDE RABBITS FOOT
Straight alcohol and bourbon flavors come through prominently in this freshly bottled 2010 vintage. The nose and body is a punchy maelstrom of green herb and spice notes. Black fruit and sooty charcoal flavors have their say too. The honey and cocoa additions provide some complimentary, but not overly chocolate-y flavors. As my review of the year old 2009 vintage attests, cellaring this beer encourages its desserty side to develop and its bitterness to mellow. This is an impressive bourbon barrel aged American Double Stout, and like many of its ilk, it only improves with age.

Full review: Hoptopia

Hub City Review makes a move

My favorite regional beer review guys, Hub City Review, have branched out and is leaving their host at Spartanburgspark.com and will launch their own page over at Hubcitybrewreview.com.

Mike and I haven’t decided to pack it in or anything like that. In fact, we’ve decided to expand and we need the sort of leeway to do that that just doesn’t fit with the rest of the Spark’s mission. So we’ve created our own site: Hubcitybrewreview.com. It’s still in the early stages at this point, so be gentle in your assessment of my website building skills (soon those blank spaces will be filled with Google Adsense ads). With any luck, in the coming weeks and months you’ll find a full-featured beer site with the normal reviews we have now, as well as some videos from regional breweries and a page for beer news. You can also join our Facebook group, follow us on Twitter, and of course subscribe to our YouTube page to keep up with the latest goings on with our little beer-reviewing vlog.

Also, soon we plan on launching our Hub City Home Brew project. You’ll get to watch the two of us flounder our way around the world of home brewing as we put our money where our mouths are and brew our own, hopefully tasty, ales.

They Go out with a drink of KIND Amber:

Granted that this is well-hopped amber, which would set it apart from some other ambers out there, but we’re not here to judge an amber; we’re here to judge a pale. As a pale, the hop profile is pretty nice, but that sticky, caramelly malt just ruins things.

Hub City Review: Kind Red

Kind ales. Based in North Carolina but made in South Carolina and here, reviewed by South Carolina’s Hub City Review guys:

“Coming to us from North Carolina by way of Thomas Creek Brewery in Greenville, is this offering from Kind Beers. The folks over at Thomas Creek brew this tasty beer for the small startup, and it just recently showed up here in Spartanburg at Oasis. It’s malty ale, with that classic fruity flavor, and all those fermented syrup notes you’d expect from a darker belgian ale. Also, there’s a nice herbal, earthy quality to the subdued hop presence in this one that helps round out the nose quite nicely. The taste though, while pretty good overall, is a bit on the weak side. It could be that we’re looking at a new company trying to bring in some people with something a bit mellow at first (Kind only has two beers on the market at the moment), or it could be a bad transfer from small batch to larger production run, but whatever the case, those nice malty belgian tastes just weren’t substantial enough for us. Still, overall this is one definitely worth trying, especially for those who are–to put it gently–less geeky about this stuff than we are. Check out the video for the full review.”

FULL ARTICLE