• Silver: American-Style Imperial Stout: Sexual Chocolate Imperial Stout (Foothills Brewing)
• Silver: Old Ale: Irish Walker (Olde Hickory Brewery)
• Silver: Herb and Spice Beer or Chocolate Beer Lemon Grass Wheat Ale (Outer Banks Brewing Station)
• Gold: Sweet Stout: Duck-Rabbit Milk Stout (Duck-Rabbit Craft Brewery Inc.)

Pictured here is Jamie Bartholomaus of Foothills accepting his award from Charlie Papazian. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the reflexes to get pictures of any of the other North Carolina winners.

Congrats to these breweries! Support North Carolina beer!

charlottecraftbeerweek.org

Check out the schedule here. And let us know in the comments or in the forums if you are going or if there are events that really stand out to you as “must attend” events. Personally, I think the NC Brewers Guild event at the Flying Saucer on Sunday, March 21st sounds awesome and that is one I would have on my list if I were able to attend.

If you’re in the Charlotte area, please check out these events and rsvp or buy tickets now for the events you want to attend!

Duck-Rabbit Craft Brewery (Farmville, NC) and Foothills Brewing (Winston-Salem, NC) brought home some shiny new medals to hang on the wall at the recent Great American Beer Festival in Denver, Colorado.

Foothills won a Bronze for their Sexual Chocolate Imperial Stout and Duck-Rabbit was skillful enough to capture a Bronze for their Barrel Aged Baltic Porter and the non aged variety placed first in the Baltic-Style Porter category.

Congratulations to these two fine breweries and congrats to all of the other awesome North Carolina breweries that put forth the effort to attend and enter the competition.

To see other winners of GABF awards, you can use this tool built by the Brewers Association.

And if you would like to see the chaos that is the Great American Beer Festival, they videotaped the whole thing from setup to breakdown and have it available for viewing in this 1 minute video.

CNN.com just released a pretty good article about Beer and travel. You can read the full article here. The article interviews several beer sources (like Randy Mosher and Stephen Beaumont) and it reports on how our country has become a travel destination in the beer world.

“When it comes to taking spirited vacations, wandering a vineyard falls flat in the face of handcrafted brew. With more than 1,500 breweries across the United States, beer is not just a drink — it’s a destination.”

But the best thing about the article was how it mentions that North Carolina is the home to some great beers and a great brewing scene. Asheville is given props and the article specifically mentions Foothills and their beer, Sexual Chocolate.

Check out the article and raise a glass to North Carolina, a great beer state!

Check out the map and make sure to Know Your NC Brewer!

Also, if you want to see a map with more than breweries and brewpubs, you can always bookmark the North Carolina Beer Map, available at The Beer Mapping Project. You can click the colored pins in the legend at the top left of the map to turn off different types of locations.

From the Bruisin’ Ales blog:

“If you had the opportunity to meet Sam Calagione (aka, our new t-shirt model), you know what I’m talking about. He’s a class act, laid-back, funny, and clearly passionate about beer. We love that. Better yet: He LOVED Asheville. Although we had a little glitch with his flight cancelled from Charlotte to Asheville on Friday, we made it work and hope everyone was happy. The Thirsty Monk put on a killer “Brewer’s Choice” line-up of beers on Saturday, and per usual, Zambra outdid themselves again with a great brunch pairing.”

Untamed Beer has a pretty interesting post about picking Calagione up from the Asheville airport.

“Let me tell you, I haven’t felt that much pressure driving a car since my dad was giving me my first lessons when I was 16: I’m under is a tremendous time crunch, I had never been to the Asheville airport so I didn’t exactly know where I was going, I’m going to pick up a craft brewing icon, and there are dozens of people back at the store that will be really pissed if I screw up.”

And there are a bunch of pictures taken over the weekend that are up on the official event page on facebook.

Looks like it was a hell of a lot of fun, drinking great beer in a great NC city!

click to view video

Sean Lilly Wilson, leader of the Pop the Cap movement, and founder of the soon to be Fullsteam Brewery, was invited to participate in the video. You can see Sean at 25 seconds into the video and he appears at least one other time as well.

Congrats Sean! Now, get back to work!

Overnight, a fire started in Greenshields, a downtown Raleigh Brewpub. The firemen claim that the fire started in a vent system, and they seem to have contained it without allowing for too much structural damage.

At the moment the fire is out, but it is still too hot for anyone to really get in and survey the damage. The owner of Greenshields was present, but did not want to appear on camera.

It looks like it might be at least a couple of weeks before the brewpub is able to open back up. Most likely it will be longer.

Each beer has something to give to the world.

Today, I received the news that I had lost one of my beer friends. She wasn’t a friend that I could only talk beer with, nor was she someone that was as crazy about beer as me. But she and I probably wouldn’t have become friends if it weren’t for beer. We met through friends that also joined the rank of my friendship because of this lovely beverage which we all seem so interested in.

Lives are often cut short, and people that we love are taken away. Even if we are only distant friends, the losses are often sharp and the pain is difficult to put into perspective. I know that the loss of Rebecca will be felt more deeply by others who were closer to her than me. But the knowledge that she and I will never share another beer together strikes me hard.

Beer has brought me close to many people. We all have ‘other’ lives that have little to do with beer, but it is this one part of our lives that seems to have brought so many like minded people together. I wish that Rebecca didn’t have to leave us, but I am glad for the time that I got to know her.

Rebecca gave something to my world.

There are beers poured into belgian styled tulip glasses and there are beers poured into shaker pint glasses. There are beers that are garnished with a lemon and there are beers that are flavored with roasted coffee beans. There are hefeweizens that are served in huge tall glasses, and there are barleywines that are presented in smaller than normal sized glasses.

Beers poured into short glasses might be deceiving at first. We may be unhappy at the fact that they’re not as big as others. But often these beers are full of flavor, packed to the top of that small glass with an experience that shouldn’t be missed. The full flavors of malt and hops that are overflowing from a barleywine will usually last for a while on your palate. If you are drinking a well made barleywine, you won’t easily forget what it is that you’re drinking. The flavors will remain in your memory for the entirety of the glass, and they will linger on for a good time after.

My memories of Rebecca will remain with me. Even though she didn’t get the chance for a long life, she was full enough in life to leave all of her friends lingering, savoring over the memory of her. I am glad that I got the chance to be her friend in beer.

During the next two weeks we’re going to be vastly expanding those limits, and I want you to join us. Saturday August 14th is going to be a good day to sample beer in North Carolina’s mountains. Asheville, NC is a beer town among beer towns in the southeast. There are some great breweries within the Asheville area, and a few good beer bars. The next Saturday we will be Popping The Cap on the other side of the state in Wilmington.

The event in Asheville is going to be held at Barley’s Taproom. The taproom is a dual storied complex of beer nirvana. Downstairs there is a big bar stocked with 24 taps concentrating on local and regional beers, with a few imports and American Micros thrown in for good measure. The upstairs bar adds 19 more beers to the mix. To top this all off, you have a pizza oven in the back and a full menu to compliment the malty goodness.

Pop The Cap’s Asheville event is expecting beers from many of the local brewers. Asheville Pizza and Brewing, Highland Brewing and French Broad are three of the locals that are bringing beers to sample. Dogfish Brewing out of Deleware has donated a keg of Raison D’etre to the mix, and there will be offerings from Mash House, Sierra Nevada, as well as a big beer from Rogue. There will be something special present that isn’t being discussed at this time. (I know something you don’t!)

If this event weren’t enough, or maybe you’re afraid of hills, you can always aim your gas guzzling SUV towards the coast in two weeks. August 21st in Wilmington Pop The Cap will pop up again. There is a joint called The Soapbox LaundroLounge that will play host to our Coastal event. A local radio station will be helping to host and they’ve gathered 5 bands from the local scene to provide some background tunes to help with the sampling. The beers for this event aren’t totally ironed out, but we’re contacting Front Street and Duck-Rabbit to see if they can attend, and I’m sure that our Asheville connections will be donating some brews to send to Wilmington. Mash House, one of the biggest beer sponsors to Pop The Cap, will also be there.

There is also a hint of a Californian Brewery sending some beers our way that aren’t normally available for purchase here in NC. If things work out correctly we may end up ‘learning’ a few Beach Bums a thing or two about hops.

I know that sometimes I feel like a Dead Head must have felt when they were following the Grateful Dead in their VW bus. I am devoted to changing this law, and Pop The Cap, and I’m in it for the long haul whether that be a physical ‘long haul’ or a mental one. A few hundred miles can’t stop me. I wouldn’t try to get in my way if I were you. Join us in Asheville or Wilmington if you can. If you can’t make it, you can still show your devotion to the cause by sending a few bucks that you aren’t spending, to help us pay for our lobbyist!

I’ll be seeing you guys in the Mountains and by the Sea!