• 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!

Congrats Asheville! and Congrats to NC for having such an awesome Beer City!

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT:
Julie Atallah, Bruisin’ Ales, 828-252-8999
julie@bruisin-ales.com
June 5, 2009

“Beer City Bash” to be held at The Orange Peel on June 26

ASHEVILLE, NC—Bruisin’ Ales, The Orange Peel, and The Mountain XPress are sponsoring the “Beer City Bash” on Friday, June 26. The bash is a celebration of all things beer in Asheville. The event is a victory party for the local beer community, who rallied to win an Examiner.com poll by Charlie Papazian, founder of the Brewers Association, author, and one of the most recognized names in the world of beer and brewing.

The poll was an informal vote for “Beer City, USA” and included other notoriously large beer cities, such as Portland, OR; Denver, CO; and Philadelphia, PA. Asheville was the smallest city by population in the poll. In the end, Asheville tied with Portland, OR—a city five times the size—claiming the co-title. The Orange Peel in downtown Asheville is hosting the “Beer City Bash.” For the event, all draft lines at the venue will feature locally-brewed beer with all area breweries represented. Tickets are $10 per person (ages 21 and over), including two 9 oz. craft beers of your choice, a raffle ticket for giveaways, and live music. The music line-up features the bands Rat Jackson, Wilsin and Floating Action. The bash starts at 8:00 p.m. Doors at 7:30 p.m.

Proceeds from the event will go to the newly-formed Asheville Brewers Alliance and Arts2People, both non-profits that benefit the local community.

Tickets are available through www.ticketweb.com, 866-468-3399.

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Here is the url for The Orange Peel: theorangepeel.net

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!

Here is the detailed craigslist.com posting:

THRIVING WINE & BEER STORE IN Outer Banks FOR SALE

“They say alcohol is recession-proof, and sales continue to stay solid at this highly successful and profitable wine and beer store. This hip and snob-free shop is on the major thoroughfare in a resort beach town. It has a strong local following and a huge insurgence of tourists in summer months.

Store features 1800 square feet housing 2000 wines from around the world and is known widely for its “Great Wall of Beer” featuring over 400 crafts beers sold by the individual bottle. An additional 450 square feet is devoted to trendy gifts and accessories with another 450 square feet with a wine classroom/tasting area. Owners have fitted out this store with high-end, durable shelving, a 5-door cooler, Dell computer system with LiquorPOS software, all new in 2005.

This is truly a turn-key operation with all systems perfected and relationships with distributors well established. The hard work is already done! There are no direct competitors. The only nearby wine shops have closed their doors since this one opened. Known locally as the “go to” store for wine and beer knowledge, this business was unaffected when a large high-end supermarket opened four miles away. In fact, supermarket employees frequently send customers to this shop!”

Maybe we should pool all our money and we can work the store in shifts throughout the year!

Images from the inside:

If you have an NC site that you would like to recommend us to attempt to partner with, please let us know in the comments.  More importantly, we’re looking for advocates of NC beer that would like to help us out by either writing for the blog/site or taking over some responsibilities with the NC Beer Calendar.

We have an NC History page that also needs updating. If you have any interest, please add to the comments or post in the forums about it and we’ll see if we can find a position that would work out for you.

Beer Y’all premieres in screenings across North Carolina and on DVD in May 2009.”

Read more about Beer Y’all and watch the Trailers at beeryall.com