PorchDrinking’s Thanksgiving Beer Pairings

Thanksgiving is nearly upon us. Or—as your aunt insists on calling it—Turkey Day. Of course, this day involves a lot more to eat than just a large bird and therein lies the challenge when it comes to Thanksgiving beer pairings. Which beers are flexible enough to work well with the cornucopia of flavors and textures we enjoy on this holiday?

Many guides to pairing with Thanksgiving dinner suggest course-by-course pairings with one beer matched with one particular dish. No one actually eats like that though. We pile our plates with as much food as we can fit and then dive in. Rather than match beers with dishes, I’ve outlined a beer pairing list that divides the day into stages and offers suggestions for each phase.

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Market Garden Brewery | Prosperity Wheat

Market Garden Brewery in the historic Ohio City neighborhood of Cleveland, Ohio, has made a name for itself on the success of an unlikely flagship beer for a modern craft brewery. Prosperity Wheat is a Bavarian-style Hefeweizen, and it won the gold medal for the style at the Great American Beer Festival last month.

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Grisette | The Grey Lady of Belgian Beer

The name “grisette” has popped up on brewery taplists more and more in recent years, but the style is still poorly understood by many. What is this curious little beer, where did it come from, and why is it growing in popularity? Turns out none of those questions have easy answers.

The popular origin stories for many historical beer styles are often festooned with fanciful narrative elements of dubious veracity. Ask any dudebro at a bar about how IPA was created and be prepared for a tall tale involving colonialism and sea commerce. The true story is often a little more complicated if it can be uncovered at all, and grisette’s backstory is no exception.

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Event Recap | Ohio Craft Beer’s Ale-O-Ween Offers Spooky Treats

Ohio Craft Beer’s Ale-O-Ween beer festival moved to a new location this year, but the spooky fun of this 4th annual event stayed true to its calling. Ale-O-Ween moved to the Dayton Convention Center this year after a couple years at The Steam Plant event center, and Ohio Craft Beer is hoping the event continues to grow into the larger space.

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Event Preview | A Comprehensive Guide to Ohio’s Ale-O-Ween

Leaves are falling, Ohio evenings are getting crisp and jack o’ lanterns are smiling from porches across the Buckeye state. It’s time for the Ohio Craft Brewers Association’s Ale-O-Ween in downtown Dayton!

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2019 Denver Rare Beer Tasting Brings Out the Elite During GABF Week

Utopias on Cherries. Coconut Brandy Medianoche. Millerzzzzz. 5 Candles.

If you’d thrown a dart at the pour list for Denver Rare Beer Tasting 11 at the McNichols Civic Center in … Read More

2019 Great American Beer Festival | Brink Brewing’s Incredible Success

Brink Brewing in the College Hill neighborhood of northern Cincinnati just opened in 2017, but they already have seven medals and awards from the Great American Beer Festival. In fact, they’ve never failed to medal in the three GABFs since their founding. Last week they brought home gold medals for their Hold the Reins English Mild and Moozie Milk Stout, as well as top honors for Very Small Brewing Company of the Year, which is awarded to a brewery producing fewer than 1,000 barrels of beer annually.

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2019 Great American Beer Festival | Obscure & Historical Beer Styles

Pastry stouts, hazy IPAs and rare sours tend to command most of the buzz at the Great American Beer Festival; the lines at brewery booths pouring those beers last week in Denver certainly attested to that. However, I chose a different tasting route for my festival experience. As I wandered the festival floor, I didn’t so much choose “the road less traveled” as much as an overgrown path forgotten by time: I wanted to taste as many obscure, historical beer styles as I could.

GABF offers a wonderful educational opportunity for anyone who wants to taste styles largely lost to history. Want to know what a gruit tastes like? Want to compare multiple export stouts or Dortmunder lagers beside each other? You’ll never have a better chance to do it than at GABF.
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GABF State Spotlight | The Best Ohio Beers

I’m just going to cut to the chase: We make some really good beers in Ohio, and if you’re going to the Great American Beer Festival in Denver on October 3-5, you’ll get to taste quite a few of them. To help you plan your tasting tour, here are some of my favorite Ohio beers that will be poured at GABF.

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Dayton Breweries Come Through Strong for Community

On the night of May 27, a powerful line of storms ripped across Indiana and Ohio. Numerous tornadoes caused considerable damage. The Miami Valley region of southwest Ohio, centered around the city of Dayton, was hit especially hard. Multiple tornadoes left parts of the city and surrounding communities in shambles. Lives were disrupted and families were displaced.

In the wake of the storms, countless area businesses and individuals came together to help those affected by the disaster. Dayton’s breweries were no exception.

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Oktoberfest Lagers | Märzen, Festbier & Autumnal Confusion

Beer lovers rejoice: It’s Oktoberfest season!

Most folks assume the word “Oktoberfest” on a beer label or tap list refers to a particular style, but it’s actually a little more complicated than that. Let’s talk about how we got here, and then get into what’s what with Oktoberfest lagers.

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Viking Age Brew: An Interview with Mika Laitinen

Most of the time when we see Farmhouse Ale on a beer label in this country, the beer in question is a Saison or Bière de Garde. A new book about northern European rural brewing traditions expands the world of farmhouse ales and opens readers’ eyes to a thriving Nordic subculture of farmhouse brewing and expands our understanding of farmhouse ales beyond popular Belgian and French traditions.

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This Ain’t the Beer that You’re Used To—An Interview with Dom Cook

“I didn’t write it for people who are into beer. I wrote it for a specific demographic of people who didn’t know anything about beer.”

That’s Dom “Doochie” Cook, founder of Beer Kulture, talking about his new book, This Ain’t the Beer that You’re Used To: A Beginner’s Guide to Good Beer. The book is intended to be an introduction not just for newcomers to craft beer, but for racial and ethnic demographics that for the most part haven’t had good beer marketed to them. The book is finding an audience with established beer fans as well though, providing a new perspective on an industry that has too long been dominated by white voices.  Read More

Wooly Pig Farm Brewery | Rustic Helles

Draped over a few rolling hills in eastern Ohio sits the property of a farmhouse brewery that comes by its agrarian title honestly. Wooly Pig Farm Brewery’s name isn’t marketing; the brewery is a working farm growing livestock and hop bines. Founder and brewmaster Kevin Ely specializes in rustic German lagers, and his bestseller is Rustic Helles, a Munich Helles served unfiltered and cloudy straight from the lagering tanks. Read More

Debunking the Misconceptions Behind Craft Lagers

When I lead beer tastings and classes, I often hear people express a common misconception: lagers are inferior to ales. This idea is starting to change as craft lagers become more popular, but there is still plenty of confusion out there about lagers, and for good reason—with so many styles, craft beer can be confusing! Fortunately, misconceptions about lagers are pretty simple to clear up.

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We’ve Got Your Bock | The Basics of Bock Styles

Germans love their beer, and they love to drink a lot of it, which means most German styles need to be crisp and fairly low in alcohol to support extended drinking sessions in those gorgeous beer gardens you keep drooling over on Instagram. When I say the words “German beer,” you most likely picture a glass of pale, brilliantly clear Pilsner, or perhaps a stein of amber-colored Märzen (Oktoberfest). Maybe you think of a curvy vase of cloudy Hefeweizen that’s the color of a wheat field. All of those refreshing styles can make a sunny day even better, but it gets pretty cold in Germany during the winter months, and one family of German lager styles—Bocks—have the strength to stand up to the season’s cruelest weather. Read More

Book Review & Interview | Marika Josephson on Farmhouse Beer

A new chapbook by Scratch Brewing co-founder and brewer Marika Josephson lays out a blueprint for what it means to run a true farmhouse brewery in the 21st century.

“There is an ironic disconnect in craft beer in which drinkers care a lot about beer being made locally but don’t know or don’t care about where the ingredients themselves are from,” said Josephson when I interviewed her for a story for Civil Eats in November 2017.

The quote could serve as a thesis statement for her new chapbook Keeping the “Farm” in “Farmhouse Beer”, published by Good Beer Hunting in 2018.

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Branch & Bone Artisan Ales | Black Razzath

Since opening in June 2018, Branch & Bone Artisan Ales in Dayton, Ohio, has created eye-opening beers in a wide range of styles, including bright and juicy IPAs, crisp and inquisitive session sours, and velvety smooth stouts and coffee beers. Head brewer Brett Smith loves them all, having carried many recipes over from his homebrewing days, but the beers that really have his heart pour from two wooden vessels in the back room of the brewery: oak wine foeders Smith picked up from American Solera in Oklahoma City. They once held Italian Vin Santo.

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North High Brewing | Cover Crop Beer

A new beer from North High Brewing in Columbus, Ohio, is shining a light on the importance of agriculture in the world of craft beer. North High has partnered with Ohio Farm Bureau to brew Cover Crop Beer, a blonde ale brewed in honor of the centennial anniversary of the latter organization, which exists to promote and support Ohio farmers.

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Book Review & Interview | Fal Allen on Gose

Five years ago, most craft beer fans had never heard of Gose, the sour German wheat ale seasoned with salt and coriander. Now, it’s tough to find a brewery that hasn’t made one and many breweries offer multiple Goses with various fruit additions. How did the style go from obscurity to ubiquity in just half a decade?

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