Pranqster

Pranqster has grown to be one of my favorite beers, which makes North Coast Brewing Co. one of my favorite breweries. Pranqster is a beautiful golden, slightly hazy beer with a lot of head. It’s an excellent Belgian beer that has the perfect amount of carbonation on the nose and finishes with that great fruity Belgian Golden flavor. Often with Belgians I find my biggest complaint is too much carbonation, or the carbonation amount doesn’t balance with body and flavor. This is not the case with Pranqster; this beer is very well balanced and extremely smooth without losing its awesomeness and quality.

April 6th, 2009

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Tags: ale, beer, beerfather, belgian, brewing, coast, company, golden, north, pranqster, style

Strong vs. Weak

I’m sure if you’re reading this blog, you’ve dabbled in the many beer rating websites out there. Personally, I’m getting quite annoyed with these sites… the “let’s rate the strongest beer the highest mentality” can get old. Any true beer lover knows that alcohol content has nothing to do with the quality of the beer. Granted, beers with higher alcohol content have typically been sitting around, aging longer, getting better and better by the day, just crying for you to drink them. Having high alcohol content or being dark in color doesn’t automatically qualify them as superior beers. I’ll agree, some of them are fantastic beers, but some of them are absolutely terrible. Anyway, my point is to give some of the lower alcohol content beers a try. Don’t just listen to these beer rating websites. Low alcohol content doesn’t mean the beer sucks. Beer should be appreciated and enjoyed for reasons other than its alcohol content. I think that some less strong beers tend to get ignored by so called sophisticated beer judgers. And yes judger is an official term because I’m One Thousand Years Old and I say so. Just because your friends are hooooo raaaa’n because they can’t see through it doesn’t mean it’s God’s gift to beer. EVERY beer has its place; dark, light, strong, weak, hoppy and not. A true beer lover will learn to appreciate ALL beers.

March 19th, 2009

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Tags: beer, beerfather, strong, weak

RECIPE: Low Fat Beer Brownies

Replace the fat in brownies with beer! They turn out more on the cakey side and less on the fudgy side, but they don’t have the fat and they’re made with beer…so they’re cool.

Ingredients:
1 box of fudge brownie mix
2 eggs
Young’s Double Chocolate Stout

Make the brownies as directed on the box, except replace the water and oil with the beer! Sprinkle with powdered sugar when finished. **Note, this takes less time to bake than it says on the box, so keep an eye on it. You don’t want to overcook them. I may be updating this recipe after I play with it a little more.

March 18th, 2009

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Tags: beer, beerfather, brownies, chocolate, double, fat, low, recipe, stout, youngs

PUB REVIEW: Kells Irish Pub

Kells Irish Restaurant and Pub
112 SW 2nd Ave
Portland, OR 97204

We knew St. Patrick’s Day was coming up, so we thought we’d review an Irish pub. We’d heard about Kells before…it’s rumored to be the best Irish Pub as well as Irish Restaurant in the USA. No seriously, that’s what we heard.

Kells is your typical Irish pub…in a good way. The staff is friendly, it’s clean, and you do feel a bit Irish when you’re in there. One nice thing about Kells was that they didn’t plaster the entire place with Guinness paraphernalia and shout, “OK NOW WE’RE AN IRISH PUB!” The décor was cool and fun to look at. They’ve got a big huge stone fireplace to welcome you when you walk in, a good number of tables and cozy private booths, and also a large bar to sit at. Our waiter told us that they have live music 7 days a week, including an open jam session on Sundays. Pretty cool. We asked about all of the money stuck to the ceiling and were told that patrons donate a dollar and 2 quarters, the waiters magically make it stick to the ceiling (leprechaun magic, we’re told) and every once in a while, they sweep the ceiling and donate the money to charity. The owner matches whatever is on the ceiling, which is nice. Good old fashioned warm fuzzy feeling while you drink your brew and take in the Irish ambiance.

OK, now onto the beer (ahem and of course food). They had 13 beers on tap, which included Boddingtons, Guinness, Harp, Kells Irish Lager (brewed by Rogue), Mt. Hood Smoked Porter, Smithwicks, Stella Artois, and 3 Widmers. The beer selection was pretty good for an Irish Pub. Usually these places have about 5 on tap; 2 of which are good. We were there during happy hour, so our food only cost $3 each. We tried the Kells Irish Nachos and the Gorgonzola Spread. The nachos were okay. The chips (which were actual chips, not fries) were kind of burned and the cheese wasn’t melted enough so it was sort of goopy and hard to eat. We might have just had a bad batch. It LOOKED yummy though! The gorgonzola spread was UH-mazing. Get it. You will want to marry it.

Kells is a fun place. Good beer selection (relatively speaking), good food, and good service. Not the best Irish Pub we’ve ever been to, so we have to disagree with the word on the street, but a great place nonetheless.

March 17th, 2009

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Tags: beer, beerfather, irish, kells, pub, review

Sierra Nevada Pale Ale

Sierra Nevada, oh how you remind me of times camping in the Sierra Nevadas. Sitting around that crackling fire with your fresh out of the cooler icy self. I often found myself gazing into your green and gold beauty and wondering “is that a picture of heaven?” Gosh…you are so wonderfully beautiful and tasty, let’s do a photoshoot.

March 16th, 2009

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Tags: beer, beerfather, images, pale ale, photos, sierra nevada

BAR REVIEW: CI Bar & Grill

CI Bar & Grill
18786 SW Boones Ferry Rd.
Tualatin, OR 97062

Well, we were hopeful. Everyone wants their own personal Cheers…the sign said free WIFI…we thought this might be it!
The menu was promising. They listed about 10 craft beers at $10 a pitcher. We ordered a pitcher of Deschutes but quickly had the menus swatted away and were informed that they “only had 3 craft beers”; none of which were on the menu. We went with Winterhook, not amazing but at $10 a pitcher there wasn’t much to cry about.

We needed something to wash all that beer down, so we ordered the combo platter. It wasn’t too offensive—it was your standard platter of assorted fried things dipped in ranch. They had good ranch, too…nothing worse than excitedly dipping a big fat onion ring into your ranch and then finding out it’s not the yummy ranch, it’s that lame bottled healthy tasting ranch and it is certainly NOT what you are looking for. So yeah, the ranch was good. A plus.
If you are in this part of town and just want to go somewhere easy, low profile, and cheap to enjoy a game of pool or pinball and perhaps hang with the locals, we’d say go. Otherwise, eh.

March 15th, 2009