Best Fall Session Beer
Sierra Nevada Tumbler
This brown ale was a near unanimous favorite for its overall drinkability. It was described as perfect for early fall "when it's just getting brisk out but you still don't need a heavy overcoat." It’s an auburn-brown malty beer with enough hops to keep the flavor clean, not sweet. It's balanced and mellow enough that you could drink a few without blowing out your palate, and at 5.5 percent ABV, you won't get yourself into trouble too fast either.

Best Beer for Hop Fans
Sixpoint Autumnation
Another favorite across the board, Sixpoint Craft Ales' festively canned beer impressed us with its unique flavor combination of fresh hops and pumpkin, ginger, and white pepper. The Brooklyn-based brewery created it to celebrate the hop harvest by adding just-picked Citra hops to the beer while brewing, i.e., "wet hopping" it. The result is an intensely vegetal, almost marijuana-esque aroma. Flavor-wise, it's not what you'd expect for a hoppy beer: The fresh hops give it an herbaceous, citrusy, and refreshing taste rather than a heavy, super-bitter hops flavor.

Best Lawn Mower Leaf-Raking Lager
Lakefront Pumpkin Lager
This brewery out of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, was new to us, and its pumpkin lager was the sleeper hit of our tasting. In fact, the brewery claims that this is the only pumpkin lager (as opposed to ale) in the world. Whether that is the case or not, we liked the frothy, medium-light body and smooth, easy drinking of Lakefront's brew. It had a nice smell of fall spices that didn't come off as cloying or fake like many pumpkin brews do, and a mellow, toasty flavor that didn't finish too sweet. One taster noted that "I could have more than one, which I don't normally do with pumpkin beers."

Best Beer for the Sour-Beer Geek
New Belgium Lips of Faith Kick
New Belgium's Lips of Faith Series delivers again, this time with a special-edition collaborative beer made with Seattle's Elysian Brewing Company. Kick is a blend of 75 percent pumpkin-cranberry ale and 25 percent oak-barrel-aged ale. Together, they create a light-bodied sour ale with an orange color. It might be a little too bracing for fall, or it may be just right if you hit an Indian summer day, or want to pair it with a meal.

Best Beer to Cozy Up To on a Cold Day
Firestone Walker Velvet Merlin
This Southern California brewery's fall beer was one of the darkest, most roasty we tasted, being an oatmeal stout partially aged in bourbon barrels. It pours deep brown and tastes chocolaty. We liked that it didn't come off overly sweet and finished with a nice hint of coffee flavor. Considering its depth, we felt it would be best as an end of fall/early winter beer.

Best Classically Autumnal Beer
Brooklyn Brewery Post Road Pumpkin Ale
While there were obvious spice flavors and aromas in this pumpkin beer, particularly of cloves, they were nuanced and balanced so as to not overwhelm the other flavors. Those other flavors were toasty and malty, and the body was medium-light. One taster noted that, with Post Road's low ABV of 5 percent, you could easily drink a few to "cut through the fog."

5. Cold-Activated Graphics
When you sell characterless adjunct-laden American lager to the largest group of consumers in the general marketplace, there are really only two ways to distinguish yourself from the competition, and neither of them is flavor.

The first is your advertising. Celebrities, scantily dressed women, scantily dressed celebrity women, innuendo—the sky's the limit. There are no boundaries to your creative horizons, so long as your ad's bare skin is PG-rated.

The second way is your packaging. Not doing a vortex neck for maximum beer-related vorticity? Do what Coors does: Make your can or bottle change colors when the watery yellow liquid it contains is sufficiently cold that you can no longer actually taste it.

4. Pretty Much Anything Done by BrewDog
Scottish brewer BrewDog has turned food media manipulation into a fine art through a four-part process that should certainly be patented if it hasn't been already: (1) Brew a beer with an insanely high ABV. (2) Give it a painfully gimmicky name (Tactical Nuclear Penguin) and a huge price tag (about $56 for a 330-milliliter bottle). (3) Talk to the press about how "extreme" it is. (4) Profit.

Infuriating, and reliable. And therefore even more infuriating. It would be different if the beers regularly garnered great reviews, but the responses are solidly mixed, a shame at these brews' price point.

3. "Gay" Beers
It's not entirely clear if gay-targeted beers are a sign of progress ("Hey! Gay people! You're people, too, so we're making beer just for you!") or just another in a line of slights ("Hey! Gay people! There are plenty of great beers out there, but perhaps you'd like a beer that's about gay identity rather than, say, locality, flavor, or brewing technique!"). Probably some of both.

2. The Monstrosity That Is Budweiser Chelada
View my video review on this stuff to understand why mixing aged seafood, tomatoes, and beer in a can is a questionable idea.

1. Double Cold-Activated Beer Can Graphics
See number 5. Then, double the stupid and spin it as "two-stage cold-activation technology." You still get the color-changing mountain when the beer is cold, but you ALSO get a "Cold Indicator" bar on the label that turns blue. But wait, there's more. ANOTHER bar called the "Super Cold Indicator” that turns blue when it's really, really cold! Who. Is. Still. Drinking. Beer. Like. This.

Evidence that home-brewing has stepped out of the basement and into the mainstream is everywhere. Williams-Sonoma now carries one-gallon home-brew kits from Brooklyn Brew Shop. A recent New York Times article noted that membership in the American Homebrewers Association has doubled since 2006. And now, San Francisco is home to Brewlab, a unique collective that helps home-brewers distribute their beer to members through a CSA-like mystery grab bag of brews.

It works like this: The home-brewers mix up a batch of beer and then deliver about 40 bottles to Brewlab cofounders Emily Ford and Sam Gilbert, who put them together into assorted six- or twelve-packs. (Brewlab reimburses the home-brewers for their supplies, but no one is paid to brew.) Nonbrewing members make an optional donation to join (since no one is paid to produce beer, this keeps the project on the right side of the law). About every five weeks, new assortments either are delivered to members or are ready for pickup at a central site, CSA-style.

"Just as CSA members quizzically try to figure out what exactly a kohlrabi is and how one cooks it, I envision members discovering different beers and what to [serve] them with," says Ford.

And the results? The beers range from bourbon-oaked IPA to wheat Kölsch. A few were punishingly hop-loaded for my taste; several were well balanced; and at least one—a Belgian yeast pale ale—was so good I'd pay to drink it again. Creative names, like Randy Savage Lite, are a bonus.

"Brewlab is a labor of love," says Gilbert, who laughed at the idea that Brewlab was established with any sort of business model in mind. While Brewlab only delivers within the San Francisco city limits, it's only a matter of time before this idea is picked up by other home-brewers around the country.

"Wild Bolivian coca leaves are hand-picked at 2000 meters in the Andes and shipped under armed guard in 2000 Kilo Bales to Amsterdam to be macerated and de-cocainized. The potent high strength flavor formula is reduced to 60 proof, bottled and then shipped around the world in a more conventional format."

Consumers tend to imagine wine being produced at a bucolic Napa vineyard by a guy in an apron, but that’s not necessarily so, says the Hungry Beast in “How Wine Became Like Fast Food.” Wine and spirits stores like Total Wine and BevMo! are making and marketing their own private-label wines now. “Such brands are highly lucrative,” writes Keith Wallace, “with profit margins often 20% higher than comparable wines.”

The trend isn’t limited to dedicated booze stores: “Trader Joe’s has its ‘Two Buck Chuck,’ Wal-Mart has its Alcott Ridge, and 7-Eleven has its Thousand Oaks Vineyards.” Retail chains love the private-label wines because Joe Glug-a-bottle starts to associate this wonderful grape beverage with the company that introduced him to it—and is tempted to stop by more often to get more.

Last week WhiskyFest blew through SF, leaving behind a trail of dead. Joking aside (though seriously, the stuff will slay you after a few hours if you don’t force yourself to dump after tasting), there were more than 200 whiskeys to sample from all over the world, many master distillers on hand to talk about their products, and, well, a lot of those profusely sweating guys who always seem to show up to beer and spirits festivals. I concentrated on the domestic offerings, leaving the many great Scotches and other imports for next time.

Here are a few of the highlights:

Death’s Door Spirits: Out of Wisconsin, this small-batch distiller is named after the passage between Washington Island and the Door County Peninsula. It uses organic grains, and makes a “white” whiskey. The perfectly clear spirit is made by double distilling, resting the booze for three weeks, then popping it in oak barrels for less than 72 hours. It picks up some whiskey flavors, and even has a sweet suggestion of reposado tequila. Would be fun to experiment with in cocktails that call for gin, or to make something odd like a white Manhattan. They were also pouring a very good, creamy, almost buttery gin, with lots of botanicals but no overwhelming juniper bitterness.

High West Distillery: First off, you have to give some props to these people for not only starting a distillery in Utah, but also starting a ski-in distillery and pub. More importantly, they are selling some very good ryes. Since the company is only a few years old, High West’s own stuff is still aging. In the meantime, it’s been blending other distilleries’ booze to great success. I liked the Rendezvous Rye, a blend of a 6-year-old, 95 percent rye and a 16-year-old, 80 percent rye. It’s strong and spicy, with some vanilla in there. It’s not chill-filtered—a process many distillers put their whiskeys through to remove oils that will make the whiskey appear cloudy when it’s cold. Skipping the step leaves a little more texture in the Rendezvous and flavor in the finish.

Stranahan’s Colorado Whiskey: Stranahan’s is a great microdistillery in Denver. Its Colorado Whiskey is aged in charred American white oak whiskey barrels, and contains both floral Scotch qualities and some of the brown-sugary spiciness of bourbon, with some hints of smoky, leathery, earthy funk in there too from, well, who knows. Like High West’s Rendezvous Rye, this is not chill-filtered. Don’t be scared off by the 94 proofage—it’s fiery to be sure, but still totally sippable.

Shmaltz Brewing, of Coney Island lager fame, debuted its new, blood-red beer at last Saturday’s second annual beer and music festival, Freaktoberfest. A packed crowd of craft beer fans partied at the Public Assembly in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, sampling a range of great mostly local brews.

Shmaltz’s beers are always tasty, and they were being poured in abundance. But a new discovery was the New Hampshire-based Smuttynose’s Farmhouse Ale. A little maltier than I was expecting, it was golden in color and nice and spicy-yeasty. Tasty ’til the last swallow. There’s something great about farmhouse ales and Saisons when the weather turns wet and cool. They’ve got enough body and funk to keep you warm and stand up to heavier foods, but are still fresh and crisp tasting, like the fall air.

An absurdly enthusiastic mass of beer geek dudes practically mobbed Dogfish Head craft brewery’s Sam Calagione as he stepped into the Blind Tiger Ale House in NYC last night. For more than a half hour, the Delaware-based brewer was locked in pivot position, distributing gratis pints from the bar to his many admirers, who pumped his hand and had him pose for pictures. The Dogfish event, which featured 25 (!) of the company’s beers on tap, including some real obscure ones, was one of the most hotly anticipated events of the NY Craft Beer Week festival that kicked off last Sunday.

Calagione, a tanned, rugged guy (he once modeled in some Levi’s ads) with a bro-style friendliness, has become the de facto spokesman for the current craft brewing craze. His beers are easy to market and get excited about, in large part because of their J. Peterman-inspired marketing. Check out some of last night’s pours:

Chateau Jiahu: Developed from a recipe found in 9,000-year-old preserved pottery jars in the Neolithic village of Jiahu, China, using pre-gelatinized rice flakes, wildflower honey, Muscat grapes, hawthorn fruit, chrysanthemum flowers, and sake yeast.

Pangaea: An ale brewed with an ingredient from every single continent, including crystallized ginger from Australia, muscovado sugar from Africa, Antarctic water, Belgian yeast, and exotic grains.

Theobroma: “Based on the chemical analysis of pottery fragments found in Honduras” that contained residue of some boozy chocolate drink enjoyed by 1200 BCE partyers. Containing Aztec coca powder and nibs, honey, chiles, and annatto seeds.

Especially in a recession, there’s something great about the kind of armchair travel you can do from your barstool. Or, as Calagione proclaimed as soon as he had extricated himself from fans to stand on the bar, “The great thing about craft beer, is you can upgrade from the shittiest wine, and for the same price … try the shit from small, independent breweries!” Well said.

Attendees of the upcoming Great American Beer Festival in Denver should check out the “Collaborative Evil” event in the Brewers Studio Pavilion, September 24 at 6:30 p.m.

What is Collaborative Evil? Steve Altimari, the brewmaster at Valley Brewing, explains the concept: Nine brewers (mostly friends and acquaintances) have agreed on a style (Belgian golden strong ale) and some basic parameters and limitations they wanted to follow (that “it be not loaded with spices, be fairly dry in finish, and … that each brewer would choose a secret sugar ingredient to differentiate the beers from one another”), and have all made different versions of the beer to pour at the festival.

The whole thing has been put together by Todd Ashman of FiftyFifty Brewing Company, and this is the second year he has organized a collaborative beer for the Festival. In 2008, the Collaborative Evil project only included three breweries, but all of them received A- or better reviews on BeerAdvocate. It will be interesting to see how this year’s batch of brews comes out.

(As well as FiftyFifty and Valley, the other collaborators are: Sacramento Brewing, Fat Head’s Brewery and Saloon, Flossmoor Station, Oakshire Brewing, Silver Peak Brewery, Speakeasy Ales & Lagers, and Lucky Bucket Brewing).

If all that isn’t enough to get you interested, how about the sweet metal-esque label art (pictured). Ashman commissioned it, and is also responsible for the name, an extension of a beer called “Evil” he was brewing. The art covers all your metal basics, and would look pretty awesome painted on the side of a van. “No, we are not all metal heads,” claims Altimari, while Ashman explains that “we’re trying to have fun with this … the beer, the GABF tasting, and working together of course.”

From the “interesting weirdness” department comes Cognac.com’s handy list of “10 Asian Liquors Most Likely to Give You the Creeps,” a squeamish look at booze with a little something extra. Like, oh, whiskey with cobra snake (Spirits Review says it has a “fishy, hot taste” and numbs “every part that comes into contact with it”). Scorpion vodka. No, wait, maybe you want to get that good scorpion flavor with a dash of fruit, as in Banana Flavoured Scorpion Liqueur.

There’s a whole raft of this stuff for sale at Thailand Unique, which seems to specialize in products intended to shock the Western palate. Pregnant crickets, anyone?

You heard it here first: Norwegian craft brew is going to be HUGE! Well, maybe not, but it’s still really good. Here are two small, experimental breweries that are exporting interesting beer to the United States. Shelton Brothers is distributing both companies’ beer in the States, and you can order it online from Sam’s Wines & Spirits.

HaandBryggeriet: Brewmaster Jens Maudal is trying to revive ancient beer styles from back in the day when brewing was mandated by law in Norway and the beers would have varied from village to village based on the local yeasts, hops, malt, and gruit, spices and herbs that Maudal says might have been used in lieu of hops. (Today he says the country drinks mostly homogeneous pilsners.) The most traditional of HaandBryggeriet’s brews is Norwegian Wood, a smoky ale (“All old beers used to have some smoky taste because they dried the homemade malt over open fire,” explains Maudal) flavored with juniper twigs and berries collected from the woods outside the brewery.

Two others that are soon to be released: Hesjeøl, a smoky harvest ale brewed with three different grains, normally a low-alcohol beer for farm laborers to drink during the harvest but amped up “for today’s not-so-hard-working beer drinkers,” says Maudal; and Wild Thing, a farmhouse fruit ale made with red currants and mountain cranberries, and fermented with Brett yeast to give it a pleasantly barnyardy, sour taste.

Nøgne Ø: Nøgne Ø makes great saison, pale, and amber ales, imperial brown ale, and IPA. It just released Tyttebær (which means lingonberry), a sour fruit beer made with Danish brewery Mikkeller in 2007 that’s been aging in the fermentation vessels and then in the bottles. Nøgne Ø brewer Kjetil Jikiun is also experimenting with extremely high-alcohol beers (17 to 18 percent) made with sake yeast, which can stand up to the higher alcohol levels without dying off. A soon-to-be-released holiday brew called Special Holiday Ale was made as a three-way collaboration with Stone Brewing and Jolly Pumpkin same recipe was brewed at the three individual breweries, with their unique styles. The one brewed at Stone last year is already sold out, but Nøgne Ø’s version will be released this year for the holidays. Jolly Pumpkin is still aging its version, which isn’t slated to come out of barrels until 2010.

Apparently, standing in the stinky mist for 40 minutes is about the equivalent of one drink. But I agree with Dlisted, which snarks: “Now, do you get to drink gin as well as breathe it in? ... After 20 minutes of not getting drunk by breathing in booze vapors, I’d sniff out the source and stick my mouth on the damn mister. 40 minutes sober in a bar feels like ten lifetimes to a drunk!”

This video, by ITN’s This Is Genius, will tell you more, but be warned: You’ll really want to punch the guy who says, “Hence, ‘Alcoholic Architecture,’” with an astonishingly smug expression.

That’s a fair bit of weight. But the British government’s campaign is based on the somewhat dubious assumption that all alcohol consumption comes in addition to a full day of calories, abetted by the idea that alcohol consumption demands the additional eating of fatty/salty snacks. The Telegraph compounds the damage with odd math, suggesting that “the average wine drinker consumes an extra 2,000 calories a month—the equivalent of 184 bags of crisps.” Crisps are potato chips, but is any bag of chips a mere 11 calories?

Two facts are apparent after reading the story: One, yes, alcohol has calories, and anyone who doesn’t understand that is probably dealing with bigger problems than unexpected weight gain. And two, the British government seems absolutely heedless of enhancing its reputation as the world’s most clucking, scolding nanny state.

But serious tea connoisseurs certainly exist, and they’ve got some tips on how to properly steep your tea if you wanna be serious about it too.

“Long Island Iced 401(k): Put hopes in shaker. Add dreams. Shake until dashed, then drink all the vodka, gin, tequila, and rum left in liquor cabinet.”

“BlackBerry Sling: Discover that your BlackBerry doesn’t work because you haven’t paid the bill. Sling it against the wall, then buy a prepaid phone and make some rum in your toilet.”

Other recipes include Trickle-Down Punch, Nasdaiquiri, and Tequila Slumlord.

Bon Appétit has a recipe in its April issue (not online, sorry) for Virginia bar PX’s Double R Daiquiri. At the bar, bartender/owner Todd Thrasher uses fresh rhubarb juice in the drink in addition to some citrus.

While juicing the rhubarb sounds like a hassle—they suggest puréeing it, sieving it, then squishing any remaining juice from the pulp by hand—I love the idea of using it fresh in a drink and leveraging its bitter/sour flavor, as opposed to making it into a syrup. (Though syrup has its own merits, like in our Touch of Evil cocktail or Knockout Punch recipe.)

It looks like I’m not alone. Apartment Therapy’s The Kitchn recently spotlighted a cocktail created by Franny’s in Brooklyn made with fresh rhubarb juice, Aperol, and vodka. And there’s a whole section of drink recipes at the rhubarb fetish site Savor-the-Rhubarb.com.

Eric Felten published an amusing look at fictional cocktails from cartoons, movies, and books this week over at the Wall Street Journal. It’s a good read, and you have to love the fact that Felten has taken the subject of Flanders Planter’s Punch from The Simpsons (“three shots of rum, a jigger of bourbon, and just a little dab-a-roo of crème de cassis for flavor”) seriously enough to analyze it next to the traditional Planter’s Punch recipe:

“A traditional Planters Punch is made of rum, fresh lime juice and sugar syrup. The Ned Flanders version adds bourbon, which is an interesting variation, and then substitutes a sweet fruit liqueur (the crème de cassis) for the sugar syrup, which is a standard strategy for personalizing a classic. But what’s missing from Ned’s concoction is the lime juice necessary to balance the sweetness of the cassis. That, and sensible portions.”

This is not Kid Rock’s first attempt at creating his own beer. There was chatter last fall about a deal he signed with Drinks Americas, maker of other celebrity boozes such as Dr. Dre Cognac and Trump Vodka, but we haven’t seen any sign of that beer actually coming to market. No bother, now he can appear altruistic and still get paid.