Reverend Matthew's blog

In the East Village in New York City, sitting just North of the Bowery, is a jan-you-wine piece of brewdie history, perfectly preserved in all its glory and roughness.

I'm talking, of course, about McSorley's Old Ale House.

Okay, everyone who's read my blog entries this far can probably guess with some high degree of accuracy that I'm something of a beer snob.  It's the way I've been since my buddy Mark introduced me to Left Hand's Sawtooth Ale way back when I started drinking beer.  I started off with craft brews and imports, I didn't misspend any of my youth on watery, fizzy yellow swill.  I take this stuff seriously.  The website's called Brewdies, for god's sake.

Saying that so-and-so or what-and-what is the best of anything is always a sticky situation, and I'm wholly aware of the risk involved biting the hand that feeds you (or in this case, serves up your pints) but as Denver has recently become something of one of the new promised lands for craft brewing, I feel that it's important to provide potential beer-tourers a handy-dandy guide to the best stops in the area.

I brewed my first beer last weekend. I'm pretty proud of myself, and pretty excited to see how it comes out. From what I gather, that's a pretty common sentiment with one's first batch of homebrew, so forgive my girlish giddiness.

Impelled by my friend (and local Brew Ninja) Mark, who's been doing and championing homebrewing as a way to get exactly the kind of beer you want in much more quantity than you really need for a while now, I decided to take his advice and tap into his vast array of brewing knowledge, convincing him to co-author a beer with me.

Let me be frank. I don't like Oktoberfests. Something about them has always just rubbed me the wrong way. Maybe I'm a closed-minded chump – after all, I had to make an effort of teaching myself to appreciate pale ales and IPAs as much as I do now. But Oktoberfests? No, no thank you. Maybe it's the spices in the ones I've tried, maybe it's a personal problem with the overall style – some people don't like IPAs, some people don't like stouts. And up until this year, I plain didn't like Oktoberfests.