Brooklyn Brewery Launch's Joshua M. Bernstein's THE COMPLETE BEER COURSE!

 



Last night at the Brooklyn brewery, in Williamsburg, Sterling Epicure launched Joshua M. Bernstein's THE COMEPLETE BEER COURSE. Joshua M. Bernstein's first book, Brewed Awakening, was published by Sterling Epicure in 2011. Josh is a beer journalist and critic who has written for New York, Saveur, Details, Time Out New York, Draft, Forbes Traveler, New York Times, and Gourmet.com, where he was the beer columnist. He is a contributing editor to the drinks magazine Imbibe, where he writes feature articles on craft beer. As a beer expert, he's been featured on NPR's Marketplace and Beer Sessions Radio. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. And he and his wife are expecting their first baby!!!

 

The launch was a huge success. More than 250 people attended the event, which was sold out weeks ago! If you want to get a chance to meet Josh, he'll be touring the country the entire fall -  save the baby's birth!

 

For more dates and appearances, click on an up-to-date url below for times and destinations...

http://joshuambernstein.com/events-and-appearances/

 

 

About the book: Go on a fun, flavorful tour through the world of craft brews with one of the most unique and fascinating voices in beer today. In this thoroughly up-to-date, comprehensive, and utterly witty beer course (the only one currently available in print), Joshua M. Bernstein demystifies beer by "elementally breaking down the grains, yeast, hops, and techniques that cause beer's flavor to spin into thousands of distinctively delicious directions."

            Not only has the work of Bernstein, a highly acclaimed beer expert, appeared in publications such as the New York Times and Imbibe, but he also leads a New York City tour of homebrewers' apartments and lofts as well as lectures around America. Now he has created this complete course for anyone who wants to choose from and enjoy the vast array of singular brews available today.

             After giving you the tools to taste, smell, and evaluate beers, Bernstein takes you through a series of easy-to-understand classes that will have you hopping from lagers and pilsners to hazy wheat beers, Belgian-style abbey and Trappist ales, aromatic pale ales and bitter IPAs, roasty stouts, barrel-aged brews, belly-warming barley wines, and mouth-puckering sour ales. A sequence of suggested, targeted tastings will help you distinguish appropriate flavors and those that "signify that you should dump those beers down a drain." Features on the world's most visionary breweries, a glossary of terms, a chapter on pairing beer with food and starting your own beer cellar, an informative chart on hops, and a calendar of craft beer weeks complete the course.

             "Years of experience and sampling have given me the confidence to pass on certain beers, and seek out others as rabidly as my dog does a chicken bone,"writes Bernstein. "The key is being armed with the necessary knowledge. That means learning the ropes, loosening your lips, and trying one beer after another, and another. Something tells me you'll like taking The Complete Beer Course, where earning extra credit has never been so much fun."

 

 

 

Brooklyn Brewery makes beer. Good beer. Not only does it taste good and make your meal better but we like to think that since its founding in 1988, Brooklyn Brewery has brewed flavorful beers that enrich the life, tradition and culture of the communities it serves. Its award-winning roster of year-round, seasonal and specialty beers have gained the Brewery notoriety as one of the top craft beer producers in the world. While striving to brew the best beer possible (and make time for our growing families), The Brewery promotes the proliferation of good beer and good food whenever it can. Brooklyn beers are currently distributed in 25 states and 20 countries. Throughout 2011 The Brewery underwent an expansion that doubled the overall capacity in 2012 and quintupled it by 2013. Brooklyn Brewery probably exports more beer than any other American craft brewery.

 

Here's the thing I almost like best about Brooklyn Brewery - the guys who run the place can flat out write! They aren't just making beer - they live beer, think beer, breathe beer. Brewmaster Garrett Oliver, widely acknowledged as the world’s foremost scholar on beer, wrote The Brewmaster’s Table: Discovering The Pleasures of Real Beer with Real Food in 2003. The book was firmly established as the first and final word on beer and food pairings in addition to being an entertaining guide to the world’s best beers and breweries. In 2005, Co-Founders Steve Hindy and Tom Potter wrote Beer School. Beer School’s real world stories about starting a brewery from scratch continues to inspire entrepreneurs today. The Brewmaster's Table is reportedly selling for about a dollar more than Beer School on amazon.com and that does not bother Steve.  More recently, in 2011, Garrett acted as the editor-in-chief of the comprehensive Oxford Companion To Beer. Essentially a beer encyclopedia, the book documents everything from malt disease to beer clubs to the ancient process of bottle re-fermentation.

Can't lie, I'm pissed. I saw Garrett Oliver early in the evening, paling around with Josh, but didn't get a chance to snap the two of them together.

 

 

Of course, I went through the entire tasting menu at the brewery. There's a lot of beers here that you can't get in the stores. The Blast was a big, roasty, alcoholic brew....delicious. The Cuvee' la Boite was fragrant and fabulous! Hafling and Radius were both awesome! Socher was tremendous!

According to their notes: Brooklyn Scorcher #366 is a very tasty summer pale ale featuring a hop so new that it doesn’t have a real name yet – right now it’s just called “HBC 366”... Brooklyn Scorcher #366 is a hoppy pale ale that’s dry, minerally and fruity on the palate, snappy in the center, and bursting with the citrusy, piney notes that make our new pal 366 so special. It’s got as much hop character as an IPA, but at only 4.5%, Scorcher #366 is eminently sessionable....

 

Cuvee' was my favorite of the evening. Lior Lev Sercarz’s spice shop in New York City is called La Boîte (pronounced “la-bwat”), which simply means “the box.” Only the stuff in Lior’s boxes is not so simple. There’s a reason he is known in kitchens around the world. Lior is sometimes called “the spice whisperer” or the “the spice wizard,” but he prefers to be thought of as a chef (he spent years cooking with renowned chef Daniel Boulud) or even a spice therapist. Garrett and Loir started dreaming up beer ideas and that's how they ended up with Cuvée La Boîte, a Belgian-inspired beer in the “Grand Cru” style, subtly infused with Lior’s unique blend of Mishmish N.33 (lemon, saffron, crystalized honey), fresh kaffir lime leaves, and rare Espe- lette peppers from the French Pyrénées.

 

....but there was also something else...

I loved the Ice Cream Beer Float!!!! Made with Jenni's Ice Cream and Brooklyn Black Chocolate Stout, I was in heaven. I had two! I had one made with Salty Caramel Ice Cream and one with Vanilla Ice Cream. Both were absolutely fantastic!!!!

 

 

 

Josh's previous book, BREWED AWAKENING was an instant classic!

 

This young man, Joe Federico, a home brewing legend, and a beer fanatic, came all the way from Virginia to attend the opening!

 

 

 

 

I have to say, I think this is one of the most important beer books of the last twenty years, and should be around for a very, very long time! I am very proud to have worked with Josh, and with Diane Abrams, Scott Ammerman, Brita Vallens, Rachel Maloney, Blanca Olivery, and all the other people who helped make this book the success it already is! A great time was had by all! Tremendous launch! Very exciting book!