How about something new?: Laughing Dog Brewing

Sometimes you feel just to promote new breweries that you discover and hopefully something that might be coming to a pub close to you. Small breweries are something that you as a beer geek always need to promote.

So if you ever see a beer from Laughing Dog Brewing you should definitely test it out. This is a tiny brewery that we discovered during this years GABF and the brewery is located in Selkirk Mountains just outside of Sandpoint Idaho and in the city of Ponderay. They produce a full range of beer style as; pale ale, IPA, Stout and ESB. The bottles all come with the Laughing Yellow Lab that appears on all of their brews and is Ben their family dog. The full range of beers looks like this;

1. Laughing Dog Pale Ale
2. Laughing Dog India Pale Ale
3. Laughing Dog Cream Ale
4. Laughing Dog Sweet Stout
5. Laughing Dog Crotch Sniffing Bastard (ESB)

And they also do an Imperial IPA called; Laughing Dog Devil Dog Imperial IPA.

All great beers, where my personal favorite was the pale ale, which a very hoppy aroma pale ale and balanced perfectly with a great mixture of malts. As a pale ale this is a perfect beer that is not too much of everything, simply a very balanced beer, but still with the citrus hop kick you want in a beer.

So remember this, if you see the beer, let them a go. Just saw that the beers are available over at; Belmont Station in Portland.

So when can we expect this beer over at Oliver Twist or Akkurat??

A touch of Colorado in Sweden?

Just coming back from Colorado at this years GABF it is always fun to discover that Sweden is not a bad place for good beers at the end.

We came back this night from a play at the municipal theatre (Le nozze di Figaro) and thought to test out the new pub of Bishop Arms Vasagatan. A busy place in central Stockholm were you seldom set your foot as a beer geek.

The place is ok, but nothing to really recommend as a great bar, but it was in a sense a beer paradise if you actually got through the crowd of drunk people and could check out the fridges. We got stuck with one particular fridge that the entry is really about. I would simply call it "The US Beer Fridge", simply because it was packaged with loads of amazing US-beers.

A US-fridge from heaven

Probably a bit difficult to spot out all of the goddies, but checking the fridge I could spot the following US-breweris; 7 Flying Dogs, 6 Samuel Adams, 4 Great Divide, 7 Sierra Nevada, 3 Oskar Blues, 2 Rogue, 6 Left Hand, 6 Anchor.

Could it be better?, I do not know, at least not in central Stockholm (I am not comparing OT, this time).

Really good to actually test out a Dales Pale Ale and a Flying Dog Gonzo Imperial Stout just 2 weeks after we came home from Colorado, and actually drink beer back home from places that you visited just weeks ago.

So we also fixed the nice little picture of a Dales girl and her beer, I guess my girlfriend could not imagine that she would actually drink a Dales when she put on her new Dale T-shirt this morning (gift from me when we visited Lyons, 2 weeks ago!).

At least this is a amazing beer and in someway it worked excellect after the Nögne #100 Imperial IPA from Norway, which was the beer that I simply had to test as the first beer (I know a Double IPA at 10% ABV as the first beer, but its unique and had to be tested).

As a bar the new BA is ok, but not my cup of tea. But you could not complain about the beer when you actually got the staff to pick them out; Nögne, a couple of Danes, 5-6 Swedish Micro, a US-beer fridge etc etc, simply amazing.

Right now it was not actually discovered by the Swedes visiting the place, the still were drinking Mariestad or Staro, sad by true.

In this new bar at least we had 3 different Colorado breweries to choose from (OB, GD & FD), that does not happen every day!, at least not 5 minutes from the central station.