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 update from Portland: Swedish Beers!

With some very quick reaction regarding my comment about Danish and Norwegian beers being for sale in Portland, I got some great new from Chris over at belmont station;

As luck would ahve it, we got several Swedish beers in this morning. Nils Oscar IPA, Barleywine, and Imperial Stout, plus Oppigards Winter Ale.

It's a start :)

Chris @ Belmont Station

So now Swedish beers can hopefully find beer consumers in the States, at least in a very small scale. And it seems to be a good start with beers from two of the better breweries from back home.

Wonder which beers you can expect next, what about; Dugges Ale och Porterbryggeri (yes they have bottleing equipment now), Nynäshamns Ångbryggeri or what about Ölands Gårdsbryggeri?

And if anyone is interested in the "complete" list of Swedish breweries, here is the latest update; Komplett lista över nuvarande Svenska Bryggerier.

Danish & Norwegian beers in Portland?

The Belmont Station beer blog reports the following new beers to be sold at the beer store in Portland.

If you do not know it already Belmont is a great beer shop in Portland that is famous for the amount of beers and a genuin beer interest these guys have.

They also demonstrate with the list below that they have a big beer knowledge, they really know their business. It is always impressive to check out the latest beers they provide and you are really jealous for the beer that you can actually get over at Portland, wish I could have the same amount of great US-beers that they provide over here in Sweden.

New Danish Beer:

Norrebro Bryghus - North Bridge Extreme: North Bridge Extreme is the brewers gift to Anders on the 1 year aniversary for the opening of Nørrebro Bryghus.

Norrebro Bryghus - Skargaards Porter: An authentic Porter at 6% ABV.

Mikkeller - Stateside IPA: Mikkellers tribute to american micro-brew.

Olfabrikken - 100 Gram IPA: This is the second in a range of Ølfabrikken special ales.

New Norwegian Beer:

Nogne-O - Saison: Saison fra Nøgne Ø er flaskemodnet, dvs. upasteurisert og ufiltrert.

Nogne-O - Batch #100 Barleywine: A celebration of Nøgne Ø achieving batch #100.

Nogne-O - IPA: 17,5 degrees P, 60 IBU, 7,5 vol% alk. : Semi-dark, malty and very bitter ale.

Nogne - O - Dark Horizon 1st Edition: Dark Horizon is a ’hybrid’ - an ale that pairs the roasted bitterness of coffee with a wine-like complexity.

Haandbryggeriet - Norse Porter:

So the big question here is; When will we see a bunch of Swedish beers over at Belmont???

Seems that both the Danes and the Norwegians have found a way, but that the Swedes have not yet understod the interests of quality beers in the US.

One personal idea is maybe that most of the breweries as above are what I could call "US-inspired breweries", i.e. American IPAs, American Pale Ales, DIPAs etc, and that the Swedes are not in to that, at least not at the same level that the Danes like Mikkeller is playing around with.