Deep Ellum Brewing Co. is launching what founder John Reardon says may be their best beer yet tonight at Goodfriend Beer Garden. After enjoying a sample bottle, I am inclined to agree. Also featured in the 6 p.m. tap takeover are 2011 and 2012 Darkest Hour (my other candidate in…
American wine no longer has the second-class status it had years ago. California wineries are widely respected. The Washington Post and the New York Daily News have both declared Virginia to be the next “it” place for wine lovers. So how does Texas wine match up against the world’s best?…
Last Saturday’s Texas Brewvolution, the kickoff party for North Texas Beer Week, featured a couple dozen Texas breweries — the most I’ve seen under one roof — some rare finds from other great craft breweries across the country, and about half the attendees it should have had. I got to…
While out with friends last Friday night, Rachel Anne Ayers found herself at The Garage, one in a chain of bars that sits in Denton’s Fry Street area and caters to one thing: “How Cheaply Can I Get Drunk?” The answer: quite cheaply. It’s the kind of bar that’s heavily…
Beer and wine certainly have the run of the alcoholic festival circuit. Home brewers competitions, wine tastings, entire dinners built out of dishes incorporating beer — the list goes on. But there’s no reason whiskey shouldn’t share some of that spotlight. Whiskey is a unique booze. In the popular imagination…
The growler is an efficient and environmentally friendly way for craft beer drinkers to indulge their potable of choice. You pick up a 32 or 64 ounce glass jug, down your favorite beer, then get it refilled. The kicker is you can’t just stick one under a tap. Your beer…
The Wall Street Journal ran an article this week about a handy little gadget you might want to get in line for. A straight line. And hold your hands down to your side. Breathometer Inc. makes a smartphone breathalyzer test that can instantly tell users if their blood alcohol level…
The last time I mentioned sour beer it was as an aside in a post about the appeal of Budweiser and other mass-produced domestic beers. I’ve always been an equal opportunity imbiber, as happy with a cold, crisp lager cranked out of a factory brewery as I am with a…
Whip out your club card (or haul ass past the greeter), because Sam’s has a sweet deal for you. Well, it’s not so much sweet as it is oaky and a little like drinking fire. Or gasoline. Or gasoline on fire. The Huffington Post, MSN and others picked up on…
With the emergence of Dallas’ craft cocktail scene, bartenders — OK, fine, mixologists — have come to expect the city’s notoriously conservative orderers utter those two magic words: “surprise me.” It’s an approach I’ve been taking more and more over the last year, and as a result I’ve been on…
Dallas loves its half-priced food and drink deals. That’s why we built this calendar of half-price food and drink specials, listing the restaurant, special and time under each date. We’ll do our best to keep you up-to-date on a large chunk of weekly half-priced food and drink specials in town…
The concoction you see above is 32 ounces of Adios Motherfucker. “What’s an Adios Motherfucker?” you might be asking. Well, according to the internet, it’s a mixture of rum, gin, vodka, tequila, blue curacao, and 7-Up. It’s known as the drink of destruction, one that sends you well over the…
There are few food and drink trends that have exploded over the past decade as much as craft beer, and Dallas is finally riding the frothy wave. And within the craft beer megatrend, there’s been a niche that has seen even more voracious growth: “good” canned beer. With the rush…
Summertime in Dallas is a scorcher, and sometimes there’s no better way to escape the heat than by sipping on an ice cold cocktail. We set out to find some of the best summertime drinks in Dallas and asked bartenders from around town to create some of their favorite seasonal…
It’s summer. It’s hot. If you must be outside, you should be hydrating. And by “hydrating,” I mean “drinking beers.” If you’ve lived through any summers at all in Dallas, you know that all that mandatory hydration can get expensive if you’ve got yourself a craft beer habit. For this…
It’s Fourth of July Eve, the 12th-most popular eve of them all. It’s also gorgeous outside, which means your favorite watering hole has broken out the patio furniture and the most deliberately gaudy piece of glassware: the schooner. I despise this awful drink innovation. This bloated goblet has ruined the…
There is a thing about guilty pleasures — other than the fact that we all have one — and that is we usually prefer to keep them out of sight of other humans. Sure, we might like to drink straight out of the milk carton or have a heart-felt air…
Budweiser has so many bad ideas. For instance, putting a Clydesdale’a handler alongside a parade route when children are milling about. Everyone knows a Clydesdale will make a run for it if it sees the handler who raised from a foal before selling it to a beer company. Horses slip…
The marriage of Spune Productions and The Common Table may be the best thing that has ever happened to local craft brew fans whose music taste extends beyond cover bands and Top 40 DJs as well as music fans who’d prefer something better than $8 pints of Bud Light. Saturday’s…
More than two hours in to the second iteration of Big Texas Beer Fest, I ran into organizer Chad Montgomery and asked him what beers he’d had so far that really impressed him. The answer shocked me: He hadn’t had a sip yet, he was so busy. Montgomery’s dedication to…
Yesterday I received a box full of suburban “camping” gear and a couple of sample beers from Shock Top, a package that stands as the perfect symbol of Anheuser-Busch InBev’s utter contempt for and cluelessness about the culture of craft beer. Packed inside a shock-resistant SwissGear Synergy laptop backpack, which…
Saint Arnold is now on No. 13 in its Divine Reserve series, with Monday’s release of a strong dark Belgian-style ale. As always, it’s a very limited release, with social media abuzz over sightings of the elusive beer. I called a few Dallas retailers Monday afternoon to find out if…
