It’s a Tuesday night in the O.C., and Mesa is abuzz with a low murmur of conversation. Three couples and a group of four populate the soft brown velour banquettes and chairs; with only 40 seats, four tables is enough for the place to feel alive. We take a seat…
With Saturday’s Dallas Beer Festival canceled, the opportunity to sample two of the strongest beers ever made, along with a couple of rare Mikkeller brews, at Strangeways seemed a fitting enough way to cap off Dallas Beer Week. Brewdog’s Tactical Nuclear Penguin (32 percent ABV) and Sink the Bismarck! (41…
Comedian Doug Stanhope, who performs tonight at Trees, seldom ventures onstage without a drink. Usually it’s a beer. As anti-establishment as he comes off in his act, you might think he would be drawn to products from smaller breweries. If not simply to enjoy superior beers, he seems like someone…
Midway through the first official Dallas Beer Week, you could say things aren’t quite going according to plan. But considering how loosely organized and sporadically publicized the week has been, that’s not especially surprising, even if the cancelation of Saturday’s Dallas Beer Festival is a big disappointment. That said, let’s…
NOOOOOO!Citing lack of advance ticket sales and overcommitment with the simultaneous Dallas and Houston Beer Weeks, Cathy Clark Rascoe confirms that Saturday’s Beer Festival was canceled Tuesday afternoon. Ticket buyers will receive refunds within seven to 10 days, she said.”It was a really hard call,” she said about an hour…
A story in the New York Times Magazine over the weekend examined the practice of cramming in one more drink before the evening ends. According to “Rules for an Honorable Nightcap,” there are, it turns out, many rules. A nightcap should be a one-off, not “one more” of whatever you’re…
Editor’s note: Whitney Filloon, a trained pastry chef, is also a trained drinker. She’ll occasionally write for City of Ate about cocktails and general booziness. “Tastes like pickles.” My shaven-head drinking companion wrinkles his nose slightly and slides my tall glass back across the copper-veneered bar at the People’s Last…
Considering that I don’t get paid by the word here on City of Ate, there is simply too much going on during Dallas Beer Week to list every event taking place this Saturday through the November 19 Dallas Beer Festival in Fair Park (which warrants its own post, coming soon)…
After the first Houston Beer Week last year, Houstonians Cathy Clark Rascoe and husband Jay Rascoe (aka Guns and Tacos) decided Dallas needed its own week to celebrate craft beer as well, as we first told you back in February. Since then, the events planned for Dallas Beer Week, November…
Corey Pond at The Common Table just confirmed that his restaurant, while not in Deep Ellum, will nonetheless be the first to sell Deep Ellum Brewing Company’s beers. The launch party will be 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday, November 12, as part of Dallas Beer Week (much more on…
We’ve already mentioned a handful of them, but today being Halloween, perhaps reading about one particularly excellent pumpkin beer will inspire some of you homebrewers not to waste the chunks of gourd left behind from carving your jack-o-lantern.On the other hand, the scary results of a pumpkin experiment gone awry…
We’ve finally beaten the Germans at their own game. That’s the only rational conclusion one can draw from the results of Oktoberbest 2011, in which the lone Teutonic entry got its ass handed to it. Paul Hightower and Brian Brown, Craft Beer Examiners for Dallas and Plano, respectively, narrowed down…
The judges have spoken. The Elite Eight of our Oktoberbest 2011 have been winnowed down to the quaff-able quartet to be sent on to the Final Pour. And in our quest to determine the best Oktoberfest beer available in North Texas, Dallas Craft Beer Examiner Paul Hightower, Plano Craft Beer…
It’s that time of year, when pumpkin-flavored, -scented and -shaped merchandise invades virtually every supermarket, convenience store, coffee shop, liquor store, restaurant and bar. Pumpkins are everywhere, and each year there’s more pumpkin stuff to sift through. City of Ate wants to help you figure out which pumpkin items are…
Never in the dozen-plus years that I’ve been of legal drinking age have I seen beer as cheap as the $2.99 six-pack of Big Flats 1901 I espied at Walgreen’s the other day. Not even the Schlitz, Natty Light or Beast we drank in college was that cheap. There was…
Dallas loves its half-priced food and drink deals, and we’re no different. That’s why we built the above calendar of half-price food and drink deals, listing the restaurant and time under each day. Every week, we’ll do our best to keep you up-to-date on a large chunk of weekly half-priced…
First off, a big thanks to Observer art director Alexander Flores for the beautiful bracket above. As you can see, Round One of Oktoberbest 2011 is complete; Dallas Craft Beer Examiner Paul Hightower has determined the Texas Division winners, and Plano Craft Beer Examiner Brian Brown has picked which two…
… and were delicious. The end. What, you were expecting a Polack joke? This is Texas, where the butts of our jokes are Aggies or blonds, not Polish people. Not that we have many Polish people to offend, anyway. Apparently, there isn’t enough demand to import Zywiec or Okocimskie beers…
The first round of Oktoberbest 2011 is halfway over, with a couple of surprising upsets and a couple of shocking, bit-spitting failures by favored programs to even make the sweet 16. (Well, actually, they’re just too hard to find in stores, but that doesn’t quite have the same drama.)Plano Craft…
Now that I’ve graded more than 50 beers since introducing the Hophead Beer Scoring System, it seems a good time to take a look back at all of them and list them in order. The system (which I have called by a different name in every post, a running gag…
What with Central Market’s Brewtopia beginning today, Addison’s Oktoberfest starting tomorrow and several beer dinners planned for the rest of the month, there are enough brew events in the next couple weeks that your liver should be in fighting shape by the time October rolls around. Gotta build that tolerance…
Dallas loves its half-priced food and drink deals, and we’re no different. That’s why we built the above calendar of half-price food and drink deals, listing the restaurant and time under each day. Every week, we’ll do our best to keep you up-to-date on a large chunk of weekly half-priced…
