FuzzyBrew

Tickets are on sale for the third annual Tennessee Cigar and Brew Festival, which will feature craft beer, homebrew and cigars next month in Jackson.

The festival will be at the Jackson Fairgrounds on October 29 from noon to 4 p.m.

Beer from Memphis’ Ghost River Brewing and Nashville’s Yazoo Brewing Company will be served alongside beer from Stone Brewing Co., Sierra Nevada Brewing Co., Dogfish Head, Victory Brewing Company and others.

Homebrew will be on tap as well, with beers from Memphis’ homebrew club, the Bluff City Brewers & Connoisseurs, and Belgian beers from Hack’s Whacked Homebrew.

Tickets can be purchased online now for $20.

Well, it’s official. Discovery Channel’s show about the craft beer business, Brew Masters, has been canned.

The  web has been abuzz  this week with accusations that “Big Beer” threatened to pull ads from the Discovery Channel if Brew Masters was kept on the air. Brew Masters stars Dogfish Head’s Sam Caligione, who takes viewers across the globe in search of exotic ingredients for his beers.

The controversy started with a couple of tweets from the Travel Channel’s Anthony Bourdain, host of No Reservations. (No Reservations shares the same production team as Brewmasters.)

Other sources have since confirmed the cancellation. Five episodes have aired, though a sixth episode of Brew Masters focusing on a New York rooftop brewpub involving Caligione, may still air when the eatery opens this summer.

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Anyway, if you got hooked on Brew Masters, you’ll appreciate Brew Minions, a parody from the guys at Ska Brewing.

It’s 22-minutes long, which is too damn long. It could use a good edit. But Caligione, who is the butt of many of the jokes, was good-natured enough to make a cameo in the video, and it’s worth checking out.

Sam Calagione just posted the answer to the question a bunch of us Tennesseans have been asking all morning since we heard the rumor. Distributors in Tennessee, Indiana, Wisconsin and Rhode Island have been notified they’ll be getting no more Dogfish Head craft beers.

Dogfish Head just can’t keep up with production to continue distribution everywhere it was previously available.

So it is bittersweet for us to announce that we are pulling out of, or limiting some of our core beers from, a number of states. Yes this sucks. The glass-half-full view is that we (and a handful of other U.S. craft breweries making similar moves) have to do this because your numbers the number of U.S. drinkers buying and enjoying craft beer – are growing so quickly! [source]

It was a little unclear from Sam’s blog post if distribution was going to totally end in Tennessee or it was just going to be more limited, but Terry DeRanzo at Southwest Beverage and Distributing has confirmed Dogfish Head is completely pulling out.

“We’re very disappointed,” she said. No doubt.

She said Southwest has been out of Dogfish’s low-gravity brews for about a month, though they’ve got some high-gravity Aprihop left, which you might be able to find at Busters, Joe’s Wine & Liquors, Natalies Liquor Warehouse or Stellar Cellar. You might still be able to find low-gravity Dogfish at grocery stores like Whole Foods and Freshmarket.

(UPDATE: Just to clarify, these stores I listed are not an exhaustive list of where Dogfish Head is available. There are several stores in Memphis and Jackson that sell Dogfish Head.)

Dogfish has a “Fish Finder” online to help you figure out where you can get it, but it hasn’t been updated yet.

You said it, Sam. This sucks.

I guess I’d better go make a beer run. (Post-beer-run pic below.)

In this post I continue to explore the random video coverage I took with my new little digital videocam.

First up we have friend of FuzzyBrew, Jeff, reviewing Dogfish Head‘s Squall. Jeff is a serious man of few words. Following Jeff is Mike post-World Wide Stout, which also put me on my ass. The video concludes with some gentle harassment of Mike by the other two-thirds of FuzzyBrew.