Raise Your Pints Beer Dinner, 7-18-09

Raise Your Pints and the Keg and Barrel are presenting A South Mississippi Beer Dinner on July 18, 2009.

For more details download the flyer or visit the Raise Your Pints website.

Give a Pint...Get a Pint

Give a pint of blood and get a free pint of Lazy Magnolia beer.
June 23-25, 2009 / noon-7pm

Click the image below for details.

Beer Tasting Dinner, June 30, 2009, Mint Restaurant (Ridgeland, MS)

Limited Seating and Reservations - Only $30/person

Enjoy some unique Southern creations from Chef David Ferris paired with some fine brews from Craft Brewers Alliance. Special guest Scott Heath from CAI will speak and take questions on the newest offerings from the Widmer Brothers Brewery of Portland, Oregan and Redhook Brewery of Seattle, Washington.

Hosted by: Craft Brewers Alliance, Southern Beverage and Mint The Restaurant

Call 601-898-MINT to reserve a seat.

Beer America TV: Lazy Magnolia Brewery

Lazy Magnolia Brewery, 2009 CBC - Ep. 62 | Beer America TV - Craft Beer in Motion!

Can raising Mississippi's beer ABW limit (5%) help small businesses?

Look at what it's done for a few Alabama businesses since they raised their limit from 6% to 13.9% maximum Alcohol By Volume content of beer.

At the Southside bar J. Clyde, business is up 50 percent since the newly legal beers arrived, while customers at Western Supermarket in Mountain Brook are snapping them up so fast that the shelves barely stay stocked .... "When we would go out and start restocking shelves, sometimes it never got back on the shelves. Customers would come up and buy it off the delivery cart,"

And at Birmingham's Vulcan Beverage, beer lovers stood in a line that extended out the door to the neighboring building last week

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Help Mississippi raise their limit (currently at 5% Alcohol By Weight and the only state in the U.S. with such a low limit) by joining Raise Your Pints.

Alabama's new beer legislation will be good for business, vendors say

Daily Home, Katherine Poythress
06-03-2009

Restaurant and package store owners in Talladega County said the state's new legislation allowing higher alcohol contents in beer will likely improve their business.

We're on the bandwagon as far as the Free the Hops movement goes, said Buttermilk Hill restaurant owner Kara McClendon Bacchi. This is definitely a step in the right direction to get Alabama out of the Dark Ages.

Buttermilk Hill, in Sylacauga, has already been selling microbrews, Bacchi said, but the process of acquiring them and conforming to Alabama state law was difficult. Until May 22, when Gov. Bob Riley signed the Gourmet Beer Bill into law, Alabama law prohibited the sale of beers exceeding six percent alcohol by volume (ABV). The new law, energetically lobbied for by Free the Hops, a specialty beer advocacy group, allows the sale of beers with ABVs of up to 13.9 percent. This means vendors can now tap into a diverse pool of specialty beers to provide a wider range of products to their customers than they have been able to in the past.

It will be good for business, said Bob Ahmed, manager of CC's Tobacco and Package Store in Talladega. It will improve the business a lot, definitely.

He said Tuesday morning a lot of customers had already asked him about the availability of any new specialty beers.

We're excited, Bacchi said. I don't know how many more beers we'll be able to provide, though, because that's been off the radar until now.

She said the number of specialty beer labels available is overwhelming. Which beers she carries will depend largely on what her suppliers carry, and how well the specialty beer companies advertise their products in the newly opened market.

It would take a lot of research to figure out what needs to be offered, Bacchi explained. She relies largely on her customers for guidance about what liquors and beers to have ready to pour.

The consumers, though, are as much at a disadvantage as we are when it comes to determining what they like and what they want, she said. They don't know what they want, unless they have lived somewhere else before, where these specialty beers were available. The marketing will really determine what they want.

Bacchi has a number of ideas for how to begin introducing her customers to some of the new brews as they become available, she said. Among these include beer dinners, instead of the traditional wine dinners, in which the beer would play a central role in the dining experience. Other ideas include beer tastings and featuring a beer of the month.

Some alcohol vendors will conduct their business as usual, unaffected by the Gourmet Beer Bill's passage.

I don't think that will be a benefit to me at all, said a lounge owner in Talladega.

That does not curb the enthusiasm of consumers eager to try the new offerings, and store owners just as eager to supply them.

If anybody is going to take advantage of it, I think the package stores should, said Lee Goodwin of Sylacauga. Because I'm not going to want to pay restaurant or bar prices, but I just want to try new beers sometimes.

Ahmed said his suppliers have not yet obtained any high-ABV beers, but he expects within the next month to be able to meet consumer demand for the specialty brews. Although Jefferson County suppliers gambled on the legislation by purchasing specialty beers in advance of its passage, Ahmed said Talladega County will not be far behind now that the hops have been freed.

We'll be able to sell pretty much anything now, Bacchi said.

With the exception of beers in containers larger than 16 ounces. That is the next battle for Free the Hops.