Tasty Beverage Company | Raleigh, North Carolina Beer Store

Super Bowl Sunday Fun Fest

The Super Bowl is America’s largest sporting event and refrigerators across the country are going to be stocked with big name beers from multinational corporations. This year, why not enjoy the game with craft beer brewed by small, independent brewers from the teams’ home towns? To make your Super Bowl Sunday beer selections easier, we’ve featured breweries from Baltimore and San Francisco both here and on the shelves.

Pulling for the Baltimore Ravens this Sunday? Check out the incredible offerings from Baltimore’s own Brian Strumke of Stillwater Artisanal Ales.  Most of his beers are Belgian-style farmhouse saisons or at least pay homage to the style. The Super Bowl ranks right behind Thanksgiving in regards to food consumption, and saisons pair excellently with foods of all kind, even chicken wings. You could also enjoy some of the fine beers from Clipper City’s lineup of Heavy Seas beers. They offer a wide selection of styles, from an “Uber Pils” to an Imperial Stout, so you can surely find something to please everybody.

On the other side of the country, San Francisco is home to some great breweries as well. Anchor Brewing is one of America’s oldest breweries, with roots dating back to the California gold rush. Whether your drinking their traditional Anchor Steam Beer, a Brekle’s Brown or their porter, you’ll be showing your love for the 49ers and supporting an American owned and operated company. 21st Amendment Brewery also has its heart in San Francisco. They’ve been distributing to North Carolina for just over a year now and their canned beers have become favorite of ours and our customers alike.  The Bitter American is a sessionable hop-forward pale ale that would be perfect for drinking during the big game.

The big boys will spend millions of dollars on ads trying to tell you what to drink by making you laugh or pulling at your heartstrings. We thank you for not being so easily persuaded and respecting your tastebuds. Have a fun and safe Sunday with your friends and family.

Announcing SAISON-A-THON

Hello Internet browser!

If you like things that taste great, you probably like saisons. I love them. And so, I wanted to create an excuse for Tasty Beverage to have a variety of saisons on tap at once. If you are not familiar with them, saisons (saison, farmhouse ale, and biere de garde are sometimes used interchangeably) are beers that are most often refreshing in character. They may be floral, herbal, fruity, grassy, hoppy, yeasty, funky, dry, and / or sweet. And sometimes, in apparent contradiction, they may be all of these things. The style is more open to interpretation than many or most, and that is another part of the fun.

As it turns out, “saison” is French for “season”. As a verb, to season is to make some thing taste spectacular by adding herbs and spices and such to it. Brewers of saisons often do this. As a noun, season refers to any of the four, nearly equal portions of a year of which you are likely already familiar. Spring is one of them, and on Tuesday, March 20, 2012 it will become spring in the northern hemisphere. And I can not wait. Hooray for the March equinox. In celebration of the end of winter and the beginning of spring, the warmer and more pleasant weather to come, and [of course!] delicious beer; Tasty Beverage Co. will host a SAISON-A-THON fun time during the first week of spring, beginning on March 20. This will involve a variety of saisons on tap and in the bottle for our enjoyment and yours. Hooray!

I am excited about the delicious tastes I will taste during this week. I am excited for you to taste these tastes, too. Please join us and fall in love with saisons if you are not already. Rekindle if necessary. This would be a wise decision. If it is sadly not possible for you to join us, please celebrate SAISON-A-THON in your own way, how ever you see fit! To see what other people are already planning, visit saisonathon.com. Oh yes. Good times in deed!

If you are looking for tasty saisons, Dupont, Fantome, Ommegang, Stillwater, and Victory make some of our favorites. There are plenty more, so be sure to explore. Chombers!

Add SAISON-A-THON to your calendar! It will begin on Tuesday, March 20, 2012 and continuing through the week. I think my mouth can already taste the goodness. Yes!

Holidays and Beer Events

Happy Days!

Hello everyone. We hope everyone is doing well preparing for festivities and good times for Christmas and the New Year. Hopefully you shall have some relaxing time with family and friends once the craziness of getting ready subsides. Here are some updates to things going on in Tasty Land.

We have a large amount of great Holiday and Christmas beers in stock right now. A few of our favorites that we think will add to your experience of Christmas are The Bruery’s 4 Calling Birds, Delirium Noël, Fantôme de Noël, and Ommegang Adoration. A large amount of tasty stouts and dark beers come out around this time so that they may warm you up from a cold day or night. North Carolina does not always have consistent cold weather during this time, but these beers are still available to be enjoyed.

In addition to the many fine beers we have in stock, we also offer gift cards, local salami, cheeses, crackers, and mustards (made with beer). We love all of the foods that we carry in our store. These things may add to the goodness of your gatherings. You may also want to visit the newest addition to the Raleigh Depot building, Videri Chocolate Factory, to pick up some tasty Raleigh made chocolates for your enjoyment.

This evening (12/20) we will be tapping a keg of Terrapin Wake-N-Bake and Founder’s Breakfast Stout at the same time to see which of these delicious libations are more popular to the masses. We love them both. We think this will help you get in a festive mood of happiness.

Our holiday hours this upcoming weekend will be:

Friday (12/23) 11am-10pm
Saturday (12/24) 11am-5pm (Bar will be closed)
Christmas Day – Closed
Monday (12/26) – Closed

We wish you the best Christmas and New Year celebration ever! Be safe and have fun please!

Thanksgiving Meal Beer Pairing

The suggestion of pairing food with wine is prevalent in today’s society, however, food being paired with beer is sadly still not a mainstream notion.  That said, as beer enthusiasts well know, beer has the ability to be the perfect accompaniment to everything on your Turkey Day table.

For appetizers & h’orderves, we recommend starting with a light Belgian-style Pale Ale. Something along the lines of Brooklyn’s Local 1 or Duvel would be a great start, as they are world class beverages that also won’t offend anybody’s palettes.

“The key to great Thanksgiving beers is caramelization,” says Garrett Oliver, brewmaster at Brooklyn Brewery. “It’s the caramelized flavors of the turkey skin, the gravy and many other elements of the meal that tie the whole thing together. I’ve always enjoyed beer far more than wine with Thanksgiving dinner, and I know plenty of other people do also, I’ve pretty much converted everybody I know!”

Following Oliver’s suggestion, French and Belgian farmhouse and abbey ales make a great pairing to the best meal of the year. La Choulette Ambrée is a French Bière de Garde and certainly fits the bill. It has dark fruit notes, rich caramel malt flavors and just a slight amount of farmhouse funk and spice. Additionaly, a solid Saison would not be out of the question either. We recommend anything from the Stillwater portfolio, my personal preference being Cellar Door. Either option would provide a counter to the richness of the meal, without overpowering any flavors.

For dessert, I usually just pass the pumpkin pie and go for The Bruery’s Autumn Maple as my dessert.  However, if you’re looking to pair your dessert with a beer, one could always reach for something bourbon-barrel aged.  Allagash Curieux or Founder’s Backwoods Bastard would certainly do the trick. Finally, a nice stout is the perfect companion for some after-meal lounging, providing the chocolate and espresso flavors people crave after big meal. Cheers!

Welcome To Our Website!

Hello friends! Our new website is now live. We’ll be enhancing it over time, but we hope this improves your experience with Tasty Beverage Company.

When you first arrive to the site you’ll see our most upcoming events, recent blog posts, our featured beer and easy access to the rest of the site. The beer page will keep you up to date on what we currently have on tap and what’s new on the shelf. We’ll do our best to keep it updated with up to the minute information, but we still recommend following us on Twitter and liking us on Facebook. The events page features information about all of the good times we have coming up at the store.  Lastly, we hope to use this blog to provide you with updates about the store, information about craft beer and recaps of events.

Thanks for all of your support over the past few months. We hope to see you soon!