It has come to our attention that we have a pair of tickets for today and tomorrow’s Yankee games. They’re both at 1pm. Anybody want’em? First come, first served. Come to the green door at 79 N 11th St and hit the buzzer.

We’re pouring beer at the Williamsburg Waterfront concerts all summer long. On Friday, July 2nd Faith No More will play their first East Coast show in a long, long time. Also, we got our mitts on some VIP tickets.

Email info@brooklynbrewery.com with “FNM Part 1″ in the subject line for your chance to win a pair to Friday’s 5pm show.

Thankfully, Brooklyn Brewery got roped into sponsoring the Friar’s Club Improv & Sketch Competition this weekend. It’s being held at Upright Citizen’s Brigade Theater. Fine, we’ll call it UCB from now on. Happy? You’d be happier if you won a pair of tickets to Saturday’s show and after party at The Actual Friar’s Club Where Weird Stuff Probably Happens All The Time.

For your chance to win a pair of tickets, email info@brooklynbrewery.com with “Friar’s Club” in the subject field. And try to be funny about it.

To learn more about the Competition go here.

To purchase tickets go here.

FrISC Sketch Competition
Friday, June 25th and Saturday, June 26th
7:30pm
UCB Theatre – 307 w 26 St.

Listen, Band of Horses and Grizzly Bear and a woman are playing a concert in East River Park which is right around the corner from the brewery. It’s the first show of many that will occur during the warm months of the year that we refer to as SUMMER. And Brooklyn Brewery will be pouring beer at all of the shows during the SUMMER. We’ ve also been given tickets to these SUMMER shows that we can do whatever we want with. Right now we want to give some of them to you, dear reader. SUMMER. Email info@brooklynbrewery.com right now with “SUMMER” in the subject line for your chance to win a pair of VIP tickets to Sunday’s SUMMER show.

Do it.

By the feel of the last two days you wouldn’t know it but, guys, summer is nearly here. To help nudge Mother Nature along we’re releasing two Spring/Summer beers tonight at the brewery. One, Sorachi Ace, is an old friend who’s back for another spell in the limelight, this time in re-fermented bottle form. Another, Brooklyn Buzz Bomb, is a brand spanking new Brewmaster’s Reserve release. Descriptions of both beers can be found below.

But FIRST, let’s do some giveaways. The first handful of loyal Brooklyn Brewery Blog readers to email “Sorachi Ace In The Place” to info@brooklynbrewery.com will win a pair of spots on the guestlist for tonight’s party at The Brewery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. To email you go!

Brooklyn Sorachi Ace Ale

Most Brooklyn beers are made with a blend of hop varietals. As a chef does with spices, we look to get the best qualities of each hop and create a harmony of flavors and aromas. However, a few years ago, our brewmaster ran into a hop unique enough to deserve its own moment in the sun. A large Japanese brewery first developed the hop variety “Sorachi Ace” in 1988. A cross between the British “Brewer’s Gold” and the Czech “Saaz” varieties, it exhibited a quality that was unexpected – it smelled really lemony. The unique flavor of Sorachi Ace was bypassed by the big brewers, but we thought it was pretty cool. So we made a special beer with it, and added the beer to our Brewmaster’s Reserve special draft beer program last year. Most Brewmaster’s Reserve beers are only available for a short time, and then they’re gone. But we liked this one so much, we decided to bring it back and give it the star treatment.

Brooklyn Sorachi Ace is a classic saison, a cracklingly dry, hoppy unfiltered golden farmhouse ale, but made entirely with now-rare Sorachi Ace hops grown by a single farm in Oregon. We ferment it with our special Belgian ale strain, and then add more Sorachi Ace hops post-fermentation. After the dry-hopping, the beer emerges with a bright spicy lemongrass/lemon zest aroma backed by a wonderfully clean malt flavor. From here we’ve taken it through 100% bottle re-fermentation with Champagne yeast, giving it fine pin-point carbonation and a beautiful pillowy foam. It tastes like sunshine in a glass, and that suits us just fine, especially with seafood dishes and fresh cheeses. It’ll be just the thing on nice summer days and beyond. We only made 2500 cases, and to tell you the honest truth, we pretty much made it for ourselves. But beer’s no fun if you don’t share, so we do hope you’ll drink some with us.

Brooklyn Buzz Bomb Ale

In medieval Europe, ale graced the tables of everyone from paupers to kings, but honey wine, called mead, was largely reserved for the rich. In the days before table sugar came from the tropical parts of the world, honey was the only intensely sweet thing that many people had access to. Honey was expensive – after all, a man can only keep so many bees. Meads were also expensive, but people often brought ale and mead together in a popular drink called “braggott”. Sometimes these braggotts were simply blends, but the best of them had the grain and honey extracts fermented together, bringing both sets of flavors into a unified whole. To tell the truth, our brewmaster hadn’t spent much time thinking about braggott until last summer, when he ran into Nathaniel and Thatcher Martin at the New Amsterdam Market in New York City. The Martin brothers were pouring small samples of their mead, called Brooklyn Buzz. It was pretty delicious, and they all got talking about honey. It turned out that the Martins source their raw wildflower honey from the same place that Brooklyn Brewery does – Tremblay Farms in upstate New York.

And now, as summer smiles upon us once more, we bring you the result of last summer’s stroll through the market – Brooklyn Buzz Bomb Ale. We’ve used Alan Tremblay’s wildflower honey in a few of our beers, most notably Brooklyn Local 2. In Brooklyn Buzz Bomb, the honey takes center stage, making up a full 25% of the fermentable sugar. We added the honey to the kettle along with a gentle hopping and a lilt of orange peel. Is the beer sweet? Actually, not at all – honey is quite fermentable and our Belgian ale yeast is very hungry. Brooklyn Buzz Bomb has a bright gold color and a spicy floral aroma showing distinctive honey notes. The palate is light, crisp, and very dry, showing a zing of acidity and a quick burst of fruit. Complex floral, honey and spice flavors linger in the bone-dry finish. Brooklyn Buzz Bomb is a perfect match for summer foods – salads, barbecue, shrimp dishes, hummus, grilled salmon, brunch dishes and fresh goat cheese. It’s also very pleasant all by itself, as you smell the flowers, feel the sun dapple through the trees, listen to the birds sing and wonder what it was you really liked about snow anyway.

Do you guys remember that movie about the old people singing rock ‘n roll songs? Well now they’re on their very first American tour and they’re coming to the Brooklyn’s venerable St Ann’s Warehouse. Because we’re in good with St Ann’s, they’ve given us a couple of free passes that come with a Brooklyn Brewery sponsored after party.

Email info@brooklynbrewery.com with “Young@Heart” in the subject line for your chance to win passes to the 3pm performance on Sunday, April 25th.

To learn more about Young@Heart and buy tickets like a normal person go here.

Big news! Brooklyn Brewery  is co-hosting “Computer Blip Bloop Bullshit!” at Club DeVille in Austin along with our pals Found Footage Festival and Busted Tees. FFF is celebrating the success of the new website and tour. Brooklyn Brewery is celebrating its now-availability in Austin. And Busted Tees, another year as the tits of funny T-shirts.

This is an official SXSW Interactive party, but good news: NO badges or wristbands required. So yeah. Come and bring your friends. Monday night, March 15. It’s a free party. Everyone is invited, but you must be 21+ to attend.

To entertain you:

The Black And White Years (rock)

The Laughing (rock)

Mike & The Moonpies (honky-tonk).

Found Footage Fest VHS Favorites

DJ Jester The Filipino Fist

To wet your whistle: Brooklyn Brewery beer, of course.

Sponsored by the Found Footage Festival, Busted Tees, Brooklyn Brewery, A.V. Club, Maria the Date Coach, and The Onion.

From The AV Club Austin

Every day, the human race places more of its trust in computers, and where exactly does that get us? Identity theft, fapping creeps behind every turn of the Chatroulette wheel, and a tangle of government-sponsored wires waiting for the day they can finally unleash the nuclear weapons. Before artificial intelligence can revolt, the VHS revivalists of the Found Footage Film Festival fire a shot at their would-be cybernetic oppressors, hosting a pre-SXSW party with the analog-friendly likes of synth-heads The Black And White Years, red-blooded honky-tonkers Mike And The Moonpies, and The Laughing, whose techno-tribalist triumph Fever has enough future-fret to kill all your iLust. DJ Jester The Filipino Fist makes musical juxtapositions the old fashioned way—on turntables—completing the sense that neither computers nor the Internet have done a lick of good for the evening’s acts. To win tickets to this event, e-mailrsvpaustin@theonion.com.

The latest invention from our intrepid brewing team is rolling to a better beer bar near you. Read Dark Matter’s creation story from Brewmaster Garrett Oliver below, and find out how you can win a pair of tickets to next week’s launch party.

Cosmologists tell us that the universe was made by a massive explosion called the Big Bang. And in this Big Bang was created a material called “dark matter”, which accounts for 95% of the mass of the universe and actually binds the universe together. Well, that sounds pretty heavy. But it’s theoretical. Here in Brooklyn, our cosmology is a bit different.

In the beginning, there was Black Ops. Or perhaps not. Beer does have its mysteries. Anyhow, they say that back in 2007, a small amount of Dark Matter was created alongside Black Ops, but very few people had an opportunity to taste it. The Brooklyn Brewing Team decided that this shortage was unfortunate – plenty of Dark Matter for themselves, but not enough to share with all their friends. So last autumn they decided to recreate Dark Matter and open up the Brooklyn Barrel Room to a wider world. Brooklyn Dark Matter is a robust brown ale aged for four months in bourbon and rye whiskey barrels. Some barrels previously held Black Ops, some hosted The Manhattan Project, others came straight from the distilleries as soon as the whiskey was decanted. We’ve blended these barrels to create a beer full of caramel and chocolate flavors heightened by vanilla-like oak notes and hints of the barrels’ previous tenants. The result is a smooth, rich beer that really loves food, from fried or roasted chicken to char-grilled steak, barbecue, pork chops and even monkfish. And on some chilly evening in late winter, or perhaps the first warm night of spring, we hope that you may be tempted to believe that Dark Matter really does bind the universe together.

– Garrett Oliver

The first 25 drinkers to email info@brooklynbrewery.com with “Dark Matter Winner” will win passes for two to THIS MONDAY’s party (March 8th, 7:30pm – 10:30pm) at The Brewery. Get to it!

We’re teaming up with our friends next door at Brooklyn Bowl to put on an all-Brooklyn extravaganza of sorts.

This Sunday, February 21st marks the first Local X Local, a monthly event presented by us & Brooklyn Bowl which celebrates Brooklyn’s local art & music community. This edition of Local X Local features The Phenomenal Handclap Band. The Brewery & The Bowl invite you to a special night of music, art, and food.

7pm – 10pm :: $2 Brewery Draft Special with RSVP on Facebook here :: http://bit.ly/BBLxL1
Brooklyn’s finest graphic design and live t-shirt printing team, Peripheral Media Projects, will be on-hand screening and selling custom shirts. Check them out here: www.peripheralmediaprojects.com

Join Greenhorn’s director Severine v T Fleming + Greenpoint’s own farmer Annie Novak of the Eagle Street Rooftop Farm to plot, plan+ prepare for your summer garden on rooftop, fire escape, backyard or scrap of lot. They’ll bring seed catalogs, minipaks, garden planning materials and supplies– and will be available for free consultations and pep talks. Get your green on!

Information on greenhorns www.thegreenhorns.net/ www.thegreenhorns.wordpress.com Info on food education with growing chefs www.GrowingChefs.org

Check out photos of the afterparty, some upside right and some not so much.

Comedian and friend of the brewery, Liam McEneaney has gathered some heavy hitting comics for a benefit to fight cancer, tonight. We liked the idea and therefore donated some beer for the afterparty. See more below.

From NYTimes.com

Liam McEneaney, the floppy-haired Comedy Central and VH1 regular, will host “We’ll Kick Cancer’s Butt!” tonight at Comix. The fund-raising event, sponsored by The Onion, will help raise money for The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. It will feature sets by John Oliver of “The Daily Show,” Kristen Schaal from “Flight of the Conchords,” Caroline Rhea of “The Tonight Show,” Triumph the Insult Comic Dog and others. A nerdy raffle is also on the lineup featuring such special prizes as a new iPod Touch courtesy of TekServe and an autographed script of Fox’s “The Family Guy.” Stay for the free beer afterparty sponsored by Brooklyn Brewery.

If you want, you can buy tickets here.