My friends! Beer Week is once again finally upon us! That reminds me, with Beer Week here, I'm reminded that a few of my earliest posts dealt with last year's goings on. I totally glossed right past my one year anniversary! So let me take this opportunity to belatedly thank each and every person who has checked in here every other day over the past year. It's so cool and totally gratifying that people get a kick out of this stuff. It's also cool because it makes that 'est. 2012' up in the masthead look slightly less preposterous. Stay tuned, because I have zero plans of shutting this thing down any time soon. There's way too much beer that I haven't had. Anyway, now that that's out of the way, back to Beer Week and more importantly, this beer. Last year to celebrate the inaugural Beer Week all of the local brewers got together at Mt. Carmel to produce a big, monstrously hopped barleywine. A beer that I was able to try and thoroughly enjoy. But also a beer that I am kicking myself to this day for not grabbing a six pack of. I imagine it would've aged amazingly. If anybody was forward thinking enough to lay a few bottles of that down let me know how they turned out! For this year's version Rivertown handled the brewing and bottling. There were also a few more cooks in the kitchen on this one. But in this case, that is categorically an advantage, as it just means that there are more Cincinnati breweries throwing their two cents in. Collaborating on Embree's Northern Dark Baltic Porter are Blank Slate, Christian Moerlein, 50 West, Great Crescent, Listermann, Moerlein Lager House, Mt. Carmel, Rivertown, Rock Bottom, Samuel Adams, and Triple Digit. Phew! I can't imagine there are too may cities in America that can boast too many more great craft breweries than that. OK, I've rambled enough. Let's see what we've got here. To the beer!
