Beantown Brews: A Boston Beer Blog

If you haven’t yet had the pleasure of visiting Sunset Grill & Tap, stop what you are doing right now and go.

GO!

Still here? Okay, maybe you need more information before you can be convinced. Touche, you discriminating beer connoisseur.

Sunset is one of the happiest places in all Boston if you are a beer lover. Boasting well over two-hundred beers on the menu – if you can’t find something to sate your palate here, you aught to call a coroner for your taste buds.

Just check out the menu!

Better still – 61 of these beers are, you guessed it, brewed locally. The menu is divided by style and you can almost always find a local option in any given section.

Sunset also offers Sunset Flights, four 5oz glasses of beer for $8.99 that let you sample some great brews. Two of these flights showcase all local beers.

Local Boston Shuttle has Sam Adams Brick Red, Cisco Whale’s Tail, BBC Coffee Hauz and Allagash White.

New England Happy Camper has Allagash Black cask, BBC Coffee Hauz, Green Monsta and Harpoon UFO.

You can buy beer in various sizes here, including by half and full yard. You buy the yard, you keep the glass.

You can also join the Sunset Yard Club and Tap-Tour. Win prizes and pride by completing euro- and micro beer tours. Complete them enough times and you get you name on a table! Maybe they will add a local beer tour someday…

Still doubting all the magic of Sunset – you can buy smokes there AND, as a matter of principle, no malternatives are ever served at Sunset…ever. They do serve cocktails though, so you can bring your not so beer-loving buddies if you must.

So really now – why are you still reading this blog post? We will be here when you get back.

My soon-to-be sister-in-law commissioned me to brew her a batch of beer for her up coming farm-day party. She wanted something summery, so I immediately thought Hefeweizen.

I found a fantastically simple recipe in The Complete Joy of Homebrewing, which I only slighty tweaked. Here is the recipe.

Variation of the Lovebite Weizenbier

6.6 lbs half-and-half wheat and barley malt extract syrup.

3/4oz. Tettnanger hops substituted for the Hallertauer. I like the mild honeylike tones of this hop and it has a similar alpha acid content appropriate for a hefe. They are boiling hops and go right on in with the malt for the duration of the boil.

German wheat beer-type yeast . I am making two batches. One with a Bavarian WYeast the other with a German WYeast. This is a simple beer with an opportunity to showcase two wonderful yeast strains. Hefeweizens are really all about the yeast and I am anxious to taste the differences between these two brews.

3/4c. Corn Sugar – to prime for bottling.

I typically do double-stage fermentation, but this recipe calls for single. I am not overly concerned with clearing the beer since hefes are cloudy anyhow, and if a bit of yeast makes it in the bottle, all the better! After fermentaion; prime and bottle it for 2 weeks. Bingo, bango – delicious hefeweizen.

As for the question of fruit vs. no fruit – I will be bringing some lemons to the farm-day celebration just in case anyone would like to add it to the beer. But as for my beer, that is staying lemon free.

A good beer needs no augmentation.