Growing up in the Chicago area, it was always the highlight of the summer to go visit my grandparents at their house in northern Wisconsin. When we were younger, my grandpa would take my brother and I down snowmobile and logging trails and look for wild berries. We’d come back with a couple of small buckets and mostly put those berries in our cereal the next few days. While we would also pick some blueberries, the blackberries and raspberries…
Ahhh, German beer. There’s just something about the thought of it that conjures up so many vivid images. Men in lederhosen and alpine hats, women in Dirndl dresses holding steins half the size of them, a polka band in the background while the smoke from grilled sausages gently wisps through the air. Maybe I’m just thinking about Oktoberfest. Hmmm… In either case, the Germans make some of the finest beer in the land. It is always crisp, clean, expertly…
Several members of our staff, as well as myself, are legitimate Dead Heads. The first album we listened to on our first ever batch was Europe ’72. Our bar manager has the Steal Your Face logo tattoed on his leg. So when the Grateful Dead announced they were going to perform some reunion shows, we knew we had to make a beer to commemorate the occasion. Dogfish Head had already brewed a beer with granola and American hops named…
The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan was the album that took Dylan from an unknown artist to a megastar, with the Beatles listening to it constantly and drawing inspiration from it. For me personally, it was the album that took me from Dylan “appreciator” to Dylan fan. I loved the simplicity of it, Bob alone with his voice, guitar and harmonica. I loved how you could really dive deep into what he was singing about as the focus was firmly on…
I fretted over what style of beer I would brew for Highway 61 Revisited more than any other beer in this series. One of my reasons for that was that I’d argue Highway 61 is Dylan’s most important album. It was released about five months after his landmark Bringing It All Back Home album, in which he had “gone electric” for the first time on the first side of the album. This move alienated and infuriated members of the…
With Memorial Day weekend behind us, we are now unofficially into summer. Sure, the first “real” day of summer isn’t for almost another month, but we’ve never really been ones to be told what to do. Baseball is in full swing, the weather is slowly but surely warming up, the activity around the lake is growing, cyclists are more numerous, and, to do our part, we’re releasing our annual summer seasonal, the Summer Wit. Summer Wit is our take on…
It’s hard to know exactly where to start with Blonde on Blonde as it’s one of my all time favorite albums and a true masterpiece. It’s widely regarded as one of the greatest albums ever made, and is one of only two of his albums to go 2x Platinum in the US (the other being Blood on the Tracks). This unique combination of commercial and critical success made designing this beer a bit of a challenge to make sure proper…
For the second release of our Bob Dylan series, we fast forwarded 10 years from our first release, Bringing It All Back Home. This time difference resulted in a lot of change for Dylan, most notably his motorcycle accident in 1966 that lead to him not touring for 8 years, as well as becoming estranged from his first wife, Sara. Although Dylan has claimed in subsequent interviews as well as in his autobiography “Chronicles Volume One” that Blood on the…
For the first release in our Dylan series, I thought an excellent start would be his 1965 release, Bringing It All Back Home. By this time, Dylan had felt like “a pawn in the game” with the folk and protest music scene stifling his creativity and using him for their own purposes. On “Maggie’s Farm”, Dylan sings “Well, I try my best to be just like I am, but everybody wants you to be just like them. They say sing…
(Brewer’s note: Joyride will be releasing a 5 part Bob Dylan beer series over the course of the next month, all based off individual albums. The first release will be “Bringing it All Back Home Sour IPA” on Wednesday, May 13th) I should start by expressing that I am not a music critic, or even a major music buff. I am a beer nerd, through and through, who also happens to listen to and enjoy a lot of music. While…