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Old Posted May 1, 2009, 3:03 PM
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hammersklavier hammersklavier is offline
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Join Date: Apr 2008
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The Illadelph has an interesting feature on ballpark beers.
Quote:
Eric Asimov then proclaimed American craft pilsners as the would-be savior of ballpark beer, and then declared Victory's own Prima Pils the best of the bunch. (Again.)

THE new Yankee Stadium has a problem. No, it's not all those home runs, it's the beer.

The stadium pushes the usual mass-market brews, which is to be expected of any big venue. It also has a beers-of-the-world stand that sells brews like Heineken, from the Netherlands; Beck's, from Germany; and Stella Artois, from Belgium — all from nowheresville, if you ask me.

It has a retro-beer stand that sells — give me strength — Pabst Blue Ribbon and Schaefer. If you look really hard, you can find Guinness, which is an acceptable fallback. But with all the great craft beers available nowadays, why aren’t any of them at Yankee Stadium?
[...]
But if I do go to Yankee Stadium, I want some beers worthy of the team. I offer you now my solution to the big beer wasteland in the South Bronx: American pilsners.

While any number of styles would make an enjoyable companion to a good ballgame, none, I think, could do better than a crisp, zesty, refreshing pilsner. It's a style that has long been associated with American sports, though in its bland mass-market form in which the barley-malt core of a great pilsner is diluted with adjuncts like corn or rice. Budweiser may trace its roots to the Czech birthplace of pilsner, but it is no longer a true representative of the style.
[...]
For great American pilsners, though, you have to go to the major leagues of brewing, which to my mind are the small craft breweries that have so thoroughly revitalized beer drinking in America. To inaugurate the new baseball season, the tasting panel recently sampled 18 pilsners from American craft breweries.


So chalk one up for CBP over the new stadiums in NYC. (They may have Morimoto and Shake Shack, we have excellent local beer.)

Then he gets to Prima Pils.

The Victory Prima Pils, which was our No. 1 pilsner four years ago, again came in on top. It seemed to be alive in the glass, with wonderfully refreshing bitterness to balance the floral and citrus aromas.

Good showing all around.
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