Pantsville Brewing Company
After ensuring a steady supply of pants, Steve’s thoughts turned toward beer.

Reply from the Brewers’ Association

Posted by Brian Glenn
On June 20th, 2009 at 15:06

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Posted in Craft Beer

I did receive a reply from the Events Coordinator of the Brewers’ Association about the errors in the content as well as the USB drive itself. They have corrected the content, which is good, but they did not seem to be interested in fixing the USB drive for next year. Hopefully, she was just too busy to engage in any sort of dialogue about it, but perhaps they will take the comments to heart. One of the worst things I deal with working in technology is software and hardware that does not easily work together with all platforms available out there. It is quite easy to make it work if only you are aware of the problems that exist. Hopefully, I have at least made them aware of the issues that exist. We will see what happens next year.

On a more positive note, I am going to the Cornerstone Brewpub tonight in Berea, OH. I am trying to visit all of the local brewpubs in town. It is sad that there are still a few left that I have not been to. A review and possibly some pictures later.

SAVOR 2009: The Second and Best So Far

Posted by Brian Glenn
On June 1st, 2009 at 22:06

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Posted in Craft Beer

I was fortunate once again to be able to travel to Washington, DC to attend the second SAVOR event held by the Brewers’ Association. This year the location was the National Building Museum, which had plenty more room than last year’s location. This meant less crowding and easier to see lines for all of the stations. This year was also improved by having the breweries using similar food for their pairings grouped together at the same table, which made trying multiple beers with the same food much easier than before. Many breweries were represented at the event including our own local craft brewery, Great Lakes Brewing Company. I didn’t try any of their beers that evening, of course. Here is a picture from above to get an idea of it:

SAVOR 2009

SAVOR also has smaller break-out sessions called salons that offer a smaller venue for one or more brewers to speak or showcase a particular product. The first salon I attended was held by Sam Calagione from Dogfish Head in Delaware. Dogfish Head is known for doing what they like to call “off-centered ales for off-centered people,” so when an archaeologist discovers the remnants of a vessel likely having contained a fermented beverage, who better to attempt a modern interpretation of it than Dogfish? There were three of these sorts of beers presented for tasting. The first I had had before, which is called Midas Touch. It is generally available, so you ought to be able to pick that one up easily. The second was called Chateau Jiahu. It is taken from a Chinese clay pot that is believed to be over 9,000 years old. The last, called Theobroma, was taken from an archaeological dig done in Central America. The first two were somewhat similar, both having honey and grapes in the recipe, but the third was surprisingly different. It was based more around cacao and chile peppers, making it quite a bit different than I expected. Overall, Sam gave his usual spirited opinion of the Reinheitsgebot (Bavarian Beer Purity Law) and pigeonholing beer in general. Sam is an excellent speaker on the topic of brewing outside the norms, and I highly recommend catching him if you get the chance.

The second session I attended was given by Rob Tod of Allagash Brewing and Peter Bouckaert of New Belgium Brewing. This was done more as a private tasting than an educational session. The maximum attendance size was much smaller for this, so I was fortunate to get tickets. Both Rob and Peter discussed a few beers they have been working on and the sort of accidental success that sometimes happens with beer fermented with unknown or wild yeasts. I had heard Rob’s head brewer, Jason Perkins, discuss the wild fermentation process on Basic Brewing Radio not too long ago, so I was excited to both hear Rob discuss it as well, plus actually get to try the beer. As much as I enjoyed Sam’s presentation, I will probably put more focus on these private tasting salons next year as I enjoyed the cozier atmosphere and opportunity to have discussion rather than lecture. Here is a shot from the session:

Rob Tod and Peter Bouckaert

The only complaint I had and heard from a few other people was that the food was of lower quality than the year before. I would agree that the food was not as imaginative as it was last year, but the catering staff did a much better job of keeping everything stocked, which I think was an improvement overall from last year. I already talked about what I am going to do differently as an attendee next year, so I guess I would have to recommend this event to anyone as I am certainly going again next year myself.

I am adding another complaint. For those of you who did not attend, a little background would be helpful. Both years now, SAVOR has offered a parting gift to compliment the experience. I love this idea as it lets you continue to enjoy things about the event after it is over. This year, the gift was a USB drive containing recipes and other information about the beers and breweries. Or at least that’s what they said it was. I popped this into the drive not long after I published this post originally and was horrified to find that it would not open on my Mac. Because I work in technology, I am used to these sorts of things coming up, so I started up my Windows virtual machine on the Mac, and connected the USB drive into the virtual machine. My horror doubled when the first thing that happened was Norton Anti-Virus popping up telling me that there is a Tracking Cookie on the drive. I sigh as I normally do and tell Norton to fix it. Once I get into the drive to look around, my horror has now tripled as I see that drive only contains a web browser launcher to use this cookie and take me to a webpage on the Internet. I also discover that a proprietary format of a CD image inside the filesystem was used to create the drive, which was why the Mac wanted nothing to do with it.

After calming down a little at this technological ineptitude, I recalled getting an email for a survey about SAVOR that had a link in it. I read the email again, and lo and behold, the link that takes me directly to the content without having to mess around with the USB drive. I instantly forgave the designers because they gave me an alternate way to access the information, but as I am looking through the content, I arrive at a page about beer styles. I am reading through it, and I see that Hefeweizen and Kölsch are listed under the Lagers section. Excuse me? I am certainly not a certified Beer Judge nor an expert in the field, but after looking around the Internet a little on the topic, I confirmed my suspicion that these are indeed types of ale. I think this kind of misinformation coming from the trade association for craft beer is such a crushing defeat to an otherwise fantastic event. The point of the event is education about craft beer, and if the teacher has got it wrong, what will the students do?

I have sent an email to the BA to get their take on this. I received the perfunctory reply from a CSR. We will see where it goes.

Revenge of Mt. Hood

Posted by Brian Glenn
On May 9th, 2009 at 13:05

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Posted in Homebrewing, Hops, Hops Gardening

While getting the rest of some gardening ready this year, my wife noticed that the Mt. Hood hops that failed so miserably last year actually started growing again! They are taking off quite aggressively up the twine this year, so hopefully with a little luck and a lot of water, they will actually give me a few cones. My real goal with them was to have just enough to make a good harvest ale of some kind, so any extra will be considered gravy.

Once I get the yard cleaned up a little better, I will actually put some pictures up.

BBR-BYO Brewing Experiment 1: Update 1

Posted by Brian Glenn
On April 19th, 2009 at 18:04

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Posted in Homebrewing

It has been 13 days since I put the original beer into the fermenter, so it was time to crack it open and get half of it moved over to “secondary.” The beer tastes pretty good, but there was a disturbing amount of funk that came off the top when I opened the pail. The FG seems like it will be around 1.016, but we’ll see what happens with the yeast in the experimental batch.