Month: February 2014

I can’t tell you the 49th or 51st brewery our daughter, Sierra, visited, but you always remember the 50th. She was 10 months old in the fall of 1997 and had been walking a while (adding a certain amount of excitement to brewery visits). I have a photo — but I’d be in trouble if I posted it here — of her holding her left hand up to the Left Hand Brewing logo.

The quote collected that day — Daria and I were working on a story for Brew Your Own Magazine — I remember best was from co-founder Eric Warner: “The large brewers are not tooled to do what we do. They’ll have to build less-than-efficient breweries to make beer like we do.”

But yesterday evening I also thought of something Dick Doore, the other founder, said. He was talking about their imperial stout, which already had a serious following. They made it once a year, and in 1997 that amounted to 170 barrels (5,270 gallons).

“Basically, we fill up the mash tun and we get whatever we get. We keep pouring in two-row until we stop,” he said.

Now called Wake Up Dead and just as imperial it has become the third beer in Left Hand’s Nitro Series (Milk Stout Nitro was the first nitrogenated bottled craft beer without a widget). It arrived at The Wine and Cheese Place yesterday morning. We drank some last night and I thought about what Doore said.

A one word review: Dangerous. The beer is 10.2% ABV and awakens, perhaps frees would be a better word, a rush of images. So here’s another non-review by photo and minimalist caption.

“The devil got behind the wheel”

Boak & Bailey have invited other bloggers to “go long” on Saturday, and despite two months lead time what I planned to post is not close to done. So, sigh, I’ll haul a print article from the archives Saturday. It focuses on 1995. Thus a quiz about beer events from that year to set the mood.

1) On June 13, 1995 the first draft beer from a Belgian specialty brewer was poured in the U.S. Where did this happen and what was the beer?

2) In 1995 this brewer took his first professional brewing job at Grizzly Peak Brewing Michigan. Who was the brewer and what brewery did he later found?

3) What beer took the gold medal as a “strong ale,” finishing ahead of Bourbon County Stout at GABF in 1995, and what was the story behind its name?

4) On June 30, 1994 this brewer quit is job at Otter Creek Brewing in Vermont. One year later he sold the first keg at his new brewery. Who was he and what’s the brewery?

5)This was the largest draft-only brewery in the Western Hemisphere in 1995, a claim it had to give up when it began bottling. What was the brewery and where is it located?

Leave your answers in the comments.

MONDAY BEER LINKS, MUSING 02.24.14

One point I tried to make at the UK Craft Writing symposium is that every writer makes a choice about what to say and how to say it. The ease with which multi-media content can be delivered via the Internet sometimes changes the equation.

I included a clip of Sierra Nevada’s open fermentation video that went viral last month, and joked, but perhaps not clearly enough, that you could just shoot me now. How could a writer capture the power of that message? I should have added that trying is part of the job.

I finished the presentation by showing this oft-published photo of Jack McAuliffe that not long ago was on the cover of All About Beer magazine. The photo does not appear in the advance copy of “The Craft Beer Revolution: How a Band of Microbrewers Is Transforming the World’s Favorite Drink” I’ve seen. Instead, Steve Hindy brings the words big time, writing:

“A wonderful photo of McAuliffe shows him leaning, with one muscled arm, on an ancient cast-iron keg-cleaning contraption that looks more like a medieval torture device, all big screws, brushes, and wheels. He is the picture of a noble pioneering craft brewer, with a square jaw, level gaze, and thick dark hair falling over his ears and across his forehead. He’s wearing a short-sleeved collared shirt and a leather apron. His jeans are splattered with what must be whitewash or paint. His smile is as enigmatic as the Mona Lisa’s, I kid you not.”

I thought about this Friday when I was reading about the “California Brew Masters” book project that photographer Nicholas Gingold has mounted a Kickstarter campaign to fund. His goal is to publish a coffee table book full of photos — his samples are stunning — along with stories from the brewers. Literally at the same time I was admiring that artwork Max Bahnson’s “Monday Afternoon Blues” post popped into my feed reader. It’s worth your time.

It was a big week for links, so I won’t be keeping it to five. (In addition, there are links to numerous posts about the conference in my own related submission last Wednesday.)

– What Makes a Brewery Good? Boak & Bailey host another round of “go long” posts on Saturday. Busy week ahead here so I may have to sit it out. But if at all possible I plan to write at length about “what makes an expert” because one of the keys to the Beer Graphs data-driven posts (like this one) is the data itself. Rating the quality of a beer is not as easy as tracking fly balls and ground balls. Yes, yes, I know there’ more than that to sabermetrics — I own a copy of Bill James “1977 Baseball Abstract” &#151. My point is we’re talking subjective and objective, and what Nate Silver calls “Dark Matter.” [Via Beer Graphs]

– Journalists Banned from Tasting Domaine Huet Wines. Imagine something like this happening at GABF. [Via Vinography]

– August Schell Announces a New Genre of Beer: German Craft. Without much fanfare they have added that tag on their home page. [Via The Growler]

– Does New Zealand Have Its Own Beer Style Or Flavour? Zinzan Brooke making a New Zealand beer in the UK using NZ hops and malt. What does that mean? [Via Luke’s Beer]

– The Coolships Have Landed. “We’ve calculated that we’ve already spent around $75,000 on our spontaneous program. We don’t even hope to release spontaneously fermented beer until 2016, and it could take much longer,” says Jeffrey Stuffings at Jester King Brewing in Texas. [Via Table Matters]

– The discreet charm offensive of the BrewDoggies. In case you thought only American breweries could talk trash, grow fast, and — oh, by the way — put their money where their mouth is when it comes to spending on quality control, then read Martyn Cornell’s report from the belly of the beast. [Via Zythophile] And this thought from the same junket: “But you know, I don’t think that matters so much as the fact that these guys are beer people through and through and unafraid to say so. Beer people, even when they don’t brew cask are invariably impressive. It was good to hang out with them for a bit.” [Via Tandleman’s Beer Blog]

– Demystifying the craft beer movement. In the UK, and, well, maybe. [Via The Morning Advertiser]

– “Water Is Essential to What We Do” San Diego breweries and the California drought. [Via Voice of San Diego]

– How Breweries Kept Busy During Prohibition. This is why we own a “Bud Brand” frozen eggs product tin. [Via Mental Floss]

And other things I learned at Craft Writing: Beer, The Digital, and Craft Culture.

Let’s start with this tweet from Nathaniel Rivers.

Whoa! I just figured that out? If that was a complete thought somewhere in my head it was so subliminal that the beer intruders intent on hunting down and destroying every living cell in my brain had not found it yet. It took Mr. Rivers to connect the dots.

From my perspective this alone made the symposium a rip-roaring success. I learned something that might improve my writing. Some stories, like the business article I am supposed to be working on at this moment, fall outside the science-food continuum but if I am ever asked to talk about writing again I am claiming this idea as my own.

As I said at the outset of my presentation, when I get up in front of a bunch of hung over faces on a Saturday morning, a screen loaded with charts at my back, I’m usually talking to homebrewers about the length of a ferulic acid rest and resulting production of 4-vinyl guaicol. But, with full credit to Jeff Rice, I think this conference was unique beyond giving me something different to ramble on about. The discussion about beer and writing began at 10 in the morning, continued officially for seven hours and, not surprisingly, beyond. Yet somehow it didn’t spiral into navel gazing. Hallelujah (I have already used my quota for exclamation points in a post, that being one, or I would place one here).

I’ll leave it to others to provide a full recap, starting with a tweet (an explanation of the headline follows, along with an idea for a cage-rattling blog post).

Now some links:

– Craft writing recap. From organizer Jeff Rice. (From his Make Mine Potato blog)
– 5 valuable marketing insights from Craft Beer Writing conference.
– Not so simple a symposium. (From Roger Baylor)
– A brief review of the Craft Writing Seminar at UK. (From Gary Spedding)
– Writing about beer. (From Tom Streeter at Hoperatives.)
– “The Elephant in the Craft Beer Room.” (From Kevin Patterson, writing at LexBeerScene.com)
– Beer Nerds Unite Over Kentucky Craft Writing Symposium (From Hey, Brewtiful)
– On #craftwriting. (From James Schirmer at betajames)

What else did I learn?

– Somebody should write a book about Teri Fahrendorf.

– Nobody has written a down-and-dirty details-rich article about the refermentation program at Brooklyn Brewery. We need that story. OK, that might be me tilting a bit too far at the science end of the spectrum, but wait there’s more.

– My first stop in Lexington was Brewing and Distilling Analytic Services. Two hours flew by, cool stuff. Or at least to me. However that evening at Country Boy Brewing when I started to describe what I’d seen in detail I quickly remembered that some beer stories resonate better than others.

– Hanging out with Roger Baylor will poke, provoke and otherwise inspire your inner contrarian. Among the questions he asked Saturday that we didn’t back to, at least in the conversations I was part of: Are VIP sessions at beer festivals a good idea? Do they make beer less egalitarian?

– Country Boy Brewing does not have a corkscrew. And we probably could have sent somebody to the store to by one in the time it took us to break into a bottle from The Ale Apothecary that Teri brought.

This requires a bit of a back story. Originally, the weekend festivities were to begin Friday evening at Country Boy Brewing with a bottle share. That got changed to “sample a lot of Country Boy beers, eat some great food, and listen to music.” When Teri and I were talking about a week before I didn’t know about Plan B and mentioned the bottle share. She and I showed up with bottles from our respective neighborhoods (Oregon and St. Louis), and eventually got around to opening them.

Thing is The Ale Apothecary corks its bottles, like with wine corks, not the sort you can ease out with you thumbs. But we were in a brewery, how hard could it be to get a little beer out of a bottle? Harder than we expected. Country Boy brewer Nathan Coppage tracked down a deck screw and a pair of pliers. That’s him on the right. Scott Hand (of Alltech’s Lexington Brewing and Distilling) held the bottle. Don’t they look casual in the photo? That’s how it began, but soon bodies were twisting, arms were flying, and and a crowd was cheering them on. Saturday we talked about the role multimedia can play in “writing.” This was probably one of those video moments.

They persevered. We all drank a bit of the beer. It was good. And so is the story.