musing

View from atop New Belgium

Peter Bouckaert

New Belgium Brewing’s Peter Bouckaert gestures into the distance while giving a tour to members of the media who were in Colorado during the Great American Beer Festival, making a bit of a joke we’ll get to in a moment.

This view is from the roof of the brewery. The building under construction is the new packaging facility. When it is complete New Belgium will be able to brew and ship 850,000 barrels of beer per year – and that’s capacity for the current site.

What then? If you know just where to look in this photo you’ll spot Anheuser-Busch’s Fort Collins brewery (current capacity 10 million barrels) in the distance. New Belgium will take that over in 2010, Bouckaert said, smiling while adding “just kidding” in case the A-B employees on the tour (which next went to the A-B plant) were worried.

New Belgium shipped 370,000 barrels in 2005 and will likely sell about 435,000 in 2006. That number is constrained by the currently packaging line, which runs 24/7. “We’re bottling gold,” Bouckaert said.

Among items on display in one of the brewhouses (below) is the original five-hecoliter system that Jeff Lebesch began brewing on when he and his wife, Kim Jordan, started the brewery in the basement of their home. In front are a couple of the wine barrels that Bouckaert began experimenting with in the late 1990s (eventually producing La Foile). The Fat Tire bicycles to the right are examples of those each employee receives after one year of working at New Belgium. After five years they get a trip to Belgium.

NBB brewhouse

The photo below shows a mini-shrine hanging on one wall of the hospitality area of the brewery. Call it beer folk art.

NBB shrine

Win one for the mom

One more story (for now) from the Great American Beer Festival.

Russian River Brewing Co. won three medals, one for a beer called Aud Blonde. The beer was named for Russian River brewer Vinnie Cilurzo’s mother, Audrey.

And she was there to see him claim the bronze medal.

You don’t usually think of GABF as a place that you bring your folks, but Vincenzo and Audrey Cilurzo were around all weekend.

On Friday evening, Cilurzo squeezed to the front of a crowd at the Firestone Walker booth and handed head brewer Matt Brynildson two glasses.

Cilurzo: “Give me a beer for my mom.”

Brynildson: “Hoppy or drinkable?”

Cilurzo: “Drinkable.”

Blogging GABF

I didn’t.

(But I’ve got a story or two after I explain.)

I thought about it going in, even took my notebook computer and connections to move photos from my camera to the computer. Didn’t happen. When you spend all your time a) sampling, b) socializing and c) collecting information for stories or that will somehow improve the quality of what appears here or elsewhere then connecting at 2 o’clock in the morning doesn’t seem like such a great idea.

And no way I would have done as complete as job as Rick Lyke or Jay Brooks.

To read Lyke’s work, start with GABF After Thoughts and work your way backwards. Lots of pictures and lots of interviews/commentary.

Brooks has even more pictures. Start with GABF 2006: The Awards and work your way backwards. There are so many photos that you’ll have to click on the gallery links to see them all.

I also recommend Lew Bryson’s commentary on judging. I’m always a little worried when people call for balance – yes, they are correct there is nothing pleasant about overhopped and out-of-balance high alcohol beers – because I’d rather accept some occasional missteps in the name of innovation than discourage it altogether. But Lew finds the right, uhmm, balance.

Now back to the story I promised. If you check out Jay’s gallery from the awards ceremony and scroll about 80 percent of the way down you’ll see a big brewer in checked pants carrying another brewer on his shoulders.

No, Jeff Bagby (the big guy and lead brewer for Pizza Port Carlsbad) and Noah Regnery (his assistant) weren’t just giddy because they’d won their fourth medal of the day.

While they were bottling the beer they call Sticky Stout to send it to the competitition Regnery was so excited about how it tasted he predicted it would win a gold medal.

“I told him that he’d never been here, he didn’t understand what it was like, how hard it is,” said Bagby.

Regnery insisted Sticky Stout would win.

“I said, ‘If we win I will carry you to the stage on my shoulders,'” Bagby said.

They did, and he did.

GABF has come a long way, baby

GABF then

The Brewers Association provided the picture above from the Hilton Harvest House in Boulder, Colo., where 20 breweries offered about 35 beers at the first Great American Beer Festival in 1982.

The photo below is opening night line at the at the Colorado Convention Center (half an hour before the doors opened), where 383 breweries offered festival goers a choice of 1,668 beers Thursday through Saturday.

GABF now

The festival sold out the Friday evening session (two hours before the doors were to open), the Saturday afternoon session and the Saturday evening session. Although some breweries started rationing beer on Thursday they still ran out of many choices before the Saturday afternoon session ended.

Will blog for beer

Not everybody likes the “Will Blog for Beer” feature in the StatesmanJournal in Salem, Oregon.

The blogs author, Dan de Carbonel and Tim Akimoff, found themselves getting a little bit of heat this week. Here’s a letter their editors received:

“The promotion of the use of beer and wine, etc., by the newspaper is a disappointment. Please do discontinue the beer blog. These articles, in effect, encourage alcoholism. Note the media accounts of traffic accidents, drug abuse, etc., causing injuries, deaths and other problems to society (broken marriages, erratic driving of vehicles, thefts, robberies, etc.)”

All the responses are worth reading, but this is my favorite:

Who knows, mabye some of us might like beer.
Not too many of us like death, but they continue to run those dang obits.

Quick aside: Their blog does not have an rss feed and can be a little tricky to find. The easiest way to browse through the entries is to start with one – such at The Tao of Beer – and use the navigation on the lower right.