More beer just around the Bend

Saturday morning came bright and early, awfully early considering my Friday afternoon through evening in Portland.  We stopped by Milo’s City Cafe for a quick breakfast and I got cheddar and Italian sausage-stuffed french toast.  How incredible of an idea is that?  Stuffing meat and cheese in the french toast!  I’m always torn between savory and sweet and here it came all in one neat little package.

Mount Hood out the sunroof of our car

But we couldn’t stay long… we had the approximately 3 hour drive to Bend, OR, ahead of us, and a long itinerary of beer spots to hit once we got there.  The highlight of the drive for me might have been the stop for coffee/gas at the ski center just past Rhododendron.  It was nothing special, but I needed that coffee in a bad way, and I wasn’t even driving.  As we headed past Mt. Hood on Route 26, I tried to take pictures out the window without a lot of success due to the angle.  This was when the idea to stand up out the sunroof to get the right shot first surfaced, but Allie and Melissa wouldn’t let me this time around.  It was a different story on the way home, but that’s for my next post to tell.

I just asked those two if there was anything else of note about the ride down to Bend and all they came up with was crossing the 45^th parallel.  Woo-hoo!  It was beautiful territory in the forest near Mt. Hood, and in the Warm Springs Indian Reservation, but there’s not a whole lot to say about it.

The idea to go to Bend had come about because I’ve wanted to visit the Deschutes brewery for a long time, and Bend Brewing ever since they won Champion Small Brewpub at this year’s World Beer Cup.  We figured that while we were in Oregon we might as well hit Bend as well as Portland.  It was only after we decided to go that I checked the Deschutes website and realized that it was Oktoberfest in Bend this weekend.  All the more reason to go!

When we pulled into town, the streets were chaos.  The festival was being held under a tent on a closed-off block of one of the main downtown streets.  We stopped at one of the two addresses we had for Deschutes, hoping it would be the main brewery, but it was just the downtown brewpub.  The place was mobbed.  Luckily, once we drove a mile or two down the road to the actual Deschutes Brewery, the crowds had dissipated and there were only four or five other people in the tasting room waiting to take the tour.  We tasted a few beers while waiting for the tour to start.  I had the Hop Trip, a fresh hop pale ale, and am happy to report that it was miles better than the 9-month old bottled 2007 version I had at my IPA tasting a few months ago.

The new 150 barrel system at Deschutes

The tour was once of the best we’ve ever been on.  Our tour guide had only been with Deschutes about a year and a half, and only worked occasional Saturdays, but she knew her stuff.  Not only was the info included in the tour pretty comprehensive to begin with, but she had answers to every question we had.  We saw the old 50 barrel brewing system, the shiny, new, German 150 barrel system, the hop storage room, the sensory tasting room, the lab, the cellar, and the bottling line.  The most impressive fact of the day was that they only brew with whole hop cones, with only a couple exceptions for their IPA and other super-hoppy beers that would require too great a volume of whole hops to be practical.  I had seen a video on their website before in which they mentioned this, but I had thought it applied only to special beers.  I hadn’t realized that the non-whole hop beers were the exception.

Me in the sensory analysis lab

I also liked seeing the cases stacked up waiting to get sent to the brew library.  They keep a couple cases from every batch in a library until that batch’s ‘best by’ date has passed.  This way, if someone has a complaint or other quality control issue, they can go back to the library and see if the issue affects the whole batch, or if the problem was caused by something that happened after the beers left the brewery.

The other really interesting thing we learned was that the brewpubs brew all of their own beer, even the landmark brews.  I would have thought that most of the beer would have come from the main brewery, with only the special pub-only brews being made at the pub.  Nope!  Even the old standby’s like Mirror Pond and Black Butte get brewed at the brewpubs, and in fact our tour guide thought, but wasn’t sure, that Mirror Pond had a different recipe at the brewpub.  I would have thought that for the sake of presenting customers with a consistent taste under a single brand that there would only be one allowed recipe for each of the landmark beers, and that for efficiency’s sake they would all get brewed at the main brewery.  I’m sure they have a reason for why they do this, but I’d be interested to hear what it is.  Allie and I were thinking that we wish they would stop brewing the landmark beers at the brewpubs to free up that small system brewing capacity to do more one-off or special release beers.

The last exiting part of the trip was returning to the tasting room to try The Dissident and pick up some bottles of Black Butte XX.  I couldn’t believe that they were pouring The Dissident for free or that they still had the XX!  I really enjoyed The Dissident.  It was tart, but not abusively so.  The cherry flavor added something new and was neither too sweet, nor too overbearing.  There was also a mild hay-like flavor from the Brett, but it was definitely secondary in strength to the sour elements.

Bend Brewing Company bar

After Deschutes, we were ready for lunch so it was off to the Bend Brewery for some food and beer.  I was ready to love this brew pub because I had heard great things from friends and I have a soft spot in my heart for anywhere with an award-winning female brewmaster.  I have to say though, that while almost all of the beers we had were solid, and the Scotch and IPAs were very tasty, there wasn’t one or more that were mind-blowingly good.  Ah, this is the problem of high expectations — I don’t want to sell them short just because we came in expecting a lot out of them.

We got the sampler tray and took a few short notes on each of the beers:

• High Desert Hefeweizen: ok, I lied about each of the beers, I have no notes on the hef or the golden
• Metiolus Golden Ale
• Elk Lake IPA: Great American NW hop aroma, full bodied with citric hop flavor and balanced bitterness.  Gets more ‘green’ tasting as I kept drinking it.
• Hop Head Imperial IPA: Has a bigger body than the regular IPA but tastes and smells less hoppy to me on the first go around.  I think this was just having the regular IPA on my palate, because after I ate some more and tried them in the opposite order, with the Imperial first, the regular tasted less hoppy by comparison.  The imperial definitely still tastes like classic Pacific NW hops, like the IPA but greener and less citric in flavor.  It’s not a red or as viscous as the Deschutes Hopicide, but more bitter, more like an actual imperial IPA. 
• Outback Old Ale: They described this beer as “A rich, malty, reddish-brown beer with slightly roasted coffee notes.”  And that’s all correct, but this tasted less warming and alcohol-peppery than I expected for an old ale.  The aroma led in with light raisins and then transitioned into a light coffee note in the taste, which was an interesting change up for an old ale, since they’re not usually roasty.
• Pinnacle Porter: Robust body and bitterness with malt complexity.  The flavor kept changing on my tongue, leaning first towards roast then towards hops. 
• Ginger Stout on nitro tap: We were all excited for this one since it is such a creative idea.  It was good, but not a new favorite of mine.  I wonder if would have been better in an imperial stout.  The ginger wasn’t overwhelming the stout flavor, and it wasn’t too sweet, like an alcoholic ginger snap, but the layers of ginger bitterness, roast bitterness, and hop bitterness together, and the lack of residual sugar made this a very dry, bitter brew.  I think with the extra imperial alcohol and residual sugar this would taste like a rich, christmas-y, drink. 
• Black Lager: This came served with a lime wedge.  Huh?  We didn’t squeeze the lime at all, but having it on the edge of the glass still completely overwhelmed any aroma coming from the beer itself.  On a full pint instead of a taster shot it might have been different, but I’ve always thought citrus garnishes on beer were meant historically to keep bugs away and used presently to mask the boring or off flavors in mediocre beer.  The beer itself had a mild smoky flavor, but it was no Death & Taxes.  That’s a high bar to hold anything to, but then we’re talking about the champion small brewpub here, I think it’s fair to have high expectations.
• Oktoberfest: A nice example of the style with hints of caramel and a rounded mouthfeel.  It avoids the trap of watery-ness that is my big complaint with a lot of Oktoberfest beers.
• Scotch: Another one of my favorites on the tray.  It has lots of fruit but still carries a distinct peat flavor.  The aroma is like brown or burnt sugar.  It tastes a lot like the Old Stock, but with an extra layer of complexity coming from the peat flavor.

Bend Brewing Company beer board

In other notes, Bend Brewing also had amazing onion rings and photography on the walls.  Right now all of their photos were from Mike Putnam Photography and as far as I could tell they were all Oregon landscapes.  I loved almost every single one of them, and Allie and Melissa’s favorite was this one.  I wished we could have bought one, but the framed prints started at $450.

Following our meal at Bend, we took a mid-afternoon break to check into our hotel, blog a bit, and nap.  It’s hard work, all this sitting and drinking.

When we went back out it was nearly dinner time, leading me to observe that all we ever seem to do on these trips is eat and drink, not that I mind, but the meals do seem to come one right after another.  We parked halfway between Silver Moon Brewing and the Deschutes Brewpub.  We planned to eat at Silver Moon since Allie and Melissa had already been to a Deschutes location twice in the last two days and I had been three times.  However, when we got to Silver Moon, we realized there wasn’t much we liked about it, so we just finished our sampler tray and moved on.  All of the beers seemed to have a common theme running through them of bad bitterness.  Not clean, crisp, hop bitterness, but similar to what came through in my IPA, that is, my first homebrew batch in which I didn’t know any better and squeezed the grain bag releasing all those tannins into the beer.  Here’s what we tried:

• Bridge Creek Pilsner: One of the better two beers of the tray.  It was light bodied with moderate tingling bitterness and a very nice floral scent.
• Oktoberfest Golden Lager: Way too sweet for my tastes, and since when are Oktoberfest beers golden? 
• Hounds Tooth Amber: Eh.  Your typical insipid amber.  Sweet-ish without a standout caramel flavor, mild indistinct hops, nothing of note to remember.
• 70 Shilling Scottish Ale: I have a hard time reviewing these most of the time because I wish they were all heavier Scotch beers, wee heavies, instead of merely Scottish beers.  So, my initial reaction of, “Oooh, this is watery and too thin” is probably not fair.  But I think it is fair to say that like the Oktoberfest, it was too sweet.  This is a sweet style to be sure, but it ought to taste like something other than Gatorade, to have some flavor with that sugar like molasses, or caramelization, or toast, or raisins, or other dried fruits.  This just tasted like saccharine solution with the mildest touch of smoke.   
• Fresh Hop Harvest Ale: The citrus flavor of the fresh hops was apparent, but the weird bitterness that I mentioned above took over here.  It was strong and harsh.  I think in the best IPAs, even the imperials with 90 or 100+ IBUs, strong hop bitterness comes off as tingling or numbing, but this was something different.  It totally overwhelmed the aromatic and flavorful side of the hops, the point of a fresh hop ale, and just didn’t taste like something I wanted to drink.
• Hop Knob IPA: I have one word for this one: soapy.  This happens from time to time when there are too many fatty acids left in a beer from the ‘trub’.  Trub is the precipitant that falls out of wort (the precursor to beer, to which yeast is added to ferment it into beer) when it is cooled after the boil.  If the trub remains in the beer, the fatty acids will start to break down causing the beer to taste like soap.
• Snake Bit Porter: This was the other good beer on the tray, the one we were fighting over as we realized there wasn’t much on here we wanted to drink.  It’s described as an “English-style dry porter” and indeed it was dry and quite roasty with deep flavors that lasted for the full length of a sip of this beer.

We liked the pool table, foosball table, and trompe l’oeil wall murals, including one behind the bar counter that looked like brewing equipment, but was in fact just a painted wall.  The rest of the interior design we didn’t get.  Now, I don’t want every bar to look like a slick and swanky lounge.  In fact, Henry’s was a too much for me, and if every brewpub looked like the Pearl’s BridgePort and Deschutes pubs, there’d be a lot of old character lost.  But this wasn’t your grungy historic dive bar either, it just looked like it had been furnished at a garage sale, with mismatched lamps all over the place, three colors of lighting (green, orange, white), and a disco ball hanging from the ceiling.  There was also only one employee on duty, a bartender, for the entire place, which was starting to fill up because they had a live music act scheduled.  In all, there was no reason to stay with so many other great beer choices in town.

We headed on back to the Deschutes Brewpub to see if it had calmed down any.  It hadn’t.  There was a 45 minute wait for a table, so we decided to see if we could get seats at the bar and order there.  We could only get two seats, so I stood, and we decided to have just one beer and then go eat elsewhere.

I got the Red Chair IPA on cask, one of their pub-only brews.  Just as I held it up to my nose to appreciate the yeasty off-white head and floral hop aroma, they took down the Red Chair sign and put up a new beer – I had gotten the last pint of it. Yes!  Good timing.  It was dark gold with healthy level of carbonation for the last pint out of a cask.  It smelled increasingly fruity as it warmed up, first like oranges, then distinctly apple-like, but sweet apple-y, not sour apple-y, more Red Delicious than Granny Smith.  Thinking about the floral hop scent, I asked the bartender what the hops were in the beer, wondering if they were something Noble.  I was told that it was a secret hop blend and not only was he not allowed to tell me, but that he didn’t know himself.  He said maybe it had Liberty hops in it, but it definitely had other hops as well.  Normally, I’d take an answer like this at face value, but our bartender was kind of surly all night long, so this might have just been a get-off-my-case way of saying that he didn’t know.  In fact, the service was my only complaint.  Yes, it was very busy, and that can be enough to get on anyone’s nerves, but we were polite, quick to order, and curious about their beers, so there’s no reason he should have tossed coasters down in front of us like they were Chinese throwing stars designed to slice our wrists, nor huffed impatiently when Melissa asked if they actually had handcrafted root beer (she had seen their wooden, carved sign and wondered if it was just old-timey decor or an actual declaration that they had root beer: they did).

Our last stop of the evening was the Village Bar and Grill.  We were there to fill up on greasy pub food, and that we did, in spades.  Appetizers were $2 off so Allie ordered two (spinach dip and fried chicken sliders) and I ordered two (mozzarella sticks and popcorn shrimp) and Melissa got a wrap.  This didn’t sound like an absurd amount of food as we were ordering it, and we still hold it against our waitress that she didn’t warn us, but as it started arriving, it became clear we had a mountain of fried goodness coming our way.  It was also at this time that we came up with the brilliant, if not totally original or creative, idea of dressing like pumpkins for the Elysian Great Pumpkin Festival.  We have the added benefit of a mom who owns and runs a yarn shop for knitters, and became extremely excited about the idea of asking her to knit green caps that looked like stems to wear with our orange shirts.  When we called her, she refused to agree until we called her back sober, afraid this wouldn’t sound like half as great an idea to us in the morning.  It did.  So, now those hats are in the works.  Great Pumpkin Festival here we come!

This is already running long, so Sunday will have to be it’s own post devoted to our trip back through Portland on the way up to Seattle.  It includes a stop at The Horse Brass and a cryptic message from Don Younger about a story of which he refused to tell us the full version.

Pubbin’ in Portland

Greetings from Beervana (aka Portland)!  I’m here for the weekend with my sister and Melissa (of new-found cider fame).  In fact, I may or may not have a pretty convoluted itinerary ahead of me.  The original plan was to drive from SF to LA, fly from LA to Portland, hitch a ride with Allie and Melissa up to Seattle, stay in Seattle for a few weeks with a couple round-trip weekends out of Seattle in Boston and in Denver for GABF, and then fly back to SF.  Whew.  However, some really good news on the job front has thrown my personal life all up in the air.  I’ll fill you all in on that soon, when I know what it means for the future of this blog.  In the meantime, I’m here drinking hoppy Oregon beer and loving it. This trip started on a very inauspicious note.  I had a 6:03am flight to Portland from LA, so I woke up at 4:00am and got to the airport by 4:40am because I was checking bags.  I hate checking bags, but wanted to bring some homebrew to Seattle.  It was so early that even Starbucks hadn’t opened yet.  I yawned, plugged in my laptop, returned some emails and sat down to watch an episode or two of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, a new obsession of mine.  As 5:45am rolled around and they still hadn’t started boarding my flight, I was getting suspicious and decided to go investigate.  What I discovered was that there apparently there are consequences for not wearing my reading glasses, ever.  My flight was actually at 8:03am and I had another few hours ahead of me in LAX.  Ugh. The bad luck stopped there though, and once touching down in Portland it’s been only smooth sailing.  I napped and took care of some emails until 2:00pm and then set out to explore town.  The first stop was Powell’s books.  I’ve been there on my other trips through Portland and I never tire of it.  They have a store the size of a full city block full in books.  They even had enough books about Alaska that I managed to find three for my sister that she hadn’t yet read, and she’s read every book about the Iditarod, and half of all the other books on Alaska ever published.

Tap wall at Deschutes pub Portland

All this book shopping made me hungry, so I headed on over to the new Deschutes Brewpub in the Pearl District.  I shouldn’t have.  I knew Allie and Melissa would want to eat dinner here, but I just couldn’t help it.  The building is beautiful and understated on the outside and ruggedly chic on the inside.  They had 15 beers on tap and 2 on cask, which was pretty impressive.  Not many breweries have that many house beers available all at once.  The list is below with the brewery’s descriptions of the beers.  I have some qualms with their descriptors, in that they tend to be vague and generic, but few with their beers.

• Classic brews
  • Cascade Ale: “A Northwest original, Cascade Ale is clean and crisp, with an herbal hop character and smooth malt profile.  A light-hearted citrus finish makes it the perfect thirst quencher.”
  • Mirror Pond Pale Ale: “A classic American pale ale, Mirror Pond Pale Ale uses generous quantities of Cascade hops, offering a lush floral aroma with a balanced malt body.”
  • Inversion IPA: “Inversion IPA defies the ordinary, with layers of soft caramel notes and generous amounts of our favorite Northwest hops, for a bright, sunny citrus finish.”
  • Black Butte Porter: “Dark and distinctive like Black Butte itself, Black Butte Porter uses chocolate and crystal malts, crafting a rich in flavor yet easy to drink “dark” beer.”
  • Obsidian Stout: “Smooth and black, like the volcanic rock, Obsidian Stout is a solid, satisfying beer with underlying espresso and chocolaty flavors.”
  • Bachelor Bitter: “An authentic English-style extra special bitter-considered the height of the brewer’s art in British pubs-Bachelor ESB possesses a full malt flavor and balanced hop profile.”
  • Green Lakes Organic Amber: “This auspicious amber ale is brewed with five types of 100% organic malted barley and balanced with Liberty and Salmon-Safe Sterling hops.”
• Seasonal brew
  • Jubelale: “Perfect for a cozy winter gathering, Jubelale is a festive ale characterized by a large malt body balanced with hop bitterness derived from a variety of American and European hops.”
• Pub exclusive brews
  • Hopicide IPA: “This Imperial IPA was created in the most non-traditional Deschutes way: with Cascade and Centennial pellet hops.  If you are scared of lingering bitterness or a fuzzy tongue, do not attempt to tame this beast.”
  • Twilight Ale: “Made with a unique blend of four hops and malts, this lively straw-colored ale has a vigorous hop essence with a malt body that complements the flavor of this special seasonal brew.”
  • Nitro-tap Jubelale: “Our Jubelale is taken to new depths with a quick charge of nitrogen.  Smooth as silk and forever drinkable, this beer will launch many new seasonal traditions.”
  • Mt. St. Helens Keller Bier: “Keller is the German word for cellar.  This beer is called this because it is an unfiltered Pilsner like you would get straight from our cellar.  The beer is made up of all German ingredients which include yeast, malt, and hops (Northern Brewer and Saphir).”
  • Rooster Cream Ale: “This American-style cream ale is one of the smoothest beers ever made here at Deschutes Brewery.  The grist bill consists of pale malt, honey malt, flaked barley, munich, and rolled oats.  The citric hop flavor is imparted by Hallertau and Crystal hops.  Beware of this beer, you might find yourself coming back for another over and over again.”
  • Armory XPA: “This Extra Pale Ale has strong floral notes with a hoppy and flavorful aroma.  Brewed with Cascade, Centennial, German Northern Brewer, and experimental citrus hops.  With the outstanding success of the XPA we decided to bring it back again.”
  • 20^th Anniversary Wit: “A Belgian-style wit beer to celebrate our 20^th Anniversary.  Check out these experimental version in which the brewers tested out various herbs and spices.”
• Cask brews
  • Cask Bachelor Bitter
  • Cask Armory XPA

I started with the Cask Bitter and figured I’d work my way on up.  Learning to appreciate English-style ales is a goal of mine right now and I do like cask ale regardless of style, so it seemed right up my alley.  I got a 10oz pour that showed up medium amber with little to no head, just a very slight white lace around the edge of the glass.  It had a soft carbonation and a round, full mouthfeel.  I got a burst of fruitiness with sweet oranges leading the charge and other light fruits (pear?) in the background.  The hop flavors came through second and built up on my palate as I kept drinking, such that they were stronger in sips taken near the end of the glass than at the beginning.  A solid beer no doubt, but not life changing. As I was drinking, the temptation to get something off their incredible menu got stronger and stronger.  I succumbed to the pear and goat cheese pizza with duck prosciutto, though I was also eying some of the many dishes that incorporated the breweries beer, including most of the desserts.  As the quote on the menu says, “We make all of our own breads, desserts, sausages, soups, sauces, and dressings with local sustainable products in order to support neighborhood businesses, the environment, and to offer the tastiest meal possible.” My server was polite and very efficient and made quick work of filling sampler trays given the bar’s water-squirting glass cleaners.  My only complaint about the bar itself was that it had no hooks for coats or purses.  This is such an easy thing to add, and enormously helpful if the bar is full and you’ve nowhere else to put a purse since you’re sitting on a high stool. I moved on to the Jubelale, which was available on regular and nitro tap.  I just got the regular though.  It was a dark copper color with a lasting but thin off-white head.  It had a raisin-y aroma that continued into the taste of beer, while being joined by a hop sharpness.  I can’t remember having a winter warmer this hoppy before, but I really enjoyed it.  It was about this time that I decided to make hops the theme of my weekend.  Oh sure, I’ll try other not-so-hoppy beers as well, but when in doubt I’ll order IPAs, Imperial IPAs, fresh hop beers, pilseners, etc.  It is hop season after all.  The beer tastes spiced, but unlike many other breweries that add spices to their brew, those flavors in the Jubelale come just from the yeast and peppery alcohol.  If I took a big gulp, the malt flavor rose in prominence and I tasted caramel along with the dark and fruity yeast esters.  If I took small sips, the hops and alcohol dominated and I got more of a bitter, peppery flavor.  This is one I’d buy again, especially since I appreciate the craftsmanship inherent in the fact that they can get this level of spice without adding spices.

Rogue ale house and distillery

It was time to move on if I wanted to hit anywhere else before Allie and Melissa arrived, so I wandered a few blocks over to Rogue Alehouse and Distillery.  They had a nice, sunny, outside patio seating area, but I wanted to eye their list so I headed on into the bar.  The bartender, Mike, was awesome.  Even though he was busy he waved to show that he saw me and would be on his way over.  This is such an easy gesture, I wonder why more bartenders don’t do it.  It keeps people, especially people in a bar on their own, from feeling ignored and abandoned.  He headed ASAP to take my order and asked what brought me to Portland after I mentioned that I used to live practically next door to the SF Rogue location.  When I told him beer, he was brimming with suggestions and went to the back to grab me a copy of the Oregon Brewpub Guide.  This was service at its best: jolly, helpful, non-territorial. [PS - that guide is published by the Oregon Brewers Guild.  You used ot be able to request your own copy in the mail for free.  I did it last time I went to Oregon.  Now, it seems they've revamped their website and I don't see any such option anymore.  Oh well, you can still pick up the guide in any good brewpub in town.] The bar itself has a few other really neat touches, especially the brass plaques with the names of the regulars affixed to the counter and high tables.  I also liked that the sides of the room were lined with crates and crates of bombers full of Rogue beers.  I may have thought Deschutes had a lot of house beers on tap, this took things to a whole new level.  There were 28 Rogue beers available and another 7 beers from Issaquah and Track Town, two breweries acquired by Rogue in 2000 and 2004.  With so many choices, I hardly knew where to start.  Though I heard some old favorites (Brutal Bitter, Chocolate Stout, etc.) calling my name, I figured I ought to try something new while I had so many choices.  This being the weekend of the hop, I went with the Morimoto Imperial Pilsner.  I wasn’t sure how I’d like this beer, but wanted to give it a chance since Pilsners are another category of beer that I’m working on appreciating better.  Man, this was certainly the right place to start.  I loved it.  First of all, it was a total hop bomb.  The aroma reeked of dry hopping and the beer tasted like bright, bitter lemony hops.  Another great thing about Rogue is that they are data geeks, and love to provide all the stats on all of their beers, both on their bottles, on their menus at some locations, and online.  So, I can tell you that the hops in this beer are 100% Sterling, which is closely related to Saaz, a Noble hop from Bohemia (Czech Republic).  I also appreciated the straightforward mouthfeel and flavor profile: sharp and crisp.  This beer is focused, it’s not a muddle of a bunch of different flavors in a soft, mellow, complex combination.  While I want that in, say, a Belgian dubbel, it’s what sometimes gets to me in English bitters.  This imperial pilsner had purity and zing to the notes it carries and it made the bitter from Deschutes seem flabby by comparison. My one complaint about the Rogue Alehouse was that smoking was allowed in the bar area.  However, I know this is one of those black and white issues where probably just about every smoker is going to see this as a pro, just about every non-smoker as a con, and vice versa in places where smoking is not allowed.  I would have stayed longer, especially to taste some of their distilled spirits (white rum, hazelnut rum, dark rum, and spruce gin) or more of their beers, but after 2 10oz pints and this 16oz 8.8% pint (isn’t a pour that big on a beer that big a questionable move?), I definitely needed a break, so I went for a walk. I’ve copied the list of Rogue beers available in the Portland Alehouse below because the variety is just astounding.

• American Amber Ale
• Brutal Bitter
• Chipotle Ale
• Chocolate Stout
• Dad’s Little Helper Malt Liquor
• Dead Guy Ale
• Dry Hopped St. Rogue Red
• Hazelnut Brown Nectar
• Imperial IPA
• Imperial Porter
• Imperial Red
• Imperial Stout
• Imperial YSB
• John’s Locker Stout
• Juniper Pale Ale
• Kells Irish Lager
• Mocha Porter
• Mom’s Hefeweizen
• Morimoto Black Obi
• Morimoto Soba Ale
• Old Crustacean Barleywine
• Oregon Golden
• Santa’s Private Reserve
• Shakespeare Stout
• Smoke Ale
• Yellow Snow IPA
• Younger’s Special Bitter (YSB)
• Track Town 100 Meter Ale
• Track Town 200 Meter Ale
• Track Town Triple Jump
• Track Town Honey Orange Wheat
• Issaquah Bullfrog Ale
• Issaquah Menage a Frog
• Issaquah Smoke Frog

By the time I had completed walking the nearby blocks of downtown Portland, the sun had set, Allie and Melissa had found parking, and we were ready to head back to Deschutes for dinner. This time I knew exactly what I wanted, since I had been eying it earlier but didn’t want to kill my palate on my first beer of the night: The Hopicide Imperial IPA.  It arrived in a snifter, a thick, reddish copper with faint lacing.  The aroma was classic, big, American piney and grapefruity hops (Cascade and Centennial for sure according to their notes on the beer).  What was most surprising though, was that the bitterness was not over the top.  They must have gone much heavier on the aromatic finishing hops than on the bittering hops during the boil because when I took a sip, I thought it could have been more of an Imperial Red than an IIPA.  Sure, there were some hops there (as I’d expect in a good IRed), but nothing to that made me feel my tongue was facing death by hopicide.  I enjoyed it, and thought they did especially good with the aroma, but wonder if I’d already killed my palate on the Imperial Pilsner for not thinking this was particularly bitter (it’s apparently 94 IBUs, which means it ought to be awfully bitter). Our final stop of the evening was Henry’s 12^th Street Tavern.  When we rolled in, I thought we had gone in the wrong door at first, because we found ourselves at the hostess stand of a swank white-tableclothed restaurant swarming with young professionals.  Surely this couldn’t be it? Wrong.  We took a left turn and headed to the bar area, threading between the guys in button downs and the skinny girls in their peep-toe heels.  At first it looked like there was no where to sit, and I was starting to even wonder if this was the kind of place where people drink beer, expecting to see cosmos and cabernet on the bar tables.  But, that old phrase about books and their covers definitely applies in this case, because I was all wrong.  The crowd parted for a brief moment revealing three empty stools at the bar and two islands of taps behind the counter pouring 99 beers.  Another old saying is popping into my mind now and it goes something along the lines of “ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall, ninety-nine bottles of beer, take one down, pass it around, 98 bottles of beer on the wall…”

The glasses chilling on the 'snow' strip

We sat down at the bar and immediately oohed and ahhed at the glass-wide glycol-cooled strip of “snow” running the length of the bar.  I’m guessing it’s pretty unnecessary since (A) no one else has one, and (B) it really didn’t seem to cool or keep cool the glasses at all.  Well, I’m sure doesn’t hurt either, so no harm no foul. One thing I really liked about their list is that it is organized by style instead of by brewery.  This is the way a lot of restaurants write their wine lists, to make it easier for customers to zero in on the beers in the style they are looking for.  Historically, this wasn’t very necessary for beers since beer lists weren’t that long and all but a few customers didn’t know what the styles were anyway.  But with a list this long and a good share beer-geek customers, this becomes crucial.  I wish more breweries did this.  It wouldn’t require a style-nazi type mentality either.  We don’t need 80 or 90 subcategories on every list, you could just group ‘Belgians’ or ‘Sours’ together without differentiating the different sub-types and those who really want to know whether something is a dubbel vs. a tripel or a berliner weisse vs. an oud bruin could look at the description for that particular beer, rely on their own beer geeky knowledge, or ask the bartender. I have very few notes from this part of the night, but I can at least list what I drank:

• Allie round 1 – Walking Man Black Cherry Stout: smelled exactly like black forest cake. Luckily the taste was pretty dry and a lot less intensely cherry-ish.
• Melissa round 1 – Double Mountain India Red Ale
• Me round 1 – Ninkasi Tricerahops Imperial IPA: Not half as aromatic as Deschutes Hopicide but easier to drink. Lower in ABV?
• Allie round 2 – Alameda Black Bear Stout on Nitro
• Melissa round 2 – Oakshire Espresso Stout: I wanted to order this one for myself but Melissa called it first. Very smooth with prominent coffee (espresso, obviously) flavors, chocolate showing up second, and a hint of vanilla in the end of the taste.
• Me round 2 – Fearless Scottish Ale

And that my friends, was it for us.  We went home and Allie reports that as soon as my head hit the pillow I was out.  Well, what can you expect for getting up at 4:00am? Today we drove down to Bend, OR, and I’ll fill you in on all the details in my next post.  No awards for guessing which major brewery we visited, it’s too easy. Cheers! -JJ

Excited about cider

As I mentioned in my post about NCHF, I have a massive cider and cyser project underway.  For those who don’t know, cyser is apple-mead, basically a cross between cider and honeywine.  The inspiration for this project is my friend Melissa who loves cider and used to hate beer.  For a long time, this was actually quite useful, since Melissa would cart me and my sister around to all kinds of breweries without complaining about being the designated driver.  When we drove from Jackson Hole to Portland to San Francisco visiting 11 microbreweries along the way, it was Melissa who took most of the driving shifts.  As a thank you for this kindness, without which The Thirsty Hopster might never have taken off, I wanted to brew her a cider.  When I mentioned this to her, the response was a slightly wary, “That’s nice, but I hope you know I am never pressing 160 lbs of apples for you.”  My thoughts on this are, “We’re still even because I am never driving you and your sister across six states in four days. And as long as we’re both ok with these limits on our friendship, I think we’re still good.”

As I started looking into how to do this cider-making, I quickly realized there was an easy way (let plain apple juice stand at room temperature to start fermenting) and a hard way (pick apples, grind apples, press apples, split juice into many batches, add all manner of yeasts and additives, let stand at room temperature to start fermenting).  Why I felt the need to do this the hard way I’m not entirely sure, but I think it has to do with the fact that lately I’ve really felt this homesteading urge.  This happens whenever I go camping.  I start to have these grandiose dreams of living off the land, and rarely stop to realize that without my CamelBak and REI tent and North Face jackets and all manner of technical equipment, much less my local homebrew shop, I’d be toast.  So, I take on projects like this one at a time to get a taste of this do-it-yourself Oregon-trail-ish pioneer ethos, without all the mosquitoes and dysentery and so forth.

The apples, waiting to be pressed

I used my trip to Dobbins in the Sierra foothills for NCHF as an excuse to pick up apples in the Apple Hill area near Placerville.  Anyone from Placerville will point out right away that the two locations, Dobbins and Apple Hill, are nowhere near each other.  And they’d be right, but they’d have forgotten that to ignorant city folk like myself without a car, it’s all the big “East country.”  So, I had a beautiful, somewhat hangover-sullied, 2.5 hour drive south from Dobbins to Placerville following NCHF.  The best part was definitely CA-49 between Auburn and Placerville, which was absolutely gorgeous.  If I ever find myself the means to live without working, or to get serious about living off fallen acorns (Gail – I’m counting on you for that acorn-cake recipe), this is where I will move to.

When I got to Apple Hill, I encountered a few problems I hadn’t really anticipated.  First, it was Golden Delicious season, and Golden Delicious apples make pretty bland, overly-sweet cider.  The whole idea behind making cider from the apples themselves instead of store-bought or farmers market-bought juice was to use the proper blend of sweet, tart, tannic, and aromatic apples instead of making a single varietal cider.  In the end, I found what I needed, but it involved trips to about 12 different growers, and buying 160 pounds of apples of 5 varieties from about 5 different places.  The final apple tally was:

• 60 lbs of McIntosh (somewhat tart, very aromatic) from Boa Vista Orchards
• 40 lbs of Gravensteins (sweet) from a roadside stand in Sebastopol two weeks ago
• 40 lbs of Mutsu (very tart) from Larsen Apple Barn
• 10 lbs of Arkansas Black from (sweet and aromatic) from Bolster’s Hilltop Ranch (picked by me!)
• 10 lbs of Greenings (very tart) from Rainbow Grocery in San Francisco

Arkansas Black and Greenings apples

I also got 7 gallons of fresh-pressed un-pasteurized Golden Delicious juice from Bolster’s and Boa Vista.  I figured that if my mix above leaned too heavily to the tart side, I could blend this in.  Though in retrospect I’m glad I got the juice, since I have it in three different splits fermenting right now, it was a logistical nightmare to get home.  Without refrigeration, that stuff starts to ferment right away.  I was in a car crossing sunny central California in summer, with no room for a cooler since there were apples everywhere, and the juice would have required 2 or 3 coolers anyway.  I did my best to pack it in the shade behind the front seats and then turned on the AC full blast for the ride home.  It worked, but driving 2.5 hours home in that ice-box was a challenge to say the least.  I had my sleeves pulled over my numb fingers and my sweatshirt hood up for warmth.  As I huddled over my stewring wheel shivering the other drivers must have thought I was a lunatic.  Squeezing all that juice into our fridge, already overladen with beer, was another piece of logistics I hadn’t anticipated, but I threw out some leftovers and made it work.

The apple grinder (left) and press (right)

The next day was cider making day!  I picked up my joint grinder and press from The Oak Barrel in Berkeley.  It looked unwieldy and as the Bob from the store started to explain how many pounds of apples two people could press in an hour, I started to wonder what I had been thinking to attempt this on my own.  Even getting it out of the trunk back at my place was a challenge.  Luckily, as a former rugby player, I’m a bit tougher than I look, and with a little elbow grease the press was unloaded and reassembled.

The lead up to the pressing was maddening.  All I wanted to do was turn 160 lbs of apples into juice, how hard could that be, right?  Between driving to pick up the press, bringing it to my place and unloading it, returning the Zipcar, hauling all my apples down stairs from the apartment to the backyard, and cleaning and sanitizing equipment, it was 3:00pm before I got down to the actual pressing.  This was the part I had worried about all day, but it was actually quite simple.  Here’s the process:

• Go through a box of apples and cut each apple in half.  Also cut off any brown spots.  As you cut the apples, throw them in a tub of water to rinse them off.
• Turn on the grinder’s motor, take a handful of apple halves, and throw them in.  The mushy pulp will fall out the other end into a mesh bag.
• When the bag is full, place it in a slatted wooden cage under the screw press and place a wooden plate on top.
• Start turning the screw press down and eventually it will hit the wooden plate and start compressing the apples.  The press breaks the walls of the apple cells to release all of their juices and enzymes, which will flow out of the bag and cage and into a bucket placed under the end of the press.
• When the bucket gets full, empty it into carboys.  That’s it! Ta-da!

It took me about 3.5 hours to go through all of my apples.  I had thought it would take much longer, but the grinding and pressing went really fast.  The most time consuming part was slicing and trimming the apples.  The ones I bought pre-picked and fresh were pretty good, but the ones that I hand picked and the ones that had sat around for two weeks needed more attention.  Generally, apples are supposed to sit (“to sweat”, technically) for a short while after being picked but before being juiced, to let them soften and sweeten up a bit.  However, two weeks might have been pushing it.

In the end, I got about 8 gallons of juice out of those 160 lbs.  It’s not the pressing efficiency I would have liked – I’ve heard that it generally takes only 14 to 15 lbs of apples to make a gallon of juice, but it took me 20 lbs.  However, considering that it was my first time and that I didn’t have a second pair of hands, I don’t think that was too bad.

My friend Brian Cooper of the Mad Zymurgists had agreed to go in on the apples and press with me, and he came by right as I was finishing up to pick up his 4 gallons of juice.  He’s making a batch of strong cyser with blended yeasts out of his share.

The splits!

As for me, I had 4 gallons left of the Thirsty Hopster special blend juice and 7 gallons left of plain Golden Delicious juice and decided it was time for some experimenting.  I’ve got 10 batches going: one big (5 gallon), 2 small (1 gallon), and 7 tiny (1/2 gallon).  The half gallon batches were the result of my unproductive search for gallon jugs.  I’ve heard that the best place to find them is just to buy a gallon of apple juice at Trader Joe’s and then save the jug.  However, when I went to a Trader Joe’s in SF, the only apple juice in glass jars was quart size and all the gallon servings of apple juice were packaged in plastic jugs.  In the end, I found glass jugs at Brewcraft, my local homebrew store, but by then I had already given up and bought ½ gallon mason jars, figuring they were the best I could do.  I modified the lids of these jars to fit an airlock by drilling a hole in them, sticking in a rubber plug with an airlock, and then sealing the area around the plug with wax.

Here’s what’s fermenting away:

TH = Self-pressed blended juice

GD = Pre-pressed Golden Delicious juice

1. 0.5 gallons TH juice with Lalvin D-47 (White wine yeast)
2. 0.5 gallons TH juice with Lalvin D-47 (White wine yeast) & oak chips
3. 0.5 gallons TH juice with WLP775 (English cider yeast)
4. 0.5 gallons TH juice with WLP775 (English cider yeast) & oak chips
5. 0.5 gallons TH juice with WLP720 (Sweet mead/wine yeast) & tropical flower honey
6. 0.5 gallons TH juice with WLP720 (Sweet mead/wine yeast), wildflower honey, & oak chips
7. 0.5 gallons TH juice spontaneously fermenting (no added yeast)
   • [There was going to be an oaked version of this one but there was a hole in the jar that I didn't notice until filling my jars so I ran out of jars and lost a little juice]
8. 1.0 gallons GD juice with sour cherries and Lalvin D-47 (White wine yeast)
9. 1.0 gallons GD juice with spices (cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, allspice) and Lalvin D-47 (White wine yeast)
   • [There was going to be a ginger version of the Golden Delicious but I forgot to go buy fresh ginger so that didn't end up happening]
10. 5.0 gallons GD juice spontaneously fermenting (no added yeast)

So, there you have it!  It will be a while before I know how this massive experiment turns out, but I will post the results here when they are ready.  In fact, we will probably have to have a cider tasting as part of the Thirsty Hopster tasting series one of these next few months.

Cheers!

A meta-note about beer blogging

On this site, I usually like to stick to talking about beer.  Sure, there are huge digressions about the context in which I drink beer or the people I meet along the way, but generally I try to make sure that beer or beer-related activities of some kind are the focus.  I’ve never wanted to have the kind of blog with posts bearing tags like “life” or “thoughts” because one woman’s internal musings are often another person’s snoozefests.  It’s like when someone tries to tell you about a dream they had last night: it’s interesting to them, but your mind starts to wander almost as soon as they launch into it because, well, who cares?

So, with that all in mind, I hope everyone will forgive me for a somewhat introspective piece that’s more about covering beer and brewing than about beer itself.  This was prompted by the fact that earlier today a friend pointed out to me that elsewhere in the world of online beer and brewing coverage I had come up as a topic of conversation.  I don’t want to mention where this was because I don’t want to point more people to it, but you’ll know what I’m talking about if you came across it too.  I had a busy day finishing up my ciders (which I ought to be writing about and would be writing about if this hadn’t come up), so I didn’t have a chance to go find out what was said until this afternoon.  If this is all starting to sound like a chain of high school gossip to anyone else, that ought to be your first clue that something is amiss here.

The gist of it all is that the friend of a group of guys who cover beer met me this weekend at NCHF, and he and his buddies decided to include in their coverage of the event a short discussion about me personally.  Most comments were on the subject of what I look like, am I single, and would I be impressed hear about their beer-related gig.  The discussion ends with a single token line to the effect of, “I hear she’s a cool person.  And a good beer writer.”

I can’t really capture the tenor of the comments here, and I know there are some guys who just aren’t going to understand why this got me angry enough that I took the afternoon to clear my head before responding so that I wouldn’t completely rant, but I’d like to start by asking this question: Have you ever, anywhere in the beer journalism or beer blog space, heard the journalists devote 90% of their time to discussing a male blogger or brewer’s looks and relationship status?  No.  And the reason is because (A) they wouldn’t be talking about him if there were no real news about him, and (B) he’d probably come kick their asses.  I wish these guys would have kept the comments to the topic of whether they respect what I do or not.  And if they had nothing substantive to say on the matter, which it didn’t seem like they did, to devote the time to someone who deserves it more, someone doing something awesome for craft beer.

I must have had at least 5 guys ask me this weekend at NCHF why there aren’t more women beer enthusiasts.  I usually just shrug.  I mean, it’s not like we all have one brain we share between us women – I don’t know why other women do what they do.  But then, this little incident made me want to say to everyone who asked me this question, “Don’t you think that at least a small part of it is that we women know you’re looking us up and down instead of listening to what we’re saying?  That you’re judging us by our hair and clothes and weight, instead of how we brew or write? Don’t you think we get tired of that? Don’t you think it makes it hard for us to trust you when you say you like the beer we brewed? Or the post we wrote? To ever talk to you like one professional to another?”

A least favorite segment of mine from the discussion: “Is she married? I don’t want to go to far…” Other participant, “No, I don’t think so.”  First participant, “Ok, cool.”

Excuse me?  So, if I had a husband who would be upset by their comments, they wouldn’t have made them; but so long as it’s just me that’s going to be upset, it’s all cool?  Real classy, guys.

In the time since this blog has started, my policy has always been never to discuss being a woman in beer.  It’s a choice I made very deliberately because I think that in an ideal world it deserves zero attention, positive or negative.  This is why I don’t have a blog name like “The beer chick” or “The beer babe” and why I don’t write posts like “A female perspective on ales”, etc.  I want the blog judged on it’s own merits. Generally, I just shrug off the occasional chauvinist comment made in my presence and pretend not to know about the ones made when I’m not around.  I usually just focus on wishing guys would realize on their own how obnoxious this talk is so that I won’t have to say anything.

So why’d I cave this time and decide to post about it?  Well, it’s not because this is the most egregious discussion I’ve ever heard.  However, as I thought about things this afternoon, I decided that I guess I can’t really expect it to stop unless I mention that it bothers me, to be talked about for what sex I am, what age I am, and what I look like, rather than for what I do and say.  So, to that end, let it be said here that, yes, it bothers me.  And no, I’m not interested in “cross-promoting” with a group that devoted the first half of their piece to a discussion of their new webcam, the “beer and beaver cam.”  As the much younger party here, I shouldn’t have to be the one to say this but, dude, grow up already guys.  And once you have, then sure, let’s sit down over a beer together.

Cheers,

-JJ

PS – I haven’t totally disabled comments on this post because, even though I mention no names here, it’s only fair to leave it open to the people mentioned, or other readers, to respond.  However, I have set the comments to require moderator approval because I don’t want anyone posting a link to the original discussion here – I’m not going to promote that discussion here on this blog.

Epic: The Northern Califonia Homebrewers Festival

I have just returned from the Northern California Homebrewers Festival (NCHF from here on out) and I hardly know where to start.  I wish I could have blogged while there so I wouldn’t have such a mountain of things pent up to write about, but as there was neither internet nor power outlets at the campsite, or even spare time enough to write without missing great brews, blogging on-site was not an option for me.

Sean Paxton

It all started about three months ago when I first met Sean Paxton, The Homebrew Chef.  We had both been recruited, quite happily, to help Jay Brooks clean his refrigerator out of beer.  Sean mentioned at one point that he always cooks the Friday night dinner for NCHF and then and there I resolved to attend that dinner.  In fact, I’m pretty sure I bought my ticket the very next day.  Ever since wandering into Toronado at the tail end of the Belgian Beer Dinner and reading about it afterwards, I’ve been planning to go to one of his events.

Of course, this is all easier said than done.  Sure, it doesn’t sound like such a big deal: buy ticket, show up, drink beer.  But then, there was a lot that went into making it to NCHF.  First of all, what respectable homebrewer shows up at a homebrew festival empty handed?  No, no, that would not do.  So, Gail and I labored over our chamomile & honey Belgian Specialty beer, which after throwing us curveball after curveball was finally ready for bottling just two days before NCHF.  Though I have been asked by Gail not to talk it up, I can’t help it!  I have only been brewing since earlier this year and this is the first beer I’ve made that I really enjoy drinking.  I couldn’t wait to share it with others.  Though I only have 21 twelve ounce bottles of it, and though it was not fully conditioned at all, and will probably not peak until months from now, I brought two bottles to the festival.

Then there was the commercial beer to buy.  I figured since I wouldn’t have kegs full of my own beer, the least I could do was bring other delicious beer to the fest.  I decided to combine this festival beer buying with two other beer buying errands I needed to run: (1) buying samples of porters for my next tasting event (details are coming soon, I promise you!  Think late October…)., and (2) searching for The Dissident, an Oud Bruin from Deschutes.  That turned out to be more effort than I expected.  I had asked Healthy Spirits if they were getting any bottles of it, and they were, but unfortunately when the distributor’s delivery truck arrived The Dissident wasn’t on it.  (PS – for those looking for The Dissident, their delivery did come in, just too late for me to go pre-NCHF).  Next, I headed on over to City Beer Store where I heard they had The Dissident and He’Brew’s Messiah on Rye.  I did get to try the Messiah, which just continued my love of all things Rye, but the Dissident was sold out in bottles and not going on tap until the next day at noon, at which point I planned to be en route to NCHF already, making it another near miss.  Craig at CBS told me that Whole Foods at 4^th Street probably still had some, so on Friday I headed on over to Whole Foods before setting off for the foothills.  And, believe it or not, I was foiled again!  Their power was out, so the whole store was closed.  Feeling pretty defeated, I headed over to BevMo to see whether there was any chance they’d have it, and they did!  I was so relieved that I got 4 bottles and figured I could find happy homes for any of them I decided I could part with.  Anyone got something they want to trade for a Dissident?

Due to the Dissident run-around, it was 1:45pm by the time I got on the road on Friday.  I had planned to set out at noon, so that I could get there by 3:30pm and grab a campsite before dinner.  Little did I know that the frustrating part of my day was only beginning.  Traffic crawled at about 10mph the whole way from SF to Davis.  Ok, that’s a slight exaggeration, otherwise I would have missed all the Friday festivities, but there were long stretches in which my rental Zipcar’s speedometer, which was inexplicably set to display kilometers per hour instead of miles, was registering in the single digits.  Though I started cursing the remote NCHF location, in Dobbins, CA, while sitting in the 4.5 hours of traffic between me and the beer, the last 30 miles made me realize why they hold the festival there.  The setting was truly stunning.  I’ll admit I have a preference for green oaks against golden fields that borders on obsession, but I think anyone would agree with me that the drive in to Dobbins from Maryville is gorgeous.  The next day only reconfirmed this impression, with bright blue skies, picturesque fluffy clouds, and 70-something temperatures that kept everyone happy.

I drove straight up to the dinner site and planned to leave my car in that parking lot and pitch camp after dinner so that I wouldn’t miss the first course.  Luckily, I was persuaded by one of the festival organizers that this was a very dumb idea, and it turns out she was completely right.  It was 4:30am when I finally ended up getting back to camp and was oh-so-happy that I hadn’t left finding a spot to the early hours of the morning.  As it was, even at 6:00pm, many of the spots were already taken.  I drove the camp in circles 3 times before I found one.  This was probably the only thing that could be improved about this very well run festival.  If someone from the campground or the festival organization had kept a list of open sites and crossed sites off as people took them, it would have been easier to find the ones still left open.  In any case, I pitched my tent and met my camp neighbor, Eric Mosher, a member of the Bay Area Mashers (Isn’t that perfect?  I’ve been hearing so many great beer names lately).  We settled our stuff and then hurried on down to dinner.

Dinner was awesome, and I think that says a lot about Sean’s skills in the kitchen considering that he was somewhat handicapped with a British theme (I know the Anglophiles are going to get on my case for this one, but say what you will, the Brits have never been known for their food, at least not in a good way).  You can find the full menu here.  I was a little worried about where I’d sit, since I hadn’t come with a club as had most other guests.  Luckily, many of the same guests of Jay’s refrigerator party were there and sitting together, so I joined them.

We munched on some barley malted scones while waiting for the dinner to start, and couldn’t help but salivate when we could smell them start ladling the onion soup into bowls.  There’s something about the smell of onions that is just cozy and enticing.  It’s one of those foods, like coffee, which I like to eat or drink, but love to smell.  We also started guessing what was in our mini mason jar.  It looked like honey, but of course, given how much Sean likes to fit beer in every element of the dinner, we should have known better.  It was Samuel Smith’s Nut Brown jelly, and I’ve got an extra jar of it that I was given to take home, so I can start my days with beer on toast from here on out.  I’m really hoping the alcohol in there cooked off in the process of making the jelly, or else I’m going to have some tipsy mornings.  I slurped down my onion soup and couldn’t wait for what would be next.

The second course was bangers and mash, but these weren’t just any bangers – they were homemade sausages.  They had a great mildly spicy bite at the end.  We were told there was enough for us each to take two, but in retrospect, I’m not sure why I thought that meant I ought to have two.  I did, of course, because they were delicious, but I really started to regret it as more meat and potato courses started arriving and I was already pretty stuffed.  The beer with the bangers and mash was a version of Firestone Walker’s Double Barrel Ale that was unblended and unfiltered.  Generally, only a portion of the ale in a DBA bottle has oak fermented in Firestone’s barrel union system, but in this case all of this beer came from the union system, so it picked up a noticeable smoothness.  Matt Brynildson, the Firestone Walker Brewmaster, was on hand, though he had only just made it due to a lot of the same traffic I had faced.  He gave a fantastic talk about the history of the union system, and how he originally felt about it when first brewing at Firestone (“We’re not actually going to use these? Right?”).  He also mentioned that as part of a brewers exchange program, he’ll get to go to England next month to brew on the only other active union system in the world, at Marston’s in Burton-on-Trent.

The two Sacramento Peters

Next up was a Cornish pasty that was probably my favorite part of the entire dinner.  It was filled with steak, portobello, blue cheese, and thyme.  Portobellos are usually one of my least favorite mushrooms because people almost always cook them to a rubbery consistency, but these were perfectly tender and earthy.  The pasties were even piping hot, which is a testament to the logistical skills of Sean and the other organizers, and to the great service provided by the volunteers from the Bay Area Brew Crew.  The beer with this course was an ordinary bitter from Sacramento Brewing Company that makes me want to retract my griping about boring low alcohol British beers.  At least, I’ll forgive the style, but not the British brewers because I didn’t have a bitter half this tasty at GBBF.  It had a delicate orange aroma that made it interesting and fun to keep drinking.  Now I see why someone might want to have four or five of these beers.

Shaun tapping the cask

Then, as if I hadn’t had two entrees yet, it was on to Shepherd’s Pie with three kinds of potatoes.  In a really playful touch, the oven trays had been arranged with the potatoes in stripes that looked like the Irish flag, with the green spinach on one side, white goat gouda in the middle, and orange sweet potatoes on the end.  I loved the spinach potatoes so much I had to ask for the secret to making them, since I figure that mashed potatoes ought to be something my scant cooking abilities can handle.  Sean told me to sauté the spinach first, then blend it with the cooked potatoes; don’t try to cook the spinach with the potatoes or else you’ll lose the color.  Good to know!  The beer was a ‘Transcontinental IPA’ brewed at 21^st Amendment by Mitch Steele from Stone Brewing Company.  Shaun O’Sullivan from 21A and Steve Wagner from Stone were on hand, so we got to hear about how this beer came to be.  Mitch had brewed it in England as part of the same brewers exchange program that Matt is now participating in.  However, since he never got to taste bring any of it back to Stone, Shaun and Mitch figured they ought to brew some stateside, and in true English fashion, they cask conditioned it.  It’s my favorite beer to date from 21A, which makes me wonder if maybe they ought to consider going cask instead of can from here on out?  Though casks probably would be harder to sneak into the ballpark.

The final savory course was curry, which I have to admit I skipped, because I’ve never been a curry fan.  My usual rule at set dinners like this is that I try everything, regardless of whether I think I’ll like it.  This has worked out only to my advantage in the past, and taught me at Bar Crudo that I do like shellfish after all.  However, by the time the curry arrived, I’m not sure I could have even found room for one of my favorite foods, so I spent the time talking and digesting.  The Orval Challenge, which I’ll get to later, was launched by Tim, and through Tim I met several of the BABC members that I spent much of the weekend drinking with.

We ended with an English trifle made with hopped whipped cream.  There was imperial stout in the pudding, and the sweet and bitter coffee-ish pudding went fantastically with the slightly bitter aromatic whipped cream.

As the last few courses of dinner started arriving, the order that had prevailed earlier in the evening was giving way to a free-for-all of beer sharing.  People got up and switched tables and started producing bottles of commercial or homebrew from who knows where.  It reminded me of magicians pulling scarves from their sleeves.  All of a sudden there would be a 750 of Toronado 20^th Anniversary Ale, or barrel aged wheatwine, or homebrewed kriek.  The most fun for me to try was a beer from Peter Salmond that was started while he was at BJ’s in Oxnard and finished since he moved back to Sacramento.  I was sitting across from the Sacramento Peters during dinner and as I started telling them about the homebrew that I brought, “Well, it’s Belgian, somewhat tripel-like but sweeter, made with a small amount of wheat, some honey in place of turbinado sugar, and dry hopped with chamomile,” they just kept looking back and forth at each other.  Finally, Peter S. explains, that’s what he had just made as well, a honey chamomile tripel with Brettanomyces.  I had to admit that we had thought about Brett‘ing our beer and had just barely decided not to.  Peter opened his bottle at some point after dinner and it was delicious.  It was definitely dryer than ours, closer to the final gravity we had been aiming for.  I’m wondering if it’s the Brett that helped him get it down that far.  Their chamomile flavor was also more pronounced, while in ours the honey flavor is bigger.  All in all, it was a great experience to get to try it since it showed me, even if we already have something we like, just how much further we have to go in making an excellent beer.

Time started slipping away, the beer and conversation started to run low, and eventually we looked at out watches.  It was 4:00am!  I had had no idea how late it was.  The beer talk had been so lively it had just kept me going.  As we picked up our bags and started heading back to camp, we all realized Matt had nowhere to stay.  He had rolled in mid-meal, and gone straight to the dinner instead of setting up camp, as I had originally planned to do.  All the other brewers in that last late little crowd were staying in cabins and thus couldn’t really help him find a spot to pitch his tent.  Luckily, since I had only my one car and my tiny tent, there was plenty of room over at my site.  I felt bad for my neighbors as we pulled up at 4:15-ish and started waving around my flashlight and trying to assemble his tent palace.  Fortunately, it was pretty straightforward, and we were quiet well-behaved late arrivals, not rowdy drunks, but I did hear some grumbling from neighboring sites.  It was 4:30am before we were all done and I could crawl into my little tent and crash.

In the morning, as those who had wisely gone to sleep much earlier started puttering around at 8:30am, I just groaned and tried to block them out.  The one upside to not yet being a member of a homebrewing club is that I had no obligations to go help set up a booth.  Yet, as my eyes scanned the top of my tent, trying to decide whether to go back to sleep or not, what I noticed made me bolt awake.  Somehow I had pitched my tent on top of an ant colony and the tent was now crawling with ants.  All but two or three of them were on the outside, but man did it startle me.  After that, it was hard to go back to sleep, so I just decided to grin and bear it… and go get coffee.  I had breakfast with my camp neighbor Eric and got to hear about his easy partial mash method, which I have to admit does sound awfully simple.  I’ve done partial mash for my last 3 batches, but his sparging method sounds much easier than the juggling I’ve been doing with colanders and vegetable steamers.

Finally, noon arrived bright and sunny, and it was time for the festival to begin in earnest.  Even though this was the main event, I had been having such a good time so far that even if the festival had never taken place I’d say it was all worth it.  Each of the 15-ish homebrew clubs present had a tent, under which they were serving anywhere from four to fourteen different beers.  The theme of the weekend being “The British Isles”, there were a lot of porters, bitters, milds, English IPAs and the like.  There was also a keg competition, with Wee Heavy and Irish Red categories, in which each club could enter one keg per style.  I somehow missed wherever this was happening and thus didn’t get to sample any of those Wee Heavies.

Joe & his meads at the WZZ booth

Several beers stand out to me as memorable that morning, and the first wasn’t even a beer.  In fact it was a collection of six meads that Joe from the Washoe Zephyr Zymurgists had brought to share.  He had (1) fireweed mead, (2) jasmine mead made with clover and blackberry honey and jasmine tea, (3) strawberry mead, (4) raspberry mead, (5) sour cherry mead, and (6) heather mead.  All were relatively sweet, and my preferences ran to the floral/herbal meads (1, 2, 6) over the fruit meads across the board.  The jasmine mead was my favorite, and perhaps others’ too since it was the first to run out.  However, the fireweed mead was also really interesting in that it had a bit of a spicy kick.  It was also great to try these meads side-by-side with the traditional mead made by Brian Cooper of the Mad Zymurgists.  Brian’s mead just won gold in the AHA National Homebrew Competition.   Brian’s was dryer with more carbonation.  It was a great example of what honey tastes like without honey’s sweetness, which is a foreign concept most of the time.  This mead had fermented out a lot of its original sweetness but still retained an essential honey flavor.

DOZE beer board

Another one of my favorites was the bourbon vanilla porter from Doc Scott of the Diablo Order of Zymiracle Enthusiasts (DOZE).  Unfortunately, my notes just say that I liked it, and not why I liked it, but there you have it.  I know this beer also ran out early-ish in the festival, and thus was probably pretty popular with others as well.

I wandered over to the Bay Area Brew Crew (BABC) booth and spent a long time there, and at the Williams Brewing booth next door.  BABC had fourteen different beers, including an Orval clone and an oaked barleywine.  The Orval clone was something I had been looking forward to trying all day following my conversations with the BABC guys online and at the Friday dinner.  Matt wrote in following my last blog post to contend that Orval does age well, and Tim thoroughly stood by him on this.  After drinking a two year old bottle of actual Orval that Tim graciously shared at the festival, I have to say I was wrong in my previous post and that I agree with them.  The beer had not skunked or become flawed in anyway, had mellowed in its hoppiness and barnyard-iness, and gotten a bit dryer, if that’s even possible.  Yet, though the Orval was still a great beer after two years, I have to say I liked the more aggressive Brett aromas in the young version better.  Tasting Aaron from BABC’s Orval clone was a fun comparison, though I never got to sip them side by side.  I think he got the dryness and hop bitterness just right, and that if anything his version was just a bit earthier, not sure whether from the hops or the yeast, which I quite enjoyed.

Rick Sellers (Beer Director of DRAFT), Peter Hoey (Brewmaster at Sacramento Brewing Company), Steve Wagner (Brewmaster at Stone Brewing Company)

The BABC barleywine I mentioned just above was my favorite of the whole festival.  It has a leg up in that there is a great story behind it, but the taste of the beer is really what makes it stand out above everything else I tasted that day.  This beer was brewed when the club had a big brew in and about 10 of them brought their brewing systems to Sean’s house to brew together.  They made about 70 gallons of beer which were, if I’m remembering this correctly, fermented separately and then aged in a Firestone Walker oak barrel.  The most interesting thing to me was how recognizable the Firestone Walker character was in the beer.  I would have thought that oak from one brewery isn’t going to taste so different from oak from another brewery, and maybe because I wasn’t trying this beer blind it is all in my mind, but it had flavors very similar to many Firestone Walker beers.  When I said this, I realized it was the second time that day I had had this experience.  Earlier I had tried Tim’s sour tripel made with woodchips Vinnie Cilurzo had given out at last year’s festival.  The aroma of the tripel reminded me of a Russian River beer right away.  So, it just goes to show that there really is something proprietary about all these house oaks that brewers cultivate.

Beth and Kevin leading the tasting panel

Throughout the day, there were several speakers leading sessions under the main tent.  In the morning, I sat in on a tasting session led by Beth Zangari and Kevin Pratt, two Grand Master BJCP Judges, on how to better evaluate beer.  In the afternoon, Steve Wagner from Stone Brewing gave the keynote address.  I missed the first couple of minutes, but I’ll give a brief overview of what I did catch.  He spoke about Stone’s green initiatives, including the fact that 40% of their electricity now comes from solar power.  He spoke about collaborations with other brewers as being a big innovation priority for Stone right now.  They just brewed a tripel in collaboration with AleSmith and Mikkeler, and have new collaboration beers coming up next with Jolly Pumpkin and separately with Nogne Ø.  International expansion is also something new they are working on, and Steve mentioned that they shipped their first beers to Japan in June, though I got see this first hand when I spotted the Stone Russian Imperial Stout at Beer Club Popeye back in July.

Steve Wagner talking about Stone

Overall, I just can’t describe in words how wonderful the festival was.  The beer was amazing and all the more so because just about every beer had a proud brewer standing behind it ready to talk about it.  People were so generous with their recipes and advice, as well as humble and willing to talk about what they still struggle with in their own brewing.  The casual conversations and the formal panels were the best brewing education I’ve gotten to date, and the only thing better I can imagine is getting down to actually brewing with these guys, hopefully something that’s on the near term horizon for me.  And that’s the flipside of all this, which is to say, that as much as this weekend is all about beer, it’s also all about making friends – it’s just that much easier when you have something like this in common.  By the end of the weekend there were several people who I know I’m going to have to call up more often to invite out for a pint, the only problem being that they’re scattered from Paso Robles to Oakland, to Sonoma, to Sacramento.  I’m just going to have to start driving a lot more often.

Apples: Gravenstein, McIntosh, Arkansas Black, Mutsu (clockwise from top left)

Speaking of which, that’s what I did all day Sunday to ensure that I was ready for today’s brewing adventure.  After packing up my site Sunday morning, and hoping I could blaze a trail with my rental Scion xB such that I would neither have to wake Matt up to move his car, nor run him over in my attempt to drive out another way, I spent 3 hours driving the back roads of the Sierra foothills down to the Apple Hill area outside Placerville, and then another 2.5 hours driving back to SF from there.  The fruit of this expedition (pun fully intended) is that I now have 160 lbs of apples, some of them hand picked by me, which I’m going to grind and press for many small batches of cider and cyser.  My next post will be all about this, but right now, that’s all I’ll say because there’s a lonely cider press waiting for me at The Oak Barrel and I’ve got to go pick it up.