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.