Monday, June 20, 2011

Random Beer Things…

I can’t remember if I mentioned it or not but I recently ordered ingredients to make an Irish Red Ale plus a little. I basically ordered everything I needed to make a nice Irish Red, but I up’d my grain bill trying to make it just a little bit bigger. Not an Imperial Red but maybe just a double red or a Irish Red 2.0. We’ll see how it turns out, I am hoping to be brewing it by tomorrow night as long as fedex shows up on time tomorrow.

But while I sit here and salivate over my next brew I wanted to just share a few thoughts about craft beer. The first thing I realized is, it’s everywhere man. A few years back it was hard to find any beer that wasn’t a budweiser or miller-coors  product. Now as I walk down the grocery store, the beer isn’t only contained to the cooler any more. There are actually aisles,  yep that’s right aisles as in plural, as in more than one. So now you have choices galore. It’s an awesome time in craft beer. Even main stream grocery stores such as Wegmans or Tops are catching onto to the movement. I mean Wegmans has a “Craft Your Own Pack” section where you can mix and match a six pack of beer and the last time I was at Tops they had a little pamphlet on craft beer that gave definition of styles and the appropriate glassware to drink it out of. A really big and really cool step for grocery stores.

The second thing I noticed is that everyone I know is talking about craft beer. At work when I talk to my colleagues it seems like one of the first questions I hear is “Have you been to that new brewery to try their beer?”. Just yesterday I was having a conversation with a fellow winemaker about beer judging. He has been judging wine competitions for years and was asked to sit in for a beer judge cancellation. He is certainly no stranger to beer but he was shocked and amazed at the grading criteria in a beer competition. We were discussing how strict the style guidelines were and how many brewers are stretching the guidelines almost into new styles. I was explaining to him how there is a whole Beer Judging Certification Program that you have to complete to correctly judge beer.

So as I sit here drinking a frosty cold beer in the shade, I am just amazed at how far beer has come and I am very interested in where it is going. Who knows? Maybe in a few years I’ll know first hand. Here’s to wishful thinking!

Keep ‘em tippin’!!!

Thursday, June 16, 2011

Dreaming again...

Image from: http://www.holderbros.com/blog/tagged-with/timber-framed-barn

So lately I have been really daydreaming about a lot of different things, but the two biggest of them being opening up a small “boutique” nanobrewery. (sorry, I work in the wine industry and around me, all of the tiny wineries/farm wineries are called boutique wineries) and secondly becoming less dependent on the world and becoming more self sufficient. If I had the money to go “off the grid” I SO would, but that is not an option at this point. However, as my daydreams continue to meander through my head I thought that this would be a really cool idea and possibly feasible on the nanobrewery level.


I think that it would be awesome to start up a small brewery that is almost entirely self sufficient. I think that if I had five to ten acres of land I could do it. I would plop down a rustic timber framed barn with the tasting room up front and the brewery operations in the back. Then there would be an acre or two dedicated to growing a couple different varieties of hops, and the rest of the acres would be for barley and some wheat for the malt bill for the brewery. Then I would contract with the local farmers to harvest and possibly process the barley for me. Then I could control the growing conditions for everything that enters my beer. I would be able to control my process from raw materials to finished beer. I’m not sure if the beer laws are the same as the wine laws, but if they are then I would be able to call my beer an “Estate” beer, meaning that all of the ingredients that go into the beer came from my property. Plus on a personal note, how satisfying would it be to know that your beers were all produced using materials that you had grown? That would be awesome.

But anyway, that’s what I have been thinking about lately in the world of beer. I’m also out trying to find a real good Double Red Ale recipe. My fermenters have been dry for too long and I’m itching to get something going.



Keep ‘em tippin’!!!
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