EBF NotB 2010

Founders Brewing Co. (MI) Canadian Breakfast Stout Founders Brewing Co. (MI)	Nemesis
Founders Brewing Co. (MI)	Syzrp of Doom
Boston Beer Co. (MA)	Utopias
Allagash Brewing Co. (ME)	Coolship w/ Cherries
The Bruery (CA)	Oude Tart
The Bruery (CA)	Black Tuesday
The Lost Abbey (CA)	Angel's Share Grand Cru
The Lost Abbey (CA)	Older Viscosity 2009
The Lost Abbey (CA)	Double Red Poppy 2010
Avery Brewing Co. (CO)	Black Tot Imperial Oatmeal Stout (Rum Barrel Aged)
Berkshire Brewing Co. (MA)	Rum Barrel-Aged Shabadoo, Black & Tan
Cisco Brewers (MA)	Dark Woods
Dogfish Head Craft Brewery(DE)	Wrath of Pecan! (on Pecan Wood)
Odell Brewing Co. (CO)	Woodcut No.3 Oak Aged Crimsom Ale
Ithaca Beer Co. (NY)	$5 Shake
Odell Brewing Co. (CO)	Bourbon Barrel Stout
Shmaltz Brewing Co. (NY)	Barrel-aged Bittersweet Lenny's RIPA
Avery Brewing Co. (CO)	Sui Generis Barrel Aged Sour Ale
Cambridge Brewing Co. (MA)	Darkest Night
Boulevard Brewing Co. (MO)	Bourbon Barrel Quad (BBQ)
Saint Louis Brewery (Schlafly)	Schlafly Reserve Oak Aged Barleywine (Untoasted)
Saint Louis Brewery (Schlafly)	Schlafly Reserve Oak Aged Barleywine (Medium Toasted)
Saint Louis Brewery (Schlafly)	Schlafly Reserve Oak Aged Barleywine (Medium+ Toasted)
Saint Louis Brewery (Schlafly)	Schlafly Reserve Oak Aged Barleywine (Heavy Toasted)
Cascade Brewing (OR)	Cascade Kriek Ale
Cisco Brewers (MA)	Full and Bye
FiftyFifty Brewing Co. (CA)	2009 Imperial Eclipse Stout
Full Sail Brewing Company (OR)	Top Sail Imperial Porter Brewmaster Reserve 2008
Full Sail Brewing Company (OR)	Top Sail Imperial Porter Brewmaster Reserve 2010
Smuttynose Brewing Co. (NH)	Oak Aged Imperial Stout
Shmaltz Brewing Co. (NY)	Barrel-aged Jewbelation Bar Mitzvah
Haverhill Brewery (MA)	GestAlt
Haverhill Brewery (MA)	Brumaire
Founders Brewing Co. (MI)	Newaygo County Cherry
Allagash Brewing Co. (ME)	2006 Odyssey
Arcadia Brewing Company (MI)	Shipwreck Porter
Avery Brewing Co. (CO)	Samael's Oak Aged Ale
Avery Brewing Co. (CO)	Brabant Barrel Aged Wild Ale
Brouwerij Van Honsebrouck (Belgium)	Bacchus
Cambridge Brewing Co. (MA)	Resolution
Captain Lawrence Brewing (NY)	A Sour Night at the Fritz
Captain Lawrence Brewing (NY)	Double Secret Sour Sauce
Captain Lawrence Brewing (NY)	Fools Gold 2010 Blend
Captain Lawrence Brewing (NY)	Xtreme Blend 2010
Dark Horse Brewing Co. (MI)	Lambdick Framboozin
Great Divide Brewing Co. (CO)	Oak Aged Yeti Imperial Stout
Haverhill Brewery (MA)	Joshua Norton
Hoppin Frog Brewery (OH)	Barrel Aged B.O.R.I.S. Imperial Stout
Ithaca Beer Co. (NY)	Hot and Sour
Innis & Gunn (Scotland)	Innis & Gunn Oak Aged Beer
Laughing Dog Brewing (ID)	The Dogfather
New England Brewing Co. (CT)	Wet Willy Scotch Ale
Pike Pub & Brewery (WA)	Pike Entire Wood Aged Stout
Rogue Ales (OR)	John John Dead Guy Ale
Russian River Brewing Co.	Supplication
Russian River Brewing Co.	Temptation
Russian River Brewing Co.	Consecration
Russian River Brewing Co.	Beatification
Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. (CA)	Saison aged in French Oak Syrah Barrels
Southern Tier Brewing Co. (NY)	Oak Aged Cuvee #1
Southern Tier Brewing Co. (NY)	Oak Aged Cuvee #2
Stone Brewing Co. (CA)	2006 Double Bastard Ale aged in Brandy Barrel
White Birch Brewing (NH)	Barrel Aged Barley Wine
Willimantic Brewing Co.	Dickel Barrel aged Double Dry Hopped
Willimantic Brewing Co.	Dickel Barrel aged Willi FunkHammer Barleywine

Holiday Pumpkin Cask Ale Delivery System

It was October again and I wanted to take some of my newly brewed pumpkin ale to a Halloween party at a friend's house. The beer was in the fermenter, unspiced, as it is my habit to add the pumpkin pie type spices at bottling time, to taste.

Instead of bottling the pumpkin ale to take to the party as I had done in past years, I was thinking I would try out an idea I had been working on for a gravity feed cask system. The idea was basically to switch the dip tubes inside a ball-lock soda keg and allow the beer to carbonate naturally with priming sugar inside the keg. At serving time I would lay the keg on its side and prop the bottom end up so that the liquid level would fall beneath the reach of what would normally be the beverage dip tube. With the addition of a gas quick disconnect, this long beverage dip tube would now be able to act as a vent to allow air or a low volume of CO2 into the keg above the liquid level. Then I would simply attach a faucet to the other short dip tubed keg post and dispense the beer via gravity feed.

As I was running this idea by a friend, he interrupted with the irresistible idea of replacing the soda keg with a hollowed out pumpkin with a faucet stuck in the side. I was immediately taken with the thought. Really, what better way to serve cask conditioned pumpkin ale that from a freakin' pumpkin?

I set to work figuring out how to make this happen. I went over and over and around and around with the idea and eventually settled on the disappointing truth that I simply did not trust a pumpkin to withstand the demands I would be placing on it without leaking, breaking or otherwise failing. And if there was one thing I did know, it was that I didn't want my precious pumpkin ale to end up all over the inside of my Jeep or as a giant puddle on my friend's floor.

Refusing to abandon the idea of dispensing my beer from a pumpkin and yet sure I didn't trust said pumpkin to contain the beer inside its own fragile flesh, I set upon the next incarnation of the project. That is, concocting a separate cask delivery system which could be contained inside of a pumpkin shell, thereby eliminating the need to rely on the stability of the pumpkin itself.

Enter the humble plastic two liter soda bottle. I had had some previous experience using soda bottles as a medium for transporting and dispensing homemade beer, so I turned to them again for my pumpkin cask project.

The requirements for this new system were:

1. Vessel(s) must be able to hold pressure in order to facilitate carbonation

2. Vessel(s) must be of a size to realistically fit inside of a hollowed out pumpkin

3. Vessel(s) must be capable of dispensing beer via gravity/atmospheric pressure through a faucet.

Here is how a two liter soda bottle was able to meet these requirements and perform as a cask beer delivery system:

My initial thought was to add a bottling bucket type drum tap or similar valved bulkhead to the side of the plastic bottle. However, in order to be sure that the bottles would not leak gas (or beer!) during the carbonation phase, I decided I didn't want to make any modifications to the body of the bottle itself which might compromise it's integrity as a pressure vessel.

In my previous project attempts with soda bottles I had drilled holes through the lids to attach carbonating and dispensing tubes. I knew that the chance of a modified lid leaking, especially with the beer sitting directly on top of it, were pretty high.

I had a little piece of equipment in my stash called a Carbonator. It is simply a ball-lock gas post threaded to fit the top of a soda bottle. In this little piece of unassuming red plastic I had found my solution.

The following steps took the pumpkin ale from fermenter to glass:

Clean and sanitize four two liter soda bottles.

Fill bottles (not completely) with beer from the fermenter.

Add sanitized spice blend and priming sugar solution to each bottle.

Cap each bottle with regular soda lid.

Wait for natural carbonation to occur.

Replace soda cap with Carbonator

Attach gas quick disconnect to Carbonator

Run beer line from QD to faucet.

Invert bottle.

Cut or poke hole in top (bottom) of bottle for air.

Attach sanitary air filter (optional)

Dispense and drink beer!

I got the biggest pumpkin I could find (without breaking the bank). I cut off the top and cleaned it out and dropped a beer shank with faucet through the side. The beer filled cask. Carbonator, QD and beer hose were hooked up and placed inside the pumpkin.

When one bottle emptied I simply replaced it in the pumpkin with a full one until all four casks were kicked.

Nugget Nectar? Really? In April?

Yikes! This blog is out-of-date!

I have several posts to make about things which have occurred over the past two or three weeks. (So much for the timeliness of blogging. I guess you still need to be able to have five freakin' minutes to yourself in order to post something up!?!)

Just one for now with more to follow:

I. Went to Westy's on Saturday. (This would be Saturday, April 21st for those keeping score.)

I ran up there with my buddy Jeff (the kindest and most generous friend in my arsenal) 'cause he wanted to buy me a sixtel of Sunshine Pils for dispensation at my birthday party.

We were planning to pick said sixtel up at the brewery, but due to scheduling conflicts we could not make the trip during regularly scheduled hours. So we found ourselves in the keg cooler at Westy's Beer Distributorship in Camp Hill. (You can take it from me, there are MUCH worse places to find yourself.) So we're in the cooler, right, and I'm all like, Jeff, dude, whatever beer shall I choose to purchase in addition to your sixth of Sunshine???

It just so happened, in our search through the forest of great beer in Westy's cooler, we found one lonely sixtel of Nugget Nectar that instantly found a place in my heart.

So I'm in the checkout line and the delightful girl behind the counter says to me: "You know that's a hot item you've got there?" (She is speaking of course of the keg of Nectar and not of my previously mentioned friend Jeff.) Then she proceeds to ask me where I found the keg and did I know they've been sold out of this beer for weeks?

I say yes, found it in the cooler, surprised to see it there at this late date, etc.

She says people are coming in all the time looking for NN and that perhaps she doesn't want to suggest that I do anything illegal, like...maybe open a speakeasy or something since this product is in high demand and not commercially available.

Sooooo, I have about a quarter of the sixtel left, if anyone is interested. Stop on in for a nice hoppy pint at the Blue Water Underground Private Club for the Underbeered, email me for details ;).

The point of this post is of course to boast of my good fortune (and the good fortune of those at my b-day party) at finding this renegade keg of Nugget Nectar at Westy's at the end of April.

More less goofy posts about actual shit to follow. Stay tuned.

Thank you folks. Good Night.

Kegerator Construction Update

I have been (not really) working on building a six tap kegerator out of an old chest freezer that I picked up on eBay. When it is completed it will have four CO2 beer taps for dispensing either homebrew or commercial beer from kegs. There will also be one nitro-mix stout dispensing faucet and one dedicated soda faucet for homemade rootbeer and such.

Since my spending money is low and building a kegerator is really expensive, I am installing just two taps for now and will continue expanding this project later on as time and funding permit.

I just finished wiring up my Ranco digital temperature controller. I plugged in the freezer and set the controller temp and listened to the triumphant sound of the compressor kicking on.

Now I'm off to Westy's to buy some beer to put in this thing!

Cheers.

Surprise Bottle of Alpha Attack APA Pleases Palates

At today's holiday dinner at my wife's parents' house, my father-in-law shocked me by producing a bottle of my very first batch of homebrewed beer from his basement refrigerator.

Inside this unassuming brown glass bottle, marked on the cap simply as "#1", lay my very first attempt at brewing: an all-grain American-style Pale Ale with Cascade and Chinook hops.

This beer was brewed in October of 2005. I used this beer as sort of a trial run since I had no practical experience with either my equipment or the brewing process at the time.

When fermentation and packaging was complete back at the end of 2005, we actually ended up with a fairly decent beer. On the malt side it was lightly sweet with a crisp dry finish but the bitterness from the hops was overstated with a lingering harshness much more suited to a crazy-assed DIPA.

The beer became known as "Alpha Attack" both because it was my first ever batch and because of the onslaught of hop alpha acid that came from drinking it.

I had until today believed that there were no more bottles of Alpha Attack in existence. To my knowledge the final bottles had been consumed at my birthday party almost an entire year ago.

My first thought on seeing that bottle today was how completely horrible the beer inside was going to be. I would expect a homebrewed Pale Ale that was over a year-and-a-half-old to be completely ruined.

What I found instead was a very pleasing beer, still heavy on the bitter and with a more subdued hop nose, but the flavor was spot-on for the style. And the presentation was excellent, with clear, bright color, no hazing, and the intact carbonation fueling a nice white head.

This was a very nice surprise. I was proud to see that this humble beer had survived its journey and in some ways even improved with time.

Happy Easter, Cheers!

Follow this link for more information on Alpha Attack including the original ProMash recipe.

Seis de Miah Invitations Going to Press This Week

Watch your mailboxes. Invites should begin arriving sometime next week.

This year the party will be held on Saturday, May 5th.

No featured homebrew this year due to events beyond my control. But we will be pouring PLENTY of quality suds of the commercial variety.

More info here: bluewaterbeer.com/party.html