Recently, I was shown a cool idea online, a local beer club! Well, local to the South Jersey area, but still the concept is really cool. It is called Bammer’s Pub and comes replete with a forum, list of local bars as well as the journey of Maddox626 as he wets his toes in brewing with a Mr. Beer.

I love the result he mentions at the top:

Ok so last Friday I opened one of my beers and it tasted like beer.

Weeheee! It really does work! I’ve mentioned before how interesting it would be for me to review something like this, but there is simply no way I could justify getting it now.

You may recall I got a comment a few months ago from Peter Gariepy of Mr. Beer assuring me of the quality of the system. Like I responded though it would be really hard for me to give up the five gallon capacity. I am happy more people are brewing their own beer, regardless of how much they get from it, so long as it is good!

What a cool idea to keep a club up and running. I am surprised that I haven’t run into that concept before now. If I had more ambition I might set something like that up for our area.

Cheers!

We went to the Anoka Halloween Parade on Saturday, and amongst the marching bands, floats, cars full of assorted representation and “royalty” were two wonderfully bedecked selections! This is something I have never seen in a parade before!

Yeah, I know, its Miller Lite, but c’mon! Beer! In a parade! I yelled out if they were tossing samples too, like the folks giving my kids candy… No answer from them, but I did hear “Tony! ” from beside me. Heeheehee

But wait, it gets even better! Right behind Miller Lite?

A Leinie Wagon! Whoohoo!

As we were walking back to our car along the parade path we also walked past a guy with a minipitcher in his hand full of beer. Absolutely hilarious. It must have been only a quart in there, but it looked just like those plastic pitchers they bring beer in at the pizza joint. What a fun time.

Cheers!

FOXNews.com reports on a minor gaffe from the Boston brewery getting all up in arms about a disc jockey in Oregon registering samadamsformayor.com!

The hosts of a Portland radio show registered the Web addresses samadamsformayor.com and mayorsamadams.com and promised to give them to Adams, a city commissioner, if he discussed his political future on their show.

The brewery later states they didn’t know there really was a Sam Adams until after they sent the letter. It makes me wonder a bit about due diligence in something like that. It wouldn’t even be an issue had someone from the legal side of the brewery taken the time to do a quick search instead of jumping full strength into a brick wall. The fellow from Portland had a great comeback though:

The candidate says he’s amused by the flap, pointing out that while Boston Beer claims to have owned the Sam Adams trademark since 1984, he’s owned it since he was born in 1963.

Touche’

Cheers!

I’ve had this tin of beer and glass in my beer fridge for over a week. Something unheard of in this house! It is time for me to review this novelty from England. Wychwood Brewery produced a tin containing a half liter bottle of Hobgoblin Dark English Ale and a tall pint glass, which I’m guessing is more than a pint, possibly a full half liter to coincide with the bottle size. Lets find out shall we?

Huh, fancy that, the bottle contents fits nicely in the glass with room for a half inch of light brown head! It is nice when things are fit the way I logically think they should be. Oh, by the way, no, I didn’t bother washing the glass. Too lazy.

The ale has a nice malty warm aroma with a sneaky hint of hop. The head fades quickly, but it still looks like a nice glass of beer. Since I have this great Beer Tasting kit, I’ll hold up the card to the beer and tell you it has a nice dark red color of about 14 on the SRM scale.

First sip has some nice malt tones initially with a surprising hop finish, nothing too huge but definitely there. I’m really amazed at how dry this beer tastes, frankly I was expecting a much sweeter flavor and am pleasantly proven wrong. I get a hint of some roasted barley in there too. Almost like a flirt with stout. This is really good! Honestly, I bought it for the glass, but I’m glad I did!

Mmmm, really, wow. I’m going to have to get another bottle just so I can share it with my wife, because this one isn’t going to last the afternoon. For my rating, two frosty hobgoblin etched glasses raised high. Check this one out if you see it, and get the glass too. Its cool!

Cheers!

My wife is great at coming up with perfect ideas for blog posts! She was reading the web newsite from our no longer local newspaper and came across this article about colorful cocktails for Halloween. She suggested I find some recipes specifically involving beer!

I can think of three different ideas, one that is a blatant rip off from Allrecipes (thanks, dear. ) The Shady Leprechaun can easily be called the Ghoul if you overdo it, and its dark and creepy that way.

• 1 1/2 fluid ounces dark rum
• 1 pint Irish stout beer

The next would be a light pumpkin ale, with coloring added to make it very orange. Its hard to think about that a few months in advance though. They dye beer green for St. Patrick’s Day, why not orange for Halloween!

Finally brewing a blood red ale would be fun(ny) too. This time, perhaps a red ale base with a ton of cherries added to pitch color, flavor and up the abv. Come to think of that, I might have to add that to the que of beers to brew. It sounds tasty. A nice tart cherry set in a wheat base with some underlying hop bite, hmmm.

Oh, some vague memory of a Tom Cruise movie involving beer, tomato juice and a raw egg comes to mind, but I can’t wrap my head far enough around that to contemplate its flavor … yech.

Cheers!

I just use water to clean my brew kettle after brew sessions. Using an old dish rag and some warm water I am able to get a lot of the crud off the rim and most of the caramelized malt off the bottom. Persistence is the key for me though. I like to run about half a gallon of warm water in the bottom after I’ve rinsed it out as best I can, then use that to wipe and wipe the crud off where the foam rode.

By the time I’ve got all the crud off the sides and top rim and outside the browned stuff on the bottom is soft enough to scrub away. I vaguely recall using a metal scrub thing years ago on my first four gallon brew kettle and having wort char and stick to the bottom of that over and over batch after batch. It was very frustrating.

My five gallon kettle has close to fifty or sixty batches through it and no sign of beerstone around the top. Maybe I have to brew a few hundred before I start to see that.

I’ve never used soap in the brew kettle though. I probably read some where when I first started that it will adversely affect the resulting beer and subsequently have convinced myself that soap is evil incarnate for beer. Besides, why use anything else when good ol’ water works just as well?

Cheers!

It was brought to my attention that a brewery in New Zealand is offering a “lifetime beer supply” for information that gets their lap top returned. (Thanks Josh.)

The Register, who I’ve found tips to stories from before, puts their spin on it and thankfully cites BBC for a more… streamlined version.

From the Register:

A dozen bottles of beers is a meager ration that would barely get a Reg hack though lunchtime

I wonder if they’d hire out of country folks to write for them? Sounds like an ideal place for me! I’m sorely tempted to write to the brewery with information. Someone around 5.5-6.0 wearing clothes and a cap filched it sometime during the day. He headed towards the ocean on a bike. (Its an island right? I have to be correct through part of the journey, right?!?)

This time I think I’ll leave it alone. 

Cheers!

I went into the laundry room today and assesed the carboy situation. I’m horrible about cleaning out my carboys after I rack to keg. I’m always so excited to put the beer on gas and get it ready to try that I space the cleanup of my glassware. This morning when I opened the door I got slapped in the nose by an odor most foul. Uh-oh.

The last double batch I did was the amber and an oatmeal stout. Wow, its been almost a month that I’ve left those carboys sitting there. Mmmm. Thankfully my wife and kids haven’t noticed the smell yet! So what is a guy to do? Sit down at the computer and bemoan the fact that he’s too lazy to go clean it?!?

Heck yeah!

Actually, carboys most foul have an easy schmeezy fix, which is why I don’t stress it too terribly much. Eco-friends will cringe, sorry guys. I dump out the liquid most foul (I’ll keep calling it that. If you haven’t left the trub in the bottom of a carboy for a month, even the secondary trub, then you won’t understand. You’ll just have to believe me.) and fil the carboy with warm water almost to the top, well above any cap ring, and top up with bleach to make it an approximately 10% solution.

Then the fun begins. Put a cork in it and leave it for a day or three, swirling once in a while to get the loose crud up and let the bleach work.  After a few days if the bleach water is still clear rack it into the next carboy and repeat. A few days of bleach water will knock even the hardest crud off the walls of a carboy. I can’t even remember the last time I used my carboy brush!

I use a nose test to make sure the solution is still effective. If it still smells bleach-y, its probably good for another carboy.

After its drained, I rinse the carboy out really well and ideally let it dry completely before using. Read any homebrew books and find out how nasty chlorine affects beer.  I haven’t tested if one-step works as well with the caked on crud. Perhaps I’ll do a side by side with the two carboys and report back.

Cheers!

The Wall Street Journal pointed out Carlsberg and Heineken are considering joining up to buy out Scottish & Newcastle and then split the two evenly.

 Two of Europe’s largest beer brewers said they have formed a consortium to bid for British rival Scottish & Newcastle PLC, which has a £7.13 billion ($14.53 billion) market value, with a plan to divide the company between the two buyers. Scottish & Newcastle, based in Edinburgh, Scotland, said the announcement was “unsolicited and unwelcome.”

This buying and splitting up a company to expand distribution and increase revenue is more confusing to me than quantum physics. Here’s what troubles me with this though, and only from what I’ve heard second and third hand; the bigger brewers are knocking out the small micro’s and greatly reducing selection. Stateside the microbrews are holding their own and growing. How is the European market going to be affected? Or has all the little guys already been bought up and dispersed?

Maybe someone closer in proximity might like to comment. The closest I’ve come to Europe is looking across the ocean. Oh, and sampling imports.

Cheers.

Channel 4 News out of Milwaukee reports an increase in microbrew cost is likely to happen soon.

Russ Klisch is the president of Lake Front Brewery in Milwaukee. [snip]“The problems have sent the price of malt up 25 percent and the price of hops has almost tripled,” says Klisch.

Which also means we’ll be paying more for kits as well. Good thing I have a few stored up for brewing. Or, maybe it isn’t a good thing. Why are they still in the box and not brewed?!?

I better get on that!

Cheers!