Scintillating video that I shot with my iPhone at SAVOR 2010. Some of the language may not be safe for work depending on where you work, so make sure to turn it up super loud.

Brewfests, Craft Beer, Pairings, Tasting 1 Comment »

Yesterday Ryan started us off on his journey of trying at least 100 different beers at SAVOR. Let’s see if he made it to his goal or not.

After we got our gear, we went to the first table, which housed the Evolution Craft Brewing Co. We tried their ESB and their porter: both delicious. And we were making good time — we’d been inside the building for little more than a minute and I’d already had two beers. At first we paced ourselves, taking the time to try the food, to pair it with the different beers as suggested. For a festival with 2000 people, the lines weren’t bad. It got a bit hairy around the main supporters’ tables, with heavy hitters like Rogue, Dogfish Head, Sam Adams, New Belgium and the like — the longest line coming from Dogfish Head, who were debuting their Bitches Brew. Thankfully, we hit it early, when we could still taste things. It was delicious.

We trudged on. The tables, set up in squares, had a brewery on each side and a different finger food at each corner. Sixteen regular tables and the Supporters’ Circle in the middle, with six breweries. We began to circle the tables, orbiting around one until we had tried everything it had to offer and then swinging over to another to make our rounds once again. We tried to go in order, but we had to divert our course a few times: a trip to the bathroom, a trip to the cheese table, a trip to the oyster bar, a trip to the bathroom.

I was checking beers off furiously, putting stars next to some*. I’d let Mel and Ray go before me to the brewer and whichever beer they didn’t get, I’d ask for. If they eat got a different beer, I just asked for the one that sounded better to me and got a taste of the other. Sip. Check. Comment. Exchange. Sip. Check. Comment. Next. We worked efficiently. Near the end, we worked probably more efficiently than most people who had taken in as much alcohol as we had, maybe because I wouldn’t let the fuzzies get to me — I was on a mission, and I couldn’t let it out of my sight, even when my face began to tingle and I just wanted to lie down with one of everything from the McDonald’s menu. I would feel like a complete ass if I left SAVOR, counted up my beers, and realized I had only tried 98. That wasn’t an option.

Greg Koch of Stone, Mel, Ryan and Ray all do "the face." Well, all but Ryan.

The first time I really looked at the time was at 10pm; an hour left. I wondered aloud if I’d hit my goal and Mel assured me I had. I made a quick count to double-check: 73 beers. An hour to go and I needed 30 more beers, which might prove difficult. We were starting to get tipsy — most notably Ray, who hadn’t been pouring his excess beer. The guy had been drinking like a champ the entire time I had been sipping and dumping, and it was starting to catch up. To make matters worse, the tables we had left to hit were scattered throughout the long, open hall, and some brewers were beginning to run out. We had to hurry.

I began what Mel so lovingly referred to as “The Death March.” I paraded us around the hall, not stopping until I’d reached a table we had overlooked. “We need to get to table seven!” And away we’d go, Mel and Ray tagging along behind me, gracefully humoring my pseudo-clearheaded single-mindedness.

Like a salesman at the end of the month, as long as I hit my numbers I didn’t care. Mel and I moved with the precision of a snake. My eyes had started to blur, so I had to rely on her for some info. Ray followed behind, not seeming to care much what we did. “Which one is this?” She’d name the brewery, I’d clumsily flip to the page in the program. “Okay. You get the IPA, I’ll get the saison.” I would take a sip, check it off, we’d switch and take a sip, check it off, and dump the rest. They were all starting to taste the same, so it didn’t matter what I was tasting. Dubbel, tripel, quadrupel, didn’t matter. IPA, double IPA, ESB, whatever. Sip, dump, check. I felt, near the end, that I should probably start asking for lesser pours, but didn’t bother. I just had to hit my mark.

The end finally came and we had to leave. I hadn’t counted my beers since 10, so I wasn’t sure if I’d had 100 or not. I wasn’t clear-headed enough to really mind as we walked out, Ray and I speaking in Scottish accents that sounded spot-on at the time. As soon as we sat down on the train, I went through and counted 103. Considering myself lucky that I could even count that high, I registered the victory and congratulated myself. Hopefully, when I was sober, I would be able to count it again and get the same number.

As it turned out, with the re-count I got 102, which was 73% of the beers on offer. I had just barely surpassed my goal, but the key word was “surpassed.” With all that behind me, though, it is now time to start looking to the future. What will next year’s SAVOR bring? Maybe I’ll try for all 140. Or maybe there will be even more than that. Hopefully Mel and Ray will be as accommodating of my Death Marches and slurred directions. The only sure thing, though, is that I will definitely need to work on my Scottish accent.

* The stars were my way of remembering which beers were the real standouts.  The only problem was near the end when I stopped tasting things, I had to put stars next to the beers other people said were good.  They all started to blend together in the last hour.

Brewfests, Craft Beer 1 Comment »

Let me introduce Bathtub’s newest contributor, our guest blogger Ryan. Ryan is an avid eater and drinker who is currently working on the opposing goals of drinking his 500^th different beer and maintaining his path on the South Beach diet, which is being chronicled on his blog The Healthy Hog.

For whatever reason, my entire beer-loving experience has been based on milestones. When I first started to realize all of what beer had to offer — when I really started getting into it and paying attention, when I began to learn that there was more to exotic beer than Guinness and Killian’s, that there was even a world beyond the rare* Magic Hat #9 — I set a goal for myself: I wanted to try 200 different beers by the time I turned 40. At that point, age 25, I think I’d tried somewhere in the mid-40s, and it seemed like I was falling behind. I hit 200 in the waning days of 2009, right before I turned 28.

But by then I lived in Philadelphia. The options were endless. Trying a variety of different beers was no longer a challenge when there were bars with 200 on their list and stores that sold individual bottles of beer I’d never even heard of. I hit 300 in the four months after reaching 200 thanks to a small beer festival and a beer-swilling trip through Australia and New Zealand. This was easy now. I needed something else.

How about 100 different beers in three-and-a-half hours at the SAVOR craft beer festival? After missing out on the ten minute ticket sale, Mel and Ray had come up with an extra ticket that I’d jumped on. So, despite my hatred of math, I went through some numbers.

• The festival is 210 minutes long.
• The beers come in 2-ounce pours.
• There are 70 breweries, 2 beers each: 140 different beers.
• 100 beers is 71% of the beers present.
• 2-ounce pours x 100 = 200 ounces of beer, or 16.6 12-ounce cans of beer.

I would potentially be drinking 2/3 of a case of beer in 3.5 hours, or a can of beer every 12.6 minutes. While I think I could do that for a little while — a beer every 12 minutes doesn’t sound too outrageous — I knew if I tried to maintain that pace all night I’d either pass out, throw up, or black out and do something to get myself arrested. Or maybe all three. I knew ahead of time I would have to sip and dump; after all, all I’d ever required of my beer milestones were a sip, a taste, and quick idea of what the beer was.

We arrived inside the festival after standing outside in the DC heat for maybe half an hour; now I had worked up a physical thirst to drink a lot of beer to match my metaphorical thirst to drink a lot of beer. We got our complimentary SAVOR snifter glass for our beer, a little complementary wooden spork for the food, and — thankfully — a program that listed all the breweries and the beers they had on offer. I’m glad all I had to do was check off beers as we went rather than write them down; I knew the longer we were there, the more my writing would begin to resemble George Lucas dialogue**. As it happened, even my check marks began to look illegible as the night went on. Come back tomorrow for part II, where things really start getting interesting

* In Bluefield, West Virginia, you won’t even find Guinness on tap.  Killian’s is what you buy when you’ve got a few extra dollars. Forget seeing anything from even Magic Hat in a bar, let alone in the grocery store.  If you’re lucky there, you’ll get a crack at a Sam Adams’ seasonal every once in a while.
** Think crayon scribblings from a mentally challenged chimpanzee.

Brewfests, Craft Beer Comments Off

Homemade chai mix, just add water and BEER

It’s amazing what happens when you unclutter your home. You dig through all this stuff you’ve accumulated and you get rid of 75%, either donating stuff that still has some life in it or tossing it for good.

So what does this have to do with my chai recipe? Think about it.

I’m famous for thinking out loud on index cards, and that’s exactly what I did. Then that index got shuffled from the breakfast bar to my desk, and then, who knows where.

So will you get the original recipe? No. And neither will I — it’ll be back to the drawing board if we do this beer again. Nonetheless, I really think chai should be made to your individual preference, so grab some traditional chai spices, some tea, and put my steps to the test!

Chai is made with a black tea, like Assam. I couldn’t find that at my local Wegmans, so I decided to blend English Breakfast (this particular brand was a blend of Assam and Kenyon) with some Darjeeling, which is considered the “champagne” of tea. I used 5 bags of the Breakfast Blend and 3 of Darjeeling.

I added a ton of cinnamon (love it!), whole cloves, coriander and 2-3 star anise (all of which I cracked down a bit with my mortar and pestle), some ground ginger and allspice. I also used probably 5-8 green cardamom pods, which I gave a thorough cracking before adding them to the blend.

You need to smell your chai mix constantly. Does it smell like something you’ve had in a reputable tea or coffee shop? If so, you’re on the right track.

Once you have your mix, add COLD filtered water. Brewing it hot, like coffee, could make the chai bitter as it cools. No one wants to taste an odd, woody-bitter taste in their beer, so cold brewing it is.

After adding the water to the French press, I gave it a good stir and put it in the fridge for about 12 hours. Then I took it out, pressed and poured into a measuring cup — if the bottom of the press looks to have a bunch of dregs floating in it, avoid pouring that into the cup. Then from there you can either add it to the fermenter or directly to the bottling bucket.

Gather all your ingredients, a scale, bowl and mortar and pestle

Make sure you weigh your chai mix

Add water to the chai mix you already put into the French Press

After 12 hours, press down the plunger and voila! You have your chai extract, ready to add to 5 gallons of beer

If you need some help coming up with a recipe, check out the following for some inspiration:
Chai Tea from Simply Recipes

Chai! Recipes

Homebrewing, Miscellany Comments Off

So, um, yeah. It’s been awhile. But never fear, we’ve been brewing and brewfesting and even TEACHING people how to brew their own! Oh, and we’re getting ready to put our condo up for sale, so how’s that for a bunch of excuses? Nevertheless, on to our fairly regularly scheduled content (or some BS like that …)

When dreaming up Boris the Spider, our Chai Oatmeal Stout, I decided that homemade chai was the way to go. The concentrate you might buy at the store (Oregon Chai and Tazo) has sugars and other stuff going on, and I wouldn’t want to play around with their powdered offerings. Instead, the best bet was to do some research and figure out the best recipe for us.

Except there isn’t just a singular chai recipe. In India, there are numerous varieties of chai hailing from all the different regions — sort of like how every Italian grandma has her own very special (and often secret) recipe for meat sauce. So that meant I had a lot of reading to do.

In the end, I winged it a little, but the test batch smelled authentic (based on what I’ve had before from various tea and coffee shops) and when brewed as a concentrate and added to milk, tasted great. Though I’m sure some Indian grandma would have a few critiques.

Check back tomorrow for the full recipe with photos and get ready to brew some chai to either toss into a homebrew, or enjoy in a comfy chair with a good book.

Homebrewing, Miscellany 1 Comment »