I just had this gem drop into my gmail inbox:

PHILLY BEER WEEK TO SEND ONE REGIONAL BREWER AND ONE LOCAL BEER DRINKER TO BELGIUM FOR COLLABORATION BREW
PHILADELPHIA, PA — One regional brewer and one local beer drinker and will get a chance to win an all expenses paid trip to Belgium to help brew a Philly Beer Week (PBW) collaborative beer with world-renown brewer Dirk Naudts of De Proef Brouwerij.  The two lucky winners will be selected during a fun party on Wednesday, November 17 starting at 7 p.m. at McGillin’s Olde Ale House (1310 Drury St., 215-735-5562) in Center City.

Beers lovers can enter a raffle ($5 per ticket or 5 tickets for $20 to benefit PBW) to select the brewer that they would like to send to Belgium.  At 8:30 pm, one raffle ticket will be picked and the person who entered, along with the brewer named on their entry, will win the free trip.

Well hot damn! Talk about the experience of a lifetime! The email contained a partial list of participating breweries:
Dock Street Brewing Co.
Dogfish Head
Flying Fish Brewing Co.
Iron Hill Brewery & Restaurant,
Lancaster Brewing Co.
Manayunk Brewpub
Nodding Head
Sly Fox Brewery
Stoudt’s Brewing Co.
Twin Lakes Brewing Co.
Troegs Brewing Co.
Victory Brewing Co.
Weyerbacher Brewing Co.
Yards Brewing Co.

The opportunity to brew with ANY of these brewers would be phenomenal. So, the lucky person who gets his or her “golden ticket” pulled will get to work the brewer of their choice and Naudts to develop a special porter recipe, which will then be poured during Philly Beer Week.

According to Don Russell—or as all us Philly folks know him, Joe Sixpack—the porter is a classic beer style in the Philadelphia area. “It has been brewed here since before the Revolution,” Russell explains. “It’s an extremely flexible style that allows all kinds of interpretation by inventive brewers.”

This specially-brewed porter will be the fifth in De Proef Brouwerij’s ongoing Brewmaster’s Collection series, which started back in 2007.

Breweries, Brewfests, Craft Beer 2 Comments »

Our last week in Denver in vacation, we went up to Fort Collins, mainly for Odell Brewing and New Belgium Brewing. The tour at New Belgium is 90 minutes long. Intense!

Ray recorded the entire tour on his iPhone. He’s awesome like that.

I thought you might enjoy just a taste of our tour.

Breweries, Craft Beer, Denver 2010 1 Comment »

THE best way to sanitize our beer bottles. Fill the dishwasher, skip the soap, and put it on heated dry.

Back on Memorial Day, we had a bunch of friends over to experience the joys of a brew day, brewing the Bee Sting Ale Redux. Pizza was made and eaten. Malts and hops were passed around and sniffed. Ryan even had the opportunity to stir the brew kettle as I added 2 pounds of orange blossom honey. It was a great time.

That was also 3.5 months ago. Yes, we let the Bee Sting hang out in the carboy that long—now, admittedly, we transferred from the primary to the secondary in about a week. And then it sat as I fumbled around with my seeds of paradise tea recipe. Then I added the tea, and it sat some more. A lot more.

Was all this time in the secondary necessary? Absolutely not. But we got busy prepping the condo for sale and doing the typical summer things, and unlike a screaming baby or yowling cat, it sat quietly in the bathtub of the guest bathroom, patiently waiting.

The same friends who joined us for brew day would ask about it time and again, but even that stopped. I think they forgot they were even over for brew day. And so Ray and I decided to bottle the damn thing, finally.

Mel wields the bottling wand on bottling day.

Ray became a little concerned about the beer, because we’ve never let a homebrew sit this long in the secondary. He took a sample and did a reading with our refractometer. The good news: the beer had finished even more so, coming in at a lower gravity and an ABV of 6.1%. I liked the sound of that. We both tasted the sample as well. Yup. Tasted like the original Bee Sting Ale, maybe with a slightly drier finish. I won’t complain.

And so it was bottled, yielding 50 12 oz bottles. Our friends will get a 4-pack each. While this might have been a nice beer to have on hand during the hot summer months, I like to think of it as my little bottle of summer and sunshine that can get me through the dark and cold winter ahead.

Homebrewing 2 Comments »

We brewed the Barleywine back on July 18, 2009. It’s over a year old at this point, and wow, has it aged well. During our tasting session the other night, Ray asked me when we brewed this. When I told him last July, he nearly did a spit-take of the precious liquid. Time flies when you’re working on myriad other projects, I suppose. It’s also our first beer without a fancy-schmancy name.

Appearance: Orangeish. amber brown. Opaquely cloudy. Thick, fluffy, off-white head.

Nose: Lots of dried fruit, caramel, malt and molasses. Slight hint of alcohol

Taste: Caramel, plum, fig, raisin. Very little bitterness. A bit of yeasty breadiness.

Mouthfeel: Creamy smooth with a CO2 bite.

Overall: We’re glad we let this sit and stew for a year before sitting down to do a formal tasting. When we first bottled, it had a distinct, flowery hoppiness and brightness that Ray felt was out of place for the type of barleywine we wanted to make. After a year of aging, it’s transformed into exactly what we wanted it to be. It has a great sophistication to it.

This was also the beer we sent up to Boston when The Town Dish headed up there for its “Dish on the Fly.” A bottle of the Barleywine was given to Charlie Cummings, brewer of Harpoon Brewery, who is also a homebrewer. We haven’t gotten any feedback from him yet, but if he’s tried it, I’d love to hear from him.

So, the Barleywine. Our first year-plus aged beer that has mellowed, ripened and come out strong. Maybe we should stash a bottle and open it next July.

Homebrewing, Tasting 3 Comments »

Day 8 of our Denver trip was SO epic I have to break it into 2 parts. Grab your helmets and hang onto your seats.

We headed out to Fort Collins, arriving at Odell Brewing Co. just before noon. We were familiar with the Odell brews from GABF and some of the local pubs and restaurants, but wanted to experience it fresh.

We were instantly impressed by the facility, driving up to a spacious parking lot, walking past the Odell leaf-style bike racks and along the wooden path up to the brewery and tasting room.

The tasting room was stunning, with a stone bar (marble perhaps), with a generous area for sitting and sipping. The ladies tending the bar were friendly and quick to answer any questions, and I spied a bookcase with an assortment of brewing publications, books and some boardgames (my kind of people).

We passed on taking a tour, and instead opted to try both the Classic Tasting Tray and the Pilot Tasting Tray, each a whopping $4 (which is a steal). On top of that, we were given 2 $4 tokens, good towards a merch purchase of $10 or more.

While Odell’s t-shirts were rather tempting (I LOVE their woodcut-style bottle labels), we opted to turn the tokens back over toward some of the charities the brewery was supporting that month.

But let us talk beer.

Classic Tasting Tray

• Easy Street Wheat: super wheaty and refreshing, unfiltered.
• Levity Amber Ale: a lighter take on the traditional amber. Hints of caramel, hops shine through.
• 5 Barrel Pale Ale: hopped in 8 stages with 6 different hops. Deep golden color, perfect session pale ale.
• 90 Shilling Ale: a cross between a Scottish ale and English pale ale. Deep amber, light fruit and nutty aroma.
• IPA: American style, resiny flavor, slightly fruity/floral aroma. Thirst quenching with a big, bold taste. Sunshine gold in color.
• Cutthroat Porter: nearly opaque brown with hints of red, slight head. Roasty nose. Chocolate and coffee.

Pilot Tasting Tray

• Snowriders Ale: filtered American wheat, slightly hopped with Centennial and Amarillo. Hops shine through, making this an interesting wheat/pale hybrid. Crisp!
• Curry wheat: base beer is a German hefe. Curry spices include kaffir lime zest and leaves, coconut, coriander, ginger, cayenne, cinnamon and fenugreek. Traditional hefe aroma in the nose, with hint of spice. Spice flavor is subtle.
• Hast la muerte: “Austria’s answer to the oktoberfest” stated the tasting note. A lager brewed with Vienna, pilsner and crystal malts with a hint of chocolate. Deep amber in color. Malty, yet crisp.
• Isolation Ale: winter ale made with premium malts imported from England. Malty and robust, nice caramel notes. Fairly light for a winter warmer.
• Nitro Cutthroat Porter: nitro brings out even more roastiness
• The Wanderer: double marzen with Brett. 11.2 percent. Fruity sour in the nose, amber in color, thin head. Balanced with the sour, nice fruity characteristic, with hints of caramel—hides the alcohol well. Ray also noted that he picked up a nice caramel flavor right at the beginning before the Brett kicked in.

This sign hung above the door leading into the brewery—I'd never seen something posted like this. Very cool.

After finishing our tasting trays, we decided to share a 10 oz pint of the Bourbon Barrel Stout, which we first had at GABF. Dark, rich and thick—this was a bourbon barrel-aged beer done well, much like Golden City Brewing’s Cuvee #1 (maybe it’s just a Colorado thing).

Odell Brewing did us right. We were blown away by the beers and probably could have spent the entire day in the day room. However, we had a very important 2:00 reservation to keep …

Breweries, Craft Beer, Denver 2010 1 Comment »

I feel like I’m already at a pretty nice saturation/steady state as far as beer knowledge goes. I don’t feel the need to deliberately seek out new information, at least. Sure, the occasional new concept comes up, but as most of the developments in craft beer over the last couple years have been recombinations of existing themes (Belgian IPA, anyone?), I’m now able to have a relaxing beer life, unburdened by the task of having so much new stuff to learn and free to just enjoy the stuff.

It’s satisfying, but the thirst for learning continues, so where to next?

I’ve been a fan of whisk(e)y since before I was allowed by the powers on high to drink it, but I’ve only recently started taking the time to dissect my drams the way Mel and I pick apart every pint and dish that settles in front of us. Unfortunately, my knowledge of whisky is still lacking. What’s the process? How does one drink it properly? Is it spelled with an “e”? I won’t indulge the cliche and discuss that last part, suffice to say that as I’ll be talking about an American distillery here, that “e” will be present.

Thus far, my only exposure to good whisky has come from Scotland. Because of that, I quickly gained a bit of a prejudice against American whiskeys, a prejudice that Stranahan’s, a small distillery hidden on the outskirts of Denver, CO, was fortunately able to break. Americans, it turns out, can make one hell of a whiskey when they want to.

We took an enlightening and informative tour of Stranahan’s distillery the day before the member’s session at GABF. I’d forgotten how much appreciation I could gain for something I enjoy just by finding out how it’s made. As I would do the process a grave injustice by paraphrasing (distill some unhopped beer, drop it in a barrel, come back in a couple years), I’ll leave that story for the experts, but after seeing how much hands-on care this little distillery affords its precious barrels of nectar, I have a newly found admiration for the skill of a trained and practiced distiller.

After the tour, our guide Kristin brought us to a bar in the bottling room, where she passed out tasters and explained in detail how to taste whiskey: Part your lips when you smell it so you aren’t overwhelmed by alcohol vapors; Hold a small sip under your tongue to shock the alcohol sensitivity away; Add scant milliliters of water to bring out flavors you might otherwise miss. I was already able to pick up notes of apples and smoke, but after taking those tips into account, suddenly a new bouquet of tastes and aromas emerged. Banana. Cinnamon. Cayenne. This is what American whiskey can do? Why didn’t anyone say something?

Until our walk through Stranahan’s, I was a mere whiskey liker. With the knowledge (and the bottle :D) I left with, though, I think I’ve just found myself a whole new world to explore and appreciate.

Denver 2010, Whisky 1 Comment »