Save the Beer!!!

Posted on December 23, 2010 by RJ

Hey Friends!Bitches Brew

I was talking to a buddy of mine the other day. Not a beer geek, but not a laymen, either. He considers himself a lazy aficionado. He doesn’t seek good beer out, but simply won’t drink anything but good craft beer when he does drink beer.  We got to talking, over a Dogfish Head Bitches Brew, and got on the subject of cellaring beer.

Now this is a wine guy more than anything, with a still lazy approach, but a solid taste and overall knowledge.  Even with all this, and a startling knowledge of cellaring wine, he still could not see the benefits and reasons behind cellaring beer!  I had to try to set him straight!!

My opinion with cellaring is as thus:  Don’t bother with the IPA styles, but save the heavy’s!!  What I mean by this is that hop flavor and aroma, especially in a beer that is centered around just that, tends to fade over time.  Drink it!  Enjoy it to it’s full potential!  There are exceptions to this rule, but very few.  Being a hophead, I want to enjoy everything that that beer has to offer.  I usually only cellar beers that have aging potential.  Stylistically, I mean Barley Wines, Imperial Stouts, Baltic Porters, Old Ales, Belgian Strong Darks, many of your more complex styles that have a higher alcohol content and will benefit from the changes that aging makes.

I asked my buddy what the most prized possession in his wine cellar was, which was insane good.  A 1997 Trefethen Cabernet Sauvignon.  I asked him when he was going to drink it.  He started going off about the perfect time to open it, how long he was going to  let it breathe, his equations about it’s potential flavors compared to the rest he’s tried since he bought the case in 1997.  I used this enthusiastic explanation to make my point.  Beers should be cellared and saved for the very same reasons!  Why do you cellar wine?  It improves with age.  Plain and simple.  The same with beer.  Some of these great beers just need time to reach their full potential, just like a great wine!!

Now, we have a little beer cellar in the bottom of the garage fridge, with a few gems in it, including Stones Vertical Epic 2007 thru 2010, as well as some Black Butte XXI.  Some of these seasonal brews are brilliant because they’re made for aging.  Try it out!

Tell us what you’re aging and cellaring, how you do it and where!!  Also, follow the link below to some great information and experimental results on cellaring beer!

www.brewbasement.com

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Five Star Star San

Posted on December 14, 2010 by RJ

Hi Friends!Five Star San

This weeks product review is all about sanitation, one of the most important components in making good beer.  What do you use to sanitize your carboys?  Your implements?  While you have a few different options, I personally prefer Five Star’s Star San.

First and foremost, let’s clarify something integral to sanitation:  something can be clean or it can be clean and sanitized.  Something can not be sanitized without first being clean.  So if you still have scum trails on the sides of your carboy, hitting it with the sanitizer is not an option….for good beer, anyway.  Even though you might think that (and after a few beers during brewing, it’s an honest mistake) the sanitizer will sanitize the scum so you won’t have to worry about it, this won’t work!!  Clean, then sanitize.

That being said, here at the BrewChatter Brewery, we generally use Star San.  What it does is slam the pH of your sani water down to around 2, which is extremely acidic and a nearly impossible environment for all the bugs that you’re trying to get rid of to live in.  It’s brilliant, yet so simple.

The real brilliant part of Star San, though, is that it is a foaming, no rinse sanitizer, so you put some of your sani water into your carboy, shake and coat liberally, pour off any ridiculous excess, cover and wait to fill your fermenter with fresh wort!!  The foaming feature, although a bit off-putting at first, is great because this stuff requires about 1 minute of contact with whatever surface you’re sanitizing, plus let’s you see where you’re missing and fix it straight away.

Price wise, your looking at just under $20 for a 32 ounce bottle most places, and at 1 ounce per 5 gallons, it should last at least 32 brews.  We actually make up 2.5 gallon sanitizer buckets, so we get more or less 64 brew sessions out of a bottle!  Of course, most online brew shops and your local homebrew shop should carry this product.  If you have trouble finding it, hit www.fivestarchemicals.com to find a dealer near you!

All right friends!  Try this stuff out if you haven’t already and give us some feedback!  We want to know what you think, and what you use to keep the bugs out!

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Brew Day: The Black Virgin

Posted on December 10, 2010 by RJ

Goodmorning All!Brewing the Black IPA

Well friends, on a whim, we buckled down Thanksgiving weekend and filled a fermenter that has too long been empty.  This brew day has been a long time in coming!  It was originally planned for sometime in the first weeks of September, and continually was pushed back and aside for other things.  This weekend, though, we put our communal foot down and made the brew happen!

We’re calling this Black IPA the Black Virgin, because it’s the inaugural brew of the BrewChatter Brewery’s new home.  We decided that a big, madly hoppy IPA would be theHops for Black IPA best thing to break in the new location, and that it was!  It helps that obviously we are hopeless Hopheads, and that other than a bunch of hop additions, it’s a pretty straight forward brew.

We’ll post the recipe and the hop bill in our new recipes section soon, but we’ll describe our ingredients and what not here as well.  It all started with 21.5 pounds of grain, mostly Belgian Pilsner because that’s my personal preference.  I like the way it tastes and converts, and it gives our beer somewhat of a “House Flavor” I think.  Sometimes it’s not stylistically correct, especially in the case of an American IPA style like this, but we use it regardless!  Why not, right?  We also did some crystal 90, chocolate and carafa special malts in 1 pound and half pound quantities.

The MashBrewing Black IPA

We mash in a green, ten gallon Igloo cooler, and it works great!  It really keeps our temp right on, and the only complaint is that I wish it were a twenty gallon!!  That’s for the future, though!  Before the rest of the crew arrived, I calculated and measured our water and started heating towards strike temperature.  In this case, right about 170 F, to mash in at 150.  Now, this whole thing went off without a hitch, and the crew was slacking by the time we got to temp, so I just decided to mash in!  Again, the whole thing was real smooth.  I mashed in, closed the lid, and we were rolling!Brewing Black IPA

I generally check mash temps five minutes after mash in, then again at fifteen minutes to make sure we’re on the right track.  Usually by this point, though, something has happened.  Ran out of propane, forgot to put the false bottom in the mash tun, garden hose is frozen, something!!  Not today, though!  It felt like something was missing!  Hot liquor tank was on the burner, happily heating away.  The mash was going famously, and the coffee was especially good!

Well, 59 minutes into a 60 minute mash, and no brew crew!!  We’ve got seven gallons of 170 F water in a cut open keg to get to the top of a fridge for the sparge, and a hope and a prayer that the new weld-less fitting that I totally forgot to tighten with a wrench doesn’t leak!!  So much for our seam-less start!

Alright, so I’m looking at the options, and I decide to go the He-Man route.  I set up my step ladder and beer cooler, and inch the hot liquor tank to the top of the fridge.  Of course, as soon as I finish, Josh shows up, followed shortly by Joe!  Perfect timing!  LOL

The SpargeBrew Day Black IPA

The sparge went pretty well after we got her dialed in.  We fly sparge, and it works really well.  I like to be able to see as our sugars and color slowly leaks into the brew pot, a stainless, 15 gallon beauty I got from an old brewer who was leaving the art.  We definitely will try to batch sparge a few times, but haven’t yet.  I think it sounds like fun!

The only hitch, we find out later, with the sparge is that we decided not to trust our very precise mathematical equations for the water (taken from Designing Great Beers by Ray Daniels) and cut our sparge early when it looked off.  This seems right at the time, but always trust the numbers!  We ended up being short going into the fermenter!  Not too bad, but it threw off our target numbers, of course!

The BoilBrew Day Black IPA

With the sparge done, our wort already heating for an hour or so as we sparged, we’re off to the races with a fantastic boil, foaming up and almost over before the hot break.  We did a 90 minute boil with this brew, again a preference with the Belgian Pils.  Diacetyl is not my idea of a “House Flavor”!!

Joe builds our hop bill as we wait for the 6o minute mark to hit, and we measure our hop additions out onto paper plates or paper towels with the addition time written on them.  That way, as we’re “doing market research” (i.e. testing the flavor profile of beers that everyone brought), we only have to watch the clock and insert hops here!!  It works well on both counts!

The CoolBrewing Black IPA

Our cooling method is pretty straightforward, too!  We’ve got one of those old stretchy hoses that is 100 feet that we curl up into a bucket with ice around it for our pre-chiller, then attach that to our immersion chiller, which is in the wort and gets whirlpooled periodically.  Our chill was super fast on this brew, getting to 75 F in about 35 minutes!  It helps that it was 28 F outside!!!

To the Fermenter!

After the wort cools, we stretch a muslin bag over a clean and sanitized fermenting bucket and strain out all of our trub and debris and what not.  Were we to ferment in the bucket we would have pitched the yeast, which has been warming in Joe’s pocket since he arrived, but this is just the second to last step.  After all the wort is transferred, we put our glass carboy under the spigot in the bucket, pitch the yeast into the carboy, and let gravity take over, aerating as she goes!Beer Wall of Fame

We have lots of luck using this method because we don’t send any hop trub, debris or irish moss, etc. to our fermenter.  It all cleans up real nice and gives us a fairly clean brew, not to mention the auto-aeration system!

Well, the Virgin is in the fermentation fridge, set to 67 F, which is the temp we always use for WLP 001, California Ale Yeast, and it’s on to the clean up…

Tell us about your brew days, what quirks you and your brew crew have, and all the great beers you pull from your cellar while you brew!!!

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My Slow Decline into a BeerGeek and Hophead Part 2

Posted on November 30, 2010 by RJ

Hey Friends!

When we left off, we were just cleaning all the wort off of our hands and carboy, and sitting down for a nice, uncontrolled fermentation.  This beer fermented for five days, blew up all over my closet, and because of the way that the apartment was set up, you could smell the stink (which I personally enjoy these days) right when you walked in the door and when you tried relax and watch TV.  Fantastic, although surprisingly, it did not go over very well with the wife!!

Next was bottling.  It just so happened that Joey also had the nice, tower style bottle capper, like you would use if you were bottling champagne bottles or something along those lines.  We used a classic auto-siphon to move the beer from the carboy to the bucket with a spout, all open air and uncovered, or course!  We actually put a muslin bag at the end of the siphon to pick up any sediment or yeast that was sucked up through the siphon.  To speak the truth, I’m honestly quite stunned that our first batch didn’t pick up any sort of bugs or infections!

Our bottling process was as thus:  First, the carboy goes on the counter and the siphon begins, racking the wort, through a muslin hop bag, into the bottling bucket, where we’ve already boiled and dissolved three quarters of a cup of corn sugar.  Of course, we cleaned everything and sanitized in a bleach and hot water solution (one tbsp per gallon) first.  We weren’t complete morons!!  So, everything gets racked over, then the carboy gets put off the the side for later cleaning and the bucket goes on the counter.  We didn’t use CO2 or anything to purge.  We just rinsed the bottles with hot water, rinsed the inside with our sanitizing solution and put the beer in from the spigot on the bottom!  We never capped on foam, mostly because we wasted so much just getting the wort into the carboy!  As I said, a MIRACLE we didn’t get infections!  Not such a bad process for our first time, though.  Mine, at least.  At this point, Joey was already a veteran of making beer bottle bombs!  Despite getting too much of a yeast cake in the bottom, none blew up and the carbonation was almost dead nuts!

Well, from there we did a cider, naturally from five separate gallons of Mott’s from the grocery store!  We just put it in the carboy, pitched the yeast and let it go!!  The fun part of this was that a few months after we bottled it, trying a few every couple of weeks to see if it was still disgusting, we moved.  Now during Joey’s and my relocation, ironically across the street from one another, we lost this cider.  We ended up losing it for about two years, only to discover it again under a pile of weeds in Joey’s backyard.  It was perfectly sour and carbonated!  Best cider ever, to this day!!  Much was fermented from the champagne yeast we used, but there were definitely some wild bugs at play in the flavor.  We didn’t use any campden tablets or sulfates or anything, so that makes sense.

Now, our new locations made for a craft beer and brewing revolution.  We began studying the process, brewing every weekend, and perfecting our style, as well as our home brewery!  We tasted every craft beer we could acquire, by fair means or foul, and began expanding from extract to mini mash, and from bottling to kegging.

From there, it got serious.  I decided that it was time to take the next step.  The final step to complete control over your own beer. All grain.  The wonderful world of all-grain.  After convincing my wife how much cheaper it would be to go AG (LOL), we acquired spigots where we needed them, a ten gallon cooler to mash in, and some new brew pots to complete the system.

Well, as much as I hate to say it, that first batch was a session beer.  We totally missed our saccharification rest temperatures and converted almost no sugar!  Wow, that was a SWEET beer!

Well, needless to say, we kept at it, addiction at it’s finest, and almost have it down these days.  The important thing is that we are still having fun.  After all these years making beer, drinking beer, fighting about beer, making up with beer, making out with beer, and watching the craft beer world grow in directions we always hoped it would, not to mention finally getting access to some amazing beer in our small, backwater neck of the woods, here we are.  Obsessed.  Now we brew and collect library/cellar beers, pay way too much for bombers, and try to convert our friends.  What a fantastic way to live!!!

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My Slow Decline into a Hophead and Beer Geek Part 1

Posted on November 23, 2010 by RJ

Goodmorning Team!

I thought that this week I’d begin the story of my slow yet steady decline into beer geekdom and into a Hophead. I think that some people might be able to relate, and even understand and appreciate my growing disease! I can’t think of a better one to have!

Well, about seven years ago now, my good friend Joey was regaling me about the homebrew (horrid, horrid stuff) that him and his buddy made.  About how it blew up whenever they tried to take it somewhere, all the cool yeast in the bottom and what a mess they made producing this stuff on the stove.  I think I said, “Cool.”  That’s it, then ran the other way as fast as I could!  My alcoholic beverages of choice at that time were wines, mostly reds, preferably something well made in 1997!  A bit of a snob, but what’s good is good!  I also drank lots of Belvedere vodka, Sapphire Gin, and…well, you get the picture!

A few years or so after that, Joey set the hook.  I don’t know how it happened, and I’m not even sure why.  This is where I get spiritual and think, “Wow, I was ready.”  Like it was some crazy religious epiphany or something… Although that may an apt description!  Anyway, Joe and I go on a beer run.  The whole time we’re discussing how DISGUSTING regular old Sierra Nevada Pale Ale is.  Holy crap, it’s so hoppy.  I don’t understand how ANYONE could drink that, how did it get so popular, blah blah.  We get into the store and he grabs an Arrogant Bastard.  As I said, I was a laymen then.  I had no idea who Stone was, no idea about the wonderful things they were doing for/to craft beer.  He tells me to read the back.  Naturally, I read it and laughed my ass off.  However, there was an underlying… oh, I don’t know.  Feeling?  I think it got my back up.  Without knowing it, I had accepted the challenge given me by a bomber of beer.

Well, we get home, pop that Arrogant Bastard, and Joe has a look on his face like he was about to make the best joke in the world.  Patiently awaiting said joke, I take a monster swig.  HOLY %*&$@!%!!!  Keep in mind, my favorite beer at the time was our local brewery’s answer to the silver bullet!  Needless to say, AB blew my mind!  I was disgusted, intrigued, wet, dry, betrayed, enamored and a hundred other things all at once!  Joey, of course, hit the floor laughing.  Jerk.

From there, though, after not being able to stop drinking that one, not so innocent, Arrogant Bastard, it was all downhill.  Even though I didn’t actually LIKE IPA’s, or any super hoppy brews for that matter, I couldn’t stop trying them!  Even now, I don’t really understand what my obsession was.  IPA’s were my addiction.  I couldn’t stand them, and couldn’t stop drinking them. With that awareness came an overall craft beer awareness.  It was like my eyes actually opened all the way, and I began looking at the varieties that my local grocery and liquor stores had to offer.

Well, after drinking and drinking and drinking just a bit more for good measure, Joe began talking to me about homebrewing again.  Again, the light in the sky!  Now that we had all this craft beer awareness, and were beginning to find a desire to duplicate it, or at least duplicate beer in general.  For all you homebrewers out there, maybe you can understand what I’m about to describe.  When you begin homebrewing, despite all the study you put into it, despite all the scientific proof that this process actually makes beer, there seems to be a measure of… … disbelief.  That’s the only way I can think to describe it.  Such it was with our first few batches.

Now, we knew NOTHING, other than what Joey had done previously, and what I had lightly read up on.  Regardless, we went out and bought what was missing from the small, extract based home brewery that Joey had assembled.  Well, he had assembled a thirty quart aluminum stock pot and some buckets!  We hit our local homebrew store and got our propane burner, wort chiller, and some odds and ends, as well as our local irrigation warehouse because I had to convert the irrigation outside my apartment to something that we could use for washing and chilling!  They really enjoyed that when I left.  They told me so, quite loudly!

Well, ground zero was rough.  We stayed outside on a Friday night after work, drinking about the amount that we were intending to brew, in the landscape outside my apartment.  It was supposed to be a Honey Nut Brown, with six pounds of amber liquid malt extract, a pound of honey malt, one ounce of Cascade hops, and WLP 810, San Francisco Lager yeast.  We sat out there until about one in the morning, boiling, chilling, throwing in hops.  It was about thirty-five degrees out when the sun went down!

We managed to get it into a glass carboy after pitching the yeast, although I don’t know how!  By then, we could barely see straight, and I’m sure the wort wasn’t chilled enough!  We lost about a gallon on our hands and on the ground!  Said carboy, after not getting any hydrometer measurements, went right into a closet in the spare room with a wet towel over it…where it proceeded to stink and explode all over the place!  Needless to say, best beer ever!

Well, we’ll continue this saga next week  with our attempt at a bottling process and the switch to all-grain brewing!

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The Brewing Season Cometh…

Posted on November 8, 2010 by RJ

Hey Friends,Brewing some beer.

Well, as Halloween gets shoved on the back-burner until next year, and the holidays stop creeping up on us and begin running us down and tackling us, it’s time to really start thinking about/planning the brewing season.  This is easier said than done, for me at least.

I used to be a seat of your pants, want to brew this weekend kind of brewer.  Now, the more I indulge my other hobbies, I need to really start the season with a plan!  Between the fishing season at our favorite lake beginning, all the gourmet stuff we’re trying to create in the kitchen, and all the fishing in the local rivers getting really good, not to mention all the holiday stuff and the wife in general, the end of the year is hectic!!

Well, my fermentation fridge is plugged in, and my first beers are mmmmm.... Beerplanned.  I think that we’ll start with a Black IPA, using Centennial and Amarillo in the dry hopping tank, and in there with her will be the first of this years cider, part of a yearly trio that I am starting this year!  They will be three kinds of cider per the article by Mark Pasquinelli in the most recent Zymurgy mag (pgs. 33-37, Volume 33, No. 5, September/October 2010).  That will be fun.  From the Black IPA, which will be fermented with Cal Ale, WLP 001, we’ll go to a big fat Double Rye IPA that has been in the works for years now, using the yeast cake from the Black IPA, of course!  I think from there we will start with the Belgians.Brewing Beer

I want start the flight of the Belgians with an all grain version of my final extract batch two years ago, an AMAZING Belgian Golden Strong recipe from Jamil Zainasheff.  It’s a good way to start up some yeast, probably WLP 530 due to it’s alcohol tolerance, which will be necessary by the time we’re done with it!  I’ve been wanting to try to duplicate that since we drank a cellared BGS last year.  In next to that guy will go the second cider.  From there, I’m thinking we’ll use that yeast cake to ferment a nice Belgian Trippel, also a favorite of mine and a great beer to cellar for a year or so!  From there, it’s the big boy.  A big, fat Belgian Dark Strong, a recipe based on Sean Paxton’s Saucer Full of Secrets recipe, which came out ABSOLUTELY KILLER last time we brewed it.  After that, I think that this yeast cake will be about half the carboy!  For the record, every time we use 530, we try to keep our wort at around 72 degrees for fermentation.  Just seems to helps bring out all those fruity flavors, especially since 530 doesn’t quite have the fruity-ness that 500 does.  We’ll see what it does to the cider!!  Of course, right about when the BSD finishes it’s ferment, that third cider will go into the fermentation fridge.

Of course, nothing ever goes as planned, and those won’t be all we brew in the BrewChatter Home Brewery this year!  In queue there is also Kael’s Blood Orange Hef, a hometown favorite, and a Hoppy Brown Ale from Tasty McDole that I’ve been dying to brew since I heard about it.  The point is, it’s time to fill some bottles and keg’s this year!

Materials.  Well, the hardware is all assembled, a ramshackle RJ Brewingassortment of chopped up Coors kegs (never use craft brewers kegs as brew pots and mash tuns!), igloo coolers and stainless steel brewpots, not to mention a gaggle of other things!  The BrewChatter Brewery may not be pretty, but it puts out some mean beer!  The software (thanks Alton Brown for the terminology!) is assembled thusly:

Grain.  I always buy grain, in bulk, from my local homebrew shop.  This is a mixture of supporting my local shop and the fact that he carries great products that are consistently high quality.  I’ll also get all the specialty grains from the Reno Homebrewer, as well as any adjuncts, specialty spices and sugars.  Regular brown sugar will come from the grocery store, though!

Hops.  Some time ago, at the suggestion of an amazing local brewer that sold me some kegs, I began using Hops Direct, a small hop farm out of Yakima Valley, WA.  I’ve never looked back!  Killer prices, excellent quality and packaging.  I usually buy five pounds or so a year, just to stay on the up and up!  As of this post, their pelletized hops are just coming out!

Yeast.  This I’ll also get from my local homebrew shop.  He carries a good selection, and I get White Labs or Wyeast as I want!  Always check your expiration dates, though!  You don’t want to get to the end of brew day and realize you needed a yeast starter!

All in all, I’ve assembled my hardware between local homebrew and commercial kitchen stores, through the internet on sites I’ve heard about and liked, through Craigslist and garage sales.  This is the homebrewer standard, I would say!  Most of the ingredients we use are obtained locally, except when they are less expensive and higher quality from somewhere else!  Both points, for the record, should be significantly different.  I won’t buy a bag of grain somewhere else just because it saves five dollars.  I would much rather invest my money in my local shop!

Well, as always, we’d love to hear from you!  We want to know what you’re brewing, your tips and tricks for your favorite beer styles, your brewing season game plan, and we’d always love to trade homebrew!  Let us know!!

Check out these links below!

Homebrew Chef

The Brewing Network

White Labs

Hops Direct

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The Pumpkin Beer Conundrum

Posted on October 31, 2010 by RJ

Goodmorning Friends!Pumpkin Beer

So I have what I feel is a very valid question. Is there anyone out there who can finish an entire pumpkin beer? Anyone who brews one every year for the holidays? I just want some feedback because I know very few brewers who can or do. Not to say they don’t exist, but I just want to know!

My wife has no problem finishing a whole one, and will order two more! (That’s why I married her! She has the same approach to Double IPA’s!) A few of my buddies as well can finish one, but not more than that.

For two reason I pose this question: the first is that I want to brew a pumpkin beer, partly because it sounds like fun and partly because I know that I could cellar it and know that for the next five or six years, I would have pumpkin beer!  Any homebrew that I could keep myself and my friends out of for that long would be cool!  To be fair, this is something that I do all the time with Imperial Stouts and the Belgian Styles that we brew.  It would just be fun to have a seasonal!

Anyway, Friends, we’d love to hear your feedback, and some of the things that you brew to cellar!  Hit us up right here…

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Support Your Local Brewery!!

Posted on October 27, 2010 by RJ

Support You Local BreweryHi Friends!

I just want to say that I love living in a place where I can say that my local breweries are doing just as much, if not more than, some of the big-name craft brewers out there.  Ok, so maybe they’re not at the point where they distribute like Stone, or really really distribute like Sierra Nevada, but the beers are just as good!  That is what I love!  I go down to Great Basin, grab a keg and bs with the brewers about brewing over a pint for an hour, and I just call it Thursday!

Like I said, these guys are coming out with KILLER beers!  Black IPA’s, Double IPA’s, and still brewing the old local favorites like the Chile Beso and Icky.  Now don’t get me wrong.  I LOVE hitting the beer shop and seeing what these bigger guys are up to, and love to watch who’s distributing what and where.  It’s just nice to know that I’ve got a couple of old faithfuls.

Ok, moral of the story.  Support craft beer in general, and your local brewers in particular.  Get involved where and how you can, even if it’s just going down for a pint, or taking your wife to dinner!

We’d like to know what your local breweries are!  Get back to us and tell us what you think!!!

Great Basin Brewing Co – Website

AHA – Website

Buckbean Brewing – Website

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The North Coast Experience

Posted on October 25, 2010 by RJ

Hey Team!McMlXXXVIII-MMVIII Anniversary Ale

So this past weekend me and the family headed down to Fort Bragg, CA to visit the ocean, the hippies, and or course North Coast Brewing Co.  Now let me be the first to say that hauling ten people, five dogs, three vehicles and one beer geek makes it a chore to spend much quality time at one of my favorite breweries!

First and foremost, I have to admit that Old Rasputin XIIdespite questionable service, the restaurant part did pretty well accommodating our monster party that we just dropped in on them.  They gave us the whole back room and threw on the Giants came on the projector for good measure.  That being said, their Brewery store was EXTREMELY accommodating!  I don’t think we left them many more beer or hoodies!  They actually had to close when we left!Old Stock Ale - North Coast Brewing Co.

These guys know how to market schwag!  They’ve got shirts for every beer, every size and every special release!  Mix that with the 2010 Old Stock on tap, and we were happy campers!  I was also lucky enough to pick up a few library beers only available at the brewery, the 20th Anniversary Beer, a Belgian Style where they aged some in oak barrels, then blended back to get their perfect flavor (tasting notes on that after it’s got some age on it!), and the Old Rasputin XII, a take on their brilliant Russian Imperial Stout where they Barrel Aged the bejesus out of it!  We’ll make sure to post some tasting notes on that bad boy next year as well!

All in all, despite not having the time to dedicate to the brewery that I wanted to, and not having any new or seasonal brews to taste, North Coast Brewing Co. still remains one of my first loves and absolute favorites.  Again, we’d love to hear about your local breweries, your first loves and your gateway beers!

North Coast Brewing – Website

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Lagunitas Beers

Posted on October 25, 2010 by RJ

What’s up!Lagunitas IPA

So I’ve been able to get Lagunitas beer for just over 2 years now, and looked for it locally for just as long, but there’s this little liquor store on my way home from work that will happily order any Lagunitas beer I want. I tell the guy, “Whatever’s new…and Maximus!” I’m only human, after all.

Well we just got the Little Sumpin’ Sumpin’ ale and it’s big brother, Little Sumpin’ Wild. Damn.  This is why I love Lagunitas. Not only do they make killer beer, all the time, but they are hysterical!  Being a Hopeless Hophead, I just can’t help but love all these hoppy, high alcohol beers.

I don’t know what it is about their hops, or their hopping methods, but Lagunitas IPA was really the gateway beer that turned me into a Hophead.  To be fair, there was some help from Stone IPA, but still.  I still CRAVE just regular old Lagunitas IPA now and again, even when I’ve got some crazy double IPA sitting in my fridge.  It’s like that whole first love thing.

We would like to know what your gateway beer was.  If you’re anything like us, you always try to ‘convert’ your big 3 drinking friends!  I swear I should have a name tag that says ‘Elder R.J.’ and be riding a bicycle when it comes to new friends!  Convert, corrupt, and basque in the inevitable thankfulness!!

Lagunitas – Website

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