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Archives for March 2006

Bay Area Brewer in Belgium

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Last night on his Lufthansa flight back from belgium, 21st Amendment brewer Shaun O’Sullivan e-mailed me some of his photos from his trip to Belgium, so I thought I’d share them with everybody.

With the bartenders at the Koln Karnival at the local Pfaffen Brewery in downtown Koln.

Shaun with Jen Garris of Magnolia Brewpub and a local clown.

Shaun with another local at the Koln bar.

Touring Chimay with Pierre, a civilian that works in the brewery.

Outside of Rochefort brewery.

According to Shaun, the gate was open at Rochefort, so they just walked in and took pictures. Nobody said anything to them because of the vow of silence.

Science News: A Skunk Walks Into a Bar …

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I stumbled upon this news item from last December that appeard in Science News, the Weekly News Magazine of Science. The article, by Aimee Cunningham, entitled A Skunk Walks into a Bar . . . Fighting Beer’s Fouler Flavors was a pretty good overview of the history of identifying and codifying the individual flavor compounds found in beer. Some of the information is necessarily simplified but it still contains a lot of worthwhile and interesting information.

Watermelon Funk: A Collaboration

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21st-amend russian-river
The fruit beer craze is definitely over, not that that’s a bad thing. Most of the remaining fruit beers are very worthwhile and quite tasty. Beers such as New Glarus’ Raspberry Tart, Unibroue’s Quelque Chose or Great Divide’s Wild Raspberry Ale spring to mind. But a local favorite has to be Shaun O’Sullivan’s Watermelon Wheat, that has become as much a sign of summer as the first robin is of spring. A ubiquitous sight at 21st Amendment during the warm weather, Watermelon Wheat is very refreshing with strong watermelon aromas and flavor from the many pounds of watermelon added to each batch.

Shaun has now given several barrels to Vinnie Cilurzo at Russian River Brewing and he’s put them in oak barrels and sparked them with the Belgian yeast Brettanomyces. Nobody knows what this experiment will taste like, but I for one hope to be around when we find out. It should, at the very least, be quite interesting.