Brookston Beer Bulletin

Jay R. Brooks on Beer

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Cambridge Brewing Hinting At Bottling

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Tip of the hat to Todd Alstrom from Beer Advocate , who noticed that Cambridge Brewing Co.‘s Will Meyers tweeted out a link to a short survey asking his customers a few questions about buying beer in bottles, suggesting the brewpub is considering bottling some of the their beer. Here’s the introduction to the survey.

Thank you for taking the time to fill out this survey. Your answers will help determine the future of a Cambridge Brewing Company bottling program, and provide you with the beers you want in your local store. At this time, we are only in the beginning stages of planning our roll-out, but our success depends on you. So please let us know what you think, and what you want to drink.

Will later confirmed CBC’s plan to bottle, tweeting “Yup! Damn PSYCHED!” And to another, tweeted back that they’re “Considering it, but most interested in making our funkier beers. Lots of great ambers/pales out there already!” So that suggests they’re considering bottling the more interesting one-off and barrel-aged beers that Will has marinating in the basement … er, cellar. And that, I think, is most excellent news.

City Brewery Buys Former Coors Plant In Memphis

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Trying to catch up with all the news fluttering around the beer world, I see that last week the Hardy Bottling plant in Memphis, Tennessee has finally found a buyer. The brewery was originally built by Schlitz in 1971 and then Stroh’s operated it for a time before selling it to Coors, where they brewed their Blue Moon line of stealth micros, along with Zima and Keystone. MolsonCoors shut it down in 2006 and I seem to recall there were some labor disputes there, too. Then later that same year it was sold for $9 million and it became the Hardy Bottling Co.

City Brewing, of La Crosse, Wisconsin, agreed to buy the brewery for $30 million, plus will invest an additional $11 million to renovate and update the facility. When it reopens this summer, it will be renamed Blues City Brewery.

From the press release:

City Brewing Company is the 4th largest brewer in the United States. Prior to this acquisition, City Brewing had over 6,000,000 barrels of capacity between its breweries in La Crosse, Wis. and Latrobe, Pa. The Company currently has approximately 720 employees. With the addition of the Memphis brewery, City Brewing will exceed 10,000,000 barrels (135 million cases) of brewing capacity. The acquisition of the Hardy Bottling Plant in Memphis offers City Brewing the ability to rapidly increase its capacity for brewing, packaging and distribution for its existing customer base as well as to expand its brewing and packaging services to new customers and markets, including those currently served by Hardy. “City Brewing Company welcomes the opportunity to work with Carolyn Hardy and the current staff to fully develop the brewing and packaging capabilities of the Memphis facility.” stated City Brewing President George Parke. “This is truly a significant occasion for our industry and a unique and remarkable opportunity for Memphis, Tennessee.” Carolyn Hardy added.

Iron City Sold To NY Equity Firm

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The struggling former Pittsburgh Brewing, who emerged from bankruptcy in 2007 as Iron City Brewing, has been purchased by a New York-based private equity firm, Uni-World Capital for an undisclosed sum. The investor group led by Timothy Hickman that purchased Iron City from bankruptcy is selling the “company’s Iron City and IC Light labels, some lesser brands and the company’s other assets.” Iron City remains headquartered in Pittsburgh, despite having moved production to nearby Latrobe, PA, where it contracts its beer from the former Rolling Rock brewery that was purchased by Wisconsin’s City Brewing when Anheuser-Busch abandoned it after buying the Rolling Rock brand in 2006. To read more, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has the fullest account of this story.

Q&A With Jack McAuliffe

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Last week, you may recall, I had the opportunity to spend some time with Jack McAuliffe, founder of the first modern microbrewery in America; New Albion Brewery. That was the week after the annual Craft Brewers Conference, which was held this year in San Francisco. At CBC, the elusive Jack was in town for his first appearance at a public beer event in a very, very long time. He was going to do a Q&A session along with a short talk by Maureen Ogle, author of Ambitious Brew, and Jack’s daughter, Renee DeLuca, who writes online at the Brewer’s Daughter. As an amateur beer historian, and lover of the subject, seeing the man who built the first microbrewery from scratch back in 1976 was simply something I was not going to miss. I arrived early and got a chance to meet Jack for the first time. Needless to say, it was a great treat.

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Jack and me at CBC.

After a talk by Jack’s daughter Renee on social media, Maureen discussed “The Long View of the Big Picture,” lessons learned from failed breweries and what the ones who survived did to keep going. Then the session was turned over to jack, who answered questions from the audience for a good half hour. I recorded Jack’s Q&A and you can listen to it below. Enjoy.

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Drunken Carrot

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On Sunday, my wife and I indulged our inner geeks by attending WonderCon at Moscone Center in San Francisco. It’s an orgy of comic books, cartoons, science fiction and fantasy, art, toys, film, television and all manner of mainstream and non-mainstream entertainment. It was a fun day, and we picked up some cool stuff for ourselves and the kids. One oddity I came across is a stuffed vegetable (animal didn’t seem quite right) entitled Drunken Carrot. He’s part of the Mr. Toast collection. You can see more of artist Dan Goodsell’s artwork and characters at the Wonderful World of Mr. Toast.

Drunken Carrot is described like so: “He is orange and he has a problem.” I’m not entirely sure why one of his eyes is not working, but I assume it’s from over-indulging on beer — what is that, Dos Equis?
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Since I didn’t want him to get too lonely being stuck in my office all day long, I also picked up a companion for him: Shaky Bacon. Shaky doesn’t look to happy. He probably needs a drink.
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Marzen Madness 2011 Winners

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Congratulations to the Connecticut Huskies, who last night bested Butler to win the NCAA Men’s College Basketball Tournament. And thanks to everybody who played Märzen Madness again this year. Nobody’s more surprised about this than I am, but of the 42 people who played this year, I was the only one to pick UConn to go all the way. Of all people playing Yahoo’s tournament pick ’em game, only 3.3% took the Huskies. The majority picked either Ohio State (30.3%), Kansas (26.1) or Duke (16.1%). Every other team is in single digits. Here’s the top five finishers in our little game:

  1. Brookston (107)
  2. huskless (77)
  3. Day V (70)
  4. Unemployed in Greenland (66)
  5. Shoot the Damn Ball (64)

Brewbot: An Automated Homebrewing Machine

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This is an odd one, if not without a certain interest just for the effort involved and how it works. For a design contest, The RX MCU Design Contest, sponsored by Renesas, an Australian designer, Matt Prattau (a.k.a. Zizzle), created the Brewbot, an automated homebrewing system that does all the work.

Here’s his introduction, from the contest submission:

Home brewing beer can be a rewarding mix of art and science. It allows the brewer to explore the thousands of possibilities available using the dozens of varieties of hops, malt, yeast and other interesting ingredients. The process can be time consuming and results can vary due to many factors, including precision, technique and consistency used by the brewer in the process.

Imagine an appliance in your kitchen that could take the time and labor out of the brewing process and brew a consistent batch of beer each time thus allowing the user to focus on the ingredients and recipe.

I always thought that the actual work of homebrewing was part of the fun, not something to be avoided, but still, you have to admire the way he did it. Here’s what it looks like. The submission page also includes links to schematics and other information about the design. He’s also set up a blog where he tracks his progress entitled Brewbot Mk2

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Hack A Day blogged about the Brewbot, and had this to say:

You can see the development board there just to the left of the brew kettle. It’s network connected with a web interface that allows you to take recipes from Brewtarget and import them directly to the system. All you need to do is make sure that you load up the grain basket and boil addition modules to match your recipe. The bot takes it from there, filling the kettle, preheating that water, lowering the grains and maintaining temperature for the mash, and completing the boil with additions from the servo-controlled PVC pipe pods. Experienced brewers will notice a few steps missing, like the sparge, and a quick way to cool the finished wort. But this does take a huge part of the drudgery out of our hands. If only it had a clean-in-place system … then we’d really be happy!

But to get a real feel for it, check out the video where the designer walks you though the steps of how it works.

The Smell Of Vanilla

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Adrian Tierney-Jones — who was my editor when I worked on 1001 Beer You Must Try Before You Die — had an interesting post the other day on his blog, Called to the Bar, entitled What does vanilla smell like? It’s about the difficulties of accurately describing any aroma we encounter in beer, but with vanilla as the jumping off point for the discussion. Especially interesting is the idea of how do you describe aromas without using too much cliché, an inevitable problem when you write a lot of tasting notes. Adrian specifically mentions something he read in the introduction of the Penguin Guide to Food and Drink. Editor Paul Levy notes “how you might find a raspberry note in Burgundy but no Burgundy notes in a raspberry. But what does a raspberry smell of? Raspberry.” It’s a thorny problem for reviewing beers, and worth a read if you want to write thoughtful tasting notes, or just understand the difficulties inherent in them.