Brookston Beer Bulletin

Jay R. Brooks on Beer

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The New Stone Brewery

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I was down in San Diego Sunday through Tuesday for a CSBA meeting and finally had a chance to see the new Stone Brewery, along with their World Bistro & Gardens in Escondido on Monday for the very first time. The place is very impressive from top to bottom and seems very well-thought out at every stage. The food was pretty tasty, too, especially the deep-fried garlic mashed potato balls. Yum.

Stone’s gleaming new brewery during our tour by new head brewer Mitch Steele.

Co-owner Greg Koch toasting the end of a great day, in front of his Stone World Bistro & Gardens.

For more photos from my Stone Brewery and the World Bistro & Gardens tour, visit the photo gallery.
 

Get Wise With Schneider Weisse

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Beer Chef Bruce Paton’s next beer dinner next year will feature the classic beers of Schneider Weisse from Germany. It will be a four-course dinner and well worth the $75 price of admission. It will be held at the Cathedral Hill Hotel on Friday, June 22, 2007, beginning with a reception at 6:30 p.m. Call 415.674.3406 for reservations. The reservations may be closed now, but perhaps if you call today they may let you in.
 

The Menu:

 

Reception: 6:30 PM

Beer Chef’s Hors D’Oeuvre
Schneider Edel Weisse

Dinner: 7:30 PM

First Course

Butter Poached Gulf Prawns with Hobbs Apple Wood Bacon Flan and Citrus Nage

Beer: Schneider Weisse

Second Course:

Trifecta of Duck Preparations (Three Winners)

Beer: Aventinus Doppelbock

Third Course:

Chocolate Bread Pudding with Hazelnut Sabayon

Beer: Aventinus Weizen Eisbock

 
6.22

Dinner with the Brewmaster: Schneider Weisse

Cathedral Hill Hotel, 1101 Van Ness Avenue, San Francisco, California
415.674.3406 [ website ]

Finding the Lost Abbey

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As I mentioned yesterday, on Sunday I flew down to San Diego for a couple of days to attend a CSBA meeting. My first stop was to visit Tomme Arthur at Port Brewing‘s new production facility, which they bought a little over a year ago from Stone Brewing. I wanted to see what they’d done to the place and also sample Tomme’s wonderful beers at the source.

The lobby of the brewery has been fashioned like a ship with portholes looking into their conference room.

The original paintings from the Lost Abbey’s beautiful labels hang behind the tasting bar.

Aging beer in wooden barrels line the brewery and are fit into nooks and crannies throughout.

Tomme’s daughter Sydney, who’s just over a year-old, came to work.

Tomme Arthur and Sydney in front of aging beer destined to be in future bottles of the Lost Abbey.

Something Smells in Gilroy

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garlic
Something smells in Gilroy these days, and it’s not the garlic. That odor is the smell of hypocrisy wafting up from the South Bay town. Since 1979, Gilroy has been putting on the Gilroy Garlic Festival in order to, in their own words, “provide benefits to local worthy charities and non-profit groups by promoting the community of Gilroy through a quality celebration of Garlic.” Wow, what a great idea. Celebrating local communities and promoting the support of local foods like garlic is what the local food movement is all about. They should rightly be proud of the area’s garlic production and how much it has added to the economic benefit of the town and their surrounding environment. That’s without question a good and worthy goal.

Unfortunately — you knew there’d be a catch — such forward thinking does not extend to all of the community’s local riches. The town’s local brewery, Coast Range Brewery, is not allowed to sell its local beer at the annual event in late July, not even their own garlic beer. According to the Gilroy Dispatch, since the festival’s inception 29 years ago, the Gilroy Chamber of Commerce has “been the sole beneficiary of the hundreds of kegs served up over the three-day weekend” and has enjoyed the exclusive right to choose the beer distributor whose work ultimately lines its coffers. So not surprisingly, all of that high-minded rhetoric about supporting local businesses is thrown out the window when their own greed gets factored in, especially when over half of the revenue realized from the festival comes from beer sales.

The beer this year will again be distributed by Bottomley Distributing, the area Budweiser distributor. So expect to see such local fare as Budweiser (from Missouri), Corona (from Mexico), Redhook (from Washington), Rolling Rock (from New Jersey) and Widmer (from Oregon). Bottomley could, of course, distribute Coast Range’s beers just for the event but they’ve refused to do so. “They can make this work,” Jeff Moses, GM of Coast Range, said of the chamber. “They can purchase the beer if they like. They just won’t do it.”

Susan Valenta, the chamber’s chief executive officer, defended the chamber’s questionable actions by saying “[i]t’s a turnkey operation … At the end of the day, we’re not in the business of beer, but in fund-raising.” I’m glad to see she cares so deeply for the health of all of Gilroy’s businesses, not just the garlicky ones. What self-serving hypocrites. You can’t really claim to be promoting the local economy and then turn your back on a local business because you may not make as much money or it may be more complicated. Shame on Gilroy. I, for one, think all beer lovers should boycott the place until they get their heads out into the sunshine again.

More from the Dispatch article:

Getting local businesses involved in the festival has been a top priority for [Brian] Bowe [executive director of the nonprofit Gilroy Garlic Festival Association], who approached the chamber and several distributors about letting Coast Range Brewery into the event.

“I have tried working with the distributors directly to get them to carry the (Coast Range Brewery’s) Farmhouse products, and they have declined,” Bowe said, adding: “I think that the chamber has tried to give (Coast Range) a fair shake.”

Well it sounds like his heart is in the right place, but if he thinks that sounds like a “fair shake,” someone should buy that man a dictionary. Because from where I sit, nothing at all about this sounds fair at all. This is all about excuses. They “declined!” and that’s that? I’m pretty sure it’s your festival, Mr. Bowe. Either you or the greedy chamber could demand Bottomley do you what you claim to want them to do — include the local Coast Range Brewery — or risk losing their contract in the future. But you didn’t do that, did you? So much for local communities sticking together. It’s enough to make me want to stop eating garlic altogether.

Bay Area Brewfest 2007

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Last Saturday the second annual Bay Area Brewfest took place in San Mateo. It was another beautiful day in the Bay Area. While there plenty of local and domestic craft beer pouring at this festival, I think what will ultimately set it apart is that there are several good Belgian and German import beers in attendance. Very few festivals have better imports so it was a good opportunity to try a variety of beers from abroad.

The grounds at the San Mateo Event Center.

Alec Moss from Half Moon Bay Brewing serving his tasty beers.

Festival organizer Jeff Moses with Mike Pitsker, who also writes from the Celebrator and has an insurance agency which also specializes in covering breweries.

Rosy News About Hollister Brewing

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Brewer Eric Rose’s new brewpub, Hollister Brewing, in Goleta, California (just outside Santa Barbara), got a nice write-up in the L.A. Times today in their food section. Really the piece was about Santa Barbara’s beer scene and included Telegraph Brewing, Island Brewing as well as Firestone Walker (which at one point the Times referred to as Walker Firestone), but Hollister got most of the attention. Also, I discovered Santa Barbara brewers don’t like a lot of hops. That should come as a bit of a shock to Eric Rose, whose IPA in the past has been fairly loaded with the stuff. All kidding aside, it’s nice to see some attention paid to craft beer by the LA Times, which is the fourth largest newspaper in the U.S.

Bay Area Brewfest This Weekend

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The second annual Bay Area Brewfest will be taking place this Saturday, from Noon until 6:00 p.m., at the San Mateo Event Center. I went to last year’s event, which was pretty good for a first time festival, well-organized and with a decent turnout. So I have high hopes for their sophomore effort and the music lineup makes it look like it could be a lot of fun. Sponsored by the radio station, “The Bone” 107.7, all five bands are tribute bands. There’s The Unauthorized Rolling Stones, Zepparella (Led Zeppelin), Gator Alley (Lynyrd Skynyrd), Petty Theft (Tom Petty), and Texas Holdem (Stevie Ray Vaughan).

Tickets are @25 at the gate or $20 in advance and can be ordered online. See you there.

Beerfest in Santa Rosa

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This was the 16th annual Santa Rosa Beerfest, which is a benefit for Face to Face, a Sonoma County AIDS charity. What’s fun about this festival and what sets it apart is two things. First there’s the emphasis on local beer and food producers. Second, and most importantly in my opinion, is the way they treat food. There are as many, perhaps more, food stands than beer stands. And for your admission price you get unlimited samples of both food and beer. That means you can choose a food and a beer to pair, and try endless combination of pairings right there on the spot. More festivals should adopt this method, because it’s a terrific way to really show just how good beer and food are together. I can write about it until I’m blue in the fingers, and you can try single pairing after pairing, but to have an opportunity to mix and match like this is priceless and a fantastic learning experience. Plus, the equal emphasis on food alleviates the drunkenness that sometimes accompanies lesser festivals. Anyway, it was a great day — perfect weather — and I had a great time talking with friends, eating and drinking and listening to live music. After the festival I was so full, I didn’t have another bite for the rest of the day. I was satiated and satisfied.

Rebecca and Fraggle, inveterate festival-goers, at this year’s Santa Rosa Beerfest.

Two from Russian River Brewing, co-owner Natalie (center) and as many times as I’ve met this gentlemen I can’t remember his name, along with Brian Hunt from Moonlight Brewing (right).

For more photos from this year’s Santa Rosa Brewfest, visit the photo gallery.

Session #4: Local Brews

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Today is our fourth Session a.k.a beer Blogging Friday and the theme is something of a departure from our usual topic. This month’s host is the Gastronomic Fight Club from Omaha, Nebraska, and they’ve chosen “Local Brews” as the theme, describing his goal as wanting to “create a guide book of tasting notes to drinking local.”

As I often do, I decided to tackle the theme literally, and so I went to the closest brewery, which is Moylan’s, a mere 1.7 miles from my home (2.3 if you take the freeway) in Novato, California.

We moved to the town of Novato in northern Marin in late December, just over five months ago. We sold our condo in San Rafael for a small house, but one with a yard for the kids and no more stairs (our condo was on four levels. After a while, it began to feel like we were living in an Escher drawing.) Condo life was also impersonal, and we craved more of a community and neighborhood feel to where we lived.

Novato is a relatively small (population approx. 50,000) bedroom community with a small downtown area. It was only established in 1960, making the town one-year younger than I am! We live only two blocks from the main downtown street, Grant Avenue. In the few months we’ve been here, it’s been far more enjoyable than the three years we lived in San Rafael. We can walk to a lot of places, which is great. One place that’s a little far, unfortunately, is the town’s only brewery.

Moylan’s is located on the outskirts, so to speak, a part of our only really big shopping center, Rowland Plaza, along with a Costco, Target, Staples, a multi-screen movie theatre and many other chain stores. It was built and opened in 1995 by Brendan Moylan, a Novato resident. Moylan also opened nearby Marin Brewing six years earlier, in 1989. In addition to the brewpub and full pub menu at the brewery, there is also a production facility where Moylan’s and Marin Brewing bottle several of their popular beers in 22 oz. bottles.

I had thought about going to Moylan’ for lunch, but I just couldn’t get it together and so didn’t manage to get there until around four in the afternoon. At that late hour I didn’t expect anyone to be in the brewery itself, but happily Moylan’s new head brewer Denise Jones was still there. She recently replaced James Costa who left to work at E.J. Phair. Denise has been brewing commercially for many years and is probably most well-known for her years at Third Street Aleworks in Santa Rosa. She poured us a beer and sat down with me to chat.

I told her about “The Session” and this months theme as we tried the Pomegranate Wheat, a beer that James Costa first made last year. Denise had told me she’s been increasing the amount of fruit and lowering the IBUs so I wanted to taste the difference. Indeed, it did taste more “juicy” and had a nice sweetness that wasn’t at all cloying.

Next, I tried their ESB on cask, but unfortunately it was oxidized. Denise confessed they’ve been having a problem with the line and she’s working on fixing it. In the meantime, I also tried the ESB from a regular carbonated tap and also the nitrogen line. It was interesting to have the same beer from three different delivery systems. Oxidation aside, the cask version naturally was the smoothest of the three, though the Nitrogen one was a pretty close second. No matter how many times I try it, I’m amazed every single time how much better cask beer is, especially when you can do a direct comparison. Not that Moylan’s ESB was bad, but even the oxidized cask was almost preferable to the harsh, forced CO2 of the regular version.

Denise brought up one aspect of drinking locally that had not occurred to me before. She suggested that one reason people preferred their local brew was that it was made with the same water that was already familiar to them and that familiarity made it automatically taste more unconsciously recognizable and thus was preferable on a visceral level. It reminds me of the way your Mom’s home cooking tastes better, not because it actually is better than a five-star restaurant, but because it has that familiarity, a certain nostalgia perhaps, that makes it taste better than it really ought to. Given that water, like human beings when you get right down to it, are mostly water it does make a certain kind of sense. I’m kicking myself that it hadn’t occurred to me before now. Many beers are rightly famous in part because of what the local water source added to the beer’s flavor, but that would be true of almost everything affected by the local water, from food cooked in it to the simple tap water you drink day after day.

After a pair of session beers, I decided to go out with a bang and for my final beer decided on Ryan O’Sullvan’s Imperial Stout. It’s a style I’m already fond of and I’ve had the beer before but I don’t order it on draft often enough. It’s a mighty fine beer and at 10% abv packs quite a wallop. It’s thick and viscous, something on the order 10W-30, and very full-flavored with hints of berries and roasted coffee. It’s a great sipping beer that deserves to be enjoyed slowly so it’s ever-increasing complexity come through as it warms. It was a nice beer to finish with and I sat and savored it after Denise left for her commute home to Napa.

Here’s a list of all the beers Moylan’s currently has on tap at the brewpub. The descriptions are their own. A dozen or more of their regular and seasonal beers are also available in 22 oz. bottles throughout the Bay Area and Califoria generally, as well as parts of Arizona, Massachusetts, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Rhode Island and Washington.

BEERS CURRENTLY ON TAP AT MOYLAN’S
 

  • Unfiltered Wheat – A Light and Refreshing American Style Wheat Ale. 4.5%
  • Pomegranate Wheat – Tasty Unfiltered Wheat blended with Pomegranate Juice that makes perfect Summer afternoon treat 5.0%
  • Extra Special Bitter – Our Traditional English Style Bitter. This one is served on Co2 for a slightly more bitter finish. Enjoy! 5.2%
  • Moylan’s Special Bitter – Our Traditional English Style Bitter served on Nitrogen for Smooth Maltiness and a Creamy Finish. 5.2%
  • Tipperary Pale Ale– Our Award Winning Classic Style Pale Ale. It’s slightly hoppy with smooth, subtle malty finish. 5.0%
  • India Pale Ale – This American Style IPA is Slightly Malty with an aggressive Hop flavor crisp finish, that leaves you wanting another. 6.5%
  • Moylander Double IPA – This Ale has received a score of 97 points and a rating of SUPERLATIVE at the World Beer Championships in Chicago. Huge and Hoppy, Thick and Hearty . . . not faint of heart! 8.5%
  • Hopsickle Triple IPA – A homage to hops with an Ale that stimulates the taste buds with the blast of Tomahawk, Cascade and Centennial hops. 9.2%
  • Kilt Lifter Scotch Ale – “FIRST PLACE CALIFORNIA STATE FAIR 2005 & 2006” Our Flagship Beer! Traditional Scottish “Wee Heavy” Ale is Big, Rich, and Malty, with a Warm Finish. 8.0%
  • Old Blarney Barley Wine – HUGE malt flavors with a big hop kick, this heavy ale is not for faint of heart! 10%
  • Irish Dry Stout – A classic Irish style dry stout. Rich and Creamy with a roasted character finishes smooth and dry. Served on N2 4.8%
  • Imperial Stout – A Monster Stout with a Warming Smooth Malty Finish and Hints of Roasted Coffee and Chocolate. 10.0%
  • Cask Conditioned Ales – Irish dry stout & extra special bitter.

Rob Tod Rocks the House

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Rob Tod, the owner/founder of Allagash Brewing of Portland, Maine, was in San Francisco Friday for a beer dinner at the Cathedral Hill Hotel. Bruce Paton, the Beer Chef, put on his usual spectacular fête and the meal and pairings worked magnificently. All of Allagash’s beers are in a Belgian-style, though most are quite experimental. Rob Tod really worked the crowd and made a great impression both with his stories and his beer. Having missed Valley Brewing’s dinner last month, it was great to enjoy another of Bruce’s dinners. There were a number of friends there and a great time was had by one and all.

Rob Tod had the crowd in the palm in his hand talking about his beers.

The Main dish, cutlets of slow roasted lamb with fingerling potato risotto and bing cherry compote, which was paired with Allagash Inoculator. Inoculator is a “one-off” beer made almost by accident. It started with their triple, aged in bourbon barrels with cherries from their local market added. The yeast they used was from Rodenbach and helped create a delightful 9.5% beer.

Dave Keene, from the Toronado, won a raffle at the dinner to support a local chef’s organization. One of the items in his prize basket was “Shrimp flavored Chips.”

James Costa, from E.J. Phair Brewing, offers some to his wife, Caroline. Wisely, she declined. The smell alone was enough to produce a gag reflex.

Rob Tod, on the other hand, was brave enough to actually eat them.

Chef Bruce stopped by our table. From left, Dave Keene, Vinnie Cilurzo (from Russian River), Arne Johnson (from Marin Brewing), James Costa and his wife Caroline, and Rob Tod.

Chef Bruce also brought us a special bottle of Malheur Brut Reserve, Michael Jackson Commemorative Selection 2006. Yum.

The Malheur (at right) also worked well with the dessert, Banana Upside Down Cake with Butterscotch Mascarpone, though the official pairing, Allagash Curieux, was inspired. Curieux is a tripel aged in Jim Beam barrels.

Chef Bruce and Rob Tod, who respectively provided the food and beer for our dinner.

Malin Palssoa and Eric Schiff (from San Francisco Brewing), fans of the Bulletin at the dinner. At least I think that’s their names, I had trouble reading my own handwriting the next day.

Enjoying some Blind Pig IPA at the hotel bar after the dinner, Rob Tod and me.