Brookston Beer Bulletin

Jay R. Brooks on Beer

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Celebrator Anniversary Party 2010

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celebrator-long
The last big event during SF Beer Week was the Celebrator Beer News 22nd Anniversary Party, which was held at Trumer Brauerei in Berkeley, California. It felt good and appropriate being back in a brewery for the event, after two years in the cavernous Marriott Convention Center. There was a great turnout, all in a celebratory mood. Over thirty breweries were pouring their finest beers for four hours on a beautiful February Sunday evening.

Lars Larson (Trumer), Homer Smith (Oak Barrel) & Shaun O'Sullivan (21st Amendment)
Lars Larson, from our hosts, Trumer Brauerei, with Homer Smith from the Oak Barrel and Shaun O’Sullivan from 21st Amendment.

It felt like a fitting end to ten days of events for what to all accounts seems like a very successful 2nd SF Beer Week. Although a lot of hard work by quite a large number of people went into the festival this year, it feel like it ran far smoother too, thanks to great work by everyone, and especially Rich Higgins, Meg Gill and Dave McLean, who spearheaded a lot of the effort this year.

Me and Tom Dalldorf
Me and Tom Dalldorf (photo by Mike Condie).

Below is a slideshow of the Celebrator anniversary party. This Flickr gallery is best viewed in full screen. To view it that way, after clicking on the arrow in the center to start the slideshow, click on the button on the bottom right with the four arrows pointing outward on it, to see the photos in glorious full screen. Once in full screen slideshow mode, click on “Show Info” to identify each photo.

Below are a few videos of random happenings at the party.

The acapella group breaks into song
One interesting impromptu phenomenon that occurred Sunday night was that I kept noticing a seemingly random number of people who had dressed more dapper than most (excluding the people in costumes). At some point in the evening, they all came together and broke into song with the Trumer brewery as a picturesque backdrop. Below is a video of one of their acapella numbers.

Late in the evening, with less than an hour to go before closing time, someone started throwing coasters high into the air and it became epidemic with almost everyone there joining in. I felt sorry for the clean-up crew, so I didn’t participate, but I did capture a few minutes of the melee on video.

Consecration In 375ml Bottled Today

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I stopped by Russian River Brewing today, because my friend Pete Slosberg told me last week that he would be there for the first bottling of Consecration in the new proprietary 375ml bottles. Pete was there with a few volunteers, including Peter Estaniel, from A Better Beer Blog.

The new bottle was developed for exclusive use by Russian River Brewing, along with North Coast Brewing and the Lost Abbey. So for now, those will be the only breweries you”ll see using this new bottle.

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This is the third beer to be bottled by Russian River in the new bottles. The first two were Supplication and Temptation.

In other exciting Russian River news, the brewery is about to go off the grid, and go completely solar. One-half of the production brewery’s roof has solar panels already installed and the second half has the frames laid down, waiting for the panels. It may go live as early as this weekend and should power all of the brewery’s electricity needs.

Below is a short video of Consecration moving through the bottling line.

Below are some photos from today’s visit to the brewery.


Here is a slideshow of the Consecration bottling. This Flickr gallery is best viewed in full screen. To view it that way, after clicking on the arrow in the center to start the slideshow, click on the button on the bottom right with the four arrows pointing outward on it, to see the photos in glorious full screen. Once in full screen slideshow mode, click on “Show Info” to identify each photo.

Marin Brewing Releases E.S.CHI

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Marin Brewing released their newest beer, an herbal beer made in collaboration with San Anselmo herbalist Dr. Yen-Wei Choong. He runs the Yellow Emperor Natural Healing Center and Zen Garden and has been involved with Chinese herbs all his life. For the last twenty, he’s been working on just the right combination of herbs to improve beer, and make more balanced from the perspective of Chinese medicine.

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Brewmaster Arne Johnson started with his E.S.B. as the base beer. To that, he added 38 pounds of the proprietary mix of Chinese herbs that Dr. Choong created. The nose was subtle herbs, almost gruit-like. The flavors were soft and also subtle, in a good way. The herbs were there but never overpowered the beer, and in fact the two integrated together quite well. It was smooth and easy drinking, almost like a session beer, though I believe the beer is around 5.5% a.b.v. A tasty collaboration.

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Marin Brewing owner Brendan Moylan, Dr. Yen-Wei Choong and Brewmaster Arne Johnson.

For now, the beer is draft only and will be at several events and places during SF Beer Week. They’ve submitted a label for approval, so it may be available in bottles eventually.

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Tony Sings The Blues

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Another highlight of The Brewing Network’s Winter Brews Festival, held yesterday at Linden Street Brewery in Oakland, was the music. There were some terrific bands playing. But my favorite was, as usual, the down home blues stylings of Tony Magee, owner of Lagunitas Brewing. He taught himself to play just a few years ago and in fact his debut performance was at the Celebrator 15th Anniversary Party when we held it at the Great American Music Hall in 2003. Since then, Tony’s been getter better every time I see him play. Here he is performing a Big Bill Broonzy song, Key to the Highway.

A Rosa By Any Other Name

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odonata
One of the highlights of The Brewing Network’s Winter Brews Festival, held earlier today at Linden Street Brewery in Oakland, was Rosa, a sour beer brewed by the new Sacramento brewery, Odonata, recently started by former Sacramento Brewing’s Peter Hoey and Rick Sellers, formerly with Draft magazine. Here’s a short video of brewmaster Peter Hoey talking about Rosa.

Stone To Release Collaboration Video

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Stone Brewing, at 1:00 p.m. Pacific Time, will be releasing their latest video project, Stone Skips Across the Pond, a record of their collaborations with two breweries. [NOTE: the video, once released at 1:00 p.m. PST, will be available at Stone’s Blog.] If you just can’t wait to see some of it, check out the trailer.

The first collaboration is with Nøgne Ø, the Norwegian craft brewery. After brewing there, the Stone team heads to Scotland to brew yet another collaboration with BrewDog.

I had an opportunity to screen the video last night, and it’s a fun short film at just under 30 minutes. It was filmed again by Redtail Media, the same team that created I Am A Craftbrewer. The production values are amazing. The film stars not just Greg Koch, but also his business partner Steve Wagner and head brewer Mitch Steele, some amazing landscapes, terrific looking food, some beer you’ll be jealous you didn’t have along with the brew crews at both Nøgne Ø and BrewDog. Looks like it was a fun time. It’s a great window into the camaraderie among brewers, regardless of national boundaries, in the craft beer world

Next Thursday, Part 2 will be released, followed by parts three and four on each subsequent Thursday. For now, enjoy part one.

Stone To Seek Brewing Opportunity Abroad

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Greg Koch and Steve Wagner, the founders of Stone Brewing after tweasing (twitter teasing) the news for weeks have announced a bold, audacious plan. After resisting sending their beer overseas, they’ve decided instead to consider opening a brewery there instead. So they’re initiating an open call from municipalities or even nations abroad to see what they might propose to entice them to take over an existing brewery or build a new one somewhere in Europe, Asia or wherever. In the video below, Greg and Steve explain the idea.

Stone to open a Brewery in Europe? from stonebrew on Vimeo.

This is a very exciting project for Steve and me…and all of us at Stone Brewing. We’re going to be learning quite a bit with this endeavor, first and foremost: Will we be welcome? We’re approaching this with no assumptions other than we’d like to consider any and all options (other than having our beers contract brewed by another brewery, as that’s simply not our style). Many of the countries of Europe have great brewing traditions. Some countries are also currently experiencing a bit of a resurgence of small, independent (and independent thinking) breweries. As anyone knows that has visited the Stone Brewing Co. and our attached restaurant – the Stone World Bistro & Gardens – where we have more Guest taps than we do of Stone, we enjoy sharing the camaraderie of great craft beers. We look forward to joining in the fight in Europe by doing our part to add to the growing trend towards unique, flavorful artisanal beers, as opposed to the mass-blandification efforts characterized by megabrand sameness!

-Greg Koch, CEO

Drinking Life & Limb

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sierra-nevada dogfish
You probably remember the big news back in August when Dogfish Head and Sierra Nevada announced they’d be doing not one, but two collaboration beers. The main one is called Life & Limb, while the second is Limb & Life, a small beer made from the second runnings of Life & Limb.

To launch the new collaboration, a beer dinner was held last Sunday at Ana Mandara in San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf. Both Sam Calagione, from Dogfish Head and Ken Grossman, from Sierra Nevada were on hand for the dinner.

Hosts Ken Grossman & Sam Calagione
Ken Grossman and Sam Calagione

Limb & Life, the draft-only “Imperial small beer,” was served with hors d’oeuvres while Ken and Sam talked about their collaboration together.

The five-course meal had two beers paired with each dish, one from each brewery. We started with Limb & Life and then Life & Limb was served as the last beer of the evening, with dessert. In addition, at the end of the night we finagled a bottle of Life & Limb to compare with the draft version. Personally, I preferred the bottle. Bottle-conditioning gave it a richer mouthfeel and added complexity.

I was fortunate to sit with Sam and Ken for the dinner, as they discussed the project. While Sam has done many collaborations with both domestic and foreign breweries over the years, this was Sierra Nevada’s first one. If you can find a copy of All About Beer magazine from around this time last year, you can read my feature story on collaboration beers. I love the growing trend of collaboration beers, especially when, like this one, some thought is put into it. This makes the results more meaningful, and not simply a marketing effort. Everything about it was well done, especially the artwork for the label, done by a children’s book illustrator.

Life & Limb label artwork

Below is a slideshow of the Life & Limb beer dinner. This Flickr gallery is best viewed in full screen. To view it that way, after clicking on the arrow in the center to start the slideshow, click on the button on the bottom right with the four arrows pointing outward on it, to see the photos in glorious full screen. Once in full screen slideshow mode, click on “Show Info” to identify each photo.

Tragic Or Funny?

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Depending on your point of view, this is either tragic or funny. It happened back in June, but one of the passersby, Scott Bradley, shot a video which he recently uploaded to YouTube, and sent me a tweet. He apparently shot the video on June 17, 2009 as he was driving cross country from New Jersey to California. I guess to him it was tragic as he laments that he “was unable to put any beer in my car because my car was full to the brim with all of my stuff that I was moving.” The incident took place near Dayton, Ohio and here’s the account from the Dayton Daily News, which also includes several photos.