B.C. beer lovers re hopping to it

Deep in the dog days of summer, a frosty beer on the patio can really hit the spot.

But instead of heading to the liquor store to stock up, a new generation of homebrewer is traipsing down to a basement beer fridge and choosing a bottle of homemade ale.

If homebrewing reminds you of your dad’s smelly experiment fermenting away in the basement, think again.

The beer kit your dad might have tried likely contained too much sugar and not enough malt (barley grains), says Dan Smalls, owner of Dan’s Home-brewing Supplies in Vancouver.

The bad-tasting brews that resulted gave homebrewing a bad name.

“When I first opened the store, there weren’t that many homebrewers,” said Smalls.

“It was tough convincing people that they could make good beer at home.”

Although the novice beer maker might be tempted to start with a pack-aged kit, it’s not necessary.

“You have to be really afraid of the kitchen not to be able to pull this off,” said Smalls, who sells different types of malt and hops, as well as beer-making equipment.

Smalls and his staff also provide advice and recipes.

Dave Shea, a 32-year-old software designer who lives in Vancouver, started making his own beer two years ago.

With the blessing of a wife who “lets me get away with more than I should,” Shea has carved out storage spots in his apartment for his beer equipment and turns his tiny home office into a fermentation nook when he has a batch on the go.

“I had an interest in beer for quite a while and I would seek out interesting microbrews and craft brews,” said Shea.

“I just wanted the interesting-tasting stuff, and I wanted a wide variety.”

Shea’s first attempt, a fancy double-hopped IPA, was a disappointment.

“I tend to be a pretty harsh critic of any beer, including stuff that I make, so when I tasted it I thought there’s a lot of flaws here,” said Shea.

“The yeast just took off and went insane,” said Shea.

“I came home after a day at work, less than 24 hours after it started, and the airlock was just hissing and there was yeast caught in it.

“I started feeling like if I didn’t do something about it, it was probably going to blow up.”

After a panicked Internet search, Shea found some tips on how to release the pressure and managed to avert a sticky disaster.

Since then, he has brewed dozens of batches in many styles, from pale ales to IPAs to stouts and Belgian beers.

The most unusual homebrew Smalls has come across is a Belgian ale made with purple Hawaiian potatoes.

“It was actually quite good.” “People can take off in all kinds of directions,” said Smalls.

“There are people who discover Belgian ales and that’s all they make. . . . That’s the beauty of homebrewing.”

For more information about home-brewing, visit beermaking.ca.

The workings of an award-winning London brewery

“It’s all about the quality of the product for us,” says its chief executive,
Nick Miller. “Customers expect a certain standard to be reached. It’s
important to constantly deliver new ideas and tastes without losing any of
the attributes our customers expect from us.

“Our beers are of a high quality because the ingredients we put in them are
the best. We choose only quality ingredients from craft producers that care
about what they do. Alongside hops, malt, yeast and water, our fifth
ingredient is time.”

Quality is also reflected in the business’s non-brewing interests, which
include restaurants, bars, a visitors’ centre, all based in London, and even
an online shop.

“Quality means honest, transparent relationships, partnerships that benefit
all involved,” explains Mr Miller.

“Anything that Meantime produces, from the beer to the food in our retail
outlets, has to be of the highest standard.”

It’s a smart doctrine in a consumer sector that is evolving. Meantime will
continue ploughing this furrow, says Miller, evolving and upgrading as it
goes, and keeping quality to the fore.

Visit the SME
Business Essentials homepage to learn more about the elements that could
help improve your business.

When quality counts

Don’t compromise on quality when it comes to toner cartridges.

Original HP toner cartridges are proven to be more reliable than bargain toner
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In independent testing, more than 40 per cent of remanufactured toner
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pages from these remanufactured toner cartridges were of limited or no use

Going Green: FX Matt Brewing

• Print

5:00 AM

By: Terry Ettinger

Terry Ettinger shows us what one local brewery is doing assist in the treatment of wastewater and local sewer systems.

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UTICA, N.Y. — Five tanks like these, each 35 feet tall, 14 feet in diameter, and weight 40,000 pounds are going to use the waste from the beer brewing process to generate electricity.

“What we’re going to do is we’re going to be treating the wastewater from the brewery which would have a little bit of leftover beer in it from the tanks, it would have yeast in it, and it would have wort when we make the brews,” explained Nick Matt, F.X. Matt Brewing.

These tanks are anaerobic digesters.

“I suppose there is a parallel in a way, to fermenting and making beer. Basically you’re going to introduce some bacteria, which is going to eat up whatever residue is in the water and make the methane gas and carbon dioxide,” explained Matt. “We’ll be capturing that methane gas and burning that with a generator to make electricity. We estimate we’ll make between 35 and 40 percent of the electrical requirements of the brewery.”

State, federal, and National Grid grants are funding about half of the $4.5 million project, and brewery chairman and CEO Nick Matt, figures the company share of the cost will be covered by energy savings over the next four or five years.

“This process also cleans the wastewater by 80 to 85 percent before it goes for traditional wastewater treatment. There’s a big benefit for the local sewer system, Oneida County sewer system. We’re going to take a load off that sewer system in terms of what they have to do with the water to get it pure and put it back in the river,” Matt said.

Port City Brewing Company ‘Derecho Common’ Beer Brewed At High Temps …

We call this making lemonade out of lemons — or good beer with “a nice mouthfeel” out of rapidly-spoiling-from-no-refrigeration beer.

Like more than 1 million others in the D.C. area, Alexandria’s Port City Brewing Company lost power in the aggressive “derecho” storm that blew through town on June 29. Port City’s power stayed out almost a week, until the following Thursday, during which time 13,000 gallons of beer — pilsner, ale, lager — were in peril.

Head brewer Jonathan Reeves told The Washington Post he was worried overheated beer would “taste like nail polish.”

In an “An Open Letter to the D.C. Beer Community” sent out Monday, Port City’s owner Bill Butcher said that the beer tastes very good, indeed — and one batch of lager that fermented at too high a temperature will be available in a delicious limited run called “Derecho Common” starting in August:

There is a beer style that developed in San Francisco called steam beer, or California Common beer. It is a beer made with lager yeast and fermented at higher temperatures like an ale. This is exactly what happened to this 60-barrel tank of our beer.

The Washington Examiner has a preview of how the beer will taste:

Brewery owner Bill Butcher describes the limited-edition beer as “a bit rounder in flavor” than a traditional lager with caramel and fruity characteristics and “a nice mouthfeel.”

Derecho Common will be sold on draft at some D.C.-area restaurants and bars, and in Port City’s tasting room. Come August, we’ll be sure to try one and report back.

Here’s the “open letter”:

Last Friday’s freak storm caught the entire D.C. area by surprise. The destruction that the unexpected derecho caused is astounding. As I write this, there are still people without electricity, and our thoughts are with them as the region continues to recover.

Our power was out for five days at the brewery, and our production has been completely shut down during this time. We have been unable to brew, package, or ship any beer to market. We were fortunate to find a generator to supply enough power to run our critical systems to try to keep our 13,000 gallons of beer from spoiling.

All of us at Port City Brewing Company were absolutely amazed by the community’s response to our plight. The support from the D.C. Beer community has been unbelievable. We received messages of support and offers of help from all over. Our fellow brewers, our restaurant and retail customers, and many beer drinkers contacted us to ask how they could help us to save the beer.

The willingness to step up and help a neighbor is what defines a community. We found in a very real way that D.C. Beer community is strong and supportive of each other, and we will always be grateful for this. We are truly honored and humbled by the response, and we’ll always remember the support that everyone has shown us.

We have a long way to go to get our brewery back to normal operations. It will take weeks to get caught up with production, and unfortunately, there will be ongoing out of stocks in the market as we try to recover. We appreciate your patience as we work to catch up.

Many have asked us if we were able to “save the beer.” We continue to monitor the beer very closely, and we test and taste it daily. Five of our six tanks appear to be just fine. The 6th tank is a 60-barrel batch of lager beer that fermented at a higher temperature than we intended.

There is a beer style that developed in San Francisco called steam beer, or California Common beer. It is a beer made with lager yeast and fermented at higher temperatures like an ale. This is exactly what happened to this 60-barrel tank of our beer.

As a result, this storm has given us Derecho Common beer.

We will release the limited Derecho Common beer in early August. It will be draft only, and will be limited to about 120 kegs, which will be sold only to bars and restaurants in the D.C. Metro area.

Thank you for your continued support.

Sincerely,

Bill Butcher
Founder
Port City Brewing Company

Also on HuffPost:

Student beer enthusiasts experiment with flavor, brewing equipment

When you’re getting married to a member of Purdue’s home brewing club, picking a wedding date could take a back seat to more important plans, such as naming the beer selection.

Drew Veling, a senior in the College of Liberal Arts, is one of around 25 students who make up the Home Brewing Organization of Purdue Students, or HOPS. Since its beginning less than two years ago, the club has devoted itself to brewing craft beer as well as teaching others about the craft’s benefits.

And, “with the fervor of new converts,” as president Nick Schiewer calls it, they are crazy about their beer.

Veling’s fiancée, Amber Morrow, a senior in the College of Health and Human Sciences, said she knew when Veling was going to propose because of the expensive beer he brought one night. On their way to a New Year’s Eve party, she noticed he had brought the extremely rare “Dark Lord” stout, made by Three Floyd’s in Muenster, Ind. When she asked what was the occasion, his lie referencing New Year’s Eve didn’t fool her.

After Morrow said yes, Veling first began planning the wedding’s beer selection, which he will partially brew himself. The date of the wedding is still left to be set.

“Her name’s Amber so I’m going to brew an ale called, ‘I Just Married Amber Ale,’” Veling said. “Then we’re going to do a porter called, ‘For Richer or For Porter.’ My friend helped me with that because (at first) I was going to do, ‘Till Death Do Us Porter.’”

Brewing beer is the multi-step process of boiling and cooling four main ingredients: water, hops, malted grains and yeast. After that, brewers are free to experiment with whatever additional ingredients they want – fruit, chocolate, spices, other types of alcohol, etc.

Like a scientist mixing chemicals or an artist playing with color, brewers such as Schiewer enjoy playing the game of trial-and-error to create the best beer they can. Once Schiewer even made a smoky-tasting batch of beer featuring a bottle of Johnny Walker Red Label.

There’s more to it than just the ingredients though. Creating make-shift equipment to use for brewing is a popular challenge among many of the club’s engineering students and other members.

“My buddy crushed up coffee grounds,” Schiewer said, “then he used a vacuum sweeper to pull the husks out. We spend hours doing these ridiculous things because we want to know what happens. We want to see what happens. We’re tinkerers, for the most part.”

During meetings, members swap stories and discuss techniques over the beers they’ve brought to share. Complex methods and ingredients become bragging rights – and spending three hours shucking husks from your coffee is cool.

Talking about what you’ve done with friends or changing another’s recipe to fit your own taste is what gets Scheiwer the most excited.

“It’s semi-religious for me,” he said. “Maybe I shouldn’t say a religious thing. I have maybe the fervor of a new convert. I don’t believe in the purity of it. I believe in the personal expression of it.”

Being a convert of home brewing, however, can seem like martyrdom considering the sacrifices these happy members make with enthusiasm. Sometimes you go to bed dirty when your bath tub is full of brewing equipment, and sometimes you go dumpster diving for empty bottles when you run out at home. Morrow said she gets funny looks at restaurants when snagging empty bottles for Veling on her way out the door.

Schiewer wouldn’t consider these acts a sacrifice. It’s just all part of it.

“I want to turn people on to craft beer,” he said. “I want to turn people onto making their own beer at home. It’s the idea that we can make things that are different and more unique than a big brewery can, than even a microbrewery can.”

Brewhaha: Beer and Taxes

The Dead Yeast Society is a superbly local resource for home-brewers and craft beer lovers, so much so that donating to the cause is tax deductible.

For beer lovers of the most devoted variety – home brewers – the Hub City is home to a superbly local resource for craft beer and home-brewing.

This week’s Brewhaha blog, a promotion from The Independent crafted to support EatLafayette and encourage local flavor, features The Dead Yeast Society, Lafayette’s premier home-brewing club.

Founded in 1990, the Dead Yeast Society meets one Tuesday a month at Marcello’s on Johnston Street for a session on all things home brew. When it comes to home-brewing in Acadiana, Dead Yeast Society President Gene Nelson says via the club website that “we’re always here to help.”

“We are working on ways to help out the new brewers as well as the veterans. Check us out … come say hi,” Nelson says in the club website’s message from the president. “This is your club and with your help it can be better. We are always looking for ideas to help out the club.”

One way to help is by making a donation to the club, which doubles as a non-profit “educational” organization and thus contributions are tax-deductible.

Member-only benefits include access to the yeast library, as well as loans on the gear needed to brew your own beer.

Click here to read more about the Dead Yeast Society, including info on upcoming “sensory analysis” training sessions what it takes to “Sweat Your Brews Off” at a planned Dead Yeast Society event.

Every Friday during the EatLafayette campaign, The INDsider will post fun facts, local trivia and more under its Brewhaha blog. Post your best beer responses under the blog on our website, and we’ll choose one commenter per week to receive a 12-pack of Bud Light Platinum courtesy of Schilling Distributing. Commenters must be registered with our website to post a response. Click here to sign up for The INDsider and a chance to win.

Brewhaha Trivia:
-Name three of the four main ingredients found in beer recipes. Then tell us about some of your favorite beers and where you like to drink them. Remember, a good beer story could mean a free 12-pack of Bud Light Platinum to kick off your weekend, as the first person to correctly answer trivia is not the automatic winner of the blog. It’s a dialogue, and the winning comment may not necessarily be the correct trivia answer.

Brewhaha Fun Fact:
-The word lager stems from the German word lagem that means “to store,” referring to the process by which beer is made by fermenting over long periods of time.

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3 of the 4 main ingredients in beer is…. Water, Hops, and Yeast. personal favorite beer would have to be Abita Amber, can’t go wrong with local beer which I regularly drink at Cafe Cottage, $5 pitchers on Fridays!

And a good beer story? …. The effects of all of my past beer drinking has taken its toll…. but here’s one beer fail for you. Showing up at a party with a 12 pack of beer only to realize its non alcoholic once you start passing it out.

Rogue Brewing Beer from Beard Yeast: Specifically, Their Brewmaster’s Own …

Flickr/ Rogue AlesThe Man Behind the BeardIt all started as an effort to increase the terroir of their beer. In a press release that is equal parts repulsive and fantastic, Rogue Brewing Co. in Newport, Ore., announces it is testing recipes for a beer that will be fermented by yeast that was growing spontaneously in its brewmaster’s beard.

Rogue grows its own hops, barley, and rye, in the belief that doing so increases the authenticity and locality of the beer. Just as terroir informs the profile of wine, so do geographic location and environmental factors affect beer. Hoping to produce a beer with yeast that was growing locally, they decided to take samples and send them in for testing. Procuring specimens from all the predictable places, like Rogue’s 42-acre hopyard in Independence, Ore., did not produce any yeast suitable for brewing.

In a moment which we hope was under the influence of ale, Rogue staffers harvested nine follicles from brewmaster John Maier’s long-growth beard, nestled them in a Petri dish, and sent them to the mad scientists at White Labs. Lo and behold, the microflora growing on Maier’s beard was not only a different strand than Rogue’s standard house yeast but it was perfectly suited to fermenting beer.

The John Maier face-blanket beer, which will be christened “New Crustacean” (shudder), is set for production in 2013 and will be commercially available for purchase. The brewery is currently hammering out possibilities for what style best compliments whisker yeast.

Is there a smattering of gimmickry in this ploy? Absolutely. Is there some legitimacy to very cool wild yeast growing in an environment (albeit on someone’s face) that is exposed to combinations of “professional” yeast on a regular basis? Well, yes.

Wild yeast that is not cultivated for specific use in beer is nothing new to the brewing world; in fact, it represents the first little critters that ever turned grain juice into beer. Most notably, wild yeast is coveted in the Senne River Valley of Belgium, where open fermentation invites wild specimens to make Lambic beer — with its characteristic sour funk. This practice is not limited to the geueze of Cantillon, but can also be seen employed at Jolly Pumpkin Brewing Co., or more locally, The Bruery.

When compared to Chicha, beard beer doesn’t sound so revolting. Chicha is a traditional South and Central American beverage in which corn is chewed, then spat out so the enzymes naturally occurring in saliva can do the work of converting starch to fermentable sugar. This drink was brought to our attention when Dogfish Head brewed a batch a few years ago. But somehow even watching Sam Calagione explain and perform this task doesn’t convince us of its greatness.

Will you crack open a bottle of New Crustacean next Fourth of July? Some of us are just crazy enough to be thrilled by the prospect.

Location Info

Venue

Map

The Bruery

715 Dunn Way, Placentia, CA

Category: General

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Valley Brewers newest place for home brewing supplies

Valley Brewers in Solvang is the newest place in Santa Barbara County for home brewing supplies.

The store also offers supplies for home wine makers and cheese makers as well as beer- and wine-focused gifts, books and kits on sale. 

Downstairs there is a large open room with shelves of wine and beer kits, brewing ingredients, kettles, burners, bottling equipment, a refrigerator for yeast and hops and a freezer room with hops and cheese cultures.

Owners are Chris Kelly and Sandy Harrison. Kelly, an experienced home brewer, can help brewers through the basics or help seasoned home brewers choose the right ingredients for a custom recipe. 

They welcome customer requests for specific items.

Valley Brewers is also home to the Valley Brewers Home Brew Club. Local home brewers meet once a month to share their brews and exchange advice on problems they encounter with their latest batch.

Valley Brewers, 515 Fourth Place, is open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday to Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday and closed on Tuesdays.  

For more information, call 691-9159, visit www.valleybrewers.com, or go to www.facebook.com/valleybrewerssyv.

Calling all home-brewing aficionados

What good is a local home-brewers’ association? There used to be one in State College, but it’s now dormant.

There are many good resources for the home-brewer, including books and online forums. Why meet face-to-face when someone three states away is ready to volunteer a very knowledgeable answer to whatever arcane question you have in your quest for home-brewing knowledge?

Sure, it would be great to have a few meetings every year (say, once every season) at one of Centre County’s local bars or brew pubs to swap news, make brewing friends and debate the finer points of beer.

But for me, there are a few practical reasons for reorganizing a lasting home-brewers’ association.

Sharing skills: The group could periodically organize hands-on sessions for introductory to advanced brewing techniques. Books and the Internet are good resources, but it’s often more encouraging to try new things along with someone who has experience in the task.

Lowering the cost of brewing: The raw materials for brewing are fairly difficult to acquire around here, especially if you aren’t familiar with the farm stores. In addition to helping people find retailers, a home-brewers’ association could organize bulk buying to negotiate lower prices from suppliers. Some equipment, such as a grain mill, could be shared among the association. Thrift is an underrated virtue in home-brewing!

Most home-brewing ingredients are bought from one of the major distributors. The malted grains are likely to come from the Midwest and the hops from the Pacific Northwest or Europe. These make a good beer, but why not get these ingredients a little closer to home? A home-brewers’ association could promote efforts to try the malting process, share strains of yeast, grow hops and trade rhizomes in order to build up more local production and variety. If a few people were each growing a different kind of hop in their garden, they could trade their surplus among the rest. This would further reduce the cost of home-brewing.

Periodically, all the members of the Centre Region home-brewers’ association could attempt a type of beer, a specific recipe, or try to concoct a brew based on a broad theme — such as using an unusual flavor. Our friendly challenges could even develop into occasions for feasts.

Plus, we could make cool club T-shirts. Interested? Contact me.

Dustin Kennedy is finishing a doctorate in English literature at Penn State, where he has also taught courses in local food and sustainability. Readers may write to him at dust.kennedy@gmail.com.

Professional Beer Brewing Machine

If like me, you have dabbled in home brewing, you will know it takes time to master the art. There are many aspects, when it comes to making the perfect beer or larger. I myself have produced white wine a few times; the first attempt was a total disaster. After a few more tries, I finally produced a drinkable wine.

This Micro-brewing system is in a different league altogether, it’s all made with stainless steel, and comes with advanced monitoring features.

This brewer comes with a  touchscreen computer, which looks after the whole brewing process. You simply enter the recipe for the type of beer you’re after; from a full-bodied stout to a refreshing lager.

The system is known as a Heat Exchange Recycling Mash (HERM) system. The kit comes with a fifteen gallon hot tank with a built-in heat exchange, this raises the liquor to the perfect brewing temperature.

The liquor is then automatically circulated to another fifteen gallon mash/lauter tun, this is used to extract the sugar from the ground grain / mash.

After this process, the liquid is then pumped into a twenty gallon boil kettle, here it’s converted into the final wort. Once the wort has finished boiling, it gets pumped into another freestanding fermentation tank, and cooled along the way.

The machine will then signal when it’s time to add the yeast. There is a considerable price to pay for all this brewing genius, $45,000 to be exact, you can pick one up at Hammacher.