SF Beer Week 2016 - Part Two

Good Afternoon Ladies & Gentlemen,

 

Wednesday night, Izzy & I continued our mild SF Beer Week adventures with a visit to Fieldwork Brewing in Berkeley. This brewery is HIGHLY regarded within the brewing circles that we keep, both professionally & amateur… and for good reason. They always have a wide variety of brews on tap (usually at least 12 different options) and they are CONSTANTLY changing… and some very unique options made in-house. For example, when we went on Thursday, they had options such as:

 

·         Mandarina – Tart Saison

·         Good Conduct - Barrel Aged Imperial Stout

·         Olde Dubliner - Imperial Dry Stout

·         Black Thai – Thai Tea Espresso Porter (very nice)

·         Chocolate Milk – Brown Ale with lots of TCHO chocolate & lactose (milk sugar)

·         Amarilloweisse – Dry Hopped Berlinerweisse

·         Coconut Milk – Double IPA with LOTS of hand-toasted coconut & lactose

·         5-6 different versions & levels of IPA with different hop characteristics

 

So yeah, I recommend checking them out if just for the fresh options & variety… and they also have Crawlers now, which are basically 32 oz aluminum cans of their fresh beer that you can take home in addition to their growlers.

 

Thursday night, Izzy & I visited Seven Stills Distillery’s Taproom for a special release of… BEERCEPTION!!! See… it’s a beer within a beer! How you ask? Well, as you may remember, Seven Stills specializes in making whiskey from distilled craft beers. Well… for Beerception… they barrel aged their Whipnose IPA in a Whipnose Whiskey barrel… and dry hopped the barrels with Chinook & Citra hops. Nice little spot… right over by Laughing Monk Brewing too (will check another time, private event Thursday) in the Dogpatch… go check it out… well, in a few months… they’re still getting things put together… it’s a work in progress…

 

Saturday, we did a new first… and that’s a DOUBLE BATCH!!! What’s that mean? TEN GALLONS of beer made… in ONE BREW. BOOM!!! SCALING IT UP!!! Well… sort of… see…this is how we did it different. We basically just doubled the grain bill ingredients (malt extract mostly in this case) to make a SUPER strong wort… and then diluting it down so that it’s ten gallons of wort instead of the five or so that we started with. Why? Because we wanted to make ten gallons of Stout to run a few experiments with… including some souring… and we wanted to cut the time in half (maybe more since we used cold water to dilute at the point where we were trying to cool the hot wort). Here are some pictures from our double batch of Chocolate Stout…

 

Sunday was the day of the big SF Homebrewers Guild / Seven Stills Barrel Aging Competition in which Izzy & I BOTH had entries of our delicious beverages. We had both a barrel-aged hard cider… and a barrel-aged Scotch Ale… and there were over 30 other barrel-aged beers there to try… and a few dozen others… so times were good. Food was provided by Casey’s Pizza Van… and yeah, EVERYBODY had a great time!!! Here are some pictures of the event…

 

Towards the end, they announced the winners for the Top 3 in the Barrel Aging Competition… and top for all of the other homebrew shared… People’s Choice, of course since there were almost all of the beer styles involved & with unique twists like Mexican Chocolate Imperial Stouts and all kinds of stuff. Well… the winners were announced… and some great beers won…

 

 

The Barrel Aged winners were announced… and we didn’t win for either beer… so we were mildly bummed… but then, the non-comp People’s Choice was announced… and somehow… we had won!!! Even though both beers were part of the competition…

 

Does this sound incorrect? Well… it should… apparently when you get a bunch of drunken hipsters together to tally up votes, math goes to the wayside. It’s a mix of Steve Harvey & a Hanging Chad… but when all was said & done… apparently Tricera-Scotch actually won 2^nd Place in the Barrel Aged Competition… and we don’t have a picture with the 2^nd place ribbon because… well, they just took our ribbon & didn’t replace it with anything… so yeah. Then again, I’m pretty sure that everything was just tallied wrong… and based on our feedback throughout the event… I’m pretty sure that we ACTUALLY won… even if it won’t show on the official ledger… regardless, LOTS of great beer & LOTS of great people!!! Even taking home 2^nd Place is pretty f**king amazing… and we’ll take it!!! WOOHOO FOR TERRIBLE LIZARD BREWING!!!

 

Anyway, so a great SF Beer Week 2016… and now we just get ready for the Super Bowl… and the clusterf**k that will be upon the Bay Area for the next few weeks. More on that to come… until then, have a Happy Groundhog Day everybody!!!

Enter the Lone Cicerone

Good Afternoon Ladies & Gentlemen,

 

Last Tuesday, we had our monthly meeting with the San Francisco Homebrewers Guild at Anchor Brewing and we were treated to a wonderful talk about fermentation temperatures by MULTI-AWARD-WINNING homebrewer Keith Kost who… damn… just always has about 50-60 kegs of wonderfully prepared beer at his disposal. Winners of the Guild’s own competition were also announced… and it may not also shock you that he won a ribbon in that competition as well. Our Dunkelweizen didn’t earn a ribbon… but still did fairly well scoring wise. It’s just tough when you’re always going against some of the best brewers not just in the city… or state… but the f**king nation really. We’re truly blessed to be around this caliber of competition on a regular basis. Here are some pictures…

 

We also tried our Strawberry Hefeweizen that we bottled about two weeks ago… and yeah, it’s fantastic… we’re getting this recipe down pretty good…

 It's a Pretzel Stick...

Saturday morning, Izzy & I harvested our Galena Hops as they were prime and ready… now we’ve also dehydrated them and will use them in a wet hop pale ale or something VERY soon… we’ll keep you posted…

 

Later that morning, Izzy put her pictures up at her first art gallery showing at Elevation 66 Brewing in El Cerrito. She’s such an amazing artist and a BIG thank you to Super Dave & his lovely wife for allowing her to put up her art.

 

Please come check it out… and of course… enjoy some of their wonderful beer and food… here are some pictures from the lunch that Big Ben & his wife Kristin treated us to in celebration of Izzy’s exhibit…

 

 

…and Kristin is a newly minted cicerone and we convinced her to start her own blog at Lone Cicerone. Please check it out… it’s hella entertaining.

 

That afternoon, we also stopped by Fieldwork Brewing for a quick drink as Big Ben & Kristin recommended that we try some of their new beers, including a Golden Stout & a Rye Red… both were amazing…

 

Sunday & Monday, we went to some wonderful barbecues in San Jose and Pinole… but yeah, great people, good times, no pictures to really show for it. Trust me though, it was awesome.

 

Super busy week at work… and more importantly outside of work… with concerts, new brews, and prepping for NCHF in less than two weeks… so stay tuned… and of course, check out Kristin’s blog at Lone Cicerone. Have a great week everybody!!!

Stevetoberfest 2015

Good Afternoon Ladies & Gentlemen,

 

We’re well into my birthweek… which is like a birthday… but I’m greedy. I’m just going to say that it started Friday when my coworkers decorated my office in dinosaur attire… well, a few balloons, dinosaurs & Reese’s peanut butter cups…

 

Saturday was the 2^nd annual Steve-toberfest celebration!!! We invited friends and family to come hang out for a few hours, eat some delicious food, drink some delicious beer & just have a good time in the Presidio on a beautiful Saturday. We had about ten people actually show… and the food was quite eclectic. In the German theme, we had pretzels with beer cheese dipping sauce, kartoffelsalat (potato salad), but we also had Taco Bell tacos, brownies, Scotch eggs, chocolate covered strawberries, hummus, goat cheese, baby carrots, and other leftover baked goods from the previous week. Here are some pictures…

 

 

As far as beer on tap… we had our Strawberry Hefeweizen, Milk Stout, our Torpedo Clone, our Hoppy Red Ale, and of course… the incredibly dangerous… Steve’s Birthday Cake!!! That is our barrel aged imperial stout… and boy, it’s amazing. Big Ben also brought some Anchor Steam clone & single malt-single hop Golden Ale with hops from his backyard (he’s been growing them for a decade) and all was right with the world.

 

So the real question… “How many boots of beer did you have, $teve?” The answer is four… plus a few others… but yeah, I was pretty sleep shortly after everybody left. Great party!

 

Sunday was my actual birthday… and let me just tell you that my girlfriend Izzy is absolutely amazing. She started off the day by giving me this wonderful drawing for a gift…

 

She also fried me up a leftover hangover breakfast and then we headed to her house… and she’s growing our hops… hopefully they will have useable hops this year… but I’m told they still take a few years… and our Chinook hops are a year old but the Galena just started…

For lunch, we then headed over to Fieldwork Brewing in Berkeley, which Big Ben & his wife had been RAVING about for the past month or so… and oddly enough, they were having a beer & donut pairing special on my birthday. Fatidic? Perhaps. The brewery takes a more… I don’t know… homegrown, agricultural look at how beer is made & keeps it very simple. The atmosphere of the brewery… is basically just like the inside of a wood & tin field storage area where you might park your trailer or something… but instead there are a few 10-20 barrel systems in the back… and their décor is a lot of standard shelves with bottled samples of hops & grains, simple logos, etc. just more of a beer focus it seems. Now as for the beer, it’s also pretty good & simple. They had farmhouse ales, breakfast stouts, just good all day drinking kind of beer… except Eliza, their chicory imperial stout… that was pretty strong. The Biere de garde was no joke either… but yeah, I highly recommend going to check it out. Oh… and the donuts from Doughnut Dolly were ok… but yeah, I still prefer All Star Donuts.

 

Anyway, that was my magnificent weekend… and more news on the way… with EPIC movie reviews & fun times with others… have a great week everybody!!! Happy birthday to MEEEEEE!!!