All posts by escowles

Code4Lib 2015 Craft Drinkup

Beer, , ,

At the Code4Lib conference in Portland, Oregon this year, there was a Craft Brew Drinkup event, a semi-organized bottle-share, with some effort made to make it more inclusive of non-alcoholic options like soda and tea.  An event like this has been organized at the conference each of the last several years, though historically it’s been focused more exclusively on beer. The event has ranged from ticketed events in a local bar, to tons people crowded into a couple people’s hotel rooms.  The event has been controversial for causing trouble at the conference hotel by being too noisy, or excluding non-drinkers.

I’ve felt conflicted about the event over the years.  On one hand, it’s the best beer tasting I go to all year, and where I really got into craft beer (I still remember tasting my first sours, Cigar City’s Sea Bass and Lost Abbey’s Sinners in a crowded hotel room in Bloomington).  On the other hand, many members of the community were uncomfortable with the event and questioned whether it was compatible with a professional conference.

What Was Good

This year’s event was held at eBay in a large event space that included a lot of the amenities you’d expect from a tech company: a kitchen, ping-pong tables, a pinball machine, a stage with a full rock band setup (real instruments, not the video game), and plenty of space for a crowd.  There was also more organization than some of the past years, including having a few of the organizers being dedicated servers.

The event space was very nice, people had fun playing the games, and there was plenty of space.  In past years, the event has typically been in a hotel suite, and has been very crowded and loud. Having enough space meant that there were different areas with different vibes: a crowd around the entrance and bar, several people clustered around the pinball machine and ping-pong table, a few small groups spread out, etc.  I found it very easy to move through the different spaces, and talk to different people.

There was more effort this year to include non-alcoholic options like sodas and tea.  After some conversation on Twitter, the announcement was revised to be more inclusive.   There were tables for tea and craft sodas, with a variety of non-alcoholic options.

Having designated servers worked very well.  I was a little worried about how this would work, since it was announced the day of the event.  But it worked very well, with each of the three servers handling a different category of beers and each keeping a small inventory of open bottles to choose from.  It made it easy to find the kind of beer you were interested in, and check out the options.  There was never a big line, and I don’t think I missed any of the cool beers I was interested in trying.

As always, it was amazing to see the range of stuff people brought from all over the country, and indeed the world.  I’ve been to beer tastings and festivals with huge taplists, but the Code4Lib bottle share rivals these, and I’m always impressed by the sheer variety of beers, from breweries I often haven’t even heard of.  It’s a powerful reminder of how far-flung the Code4Lib community is, and one of the things I look forward to every year.

What We Can Do Better Next Time

This was the best of these events that I’ve attended, but I think there are some areas we can improve for next year:

There was too much beer.  People were encouraged to bring something, and most of them brought beer.  And lots of it, with many people bringing several large bottles.  Or six-packs or growlers of beers bought in Portland.  There was a ton of beer left over at the end of the event, which was given to people to take away with them.  It’s better to have too much than too little, and it’s probably unavoidable that we’ll have at least a small surplus.  But next year, we should still encourage people to bring their local beer and homebrew, but discourage bringing more than one or two bottles.  We should also make it clear that it’s OK to come without bringing anything, and that there will be no shortages.

The non-alcoholic options were much better than in past years, but not on par with the beer options.  We can do more to listen to advice on how to make events more welcoming for non-drinkers, and improve the non-alcoholic options.  Adding baked goods to the event would probably help here, both by expanding the number of people who bring non-alcoholic items, and by giving people something to eat.

Tasting of Doom

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We were going to bottle a batch of beer, and were running short on 12 oz. bottles.  So we decided to taste all the homebrew we have hanging around (including some of questionable quality), and decide if there were any bottles we could free up — that is, if any of them were so bad we’d never drink them.

We started with our sours — five batches of saison fermented in 1 gallon glass growlers for a year, with various souring agents and a small honeycomb of oak for them to live on:

  • 17a (plain saison): this tasted fine, with more oak than we expected, but was almost completely flat.  Decision: borderline (would drink if we can carbonate it somehow).
  • 17b (Brett. bruxellensis): also fine, with good Brett character, but also terribly undercarbed.  Decision: borderline.
  • 17c (Lactobacillus): terrible and acrid.  Decision: drainpour.
  • 17d (Brett. & Lacto): sweet and cloying.  Decision: drainpour.
  • 17e (White Labs Sour Mix): very nice, but completely flat.  Decision: borderline.

We then moved on to our last batch of cysers/meads — again, small batches fermented in 1 gallon glass growlers, with four different kinds of honey:

  • 16a (Cross Creek Tupelo honey): sweet, rich, and completely flat.  Luckily still mead is a thing (not the thing we were trying to make, but sometimes you have to be flexible).  Decision: keep.
  • 16b (Cross Creek Everglades honey): very nice, but with a little bit of off flavor.  Decision: borderline.
  • 16c (Uncle John wildflower honey): lots of dark honey, oaky.  Decision: keep.
  • 16d (Uncle John’s clover honey): light, with tons of honey character, best of the tasting.  Decision: keep.

I’m left with an appreciation of how hard mead and sour beer are to get right.  Of the two, the mead definitely turned out better, with even the worst batch being tolerable.  By contrast, the sours with Lactobacillus are foul and undrinkable — it was easy to dump those to free up some extra bottles.  But the other sours were fine, other than being flat.  So we’re thinking about trying to force-carbonate them, either by decanting the remaining bottles into a keg, or using our Sodastream.

New Beer Freezer

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The old faithful wine beer fridge finally gave up the ghost a couple weeks ago.  It had been reliably chugging along for years, but recently had trouble keeping the temperature down, and was running most of the time.  I did some searching online to try to find a good replacement.  I initially thought that a kegerator without the taps would be the best option, since they are large, don’t have weird bumps in them that eat into bottle storage, and keep very cold efficiently.  But they’re also much more expensive than either wine fridges, or a new category I hadn’t seen before: beverage refrigerators.  The beverage fridges seemed like a good option, since they’re designed for soda/beer (i.e., colder than wine).  But I couldn’t find any good info on how big they were inside, and estimating their capacity based on the number of soda cans made it look like they wouldn’t hold that many bottles (20-30 as opposed to the 35 the old wine fridge held).

2014-12-30 10.28.33But then we found a reasonably priced chest freezer.  Even after buying an external temperature controller (which cuts the power to keep the freezer from getting too cold), it was less expensive than the beverage fridges.  And after I built a little shelf to hold a crate of bottles in a second layer, it can hold quite a bit more than the wine fridge (about 50 bottles).

The other advantage of having a chest freezer is potentially being able to lager or cold crash beers after fermenting (or being able to do a controlled-temperature fermentation if we wanted to).  And if our trusty kegerator stops working, we could always drill a few holes and make the chest freezer into a keezer.

Month-Old Hops

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After a month, the three different hop plants are showing very different results:

  • The Golding (middle) is doing very well.  It has two bines trained on its lines and is climbing well.  It’s got healthy leaves and has put out a couple new shoots.
  • The Fuggle (right), is doing OK with a couple of decent shoots starting to train up its lines.
  • The Saaz (left) isn’t doing very well at all, with just a few tiny shoots still too small to train.  The one bine we did train has withered.

I’ve heard that many hop varieties need a year to get established, so the Saaz and Fuggle might just need to wait until next year.  But I’m hopeful the Golding at least will grow well and maybe give us some hops this year.  If the Saaz doesn’t start making progress soon, I think we’ll take one of the other Golding shoots and take over one of the Saaz lines.

Hops Trellised

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The hops have already started putting out feelers (especially the Golding which has sent out 5 of them already), so we moved them over to a place with good southern exposure and started a twine trellis for them to climb up the mostly-abandoned backyard play fort.

For the Golding, we got to choose the best two bines and prune off the rest.  The Fuggle only had one decent bine going, so we’ll wait and see if it has another.  The Saaz has a couple of very small shoots, so it should be ready to be trained in a few weeks.

Apparently hops can grow 15 to 20 feet.  We’ve only got 8 feet of fort (really more like 7 feet because of the pots).  But if we’re blessed with the problem of overgrowing bines, I figure we can just let them grow over the top of the fort.

My First Zwanze Day

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We were down in Orlando this weekend to visit the new Harry Potter Diagon Alley part of the Universal Studios theme park with the kids.  I snuck off for a couple of hours to head up to Redlight Redlight for my first Zwanze Day (Cantillon’s annual release where about 50 bars around the world get a single keg of a special beer brewed for the occasion).

I dithered a bit about whether it was worth the hassle.  I first heard about Zwanze day a couple years ago, and Redlight Redlight has been the only site in Florida.  It’s on the other side of town from where we usually go for the theme parks, so I always balked the logistics of driving there and having to sober up before heading back, or the price of taking a taxi back and forth across Orlando.  But this year I decided it was worth the hassle, and I tried Uber for the first time for the trip there (which worked out much better than a taxi, and was a lot cheaper).  In fact, Uber went so well that it took me about 35 minutes to get from the middle of Universal Studios to Redlight Redlight, instead of the hour-plus I expected.

When I got there about 2½ hours before opening time, I was a little surprised that there was no line yet.  Cantillon is one of the most-loved-by-beer-geeks breweries in the world, and the annual Zwanze release is their most sought-after.  So I killed a little time walking around the neighborhood and started standing in line when a few other people showed up.  I’m lucky that I was at the front of the line, because the tickets for the Zwanze beer itself were sold out before I decided I would go, and I got a ticket only because there had been a cancellation.

The wait went quickly since I was chatting with a group of guys from Ocala, and we quickly grabbed a table when the event started and proceeded to share glasses of almost everything on the impressive taplist.  Some highlights:

  • Zwanze 2014 (Cuvée Florian): of course this was the main event, and lived up to my expectations.  This year’s beer was a cross between Iris and a kriek.  Iris is much hoppier than typical Belgian beers, but the hops were very gentle here, and the cherries were also toned down.  The result was a delightful sour beer, with just a beautiful ruby color, and a little earthy cherry flavor.
  • Redlight Redlight also had Cantillon’s Iris, Gueuze, and Mamouche on tap.  I’d had the Gueuze several times when we lived in the Netherlands, and it was fantastic as always.  Iris and Mamouche were both new to me: Iris I liked immediately and especially since it’s one part of the Zwanze blend, it was nice to compare them side-by-side.  Mamouche at first seemed too herbal and bitter to me, but it grew on me as I sipped at.
  • I was disappointed this summer that I didn’t get up to Hill Farmstead in Vermont.  So I was doubly glad to have their collaboration with Blaugies, La Vermontoise.  I had somehow gotten it into my head that this was a sour, so I was surprised when it turned out to be a saison, and a mild and smooth one at that.  But once I adjusted to that, I found this to be a very nice, sweet, floral beer.  So now I’m really irritated that I didn’t get up there to get a case of it…
  • Angry Chair’s 3 Little Birds was a very nice Berliner Weisse, with a very subtle tropical fruit character.  It especially benefited from a direct comparison to Cigar City’s Passion Guava Grove, which is a much bolder beer that seemed overbearing in contrast.
  • The only stout we tried was Mikkeller’s Beer Geek Brunch Weasel, which was fantastic, and the perfect contrast to the saisons and sours.
  • I finished out the afternoon with The Bruery’s Oude Tart.  This is a wonderful sour I’ve had several times before and always enjoyed.  It has more body and sweetness than the Cantillon sours, and felt like a perfectly-balanced way to end.

Not only did I have some wonderful beers, I also met some nice people and had a great time sharing and talking about the beers with them.  This really ties into a few posts (e.g., this one from Boak & Bailey) that I’ve seen in the last few days about the marketing strategy for Shock Top, which boils down to positioning it as a simpler, more approachable craft beer to people who think Shock Top is made by a small/independent brewery (instead of AB-InBev).  I guess I see the parallel with overcomplicated, mystique-shrouded wine snobbery, but beer is a lot cheaper, and I’ve consistently seen bartenders hand out a bunch of samples and do their best to find the best beer for anyone who walks in the door.

Cider Tasting

Cider, ,

It may be fall in other places, but we’ve got a few more months of 80°+ weather ahead of us in Florida.  So we recently did a double-blind tasting of several bottles of cider we picked up at the grocery store.  They’re probably not as good as some of the cider we can get in New York (like Eve’s and Bellwether), but then that’s not really the reason I wanted to do a double-blind tasting.  I really had two main reasons:

  1. There’s so much snobbery around beer and cider, and so much of the market is driven more by image and brand than by taste — so I feel like it’s a good reality check to make sure I’m not just buying into that.
  2. I often find myself in a restaurant with only mass-marketed beers and ciders to choose from — so it’s really helpful to know which ones I like better, and if any of them are worth drinking.

The methodology was the same as our lager tasting: one of us poured the ciders into glasses and assigned them numbers, and the other mixed them up and assigned them numbers.  So neither of us knew which ciders were which while we were tasting them, and we revealed them afterwards.

Unlike our lager tasting, there were no big surprises.  We didn’t agree on the exact ordering, or exactly where the drinkable/undrinkable line was.  But we were in broad agreement and our rankings lined up pretty well with what we thought coming in to the tasting:

  • Both of us thought Redd’s Apple Ale and Woodchuck Summer were pretty bad.  Wind ranked Redd’s dead last and thought it was the only truly undrinkable one in the bunch (finding Woodchuck Summer strangely un-summer-y but barely passable).  I thought they were both terrible and thought Redd’s was slightly less terrible than Woodchuck Summer.
  • Neither of us liked Stella Cidre or Woodchuck Granny Smith very much.  But they were definitely better than Redd’s and Summer.  I found Stella Cidre to be strangely mineral tasting, and we both agreed there was not much flavor at all.  The Granny Smith was at least crisp and dry, but still just not much there.
  • Strongbow Gold and Angry Orchard Crisp were the clear winners.  Strongbow is much juicier and Angry Orchard is much drier, but we both found them very drinkable.

With that in mind, I’m tempted to do another round, using Strongbow and Angry Orchard as controls for whatever craft cider we can find around town.  Though it would be hard to do a blind test of our favorite cider (Julian’s Cherry Bomb) since its strong red color would obviously give it away.

Hops in Florida?

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I had always assumed that it was too hot and/or swampy to grow hops in Florida, since they’re typically grown in cooler climes.  But it turns out that quite a few people have tried it (at least at the backyard-hobbyist level) and posted about it online.  So it seems at least vaguely plausible that we can grow them successfully in our backyard, so we figured it was worth giving it shot.

We asked our local garden center about it and they hadn’t heard of anybody growing hops in Gainesville.  But we found a nice online retailer and got a few varieties of hops that we like and use frequently (Fuggle, Goldings, and Saaz).  A few days later, we had a small box with three hop crowns packed in what looks like barley hulls.  We got them potted in nice large pots this morning, and tucked them under an oak tree in our backyard to give them good shade and shelter from the heavier rains, to give them a gentle introduction to the Florida climate.  Once they’re established and putting out bines, we plan to trellis them up (and if necessary, over) our backyard play fort that’s not getting much use lately.  With any luck, our early winter will be roughly like the harvest season in more typical hop-growing places, and we’ll have fresh hops to brew with before Christmas.

The growing conditions are supposed to have a big impact on the aroma and flavor, so we’ll have to wait and see how they turn out.  But we figured going with hops we like was a good starting point.  There are a dizzying number of hop varieties, and a lot of new ones coming out all the time.  So if these three don’t work out, we might try again with a few different varieties before we give up hope.

First Magnitude Brewing

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We just got back to Florida and were excited to hear about Gainesville’s second brewery opening this weekend: First Magnitude Brewing.  They are located in a typical industrial park location at 1220 SE Veitch Street, on a side street off South Main Street, just south of SE 10th Avenue and the Hawthorne bike trail.  They’re just a mile down Main St. from the Citizens Co-Op, so we did some shopping and headed over right as they opened.

Inside the brewery building is a large open space with a few picnic tables, and a shiny stainless steel brew system against the back wall.  We came in out of the scorching heat with our two kids in tow.  We met co-found Christine Denny who welcomed us to their opening day and assured us their tasting room was family-friendly.  The tasting room is on the right as you enter the brewery, and has several large picnic tables (comfortably seating 8 each), and plenty of room to stand around.  Which is good, because by the time we’d grabbed a table and a couple of pints, the tables were all full and the line ran the length of the tasting room and threatened to go out the door.

One thing I noticed as I walked up to their bar, with 20 taps along the back wall, was how readable their tap handles were.  So many tap handles have just a small badge, or dark/low-contrast text that’s barely readable.  But these tap handles had bold, high-contrast lettering going the length of the tap handles that I could easily read.  I’m looking forward to seeing one of those tap handles around town soon.  Update: good photo of the tap handles.

We would have loved to sample all their beers (and the wonderful guest taps too!) but they were understandably not doing flights on their first day.  So we picked three that looked good to us:

  • Karst Belgian Pale: a delightful and delicate Belgian pale with great yeast character and a smooth sweetness. This was Wind’s favorite.
  • Drift English Mild: a great example of a less common style — roasty without being bitter, malty without being heavy or oversweet.  In many ways it reminds me of a Scottish ale that hasn’t been Americanized, an easy-drinking flavorful ale.
  • River Rise Belgian Strong Dark: rich and malty, with a strong plum/raisin aspect.  Earthy and a little spicy.

The tasting room is already very nice and comfortable, attractively decorated and has a lot more room than Swamp Head’s current tasting room (though I’m looking forward to their new brewery and tasting room they’re building right now).  First Magnitude is also planning a beer garden which will be a welcome addition once the weather cools off later this Fall.

Vermont Brewers Festival

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We headed up to Burlington last weekend to visit family and go to the Vermont Brewers Festival.

From the beginning, the festival showed signs of careful planning.  Online ticketing went smoothly, even though the tickets sold out in a few hours.  There were three 4-hour sessions planned over the course of the weekend.  Each attendee received a number of tickets, so the beers were limited.  And the food/merchandise area opened 30 minutes earlier than the beer booths.  So we arrived early, had a quick lunch, and pored over the taplist while waiting for the main event.

When the beer started flowing, long lines quickly formed at three booths: two breweries you may have heard of, and one we hadn’t heard of (the only booth that we saw run out of beer).  The benefit of the multiple sessions and those long lines was that the other lines were pretty short, ranging from at most ten minutes to no wait at all.  So we were able to leisurely make our way through nearly 30 beers (15 tickets each).  Some of our favorites:

  • Lost Nation Petit Ardennes – a spicy, fruity saison — perfect on a warm day.
  • Alchemist Crusher – a sweet, resiny big brother to Heady Topper.
  • Brasserie Dunham Saison du Pinnacle – a tart saison with nice Brett funkiness.
  • Foley Brothers Fair Maiden – a big woody IPA with pungent grapefruit hopppiness.
  • Mystic Chardonnay Saison – a fine wine-barrel fermented saison, with notes of honey.

And of course, it wouldn’t be a festival without some strange beers you’d never try otherwise:

  • Burlington Beer’s Folklife – a gruit which tasted exactly like a nice loaf of rosemary bread.  Not unpleasant, exactly, but pretty far from what I normally expect from beer (even with a pretty liberal definition).
  • Kingdom Brewery’s Jack Piipa – a pumpkin IIPA, very rummy and hot.  One of the strongest beers I saw at the festival too.

Overall, one of the best festivals I’ve been to — short lines, good portable bathrooms (not portapotties), good food, a great variety of beers and plenty to go around.  The setting in the park right on Lake Champlain was fantastic.  The only shortcomings I can think of is that there wasn’t much shade, and water was only available over at one side of the site.  Unlike Florida, you don’t have to have coolers full of water at every booth to prevent heatstroke.  But it definitely would improve the experience.