So Long Parkside; Long Live Parkside Brewing

This blog has been quiet for the last few months because my girlfriend and I have been on the move. We packed up and abandoned our apartment in the Parkside, left San Francisco behind, and spent the autumn season traveling in Europe. Now we've landed in Honolulu, Hawaii--our new home town--and are in the process of establishing ourselves here. Getting a home brewery up and running is near the top of my list of immediate goals, as is checking out the local beer scene. In the coming months, I hope to post stuff about all of that here, and I'm also hoping to get a chance to recap on some of the beer-related aspects of our trip--you can bet I sipped local suds everywhere we went. For now, here's a picture of me marveling at hops growing wild in Northern Spain. The stuff was thriving in some of the areas we passed through, vigorous enough to overwhelm even the notoriously invasive blackberry vines. Only problem is this particular strain of hops smelled more like garlic than anything else. Oh well. More pictures and info to come.

timeline for a toast

My grandfather was a pretty remarkable guy, and two things that made him remarkable were his focus on family and his tightfisted budgeting. Despite earning the paltry pay of a school-teacher, he managed to scrape together enough savings to take his family on vacation 14 times. When I say family I mean all the immediate extensions: his 4 children, their siblings, his grandchildren, even his great-grandchildren--a group which has grown to number 33 individuals, and who live in places all over the western coast. And when I say vacations I mean trips ranging from in-state jaunts to international expeditions--Hawaii to Costa Rica to Africa. In fact, he had such a masterful handle on money that he managed to set up a fund that lived beyond him--he passed away more than half a decade ago, and his fund has taken us on three trips since then.

Alas, despite the man's masterful money-managing, all things must come to an end. With enough in the bank to fund one last trip, we gathered this summer in Tahoe for the final hurrah. Looking for a way to show my gratitude to my grandfather, and my reverence for his memory, I decided to brew a batch of the beer I named after him, to use it for a toast.

Some ideas, no matter how inspired they sound, can become challenging to carry out. This toast turned out to be one of those ideas. Following is an abbreviated timeline of the events that culminated in the planned toast.

EARLY MARCH, 2012 - Details released regarding final reunion.

MARCH 12 - A batch of Fenton Smith's Sparring Spud Stout is brewed.

MARCH 20 - Transferred to secondary.

APRIL 16 - Bottled.

MAY 7 - Tastings of batch begin.

JUNE 4 - Selected bottles put in the fridge for cold-lagering. (Perhaps not a typical procedure for ales, but I think a few weeks in the fridge helps the yeast to settle out--doesn't matter too much for stouts, but I attribute the clarity of my other beers to this).

JUNE 21 - Bottles packed in the cooler and iced, along with several dozen bottles of my American Summer Wheat Ale (a modification on my Witch's Wheat recipe, which I've been meaning to post here but haven't ever gotten around to doing).

JUNE 22 - Drive from the Parkside in San Francisco to Squaw Valley in Tahoe. Initial plans to toast on this starting night of the reunion are foiled because of delayed arrival of certain family members. By the time they show up, other family members (those having young children) have already gone to bed.

JUNE 23 - Plans to toast on the second day of the reunion never materialize because we never get all 33 people together in the same room at the same time until dinner, and the place we eat won't allow outside drinks. By this point I start to realize that gathering my family is like herding cats.

JUNE 24, morning - Seeing an opportunity for a captive audience, I decide to bring the beers on a boat we've hired for a tour of the lake. Toasting on a boat offers special significance, too, because my grandfather was an officer in the Navy. So the beers are loaded into a car and driven to the south side of the lake (over an hour away from Squaw Valley, and across state lines into Nevada). But when we get to the dock, the boat captain won't allow us to bring the beers aboard. Anti-homebrew prejudice?

JUNE 24, afternoon - Only one chance remains for the toast: a barbecue in Tahoe City. So I pack the beers into a car again and bring them along. By this point the beers have traveled more than 300 miles by car, experienced an elevation change of more than 6200 feet (from sea level to Tahoe level), and they're sloshing around in the cooler because the ice has mostly melted.

JUNE 24, app. 5:30 pm - Unfortunately, when we get to the site of the barbecue there's a concert going on, with several hundred people and dozens of local police. Can the toast be made in such circumstances? How will the police react? I start pondering potential outcomes.

JUNE 24, app. 5:32 pm - Fuck it. I start popping tops and pouring glasses. My girlfriend gathers the drinking-age family members around and makes sure they've got a Fenton Smith Stout in hand.

JUNE 24, app. 5:35 pm - Slainte!

Magnolia Pub and Brewery

Stopped by Magnolia Pub last Tuesday. Pretty small place, but with a brew selection very close to my heart--predominantly British-style ales. They've got good food too, though the pricing is outrageous, even for slow/local.

Anyway, back to the beer. Several different bitters, an English-styled IPA, a solid Brown. Certain beers offered both on draft tap, and pumped from cask just like in Old Blimey. Everything with more of a British approach than typical West Coast. Thick, heavy-bodied beers--like a malt shake. I love it. They've also got a kolsch that's popular with the philistines. Usually a couple of guest beers on tap, though you can't get your AHA discount on those.

Magnolia's been happy to cater to the in-house crowd, slow to package for distribution like 21st Amendment (which is making headway into a wider audience now that they're putting their beer in cans). Changes may be in the wind, though. I've seen Magnolia beers on hand in a few other bars, like the Cerveceria de Mateveza I mentioned a few weeks back, and as growlers at WholeFoods. I also saw on their blog that they're opening a new brewery in the Dogpatch--the current gentrification-targeted SF neighborhood. You can even buy a share, if you want in on the action and have $50,000.

(Above picture from their website.)

another use for spent grains

Sunday before last I brewed a batch of Red American Wheat Ale. When the wort was in the kettle heating toward boiling, I figured I'd take a moment to deal with the spent grains. Normally I just dump them in my compost pile, but my compost pile is at the top of the hill in my backyard, through a forest of weeds, and I didn't feel like bushwhacking my way up there. I looked at the plant beds alongside my patio, saw the weeds encroaching on the bare soil there, and figured I'd try the spent grains as a mulch.

Now, dealing with spent grains is a challenge faced by every homebrewer, and I've heard a lot of ideas relating to it. Some people make them into dog treats, or try to use them in baking, but neither of those methods really solve the problem--a five gallon batch of beer leaves the brewer with around eight to fourteen pounds of grains, and I've never seen a recipe for bread or dog treats that made use of more than a pound or two. Some people just pitch their grains in the compost, and that's a pretty good solution, but you can end up with a lot of compost pretty quickly--every pound of carbon-rich grains needs to be balanced with an equal amount of nitrogen-rich greens for the compost pile to do its thing properly, so you end up with two pounds of compost material (before it breaks down) for every pound of grains you're getting rid of. In the end, a lot of people just bag their spent grains up and throw them in the trash, and that's not a very satisfying solution, either.

So why haven't I ever heard of anybody using spent grains as mulch? It seems like another decent option for grain disposal, but the fact that I hadn't heard of it being practiced made me somewhat hesitant to try it on my own.

There were two main potential problems that came to my mind. One: would the residual sugar in the grains draw pestilent levels of ants or rats or other animals? And two: would the grains decompose into a stinking layer of rotten matter?

In the end, because I've used cocoa husks for mulch in the past, and because that material has certain commonalities with spent grains--and because my backyard is hardly Sunset Magazine material anyway, so it's not like I'm gonna be screwing up a work of art if this goes wrong--I decided to go ahead and give it a try. I spread the grains about two inches thick on a 3' by 2' section of bare earth.

That was more than a week ago now, and the grains-as-mulch experiment doesn't seem to have resulted in any of problems I'd been worried about (or in any problems I didn't even think of). The spent grains do seem to behave in a similar manner to cocoa husks when used as mulch--they form into a somewhat solid mat. I'm also guessing that like cocoa husks, the spent grains will break down after a season or two (as opposed to cedar chip mulch, for example, which lasts for a lot longer than that), and if it gets really damp around here, I wouldn't be surprised if they develop a little bit of mildew.

But in the end, I feel like this is a pretty good way to deal with spent grains. In fact, there's plenty other areas of my yard that could use a layer of mulch, so now I've got one more reason to brew!

Cerveceria de Mateveza

San Francisco seems to have breweries and beer-related businesses proliferating like daffodils on a suburban lawn. If things keep up, we might reach the level of beer-absurdity enjoyed in San Diego--where they've got 33 commercial craft breweries to serve a population only half the size of the Bay Area. Last Sunday my girlfriend and I spent the morning in San Francisco's Dolores Park, and afterwards stumbled across this new mini-brewpub on the corner of Church and 18th. It's a quick and dirty conversion of a pre-existing cafe, featuring a stripped down menu of offerings focused on Argentinian empanadas and Mateveza beer. There's also a pair of fridges packed with craft brew available for takeaway.

Mateveza's a local brew-company that's been fairly visible in the Bay Are for a few years now, despite the fact that I've yet to find anybody who favors the stuff. Maybe they've failed to catch on with the beer-geek community because they feature Yerba Mate in all of their beers. Seems like the beer geeks are picky about their novelties--uber-ipa's and sour-beers are in, but using an herb associated with trendy soda-substitutes is out, and least for now.

Doesn't seem to have discouraged Mateveza's owner, Jim Woods, who's been doing his thing consistently and reliably despite the lack of big beer-geek press coverage or adoration. Despite the simplicity--or maybe because of it--Cerveceria de Mateveza struck me in a decidedly positive way. The beer was good--they offered us a sample of all three of their styles currently on tap, and the only one that didn't meet my approval was the Morpho Herbal Ale, which didn't really taste like a beer to me--and the vibe was right. I imagine they'll find their crowd, even if it isn't composed of the typical beer-geek flock.

Beer Night at the Cal Academy

SF Beer Week 2012 came to a close yesterday, and I was so wrapped up with work and family stuff that I managed to avoid it almost entirely. The one event I made it to was the Beer Night at the California Academy of Sciences, on Thursday, Feb. 16th. Frankly, that event was a bit of a bust.

Basically, Beer Night at the Academy consisted of expensive beer sampling in the African Hall. They set up twelve tables--one for each of the 12 breweries participating--along the length of the hall. Each brewery had two beers on hand, and you could buy it by the sample (probably 2 oz) or the glass (12 oz). A ticket cost $2, a sample cost a ticket, and a glass cost 4 tickets. In other words, they were charging $8 for a 12 oz beer poured out of a bottle (and at most of the tables I saw, they didn't even give you the whole bottle's worth--they'd pour heavy so the beer foamed up, and when the foam hit the top of the glass, they stopped. Whatever was left in that bottle got used for samplers, or combined with other bottle-remnants to fill up another 12 oz glass). Add that $8 a beer price tag to the $12 entry fee you had to pay to get in (which, fortunately, I didn't have to pay, because I got free tickets from a friend), and you're talking about a relatively pricey event with relatively common beers (common enough, at least, to be packaged in six packs--with the exception of the brews brought by Berryessa Brewing, which came in kegs, and which ran out before I even got there).

To make matters worse, I had to work late that night, so I didn't get to the place until 8:30 pm. By that point, three of the breweries had already run out of stock entirely, and a few of the other breweries only had one beer left. Plus the lines were pretty ridiculous--often a fifteen minute wait for a single sample glass of beer.

Of the beers I managed to get a taste of, only one stood out, but it was good enough to lend some light to an otherwise disappointing evening (disappointing in regard to beers, at least--I did have a fine time hanging out with friends). Moylan's Dragoon Dry Irish Stout was wonderful--rich and roasty, with a hint of lactic tang in the style of the original Guinness Export (which is one of my favorite beers ever). They also brought bottles of their Kilt Lifter Scottish Style Ale, which made for a good pair of beers to showcase the diversity of their lineup--though the Kilt Lifter didn't match my particular beer preferences.

Field Trip: Lagunitas Brewery

My girlfriend and I stopped by Lagunitas Brewery on a Sunday night a few weeks back, went on the tour, and tried every beer on draft. Things were fuzzy enough after getting through the sampler, and now the passage of time has made them even fuzzier, but here are a few things that stood out:

1) The sampler is awesome! $20 for a four ounce taster of every beer on tap--a total of 16 beer samples.

2) The sampler is terrifying! Almost every beer is above 8% abv, and since they're in those little glasses you end up drinking 'em pretty fast--don't want them to warm up or go flat, you know.

3) Lagunitas likes hops. Half of the beers on tap were IPA styles, and a lot of the rest were hop forward.

4) Money is raining down on the brewery. They've got expansions galore going on, including the recent completion of what the tour guide claimed to be the largest capacity brewhouse on the West Coast (though it didn't look obviously bigger than Sierra Nevada to me), plus a new amphitheater. And they've got a customer following that's lapping the beer up--brewing is going on 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

5) Culture-branding is serious business. A lot of effort, from the decor of the 'beer sanctuary' to the tone of the tour guide's spiel to the flavor of the website, is focused on giving you the impression that Lagunitas is a laid-back bunch of weed-smoking dudes that like to drink beer and thumb their noses at authority. Probably more of the tour talk focused on their contentious, thumbing-noses history with the ATF than it did with the beer itself. 'Course, this rebelliousness didn't stop them from clamping down and kicking out a bus-tour group that got belligerently drunk and obnoxious.

6) The design of the brewery is pretty weird. There are pipes running all over the place, moving things here and there. The lines that run from the grain storage to the mash tuns are very long, and include brushes that crack the husks a little more at each bend. There are also pipes stretching all the way across the parking lot to more fermentation tanks in a separate building. Doesn't seem super efficient in its design.

7) It's all about their eponymous IPA. You've probably tried Lagunitas' flagship beer--it's excellent and it's everywhere. The bulk of the money raining down on the place is probably coming from sales of this particular brew. They're brewing it like gangbusters.

8) Despite their obsession with hops, they're not whole-hop purists. I didn't see a single whole hop on the premises, and when I asked the tour guide about it, he said they use pellets and whole hops both.

And, if you're interested in my favorite and least favorite beers tasted, here you go:

Favorite: A seasonal release called Holiday Leftover Sucks, or something like that. Malty and fairly sweet, but still with a very aromatic hop aura.

Least Favorite: Probably the only beer I really didn't like was their Cappuccino Stout. The flavor is overwhelmed by the coffee aspect, and the coffee flavor they've captured is reminiscent of the swill that sits on the hotplate at 7-11 until it condenses and burns into a horribly bitter nightmare.