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.