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 So the 2010 National Homebrew Competition snuck up on me this year… and this is the first year I’ve been paying any attention. According to http://www.homebrewersassociation.org/ I’ll need one bottle for each entry for the regional competition and three additional bottles for each entry selected for the National Competition.
The only beer we have enough of in 10-14oz bottles is the Dark American Wheat. I suppose we should start putting more beers in 12 oz bottles so they will be ready for competition. I wanted to put our beer in Category 6 with the American Wheat and American Rye beers but there is a note in the official style sheet that mentions dark wheat beers should go into Category 23, Specialty Beer. I don’t know if having our beer in Category 23 is good or bad. So far I can see mostly bad. I don’t like that there are not style guidelines. There is no perfect beer in this category. I don’t like that this is essentially a catch-all category. There could be many more entries in this category than in others. I wonder if the beers will be judged against the defined attributes of the style you pick or if they will stand on their own deliciousness.
The beer is wrapped in bubble wrap, covered in a plastic bag, and taped into a box on its way to Ohio. Good luck to you White Shadow. Apparently each entry will receive a score and notes regardless of points earned. I am looking forward to an honest judging of our beer.
Look forward to “NHC 2010 – Part 2: The Score” sometime in the beginning of May.
A couple of weeks ago I bought two five gallon ball-lock kegs. Last week we filled the keg with the Marzen we created. Yesterday I bought tubing and clamps to hookup the five gallon keg to our pre-existing kegerator system. The results? Blickit!
  
Ahhhh, yes. The endless joys of pouring your own beer from a tap. Well, I guess its not endless but its pretty good while it lasts. It took us a while to figure out that the beer plug was not down all the way but once we did and rolled the keg back and forth for a bit (as seen in some youtube videos) we opened up the tap. Out came sweet sweet foam and more foam and some beer but mostly foam. But once that foam settled, you better believe we drank the most just-slightly-carbonated beer ever! We are allowing the beer to carbonate for a while now. Perhaps that will produce a more bubbly beverage. Ill try to keep you up to date.
Yay spring! Yay Real Ale! Yay festivals! 
There is a much more detailed report of the festival at beerinbaltimore so I will defer to that site lest I do any less at work. The weather was terrific. Katy and I sat outside most of the day, biding our time until the three o’clock raffle.
My favorites of the day were the Stateside Saison, the Three Lions Ale, and the Hot Monkey Love. I was disappointed with the BA Resurrection infused with blackberries. I think the blackberry flavor did not come through strong enough to do anything besides detract from the beloved taste of the beer. It was interesting to see a beer from the Dog brewery. I’m used to their fruity offerings served up with pizza a The Dog Pub. Their Belgian Golden was interesting but (I guess) not good enough to make my top three. It did, however, make me want to go back to Cross Street and try some of their classic style beers.
 Like I said, we had beer, food, sun, complementary (I think) PSAH pint glasses… and some serious birdseyes (2:07 – 2:16) on some of Baltimore’s beerocracy.
When it came time for the raffle ticket drawing, we had prime seats for many fellow festival-goers getting PSAH hats, PSAH t-shirts, PSAH t-shirt & hat combos, PSAH $20 gift cards, SPBW long sleeved shirts, Steve J throwing shirts at people and finally, on the second the last drawing of the afternoon, your’s truly winning two free tickets to the fall real ale festival!! Good ole ticket # 9062. My name, address, and email in Sharpie on a scrap piece of paper = free tickets to the next one. Sounds good to me.
See you all again in October when I will vehemently defend my raffle ticket crown.
Beer 19
Name: Quercus Vitis Humulus
Brewery: Otter Creek Brewing
Location: Middlebury, VT
Brewing Since: 1991
Website: http://www.ottercreekbrewing.com/
Sight: Medium to deep amber, the same brown as the bottle, bubbles slow to form, quick to dissipate
Scent: Strong aroma, carries well, able to smell it across the room, neither hops nor malt overly discernible
Texture : Smooth … a little too smooth, probably the grape juice
Taste: Probably the grape juice but something is holding back the maltiness until the very end of each sip.
Thoughts: Just because it’s Latin, doesn’t mean you can just name your beer with three nouns. Three nouns does not a sentence make. Ocean bird lamp. Heading past the name they chose, I liked this beer because it blends styles and does not follow any rules. If you are going to acknowledge rules, you might as well either follow them as best you can or dismantle them.
How to Drink: Try this instead of your favorite wine, its closer in taste to a white than a red but has more of a body than most whites. Swirl it and sniff it if you want. Or save it for a few years, I’d bet it ages well.
Might as well gets some bullet points into this post nice and early…
- We bottled the Dark Wheat beer yesterday. It looks like the alcohol content is going to be around five and a half percent. The flavor is smooth. I like it. The orange zest I added contributed to a nice citrus smell coming from the top of the carboy. We used a couple jugs, some 22′s and one six pack. We are going to send three to a friend in Georgia and three to a friend in North Carolina. Time to spread the love.
- The Marzen is either in a bottle or in the keg, still cold but I haven’t gotten the correct hosing for the keg so we haven’t been able to carbonate the kegged portion yet. We will be able to drink the bottled few sometime soon, though.
- On deck: I think I’ll do a classic English Bitter. I want to experiment with almost extreme water modification and perhaps with some lactic acid. If we get the Marzen kegged properly I would like to try to keg the Bitter with a low level of carbonation, really try for the mouthfeel of some of the bitters I tried in London.
- In the hole: I’m intrigued by the idea of a flower beer although I’m not sure if that means the beer will be influence by a flower smell or a flower taste. It might be interesting to combine this idea with a beer containing an exotic sugar, perhaps one know to create floral aromas, tastes, or both.
- Real Ale Festival at PSAH is coming up. Maybe I will get a few ideas from that party.
There have been times when I have been too busy at work or without Internet access for a day or had some other cognizant reason for skipping the Tuesday Morning Quarterback column. This Tuesday was the first time I actually forgot about it. What a shame. It worked out well because if I had written the TMQ on Tuesday, I would not have had much to write about. My attempt to go to Home Depot and get materials for a wort chiller were a complete failure. They did not have all of the parts I needed in the correct sizes and the employee I worked with to locate all of the needed parts told me that the copper tubing especially was really over priced and that I should find a plumbing supply store and buy it from there.
Yesterday we bottled most of the “March Marzen” which, after careful consideration, I think needs to have its name changed to either “March / Marzen” or something completely different. Its a little redundant for my taste. This beer is the smoothest and lightest beer we have ever made and I was surprised to exclaim, when I tasted it yesterday, “this tastes like a lager!” It turned out to be approximately 4.5% alcohol by volume. We took the half we didn’t bottle and put it into a five-gallon keg I recently acquired. Turns out, after watching the guy with the worst shirt on youtube talk to me for seven or so minutes that we didn’t have the tubing to properly carbonate the beer so we just threw it down into the keg and will let it sit for a while.
Coming soon: a new beer. Maybe two. If we bottle White Shadow AKA Sexual Chocolate AKA That Boy Good! sometime soon we will have cleared the tanks for two new beers. What they will be, I don’t know. Hopefully delicious.
Beer 18
Brewery: River Horse Brewing
Location: Lambertville, NJ
Brewing Since: 1996
Website: http://www.riverhorse.com/
Name 1: Hop Hazard Unfiltered American Pale Ale.
Sight 1: Darker than I would have thought… ncie layer of sediment at the bottom.
Scent 1: A lot of hops and a bit of malt scents.
Texture 1 : Somewhere between medium and full-bodied.
Taste 1: Bitter and hoppy but not as hop hazardous as I expected.
Name 2: Oatmeal Mil.k Stout Ale [Redux]
Sight 2: Opaque, that’s for sure + fleeting tan head.
Scent 2: Malts, malts, malts, and maybe some tang (is tang smellable?)
Texture 2: Excellent mouthfeel and body. Hangs around in my mouth for a spell.
Taste 2: Bitter and roasted flavors but not as aggressive as some other stouts.
Thoughts: I thought that I would be drinking a Flying Fish beer for my New Jersey beer but I came across these beers before I came across any beers by Flying Fish other than Exit 1 Oyster Stout (Oysters are the rats of the subtidal zone BTW). While I despise the name “river horse” as or not as a nickname for a hippopotamus, I have liked the beers produced by this brewery, misguided as they may be. I bought three and due to a sickness/coagulation of gnocchi in my stomach from Bucca Di Beppo, I could only drink two. Too bad I could not take a sip of the Imperial Cherry Ale or whatever the flip the third beer I bought is called. I left it in the hotel mini-fridge for either the cleaning staff or the next tenant to enjoy. Cheers!
How to Drink: First, avoid ever going to a Bucca Di Beppo. Second, avoid going to a Bucca Di Beppo UNLESS you can get the pope room (party of 12 needed!). I liked the two beers that I tried so you should drink them while forgetting that a New Jersey company named its self after an animal most of its employees have never seen. I’d say either beer would go well with a good burger (veggie of course) or while trying to figure out why people in New Jersey named their beer company after an animal native only to southern Africa.
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