Ron Page and Tony Forder “fluting” in the City Steam Brewery, Hartford
Day 10: A short trip down the road we make a quick morning stop at the under-consideration Old Wyndham Brewery, located at a picturesque mill site along the Shetucket River. Then we drive northeast to Natick, Massachusetts, for a lunch visit at Barley Corn Craft Brew “Brew-on-Premise” and Homebrew Supply. There are lots of customers, and a sunny day greets us in downtown Natick. By 2 P.M. we’re leaving, driving off toward Worcester, Massachusetts.
We check in at the no-frills Super 8 somewhere motel along an interstate, then have dinner with Phil Tetarult, president of the WIZARDS homebrew club, Brian Powers (Strangebrew Homebrew Shop) and Bruce Susel (Vinotheque) at the Gentle Lentil, a super restaurant serving natural and locally made cuisine. Greg Hagopian, the owner, is an enthusiastic homebrewer, and it shows in his restaurant.
This evening’s gig is at the Plantation Club Draft House for a speaking engagement and more beer tasting with about 100 American Homebrewers Association members, homebrewers, beer enthusiasts and shop owners. Outside it’s cold and pouring buckets of rain, but it doesn’t matter—we’re warming with beer and friends.
Day 11: Yet again we head north, this time to Manchester, New Hampshire. By noon we arrive for a grand reception at Steve and Darlene Fried-man’s Red White and Brew Brew-on-Premise and Homebrew Shop. Television, newspapers, brewspapers and 40 to 50 local American Homebrewers Association members, beer enthusiasts and homebrewers are on hand for two and a half hours. The hospitality is so good, we have a hard time getting away for our next destination.
We need to be in Portsmouth this evening. Taking a wrong turn, we end up driving the scenic route along the coast. It’s nice to see the ocean, even in all of its grayness. It continues to be cold and raining. We check in at the local inn at 5:55 P.M. With no time to change, we walk down the cold and windy streets of Portsmouth to Don Wagoner’s Stout Billy homebrew shop. Some good beer, cider and lots of great customers are there to greet us before Don whisks us away to the nearby Redhook Brewery, perhaps America’s most state-of-the-art brewhouse and craft brewery. At this point I make the very accurate observation that 99 percent of all of the craft breweries in America are run by former homebrewers, including the good folks at Redhook. Now that’s something special. It says a lot about why craft microbrewed beer is so special.
After a few good beers, including Red Hook Ale and Black Hook Ale, in their hospitality and restaurant area, there’s no time to waste. It’s onward to a 7 P.M. appearance at Peter Egelston’s Portsmouth Brewery for food, drink and addressing homebrewers gathered for the evening. It’s a fun place with great beer and a homebrew-friendly management.
Rolling out Samuel Adams Triple Bock Barrel in Boston
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SAM ADAMS TRIPLE BOCK HOMEBREW RECIPE
Truly the most complex and alcoholic bock beer in the world, this is the beer that began Boston Beer Company’s expedition to strive for extreme achievement. It’s the beer that put the brewing world on alert: nothing is impossible. Many brewers have since embarked on their own tangential brewing endeavors, but Sam Adams Triple Bock is the beer that turned the beer world. It is not an easy beer to make. Your success will require all of your brewing skills in order to manage the complex fermentation. Brewing a beer to 18 percent alcohol will be a challenge. Aging and cellaring in wooden casks to impart the unique characters of this beer will push your skills and patience to the limit. They said Triple Bock couldn’t be done. Likewise, you may believe you are not worthy to succeed. But that won’t stop you, will it? This recipe can be found in About the Recipes.
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Sandra and I duck out later in the evening with Peter and his partner JoAnne for a quiet late-night meal of delicious spicy-hot Thai food downed with—of course—local microbrewed ale. The food burns, and it feels good to chase it with a cold one.
Day 12: A snowstorm is impending. We move on to the Boston area, staying with my brother Rich’s family in Lexington. That evening they join us and 50 others at the Cambridge Hyatt Hotel for a beer tasting organized by local homebrewers and a gourmet dinner arranged by Jim Koch and his Boston Beer Company. There is always more to say, but let it suffice to tell you: good food, good company and the small oak keg of Sam Adams Triple Bock is something special for all of us. It goes well with the crème brûlée.
Day 13: A day off. We chill out and watch the snowstorm arrive.
Day 14: With eight inches of snow and still falling, we drive the last leg slowly to Boston’s Logan airport, return the car and know that we will soon be back home in Colorado. Sandra and I are both a bit worn, but energized. As she put it, “The people we met gave us a lot of energy all along the way.”
Beer in America’s Heartland
Fargo to Cleveland
AS SANDRA AND I slowly descend the airport escalator I’m staring downward, wondering what the small group of crazy, fanatical people are cheering and waving about. Sandra whispers in a worried tone, “Are these your friends?” I shrug, unknowingly. As we approach, I begin to make out the signs: “Welcome Charlie.”
Day 1: This is the beginning of an eight-day journey though America’s homebrewing heartland, from Fargo to Cleveland, in 2002. First stop—Fargo.
It doesn’t take long to figure it out: this small group of folks is representing the legendary Prairie Homebrewing Companions beer and homebrew club. It’s Monday, April 1, 2002, and they are not fooling around! There are already five inches of snow on the ground and it’s still snowing as they escort us into an awaiting stretch limousine, complete with a bar stocked with homebrew.
Every homebrewer in Fargo—and there are a lot of homebrewers in Fargo—seems to have taken the day off. As we stop by the Country Cannery Homebrew Shop, we walk through to the rear into a nearby woodworking shop where more than 30 homebrewers are actively brewing and finishing four separate batches of homebrew. The sweet, tantalizing aroma of malt and hops fills the air and fogs the windows as the snow continues to fall outside. There are dozens of different homebrews offered in bottles and on tap.
Next limo stop on the prairie: the Granite City Pub and Restaurant, a unique brewpub importing unfermented brewed wort from their sister brewpub in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, to lovingly ferment in the tanks at Granite City. The cask-conditioned dark and English-style bitter are magnificently welcome. It is still snowing.
Limos with the Prairie Homebrewing Companions
Limos with the Prairie Homebrewing Companions. Courtesy Prairie Homebrewing Companions.
Prairie Homebrewing Companions’ ringleader and brewster supreme, Susan Rudd, leads us to the club meeting at the Hjemkomst Center, where we are greeted by 65 more club members. Two commemorative beers were brewed, bottled and labeled for the evening’s events.
Beer’d, it is 10:30 in the evening and still snowing as we wrap up the first day of our tour. Tomorrow is going to be another workday.
Day 2: We arrive in Minneapolis. It is still snowing. We check into our hotel, visit two homebrew shops and rendezvous at the Minneapolis Rock Bottom Brewery Restaurant with 40 members of the Minneapolis Homebrewers Association, local brewmasters and beer enthusiasts. It’s a long day.
Day 3: In the morning we’re off early, heading for Madison, Wisconsin. I’m deeply disappointed about not having allowed enough time to visit the Summit Brewing Company and brewmaster Horace Cunningham, whom I had met many years earlier while he was the head brewer at Banks Brewing Company on the Caribbean island of Barbados.
On our way to Madison, we stop for lunch at the legendary all-American Norske’s Nook in Osseo, Wisconsin—an absolutely must stop for any person who considers himself a pie aficionado.
With no time to check into our hotel, we head directly toward the Wine and Hop Shop, one of the oldest and most supportive homebrew shops in the country. Then on to visits at brewpubs JT Whitneys, Angelic Brewing Company and Great Dane. It’s a day and evening filled with meeting new friends an
d reunions with those who have continued to be involved with homebrewing for more than 20 years. I recognize Dean Coffey, the multi-award-winning brewmaster at Angelic Brewpub, as the guy who years ago had worked at Lolita’s delicatessen, across the street from the Association of Brewers’ office in Boulder, Colorado, often making my lunch sandwiches to go. Dean had begun homebrewing years ago. Inspired by the experience, he moved to Madison and became a brewmaster, going on to win several medals at the Great American Beer Festival and more awards at the 2002 World Beer Cup than any other brewmaster in the world. The essence of microbrewing has trickled into our souls.
We leave late in the evening to check into the Landhaus Inn by 11 P.M. in New Glarus, 30 minutes to the southwest.
Day 4: After our morning visit and lunch with New Glarus Brewing Company owners Deb and Dan Carey, we head east to Chicago. It was snowing when we left New Glarus, but the warmth of our journeys made us oblivious to the cold April weather.
We spend the rest of the evening visiting at Chicago’s Goose Island Brewpub with one of the nation’s largest beer clubs, the Chicago Beer Society. More than 80 beer enthusiasts and relations turned out for the event, presentations, food and beer. I’m greeted by two Korean women as I enjoy a glass of Honker Ale. They introduce themselves as the wife and daughter of the Korean brewmaster from the Oriental Brewery in South Korea who had won an award in the 1996 World Beer Cup. He had asked his daughter to get me to autograph a copy of my book Homebrewer’s Gold, in which he was featured.
Day 5: Leaving Chicago on Friday, we stop at Beer Gear Homebrew Supply Shop on our way out of the suburbs and then visit the Flossmoor Station Brewpub, where several more homebrewers are awaiting a luncheon. Onward we drive to Lafayette, Indiana, where the Tippecanoe Homebrew Club is hosting an evening at the Lafayette Brewing Company. We have dinner, talks, beer and good times with more than 40 area homebrewers, some whom I knew when they joined the American Homebrewers Association in 1980.
Day 6: The Great Fermentations of Indianapolis homebrew shop is our next stop, with lunch across the street at the Broad Ripple Brewpub. In the evening we join area homebrewers at the Ram Brewery in downtown Indianapolis to enjoy award-winning beer and dinner extraordinaire.
Day 7 and 8: On our final days we cruise to Cleveland, where we rendezvous at the Association of Brewers’ annual Craft Brewers Conference. There’s dinner with local club members at the Great Lakes Brewpub and another evening event at their brewery tasting room to speak to 200 homebrew and microbrew enthusiasts. Beer maven Michael Jackson and I tell stories of beer digressions and the experiences that brought us to Cleveland.
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MICKVIRAY PAPAZIAN PILSENER
A cause for celebration Mick, Vi and Ray shared with me their beer and their recipe for their commemorative “Charlie on the Road” pilsener. These folks are award-winning champion homebrewers with a knack for brewing up the perfect beer every time. This is a classic all-malt Czech-style pilsener lager hopped exclusively with Saaz hops—the way it used to be in the Czech Republic. It’s clean, crisp, malty and refreshing, with an aftertaste that entices your very soul to have another and another. This recipe can be found in About the Recipes.
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Eight days of beer, beer and more beer. Sandra and I are tired, yet strangely energized from our experience and the endless welcomes across the prairies and rolling hills between Fargo and Cleveland. Homebrewing and microbrewing has indeed woven itself into the fabric of a quality lifestyle for the thousands of people we met on our journeys.
Completely Joyous Tour
Tennessee, Alabama and Arkansas
WHILE EACH OF THESE short stories offers you a taste of one of my adventures, words can never express the delights of every beer, every homebrewer and every unexpected brewing encounter. Four and a half days seems like an eternity when you are on the road tasting all those beers, searching for the ones that scream “ultimate.” The 14 stops on this trip really don’t signify an end or a beginning. The beer just flows into one continuous beer experience when your mission is beer in America.
We visited eight different breweries on this southern sojourn but as I said, we never seemed to really stop as we tasted our way through 32 microbrewed beers. And in between this continuous flow we squeezed in visits to two homebrew shops and five homebrew clubs, tasting more than 130 different homebrewed ales, lagers and meads.
Sleep? What was that, we often wondered? We knew it was precious, for there was very little of it. We were compensated for lack of sleep by the quality of beers all along the way. With 300 people visited and three states, four cities and 525 miles driven, we all felt the experience was priceless.
Day 1: Our trip begins as the “Completely Joyous” Association of Brewers On-the-Road expedition in Nashville, Tennessee, where we visit Boscos Restaurant and Brewery, Blackstone Restaurant and Brewery, Bohannon Brewing Company and All Seasons Gardening & Brewing Supply. Great places, great food, great people, great microbrew and great homebrew in April 2003.
Day 2: From Nashville, we continue on, driving to rendezvous with the Rocket City Homebrewers and Birmingham Masterbrewers in Huntsville, Alabama. Our traveling entourage, my wife Sandra (who brewed her first homebrew, a Belgian Witbier, two weeks earlier), Boscos Nashville brewmaster Fred Scheer and super host, driver and organizer Chuck Skypeck, owner of Boscos, is welcomed by a massive turnout of homebrewers and homebrew. The beer seems to flow from endless taps and a bottomless well of bottled homebrew.
Rocket City Homebrewers
Day 3: From Huntsville, we drive to Memphis, stopping at Hops Restaurant Bar and Brewery and Boscos Restaurant and Brewery, tasting masterly impressive beers and gathering insights from the brewmasters themselves. The evening eventually ends at a rendezvous with the Bluff City Brewers. Of course, it’s homebrew emerging at every opportunity that provides the evening’s nightcaps.
Day 4: We cross the Mississippi River as it flows its meandering way toward the delta country of Louisiana. I can’t help feel as one with the river, one long ribbon of liquid that has been the lifeblood of the population. Surely beer seems a lifeblood of these impassioned southern brewers who are brewing some of the most excellent and memorable beers I’ve ever had. Like the river, our adventure seems to meander endlessly. We roll toward Little Rock, Arkansas, to meet its homebrewers and craft brewers. There we experience the taste of mighty fine microbrewed beers at Vinos Pizza Pub and Brewery, homebrews at Fermentables Homebrew and Winemakers Supply and a packed brewhouse finale of pride and passion, beers brewed at the Diamond Bear Brewing Company.
Like a springtime tornado, we have whirled our way through parts of the South, tasting southern microbrewed beers made with soul. Make no mistake about it: here live brewers as passionate and as skilled as in any well-known beer city.
The ultimate beer? As always, there never is one ultimate beer. Just when you have experienced what you believe is the beer you want to be engaged to for the rest of your life, along comes another quintessential brew. And so it goes.
Boscos beer lover
One thing I always appreciate during these tours is the privilege of tasting new and classically brewed beers. This adventure through the South included a unique personal experience. Beers brewed from recipes in my book The Complete Joy of Homebrewing were judged in three separate “Completely Joyous” competitions in Nashville, Memphis and Little Rock. What a taste delight for me, sampling old favorites brewed from recipes out of my books: Get Rio Light Lager, Rocky Raccoon’s Honey Lager, Goat Scrotum Ale, Toad Spit Stout, Sparrow Hawk Porter, Armenian Imperial Stout, Who’s in the Garden Grand Cru, Buzdigh Moog Double Brown Ale and, most memorably, the wondrous sparkle and refreshing Wailailale Chablis Ginger Mead. Then there was the nefarious Cock (that’s Cock as in “rooster”) Ale. They were all winners in my opinion, but the ribbons went to the Chablis Ginger Mead and the Cock Ale (made with chicken and spices), which is reminiscent of spiced malty holiday ale. Both of these brews won respective
first places.
I’ll never forget the taste treat of Memphis-brewed Armenian imperial stout with added oak chips—wow! And I’ll always recall the ale brewed in Huntsville with five different breakfast cereals by the ten-year-old daughter of one of our hosts. At the All Seasons Gardening and Homebrew Supply Company in Nashville, I encountered a mead brewed with sour cherries and the Middle Eastern ingredient mahleb, ground cherrystones that offer a wondrous cherry aroma. I was astonished because of my familiarity with this spice: my grandmother used this ingredient when making braided Armenian choereg (bread).
Tapping into a keg of real ale at Boscos
Tapping into a keg of real ale at Boscos. Courtesy Boscos.
As with any microbrewed adventure, it was always comforting to know that while I was away things were getting better at home. My homebrew had a chance to age and improve for one more week. I was inspired by all those five-gallon batches and the skill of all the master homebrewers and master microbrewers I met along the way. I became inspired to brew within days of returning home. You simply can’t keep me down.
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IRISH COCOA WOOD PORTER
Here’s a recipe I’m inspired to brew based on beer tastings offered by homebrewers in Tennessee, Alabama and Arkansas. It’s an Irish-style stout, but untraditionally, it has no roasted barley. An extra accent of cocoa flavor and aromatic malts, along with a finishing touch of toasted oak chips, gives this beer the soul of the South and the spirit of your finesse. The recipe can be found in About the Recipes.
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Raising the Drinking Age to 40
The Lyons Brewery Depot
SUNOL LIES about an hour southwest of San Francisco’s Bay Area. When I managed a pilgrimage there in the late 1980s, Sunol was a small town. No, actually, it was a place, near a railroad crossing, where Judy Ashworth owned and ran her original specialty beer bar. It was called the Lyons Brewery Depot. A pioneer beer establishment, it was a mecca for beer enthusiasts in an age when yellow fizzy beer predominated the American landscapes.
Microbrewed Adventures Page 11