Part of the Craft Brewer’s Conference is the industry trade show.  It’s a venue for brewers and vendors in the brewing industry to meet face to face and talk about some of the new products the’ve come up with over the year.  Walking around on the trade show floor can make me feel like the proverbial kid in a candy store.  Some of the new products are things I can use at Iron Hill.  Others are pieces of equipment manufactured for much larger production breweries with much larger budgets.  I just look at these and drool….

One of my favorite things to do on the trade show floor is to check out some of the new hop varieties that have been introduced in the past year.  The hop growers and purveyors will bring bricks of whole leaf hops for us to check out.  The hops smell great right there on the table.  You can usually smell them from a couple of booths away.  But to reall get a feel for what the hop has to offer brewers conduct a “crush test”.  It’s simple but effective.  Just grab a handful, rub them between your hands and sniff.  It gives you a pretty good idea of what that particular variety will smell like in your beer.  The warmth from your hands and the crushing of the buds allows the essential oils to be released and become more volatile.  You also walk away with sticky and green but great smelling hands.  And if you’re me about a half an hour’s worth of sneezing! (believe it or not I’m mildly allergic to hops in their whole leaf form).

The two ‘09 releases that impressed me the most were the Citra hops and the German Traditional hops.  The Citra as you may guess are American and loaded with Citrus characters.  I’m hoping to use these for an American IPA once I get things rolling in Maple Shade.  The German Tradition are (again, intuitively enough) a very “noble” smelling German hops.  Just perfect for a German Pilsner.  I’ve been very happy with the German Select hops I’ve used for my Pils in years past, but I’m all about experimenting with what’s out there. Can’t wait to dive into these varieties!

I just got back from the Craft Brewer’s Conference in Boston.  Every year Iron Hill sends us to the conference (different city every year) for four days of classroom time, discussions, networking and tradeshow visits.  Of course when you brew for a living, the lines between business and pleaseure are often blurred. As you can imagine we also manage to have some fun in the middle of all of this business. 

Every year the CBC kicks off with a keynote speech from a leader in the industry.  This year’s speech by Stone Brewing Company’s founder, Greg Koch, took a creative twist.  He invited brewers from around the country to participate in his speech in the form of a sort of video collage.  I was impressed with it and I’d really like to share it.  If you love and support craft beer, this video is well worth watching.  Depending on how much of a beer geek you are you’ll probably recognize some of the brewers involved.  Here’s a link.  Enjoy!

Cheers,

Chris

Probably way short notice for this.  But if any of you happend to be lazily drifting through the blogs while waiting for the official end of the work day while dreaming about what you’ll do tonight…. I have a suggestion.  Beer Wars the Movie will premier tonight.  And by premier I mean be shown once and then never again in theatres.  It’s being shown across the country at the same time via sattelite feed.  It’s mostly about the 3 tier system of beer sales, but there’s all sorts of inspirational beer culture stuff infused.  It features appearances by many of the industry’s rock stars and glimpses into breweries across the country.  If you aren’t doing anything tonight, maybe you should check it out.  Here’s where you can find  a list of locations.  And here’s the trailer. 

If you can’t make it, well then just head into the Hill and drink beer. Try the India Black Ale.  It just went on tap tonight and its great.  A few months ago I asked Jean if there was anything he really wanted to brew and without a second’s hesitation he said “a Black IPA”.  I’m glad we did it, its probably my favorite sesonal right now.

Cheers,

Chris

So Wednesday night we judged the Iron Brewer Competition!  Iron Brewer is a unique competition we put on every year.  It’s very small and it has one unusual guideline, all of the beer in the competition has to be made with the second runnings from our Golden Barleywine.

Speaking of second runnings I need to give a little technical background here….  One of the first steps in making beer is seperating the sugars in malt from the husks and dissolving them in water.  This step is a lot like making coffee.  Combine water with the grounds, infuse the good stuff into the water to make coffee, seperate it and throw out the grounds.  

When we make our barleywine, we make it so strong, and use so much malt, that at the end of the day there’s still quite a bit of good stuff leftover in those grains.  It’s too weak to put into the barleywine but its certainly strong enough to make lower gravity styles with.  Because we only have one brew kettle and it’s tied up with the barleywine, we really have no where to put that remaining sugar. For years we just dumped it down the drain.

As a former homebrewer I always felt a tinge of guilt watching all of that good wort get sacrificed to the sewer gods.  I remember thinking to myself, “there are probably lots of homebrewers that would kill for that stuff!”  So one year I called the president of our local homebrew club and asked him if he thought any of his members would want some free wort to take home and brew with.  Uhhhh yeah.

The tradition has grown. This January we gave away enough wort to yield 16 batches of homebrew.  We always schedule the Barleywine  brew on a Saturday or Sunday so the homebrewers can collect the wort and take it home and brew it that day.  We also provide the homebrewers with some free Iron Hill yeast if they want it.  So they go home and brew a batch in about half the time and for less than half the money than they normally would.

The first year we did this we were amazed at how different the resulting beers were from one another.  The brewers really put their own spin on everything.  We decided that the next year we’d have to make a competition out of it.

The name is an obvious pun.  Of course the word Iron is part of our company’s name.  But this competition also shares a lot with the Iron Chef.  The participants all start with the same basic wort and take it home to see what they can do with it.  And they do quite a bit.   By adding different specialty malts and by using different varieties of hops and yeast they make a very wide range of styles.  One participant even added some dry grains and made a sour mash!

So the judging that follows a couple of months later is always a treat.  I always wonder what creative processes will yield what sorts of styles as final products.  This year there was a dark Pilsener, a couple of IPAs and Imperial IPAs, a Honey Saison and a Ginger Saison and a Wee Heavy to name a few.  Again, pretty wide range.  Well I can’t tell you who won it yet because Chris has yet to announce the winner to his club.  But I can tell you I was really impressed with a lot of the entries.

I guess I won’t be around for the next Iron Brewer in West Chester but hopefully there will be some eager homebrewers in New Jersey lining up with their plastic buckets when I brew my first Barleywine over there.  Iron Brewer East anyone?