DON'T FORGET!
The October Minnesota Home Brewers Association meeting will be tomorrow,
Saturday Oct. 14, 2006, from noon-3pm at Rock Bottom, on Hennepin Avenue
in Downtown Minneapolis. Bring your questions, bring your answers, and by
all means bring your homebrew to share with your fellow club members and
pick up some tips!
There will be a Hard Cider Making demonstration
There will be a Style of the Month tasting of Bohemian Pilsners
There will be a discussion of the club cider squeeze and cider buy
There will be discussion of the Teach A Friend To Homebrew day in November
There will be a Toast to Jimmy Carter, the president who legalized
homebrew!
See you all there!
- Al
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Hoppy Halloween, the competition held in Fargo by our friends the Prairie
Homebrewing Companions, is being held in two weeks, on Oct 27-28. Come on
up and help them judge, and then stick around to see and hear author of "How
to Brew" John Palmer at their awards ceremony and banquet. On the menu is
your choice of London Broil w/ Rosemary roasted potatoes, Salmon Picata w/
blended rice in a lemon caper sauce, or Pasta Primavera. Dinner includes
Salad, dinner rools, desert bars, and coffee or soda (of course, you may
bring your OWN beer in toos!)
Judging is Friday night and Saturday morning, with the famed "Spooky Beer"
category being judged Friday night.
Come on up - it's a great party!
http://www.prairiehomebrewers.org/hoppyhalloween.htm
- Al
Saturday, October 14, 2006, noon-3pm:
Rock Bottom, Minneapolis
The next MhBA club meeting will be at Rock Bottom Brewery on
Hennepin Avenue in Minneapolis on Saturday, October 14, 2006 starting
at noon (See Oct. Boiler.) We have been assured by head
brewer Bryon Tonnis that we are allowed (and encouraged!) to
bring in homebrew, for those of you who remember our last
meeting there.
The “Style of the Month” for October is Bohemian Pilsner so if
you have one brewed, bring it along and join the Style of the
Month Club. Also bring your Stout from last month if you
couldn’t attend, or any other homebrews you’d like to share with
your fellow club members. The Recipe of the Month for
September is Flanders Red. (See article in October Boiler.)
The technical topic is cider making. If you have a cider to share bring
it along.
Al Boyce will demonstrate cider making. We will have a discussion about
cider.
Their will be an update on the cider pressing and buy.
Remember your AHA card for discounts at Rock Bottom.
Jim R. Imbertson
235-1WS-46
TSS
Tel: 651-733-5296
In case anyone had seen and wondered about this book...
Z
---------------------------
Today's Review From
Powells.com
Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer
by Maureen Ogle
<>>
A Pitcher Is Worth a Thousand Words
A review by Doug Brown
There is a myth among us beer snobs about the history of beer
in America. It goes something like this: everyone used to drink
full-bodied beers up until prohibition. After prohibition, the
big brewers took over the industry, flooding the market with weak
beer made more from rice than barley, because rice is cheaper.
They aggressively drove everyone else out of business, and so
now Americans drink this limpid swill because they don't have
a choice. It makes a great story, particularly for fans of hearty
ales and microbrews. The only problem is, as Ogle lays out in
this fascinating history, the myth is almost completely untrue.
The first brewers in America were German, and made German style-lagers
that were indeed much heartier than today's big brews (think Paulaner
Salvator). However, these brewers had two troubles selling their
beer. One was consistency; it was hard to make the same beer with
the same flavor batch after batch. The other was that nobody other
than German immigrants liked this style of beer; it was heavy,
calorie rich, and not particularly refreshing on a hot day. For
cities with large German populations, like Chicago and New York,
this was fine. For everyone else, a new type of beer was needed.
The answer was found in Bohemia (today's Czechoslovakia), in the
town of Plzn (also known as Pils). Folks here made a light lager,
perfect after a hard day's work. This style was brought back to
America, and named pilsener after its town of origin. Except there
was a problem. You can't make pilsener with American six-row barley,
because it's too protein rich. You end up with unprecipitated
blobs of protein, sort of like drinking a lava lamp. Brewers toiled
away and found a solution: mix the barley with adjuncts like white
corn and rice. Here's where part of the myth dies -- rice is more
expensive than barley. Yes, the big brewers use rice not to save
money, but because it makes better beer. This new American style
of pilsener was immensely popular, and the thick German-style
lagers all but vanished (we're still back in the mid-late 1800s,
by the way).
Then a friend of brewer Adolphus Busch asked for a special beer
to supplement his wine dealership. The friend, Carl Conrad, had
learned of a beer made in Budweis, a town in Bohemia. The Budweis-style
beer that Busch crafted for his friend used Saaz hops from Germany
and rice as an adjunct. It was more expensive to make than most
other American beers. It was lighter in color, and subtler in
flavor. The two named it after the town of origin: Budweiser.
And the rest, as they say, is history. The new brew was a huge
hit with American palates. Imitators sprang up, and soon most
of the successful breweries were making a Budweis-style pilsener.
Breweries in large cities had all the business they needed within
a couple miles of the brewery, so had little need to expand. Brewers
in smaller cities like Milwaukee and St. Louis had to transport
their beer elsewhere to expand their markets. As they shipped
to more and more distant cities, their capacities grew. Thus,
the fact that these cities didn't have large local markets ironically
became the reason most of the major brewers were located there
(similarly true later on for Coors). Big brewers also introduced
assembly line automation decades before Henry Ford supposedly
invented the concept.
In the late 1800s a temperance movement started gaining momentum.
Interestingly, lager was previously not considered alcoholic,
as it only had a 3.2 percent [by weight] alcohol content. By the end of
World
War I, the movement was powerful enough to push through a constitutional
amendment, and prohibition was born. Only the brewers with deep
enough pockets were able to survive, though some eked along by
brewing soft drinks or selling yeast. When prohibition was repealed
over ten years later, the number of players in the field had been
considerably reduced.
The next thirty or forty years were times of further consolidation.
As more brewers fell on hard times due to decreased alcohol consumption
by Americans, the larger brewers bought up the smaller ones --
or the smaller ones just went under. By the 1960s, there were
few breweries left. Then the big breweries turned to marketing
in a way they never had, tying in beer with sports, using clever
mascots (remember the Hamm's bear, from "The land of sky blue
waters"?), and doing everything else to get Americans drinking
beer again. It worked for a while, but soon a subset of the fickle
American palate wanted something other than Budweiser.
Enter a guy named Fritz Maytag, who in 1965 bought a defunct
brewery in San Francisco called Anchor. After trying to sell the
same kind of beer Anchor had been making, Maytag found out why
the brewery had gone under. Once again, a new kind of beer was
needed. He turned to ale, and made a brew called Anchor Steam.
Restaurateurs loved it. The microbrew boom was born.
Today drinkers have a wider variety of beers to choose from than
ever. The big breweries still dominate the business with their
pilseners, but not because people don't have a choice. The majority
of American beer drinkers really do like the light flavor. Go
figure. The big breweries got big by caring about consistency,
and using more expensive ingredients than the cheap malts and
hops used by failed brewers. In short, they survived for all the
of the same reasons people like craft beer today. I won't be switching
from Deschutes to Bud anytime soon, but Ogle has diminished my
dislike of the big brewers - no small task, that. Whatever type
of beer you prefer, Ambitious Brew makes for good reading while
quaffing your favorite. Along with Ken Wells's entertaining romp
Travels with Barley, this is highly recommended for any beer fans
on your gift list (including yourself).
Read the review online at:
http://www.powells.com/pow/review/2006_10_07
Tickets are now on sale for the 4th annual Festival of Barrel-aged beer,
to be held on Saturday, November 4th at Goose Island-Wrigleyville.
Tickets are currently available at Goose Island, the Map Room and Rock
Bottom-Chicago. An order form to purchase tickets by mail is available
at www.illinoisbeer.com
jeff
Wanna work at Midwest Homebrewing on the weekends? Good pay, and GREAT
employee discounts!
- Al
_____
From: Dave Turbenson [mailto:daveturbenson@yahoo.com]
Sent: Thursday, October 05, 2006 4:33 PM
To: vp(a)mnbrewers.com
Subject: Midwest Homebrewing is hiring!
Hi Al,
I wanted to let you know Midwest is hiring. We are looking for part-time
help on Saturdays and Sundays. We need knowledgeable homebrewers to hang out
on the sales floor and answer questions about making beer. We are hoping to
get people to work at least every other Saturday and/or Sundays. I want
people who will work at least two days each month. 4 or 6 days a month would
be great. We are looking for people to commit to working from now until next
March when things start to slow down.
We typically pay part time employees around $10 an hour. We also offer an
excellent employee discount. The weekends around Midwest are very laid back
and we usually end up tipping a few beers back around the end of the day.
Please feel free to forward this e-mail to anyone in the MN brew assoc. If
anyone is interested they can apply in person at Midwest and talk to Dave.
Thanks again for your help, Dave at Midwest
