One-Off's are a Hoot

I had the honor of being invited up to Portland to Belmont Station's 15th anniversary on the 15th of March. I thought to myself, as I often do, of how much fun it would be to knock off a special beer for the occasion made out of stuff lying around the brewery. As a result, "15-15-15" was born, also known as "The Ides of Belmont Station". It contains 15 grains and the remaining bits of my small cache of special hops. It's not bad, either, and am heading up to the bar to see if I can sample another pint. Hope to see you all in Portland in a couple of days. John Foyston posted a goofy picture of me on his blog, so I now know that I need to stay away from cameras.

Colonial Mayhem

As I've mentioned here on this blog, I spent a couple weeks back in England last November. I have friends in the Lake District who have a brewery and are patient with me and drive me around on "cultural tours". They also, after demonstrating my usefulness painting walls and floors and installing fermenters without denting them too much, permitted me to design and brew a beer. It is now apparently available to the unwary public and is being (or already has been) dispensed at a meet the brewer event. I hope some lingers in a bottle until I hopefully can return there in November. Ideally there would be a pin or maybe a firkin sitting around as well (hint, hint, hint).

Now THIS is a Festival

I had decided this year to change my routine of beer festivals. No more KLCC Microbrew Festival this year. Let's do Sasquatch instead. No Firkin Fest at the Green Dragon (and I won't go into why here). How about meeting some new brewers and brewery staff and plying the trade outside of the usual Portland area. Portland gets too much attention these days anyway.

On a whim I decided to go to the Fort George Brewery in Astoria for a festival of stouts. We had done a cask swap once before with them, and so I wanted to be there to handle the casks and to schmooze - that sort of thing. I had my portable cask pub kit with me, so, in addition to the new beer engine that they had mounted in the new Lovell Tasting Room, we were able to pull an additional two casks. As usual I had to show up the day before the festival and set up in the lonely new space which used to be a car showroom.

The new brewery addition is immense. I was particularly impressed with the enormous beams, the smell of old carpentry and the piggy hot liquor tank.

Now a lot of these American beer festivals are all the same. It's just a big room with volunteers pouring products that they have no knowledge of into pitifully small bits of glassware. While this festival did employ the ticket-for-a-taste template, there was more going on here than just, well, a big room with volunteers pouring products that they have no knowledge of into pitifully small bits of glassware. For starters, how about this wonderful female voice wielding a banjo? And when was the last time you were regaled by singing pirates sporting leather tankards and what looked like disemboweling cutlasses? How often do you go to a festival that employs a live blacksmith? And belly dancing?

Needless to say, I had a good time. I got to work my own taps for a while, and found it unusual to not have to figure out what style of beer the customer wanted. 100% chance it was going to be a stout. We were serving our 8-grain winter stout called "Frost on the Bumpkin". I was only asked three times whether it had pumpkin in it.

Not a Grumpy Publican Post

Well, I suppose I should plunge back into this. I've been in a state of blog silence for a bit, related to that depressing time of year that we call the off-season. I was trying to avoid the possibility of "grumpy publican" posts that sometimes surface during this time of year.

We had hopes of another killer Winter like last year, which brings us a thing called "Ski Season". Willamette Pass Resort is just 25 miles up the road. It brings us the Winter trade that small businesses up the HWY 58 corridor depend upon. Winter's good. We need Winter. Without it we lose money, get grumpy, and write grumpy publican posts.

Winter came 8 weeks late. This is a Bad Thing™. I started and deleted a couple of grumpy publican posts and then thought better of it. But happy happy joy joy it snowed a bit and the Pass opened and some wallets trickled through the door. So what did I do? I bought some grain.

We needed grain. Can't brew without it. Trouble is, the local brewery supply warehouses require me to buy it. Can you imagine? So I scraped together some boring green paper that passes for currency and drove to Vancouver, Washington in order to secure a couple sacks of the good stuff. Enough for a brew or three. I just considered the drive to be a shipping cost, as well as a break from being at the pub every day which carries a value all its own. Nine sacks makes up almost 500 lbs. of burden. I think I could cram in a few more next time. As I was driving home, I was wondering how many other breweries in this country have to snag a few bags by personal transport.

We have now brewed three batches of scrummy cask ales, including an Ordinary and a Best Bitter that were high on my wish list. I think that with the slightly elevated trade I can maybe sneak back up for another grain run.

Huh? We need to have a talk.

I'm not really sure how to write this. Not having much truck with incendiary or controversial threads, I tend towards keeping the flow middle of the road. If I were to argue, lets do it friendly-like. Over a pint or two. A lovely game of croquet comes also highly rated. This is just part and parcel of being a publican - smoothing things out, treating everyone as equals, keeping the smiles and the laughter above average and so forth.

However, I just sat down at my computer to write one of the many posts I've been muddling around in my head about my trip to England last month, and on my way to my grotty lackluster pub "office" I picked up the new copy of the Northwest Brewing News that gets shipped to us every two months. This copy was dated "December/Januaruy 2011/2012". Spell check.

I like this rag. I know some of the pens that regularly write for it. We've been mentioned in it, which is unusual given our size. It usually is a useful and informative read, and it has the best beer and pub listings and maps, with our own little numbered black dot on it. But. BUT. An article leapt out at me: The "Behind the Bar" column by Bob Brenlin entitled "The British are Coming, but we are Not CAMRA Ready." This got me a little bit miffed. I'll explain. Starting with the second paragraph:

… our cask tradition is not CAMRA (Campaign for Real Ale) approved, nor will it ever be.

True, generally speaking, up to the "ever be" part. That sentence needs some work, starting with the irony. The article goes on to talk about the MBAA meeting I went to in Seattle at the beginning of November, and how we (Americans) would have our lame attempts at cask ale chucked down the drain in England. Funny thing — I was invited to give a talk at the meeting to talk about how we, as a small cask brewery and public house, were following the tradition. The why's, the how's, the small bits of effort and infrastructure involved in making and serving a proper pint. The education of the staff. The training on British soil. Not mentioned in the article. At all.

I could go on and on with the article, pointing out my grievances (e.g. "casks must undergo secondary fermentation at room temperature"). I won't. Just read it for yourselves, if you can locate a copy; I don't believe they publish it online until archive time. Perhaps I should go back to the mundane principles of my original paragraph and just write about how lovely it was to once again sit in the Bear Inn in Oxford and relax over a pint of Ordinary. I can't, though, because I remember having a couple conversations with one of the two English brewers (mentioned in the article) at the Friday cask feast at the MBAA meeting. He was drinking from the firkin of our 3.7% Dark Mild that we donated to the cause, served through the Brewers Union portable beer engine kit. It was bright, flavorful, drinkable, traditional, and, at the end of the night, completely drained.

I DO want to argue now. Bring it on. I'll buy the introductory pint. The first of our properly brewed, cellared, and dispensed firkins of Tanninbomb (oaky old ale) goes on this coming weekend. It will be bright, traditional, and delicious. I'm just about to roll it onto the stillage. See you at the pub.

More Smoke

As mentioned in my last post, there was a bit of replumbing needed in order to serve a firkin at High Street Cafe. It's done. It's not ideal, for reasons I'll get to, but this is the first time that real ale has been dispensed at any McMenamins establishment. Kinda cool, what?

Thanks to these slick Parker LIQUIfit fittings, the handpull can now pull from the usual Golden Gate kegs, or be switched to an adapter that hooks up to the 3/4" nut and tail that screws onto a cask tap. It works. For testing purposes, a few pints were liberated on Sunday after all was hooked up.

So, not ideal say I? It's a fine pint, and I'm sure it will sell well, but we're back to the problem of the physics of beer: temperature, carbonation level and methods of dispense. I get asked many times whether such-and-so can purchase and put on a cask of Brewers Union beer, and have to ask about where it's going to be kept and how it's going to be handled at the bar. At High Street all the beer is kept in an outbuilding in the back at 36°. Obviously this is a problem with cask conditioned beer. It is simply just too cold. As evidenced by our taste test, the temperature mutes some of the smokiness. The mouthfeel is also altered, such that instead of the impression of chocolaty smoothness you get a bite on the palette from the cold. Also, without a sparkler on the end of a swans neck on the hand pull (which is instead this wee little curved neck as seen below) you fail to achieve that tight creamy head all the way down to the bottom of the pint. It's still serviceable, though, and for a limited time you can have a pint both here at the pub if you're geeky enough to want to make the comparison.

The Big Smoke

It's been a week now since I returned from a two week trip to England. Now that I've settled back in to the doldrums of the shoulder season, I should have a bit of time to catch up on the paperwork, brew some beer, and post a few observations of my wonderings and wanderings abroad. However, that's not what this post is about, in spite of the suggestiveness of title of the post being one of London's nicknames.

Instead, I'm enjoying a pint of a smoked porter residing in one of the pumps at the bar. I'm not much of one to head for the darker stuff, especially if it's smoky. Give me a pale pint of Ordinary or Best with a hearty malt base and a balanced hop blend, but this is not too bad. Its history began this spring when I was talking to the brewer at McMenamin's High Street Cafe in Eugene, my local when I'm "down in the ditch". He had a leftover partial sack of smoked malt sitting around, and we got talking about what to do with it. The plan became one of collaborating on a smoked porter up here at the brewery, to be shared between us. In October the plan finally came to fruition, and a very very smoky porter was born. Perhaps we shouldn't have chucked in the whole 45 lbs. of smoked malt, but it makes it mighty tasty with a side of bacon. I believe this to be the first ever collaboration between a McMenamins brewery and an outsider. See you at the pub for a pint, or at High Street once we do some replumbing in the beer storage room.