First State Brewers Blog

Well, my bastard child of an abbey dubbel and a hefeweizen (dubbelweizen) is mellowing out a little. I may even come to accept it without making funny faces as I drink it. I’m sitting here drinking my second pint as I type. And I sampled my Oak-aged vanilla porter last night - it is also coming along nicely. Its more oakey than vanilla at this point … but I guess I shouldn’t be suprised. I seriously overused the oak chips. I think I’m going to have to rack to a tertiary w/ no oak and another vanilla bean in a couple weeks here.

I finally got off my slack butt and posted the December meeting minutes and the January Wort’s Hoppening on our site. I also am working on a recipes page…. It’ll probably be a few weeks before the recipes section is up and running, however I am working on it.

I was going to work on a blog page, but Scott was so hot to get one he got this set up Just kidding. Blog wasn’t next on the list… its always been a recipes section.

As Scott posted, the AHA homebrewers conference is in Baltimore this year. We royally suck if we can’t get something together for it. Granted it apparently starts Thursday, June 18 and goes to Saturday… but that still leaves the Friday night and Saturday for us to haul our beer-swilling butts down there. I actually think there are a few other regional clubs we could hook up with and have a great time if we actually developed some… oh… what’s the word I’m looking for… initiative?

The Return of Chazz’s Brew News

I read the other day that Anheuser-Busch was coming out with a new alcoholic seltzer water (their products do not deserve the honorific “beer”) with caffeine in it. Not surprisingly, quoted authorities described it as miserable, but is that a surprise? As long as A-B, Miller, and other producers of alcoholic seltzer water (hereafter i will refer to this group as “Coorsweiser”) are run by people more interested in cornering shelf space than in producing quality beer, we will continue to get concocted trash of this sort in never-ending attempts to corner shelf space. Ice beer crashed and burned, red beer crashed and burned, i hereby predict that caffeine beer will crash and burn. (I must admit that lite beer has been commercially successful, unfortunately this success just encouraged the jerks.)