Dan began brewing in 2007 and quickly allowed it to consume his life. Brewing led to the Niagara Association of Homebrewers and Ethan, where they forged a friendship out of their mutual appreciation for the number 23.
The web nerd of the group, Dan is responsible for the look, feel and functionality of the website: if you have any complaints he's the one you should yell at. He's still unsure how exactly he was lucky enough to make a job out of tweeting.
I’m writing this while hungry. That seems like a bad idea.
The mill room: now decked out in tile
Construction is progressing on the brewery. Yet again I’ll be giving you all a break from that, though I’ll be including unrelated pictures of our handiwork as we go.
This week? Let’s talk about food.
As I’ve said before, many of us came out of the local homebrewing scene. I actually brewed this past week! Just a Strong Scottish Ale extract kit from Niagara Tradition, but it was good for breaking my dry spell (I’m not the CBW brewer — that’s Rudy — and I’ve been subsisting off of pale ale test bottles for quite some time). This Saturday is the Niagara Association of Homebrewers’ annual holiday party. Yes, in February. Everyone brings a dish to pass, and the theme was given as “ Good ol’ fashioned southern cookin’ New Orleans, Louisiana, Kentucky, etc. Bonus for sneaking some beer, wine, cider or bourbon in there.”
Hmm. “Bourbon,” I thought. And then: “Bourbon barrel aged porter.” Because a homebrewer and brewery owner really should be using beer, right? (In the past I made a great peach cobbler with a peche). My mind naturally wandered to thoughts of pecan pie, and thus a Google search was born. I’m sure I could adapt an existing pecan pie recipe to use some porter, but I’ll be honest and admit I don’t really know enough to be able to judge how the extra liquid will affect things and thus preferred to find an existing recipe.
There was only one result I could find, from the Out of Key Brewing blog: Bourbon Barrel Porter Pecan Walnut Pie. I may skip the walnuts; we’ll see. Yes, it would have made sense to have made this before my post so I could tell you how it went, wouldn’t it? Alas, that required more forethought than I was capable of this week. (Fun fact: it appears the author of that blog, Brian Keyes, is also opening a nanobrewery!)
Plumbing! We now have running water in the brewery area.
Another source of recipes: spent grain from all grain homebrewing batches. When you brew at a five gallon scale you generally have more than 10 (dry) pounds of grain in one batch. You can compost it (as we’ll be doing with our spent grain, donated to the Massachusetts Avenue Project), toss it out or, as many people do, use it in recipes. It’s not the most flavorful stuff: that’s gone into the beer! But there are still uses for the grain. In the past I’ve made dog biscuits with my grain, but you can use it in people food as well. And hey, it’s not like grain, eggs, peanut butter and flour couldn’t be people food if you wanted.
As though by kismet, this afternoon I saw on the GeekMom blog a recipe for a sweet bread using spent grain. The author’s recipe worked well with the grains from a chocolate stout and so maybe an IPA wouldn’t turn out as well. I’m sure there are others that would be suitable for hoppier beers: a quick Google shows that many recipes exist.
Cooking with beer is very much a thing. I’ve done it in the past, as have many of you, I’m sure. Are there any recipes you’ve found to be especially good? I’ve done the librarianly thing and have started a list of beer and spent grain recipes. Post links here, or on Facebook if you must, and I’ll add them to the list. (Hint: you can keep adding tags to refine further: only desserts, for instance.) Right now it’s just the three I’ve linked in this post, but surely you can add more!
Emfood Buffalo! (actually, Enfood seems to work better, don’t you think?)
This week we’re going to talk about Kickstarter and construction. But! To mix it up a bit, it won’t be about us!
Oh, I didn't see you there.
I don’t know how it escaped our collective attention, but there’s a Kickstarter for a movie about the life of Michael Jackson.
Some of you may be confused.
Much like Joss Whedon is my master now, my Michael Jackson died in 2007. He was an incredibly prolific and accomplished beer writer and host of The Beer Hunter, a tv show about the wonders of beer.
The Kickstarter is for The Beer Hunter: The Movie, a documentary about his life. It has less than three days to go and is already funded, but you can still hop in for $10 to get a digital copy of the movie or $25 for a DVD. Or you could spend $5,000 and be invited to the world premiere (or any number of rewards in between). If you’re a beer lover, this is a good project to back.
It looks like Sierra Nevada will be following in the footsteps of Space Ghost and will soon be going coast to coast. The Chico, CA based brewery has announced it’s opening a second location in Mills River, NC. Construction will begin this year and end sometime in 2014, giving Mills River a 300,000 bbl/year brewery and attached brewpub.
Now, Mills River is still about a 12 hour drive from Buffalo. It’s still closer than Chico, however!
Mills River is only half an hour away from Asheville, NC, considered by many people (none of whom live in Portland, OR) to be the best beer city in the country. Sierra Nevada wanted a place that would fit with their ethos as well as cooperage requirements, and so Asheville does seem like a good fit. Sierra Nevada is a wonderful example of a brewery being one of the big guys (relatively speaking, of course) while still retaining their core values.
Now that our Kickstarter has been funded, it’s time to spend lots of money.
On cool stuff, though!
Firstly Kickstarter. The stickers and coasters are done, and now we’re focusing on the glasses and growlers. They’ll take about a month to produce, so we’ll likely be waiting on them before everything is ready. If you missed it, last week’s update has the design that will be on the glasses and shirts. The growlers and hoodies will have the CBW shield.
It looks so imposing, doesn't it? In a good way.
After that, well, we need to make beer, right? Unless we’re going for sex-in-a-canoe beer we’re going to need hops for that. The thing about hops is that they’re a crop. I’d say they don’t grow on trees, but they do grow on bines (vines with a cold) so it’s close enough to not be a good analogy. They are a finite resource. If you care about the hop character of your beer, as all craft breweries do, you need the specific kinds that you need. Saaz are not Northern Brewer are not Cascade. As such, we’re ordering hops now so we can actually, well, brew beer.
So then we’ve made beer. Great. We probably need something to put it in, right? Like, say, kegs. Kegs would be good to have! We’ve ordered kegs. As we’re a nano, and thus smaller, brewery, we’ve ordered 1/6 barrel kegs instead of 1/2 barrel. And, since we’re into trying interesting things, we’ve ordered from Plastic Kegs America. Sixtels, as they’re known are pretty much the size of five gallon corny kegs used in homebrewing.
Finally, where are we going to keep they beer we’re making? Coolers! (here you scream real loud)
No glass ceilings here! ...okay, that was a terrible joke, even for me.
This weekend was another cooler-fest down at the brewery. We’re getting close to the end: the three small coolers now have ceilings! All that remains for them is to put the same material on the walls and seal the floors and we’re good to go. The large walk in cooler was a bit more problematic, mostly because of the 11 foot ceiling. Whereas it only took two people to do the smaller room (or three if we wanted to make it easier on ourselves, or one if you’re Dave and crazy), the single panel on the ceiling of the walk in took four people, and five would have been even better. I believe I made a “how many brewers does it take…” joke but then I wasn’t holding the brunt of it.
We also have a shiny new solar powered hot water tank, which is currently neither solar powered nor filled with water. It will be!
And finally, there’s a short concrete pedestal that our brewing station has been moved to. It seems… regal.
And Ethan looks like Aslan.
Let him first be shaved.
I promised you one week away from Kickstarter topics. Sorry.
Technically, this is also about shirts. But! The growlers and pint glasses for our Kickstarter backers should be ordered by tomorrow. This is essentially only waiting on me, as I have to actually create the final images for the growlers, and I’m currently writing this post. Immediately after I’m done, I promise!
To order glasses, we need both a glass type and a design, right? We do, and we bet you’d like to see what they look like, right? Well first let us introduce Mister Willi Becher, also known internally as Slick Willi:
We really like the look of these glasses. We’re hardly the first brewery to use them, of course, but nor are we the five millionth brewery to use shaker pints. “Anything but a shaker” was something Ethan espoused with a ferocity I normally reserve for people who misuse “you’re” and “your,” and he was right.
Now, then, what design will be on the glasses and t shirts? We tapped Ryan Bedford for our design, who you might recognize as the person behind the posters for Blue Monk. This design is, well, simply awesome:
I can’t wait to drink our beer out of this glass.
This doesn’t affect very many of you, but there are still 13 of you who haven’t filled out the Kickstarter survey to give us your contact information and shirt size. Only six of those are getting a shirt (and so need to give us their size), but still: respond, folks! We need to be able to customize your stuff.
This is unrelated to beer, but it’s still very important. The Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, is a thing, and it’s very bad (thanks to Julia Burke for the link). Its Senate counterpart, the Protect IP Act (PIPA), is also bad. This is what happens when your internet is legislated by your grandfather. If you haven’t yet, you need to contact your senators and representatives to tell them how bad of an idea this is.
In a move that should be unsurprising to everyone, not only does Godaddy support SOPA, but it helped write the bill (and is exempt from it). Well, they “withdrew support” of the bill after lots and lots of people moved their domains to other registrars, but that’s like someone saying they’ll no longer visit Reddit at work because they got caught browsing it all day. I had never liked their marketing, and had switched my personal domains from Godaddy when its CEO posted a video bragging about killing an elephant in Zimbabwe: the point is that the company and its head are kind of assholes.
Quite honestly, I had forgotten that when we started Community Beer Works the registration for the domain was through Godaddy. Had I remembered I’d have pushed for us to move to Namecheap when I did (or, really, anywhere but Godaddy). Thankfully, Ethan brought it up and so we’re in the process of doing the transfer now (that is, if Godaddy doesn’t drag their feet). I bring this up to remind you about SOPA/PIPA, to show that we’re committed to online freedoms and to explain why our site may appear to be down at some point in the near future.
Now then, to stop being so serious for a minute, allow me to present two hockey drinking gifs.
Building coolers yourself is hard work.
It will be worth it in the end, especially because I’ll be able to say “Hey, see that? I helped make that.” As someone who does not self-identify as “handy,” this is a nifty proposition. (It is worth noting, however, that I received a wet-dry vacuum from my wife for Christmas. So I’m like halfway there, right?)
Sorry it's blurry. I guess I was either cold or shaking with excitement at the thought of getting my hands on the upcoming Tyvek sheet.
Tuesday we met to install a layer of Tyvek on the walls of the cooler rooms. Tyvek, I learned, is a paper/plastic-like material that comes in rolls. It acts as an air and water barrier, so we were putting it on top of the insulation to further isolate the chambers.
You might say that Ethan's a staple of our brewery.
Ethan remarked that it was like wrapping a present. Which it was: an exceptionally big present, which for some reason needs to only be wrapped on the inside, and with staples instead of tape because we wrap like assholes.
From here we took the sheets into the chambers and stapled them to the beams. Working with the Tyvek in this way involved a lot of moving it around slightly, and as such I can report back that Tyvek is apparently made out of the same material as Sun Chips bags. I’m pretty sure The Who could have shown up and started playing a set in the brewery and I wouldn’t have noticed with the loudness of the crinkling as I stoically held up some Tyvek for Greg to affix to the ceiling.
There’s still work to be done, cooler-wise. For one, we figure there should probably be doors on them. That seems like a good idea. We also have to put up the final layer of wall material and install the Coolbots to actually cool the rooms.
We’ll have some time, as the construction we aren’t involved with should be wrapping up this month, and there’s still the SLA to contend with. On that front, we’ve confirmed that they received our additions, so we’re progressing nicely!