Displaying CBW posts.

That doesn’t fit the rhythm, I know. And yet I can’t bring myself to care. I was going to talk primarily about how next week is Buffalo Beer Week — and it is, and I will, in a little bit — but then Dave dropped a bomb on us.

You see, while not official, today we received word that our application with the TTB for our federal Brewer’s Notice will be approved.

HIGH FIVIN A MILLION ANGELS

There’s still one or two technicalities, but once we take care of them, it’s ours. All ours. This is huge. It’s reason for celebration, and tonight I rooted through my cellar for a suitable barleywine. I’m drinking Brooklyn’s 09 Monster, and if you have something tasty tonight I’d appreciate it if you raised it to us.

And then we can do it again once we actually get approval! We win twice. It’s great.

But now Buffalo Beer Week. That is also great, and it starts this Sunday! Eight days of awesome beer events in and around the city of Buffalo. You should check out the official calendar and get your dance card filled up, because it’s going to be a doozy.

Did I make a Ned Ryerson joke last week? I feel like I did. He deserves it.

Anyway, if you’re looking for just one or two events to go to, might we suggest the ones we have our hands on? There’s nothing CBW branded this year: we can’t make beer yet! Ethan created the pairings for the Shango beer dinner on Wednesday the 22. He’s also suggested the pairings for Allen St Hardware’s weeklong beer special menu. If you’d like to get a head start on the festivities, Cole’s will be releasing Ithaca’s HopStash IPA on Sunday the 19th. Rudy said Ithaca IPAs “make [him] weak in the knees,” so there’s that.

The point is that you should be going out and exploring all the beery things Buffalo has to offer! It’s a jam packed week, and will be embeered out the wazoo. Which, despite what Chrome says, totally is a word.

Now then, a bit more on last week’s BarCamp Buffalo talk. If you’d like to see the video that the folks at UNY Startups were nice enough to take of me talking (quickly but, thankfully for my grandmother and 7th grade English teacher, with decent enunciation), you should head to their Youtube channel.

And, finally, the CBW Words With Friends tournament is still progressing! In a very close match, I managed to beat HogtownHarry by a mere five points. That means it’s me (Sigafoos) vs Eric (erockthered), while Josh (JoshTheBrute) waits patiently in the wings. Below, you’ll find the bracket (and here’s a clickable link).

Surprise!

Today we launched version 2.0 of the Community Beer Works website. Well, strictly speaking it’s version 2.0.2.3.5 because I’m allowed to make those decisions, but its five digits are irrelevant.

We were going for a few things with this design, and I think we’ve hit them all pretty well: for one, it’s not the default WordPress theme. That’s kind of key. Also, it should come across as less of a blog and more of a website: we have a blog (and you’re reading it right now!) but that should only be one piece of a larger whole. There isn’t necessarily an avalanche of content elsewhere yet, but that will come once we can do silly little things like sell beer.

Speaking of that, the most prominent new feature of the site is also temporary: what I’m calling the progress thermometer. People frequently ask us when they’ll be able to buy our beer, and we wanted to make that as easy to discern as we could: we’ve done quite a lot, but there’s still quite a way to go. With any luck, the next segment will be filled in soon and we’ll be ever closer.

See, if the site looks like this, let me know.

So, then, onward to the future! What’s next?

Besides a few Super Secret Projects, the obvious answer is Monday’s Blue Monk Community Beer Workstravaganza. That’s not the official title; one of these days the others will realize I shouldn’t be left to write these things unsupervised. In any event it’s this Monday, 6-7:30 and we’d love to see you there. We’ll have free samples of our beer and a dollar of everything you buy goes to us. It should be a good time! But if you’re reading this I doubt I have to twist your arm to get you down to the Blue Monk.

And finally, Words With Friends! Yes, that’s still going on. The game with Dan (gigante) and Michelle (greatsufficiency) has ended, though it was while I was in the middle of getting the new site up so I’m afraid I don’t have an updated bracket for you. The rest of you folks, though: how’s it going? Hey. Hope you & yours are doing well. Any progress on the games? Let me know.

See you folks on Monday.

As I write this, I’m 35,000 feet above the Rockies, on my way back from the 2011 Craft Brewers Conference, held this year in San Francisco. It was really an amazing experience for me, and for our humble start-up in Buffalo.  What follows are just some impressions I wanted to relate to our fans.

First of all, the broad overview. This year saw nearly 4000 attendees- quite a number of people! They ranged, of course, from brewery owners and brewers themselves (not always the same person) to representatives from other aspects of the industry: equipment manufacturers, product suppliers, advertising specialists and others certainly see the merit of attending the conference and especially the associated Beer Expo. For example, also representing Buffalo were a couple of guys from Certo Brothers distributing, and as well I got to spend some time chatting with Tom and Jeff of KegWorks. Of course, the media was also in tha’ hizzy. Despite the many domains of the industry in attendance, it was actually pretty easy to spot the brewers: look for the elaborate beards and sideburns, and you’re probably looking at a brewer! (Rudy… hop to it!)

Beard? Check! Brewer? Check!

At any professional gathering, libations are going to be available, but as you might expect, the Craft Brewer’s Conference means beer flowed like water.  That’s what you’d call an overwhelming understatement, in fact.  Simply upon registration I was given a four-pack of special, brewed-for-the-symposim beers and a nice tulip glass, but that was just the beginning. Many of the exhibitors at the expo were pouring complimentary beers, the hospitality suites were well-stocked, and even most of the sessions included a sampling. More than the fact of much beer itself, in many cases the beers presented were special in some way. Among the aforementioned Symposium Beers was a unique collaboration between Russian River and Sierra Nevada (A Flemish sour brown) while at another session we were treated to a rare 4-year-old lambic from Cantillion. Perhaps the most impressive feat of the conference was the pouring of what must have been some 3000 glasses of Sierra Nevada’s “Ken & Fritz’s” collaboration beer—a stout—towards the end of their keynote address, which we all raised in a toast to the venerable pair. All kinds of after-parties and other Conference-inspired events throughout the Bay Area’s best known craft beer bars only added to the huge amount of great beer being consumed- it was amazing to behold. Seriously, I’m not going to drink a single beer today; my liver is begging for mercy. Ok, maybe one; but that’s it!!

Smaller than CBW, actually

Yet, the drinking of beer was really beside the point. As with any proper conference, the goals were information-gathering and networking. I did as much of both as I was able to, but burnout was unavoidable. I attended sessions on brewery financing (timely!), yeast management, sour beers (a panel discussion between Yvan De Baets and Jean Van Roy (of Cantillion,) moderated by Vinnie Cilurzo; just amazing). Certainly the most inspiring hour of the entire conference was a session entitled “Micro-startup via the Nano route” given by Matt McClug who started Schooner EXACT on a 1/2-barrel system in a storage space in Portland in 2008.  CBW’s existence proof?  I’d say so, definitely.

As for networking, I did my best but I’m not really the most extroverted guy you’ve ever met- I don’t love going up to people apropos of nothing and I certainly hate to interrupt ongoing conversations. Still, I caught up with some people I knew a little bit before (Dan of Ellicottville and Phin of Southern Tier, for example) and managed to meet the dean of the current crop of nano startups, Mike Hess of Hess Brewing in San Diego. I figure two brushes with fame is not bad overall- I don’t expect I made any impression on either Charlie Papazian or Pete Slosberg, but I was definitely thrilled to shake their hands and thank them both for sparking the passion that is driving me & all the CBWers.

But the thing I most took away from the conference was the total camaraderie of the Craft Beer Industry. I’m coming into it from academics, so I can’t speak for the level of this in other businesses, but I can’t help but think that the CBC is one of the friendlier events in the business world. (Did I mention all the beer? Can’t hurt!) This was very well summed-up by Mr. Slossberg in our short conversation. I thanked him for Pete’s Wicked Red in particular and we talked a bit about the rise and fall of his brand. In parting, I wished him well on his chocolate endeavor, which he informed me he had just sold, so I asked “Are you going back into beer- is that why you’re here?” He replied “Oh, this is like Old Home Week for me; I just came to say hi to a lot of friends at once.” I look forward to seeing it that way myself, one day.

More valuable today than on Jan 31st, 2011

CBW has a lot of work ahead, but the last 4 days confirmed that we’re all getting into the best industry in the world.  All the work will be so worth it when we can pour it into a glass someday for you, and—who knows?—maybe someday 4000 conference-goers as well.  Cheers!

So, okay, there weren’t quite any elephants (by the way, did you all notice I photoshopped — well, GIMPed — in the Psychobrew system to the Aladdin screenshot?) But still, it was awesome. So very awesome.

We’ve added to our Flickr stream, though the group picture was taken by the Psychobrew group and we’ll have to wait for them to send it to us. Apologies for fairly blurry photos: it was kind of cold in there, at least at first, and apparently my hands were shaking.

We can’t wait to be able to use these bad boys (which are much quieter than we expected); unfortunately, well, it’ll be a bit still. Ah well: shiny.

How could we top last week’s delivery of our kettles? After all, they’re big and shiny and awesome. I’ve seen them myself: they are. Oh yes, my pretties.

Well, I believe that despite the overwhelming shinyness of last week, we’ve managed to outdo it already; or at least we will by tomorrow. Shortly after the post went up, our TTB (Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau) application was mailed in. That’s huge: it’s the first of the two biggest hurdles we’ll be facing, with the second being the State Liquor Authority, or SLA (not to be confused with the Special Libraries Association, of which I was briefly a member). Ain’ no beer being brewed without a TTB license.

May not be entirely accurate

So yeah, that’s all well and good in an adult, delayed gratification sort of way. But what about now? Big. Shiny. Well, as of tomorrow we’ve got that covered too, as Chris from Psychobrew is going to be rolling in to personally deliver our single tier burner system. We’ve posted pictures of it before, but not our pictures. Not in our brewery. We haven’t been able to take photos of us in front of the setup, grinning foolishly.

I picture Chris as transporting it on the backs of elephants, like the Prince Ali song from Aladdin, or The Decemberists’ The Infanta. I don’t think this is the case. But then, I haven’t seen it, have I? Maybe there are a multitude of coronets. Time will tell.

Words With Friends soldiers on

(direct link)

The games continue to trickle in, with only three of the first round still being undecided. A second round game is done as well, though that’s to be explained by it having been a match between my wife and I, so we were more likely to come home after work and tell the other to ‘take [their] damn turn.’ When you’re not married you have to be somewhat more polite. She beat me, by the way. What? I didn’t say anything.

And then we’ve also had our first casualty, with Alex Placito having been eliminated by Dan Gigante. The irony here is that Alex’s co-conspirator, Eric, was given the bye and so hasn’t even started a game yet.

Until tomorrow, friends, when the five score pachyderm arrive.