1) We couldn’t be more grateful for the support we received in 2011, and we promise you beer asap in 2012. Delicious, fresh, robustly hopped (remember, Pale Ale out of the gate) beer in growlers to go, even. When? Though it gets wearisome to have to preface the answer to the inevitable question with “well, you know, it’s hard to say…” we know we’re really closing in, too.  January was a deluge of construction, and February for at least making beer seems reasonable.  How much longer it will take to be able to sell it, alas… is really, indeed, far harder to pin down.  Let’s just say we’ve gone at least Rounds 1 & 2 with the NY SLA, and so far, so good.  Let’s see what Round 3 brings.  In the meanwhile, kegs are on their way, all the Kickstarter stuff is in-production, and we are anxious indeed to start playing with our brewing toys.

2) File this under “I read Beernews.org so you don’t have to,” but imagine my surprise–and pleasure–at finding this video from TEDx San Antonio, in which Freetail Brewing‘s founder Scott Metzger discusses a transition from economies of scale to economies of authenticity; a very apt description of the rise of craft beer.  Er, perhaps Craft Beer(tm), that is.  Anyway, the theme of my own talk at Buffalo’s TEDx event back in September was slightly different, but in some ways complimentary or even overlapping. I was arguing for embeerment in Buffalo–or wherever, perhaps San Antonio, right?–as being great for community revival, when done on what I guess he might call a scale of authenticity.  I think we’ll continue to see a lot of creative financing–kicstarter, public stock–as craft beer expands, and I like to think small scale hops farming and malting will also nestle right into that.

3) Squibs Book Review: America Walks Into A Bar, by Christine Sismondo.  I got this book for Yuletide, and devoured it.  Yum!  Actually, it’s a nice segue from the last point, because the book is really a socio-cultural history of the role taverns (and saloons, pubs, speak-easys and grog shops) played in the history of our country.  So, not really a history of beer itself, but fascinating to anyone who considers our relationship with alcohol and beer more generally.  The writer, who teaches English at Reyerson College in Toronto, presents a nicely paced survey of not only the important things that went on in taverns, but also the way our relationship with the institution itself evolved over the course of our history, focused mostly on the pre-Prohibition era.  Indeed, the book seems a little skimpy on the history thereafter, though I totally loved the chapters detailing how women gained acceptance (or didn’t) at the brass rail and the critical role bars played in the Gay Rights movement.  My favorite anecdote, however, was that Mr. Theodore Geisel, whom we tend to better know as Dr. Suess, authored this fine anti-Prohibition poster to the right in 1942 (Yes, the Prohibitionists didn’t just curl up and die after repeal).  Sismondo notes that Dr. Suess’s father was president of the Springfield Brewery, and so put out of work in 1920.  Apparently, Mr. Geisel was not one to forgive and forget.

4) She Blinded Me With Science!  This week’s Economist has a very interesting article on the relationship between flavor (well, aroma really) and music.  Turns out, we’re all synesthetes, at least to some degree.  The research, soon to be published in Chemical Senses and conducted by researchers at Oxford, looked at whether people would agree on the musical tones that paired with various smells, and found that indeed, there was a rather robust patterning of results.  They had 30 subjects go through 20 odors from a wine-tasting kit, smells that ranged from smoke to apple to violet.  For each smell, the subject chose the tone that best matched it from an array of 52 sounds which contrasted not just specific pitches but also timbre: the type of instrument playing the notes varied from piano to woodwind to brass.

The researchers’ first finding was that the volunteers did not think their request utterly ridiculous. It rather made sense, they told them afterwards. The second was that there was significant agreement between volunteers. Sweet and sour smells were rated as higher-pitched, smoky and woody ones as lower-pitched. Blackberry and raspberry were very piano. Vanilla had elements of both piano and woodwind. Musk was strongly brass.

Fascinating.  Even more interesting was some follow-up research, only briefly mentioned, in which the same researchers looked at the impact of background music on flavor perception.  In that study, they found that the perceived bitterness of toffee varied depending on whether the eater was listening to high- or low-pitched music while evaluating.  Note to beer judges: if you’re on an IPA flight, might be a good idea to modulate those hops with some Lustmord over your iPod.

5) Behold! when you search You Tube for “beer twinkie,” of course you get drunk people eating said confectionary treat on web cams.  Exciting!  But you also get Deep Fried Corn Flake Beer-Battered Twinkies, from gardenfork.tv  Brilliant, or Insane?  You be the judge:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHmRUxJj54s

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?)

Kickstarter

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.

Construction

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.

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.

Item the first: Glassware

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.

Item the second: Kickstarter surveys

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.

Item the third: SOPA and Godaddy

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.

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!

Well, yes and no.

It’s true that we all took some time to relax and enjoy our families. After everyone had left on Christmas evening I settled in with my bottle of Heatwave, the prototype American Barleywine that Rudy had made, and played two games of Forbidden Island. My four adventurers drowned both games, but it was still fun. And besides, I had an excellent beer.

We’ve been playing more than board games, though. Why, just today I picked up these lovely fellows:

Stickers!

That’s right, the Kickstarter stickers are in and, in my admittedly biased opinion, they look pretty spiffy. The growler koozie design prototype is nearly done, and by next week we’ll have the prototype design for the glasses and shirts.

Then there’s the SLA: this morning our revised paperwork was resubmitted to the state, and while we know it’s not going to happen tomorrow or anything it will hopefully be the last time we have to correct anything.

Remind me of that in a month. I’ll laugh, I know.

Next week, perhaps, a construction update!

We offered the ability to give a pledge as a gift for Christmas, Hanukkah, Festivus or what-have-you, and I was pleased to see that people took us up on the offer. Some letters were mailed out today and some were sent as PDF attachmentss to be wrapped up by the giver themselves. It’s likely too late to get physical letters sent out, but if you’re one of the 36 people who haven’t filled out the survey yet and you were planning on giving the gift of CBW we’ll be more than happy to send you a digital letter to print out.

It's a DOORWAY! Maybe that's not exciting to you. It's awesome, though.

Work on the rewards is under way as well. The coasters, well, you’ve seen them being made. Stickers should be ordered by the end of the week, and soon afterward the growlers and pint glasses and shirts and so on. It will be a shade over a month before the physical rewards are ready, due to them having to be, y’know, made, but we’ll keep everyone informed.

In non-Kickstarter news: both the SLA and construction on the brewery are progressing well. We’ve been fingerprinted and now the state has sent back the inexplicable yet inevitable list of things we need to fix, amend or change. It’s a law of nature that no matter how carefully you look over your application, no matter how many times you check and double check and confirm that everything is right, well, it won’t be. Let’s call that the Camazotz Principle.

Mill room: now walled in and fireproof!

It’s still good news, though. As soon as I’m done writing this I’ll amend my personal questionnaire and then we’ll be about ready to send in our changes. We’re moving through the system, and even if it might at times seem like a glacial pace it’s still forward progress. The end is in sight.

And construction? It’s like an entirely different building! There are walls, man. The wall that Kickstarter backers are going to sign, right there. The mill room is enclosed, the sink is where it’s going to be, we have a doorway! Most of one, at least. The concrete has been poured for the sidewalk leading up the side of the building into said doorway, which is how all of you are going to enter the building to get beer.

Why, the only other thing I could ask for right now is some snow.

Ethan has just enlogoed a coaster. Yeah, we put "en-" in front of any noun to make it a verb. It's our thing.

Now then, the rewards. A survey will be going out soon (likely tomorrow) to all our backers. Once you give us your address, shirt sizes, etc all you need to do is sit back and wait while we put the rewards together for you. If you’re splitting up your pledge for multiple levels as gifts we’ll need to talk a bit more, but it should be smooth sailing for everyone.

We’ve already begun work on pressing coasters. Kickstarter backers know this already, but on Saturday we headed to the WNY Book Arts Center to use their press. We had already done a batch of black designs and so they set us up with a custom mixed green paint this time. I think they look awesome, and it was very interesting to see all the printing apparatuses they have. I’ve been becoming increasingly interested in handmade printing thanks to seeing others (with more talent) do it, and while I haven’t actually made anything except about 15 coasters last Saturday I’m excited to head back to WNYBAC in the future and get my print on.

We recorded a short video while we were there, and while I’m sure it shows that it was filmed and edited on an iPhone I think it does a good enough job of showing you the process. The coaster printer is quite a piece of machinery, and it was a lot of fun to embed our logo onto formerly blank coasters.

Endless fields of coasters

One final note: Kickstarter is an awesome site (I backed three other projects during the time that ours ran), and WNYBAC is also running a project right now! In The Basement, No One Can Hear You Screen has three days left and has already met its goal, but why not help out another great local cause?

Again, from the bottoms of our hearts: thank you, and let’s all embeer Buffalo!

Last week’s post laid out the case for why you should still donate. It’s still worth reading, and even if we don’t make it to any of the secondary goals I mentioned we still love you all. As friends; most of us are married.

Now that we’re into the final days of the project, we thought we would up the ante. We have two new options to perhaps sweeten the deal. If you’d prefer not to have your deal sweetened, that’s fine, but we think these are both interesting options.

I can see through walls!

Update the first: Give the gift of local beer

It’s 17 days until Christmas. That’s shocking to me, and not just because as of now there’s no snow on the ground (I personally quite enjoy snow and can’t get into a festive mood without it; I don’t speak for CBW as a whole). Perhaps you don’t know what to get the beer lover in your life, or you’d like to add in a little something extra. Let us help.

You will be able to mark any donation as a gift for someone else. They’ll get notified when things are ready, they’ll get to sign the wall and they will get to go to any Kickstarter only events (if applicable). None of the rewards will be ready by Christmastime, but in their stead we will send a nice letter (to them or you, if you’d like to wrap it) informing them that a donation has been made in their name and detailing what rewards they’ll be getting.

We’re also making it possible to have two rewards with one backing: let’s say you want to get yourself the $50 level and give a friend the $25. You can pledge $75 and we’ll make that happen. You can include three rewards in one pledge, or four, and so on. Any amount can be split into smaller amounts.

“Isn’t this going to make logistics more complicated?” Yes, almost certainly. But as the person who will be responsible for it all, I think the idea is good enough to more than make up for the potential headache of adding more rows in a spreadsheet.

Share the cheer. Give someone you know a CBW Kickstarter package.

Look ma, it's insulated!

Update the second: double down

No, not the pile of grease masquerading as a KFC sandwich.

As of today, the $50 level (and all levels above it) contain two Kickstarter exclusive glasses. That means switching from the $25 level to the $50 gives you an additional glass as well as a Kickstarter exclusive t shirt. We think it’s worth the upgrade, and we hope you’ll agree.

To be clear: this applies to everyone at or above the $50 level, even if you had already backed the project. You get an extra glass, and you get an extra glass. Everyone! Gets! An extra glass! We’re not in the business of punishing those of you who made our project successful. The $500 level and above isn’t doubled to four glasses, however. Sorry.

Other Kickstartery goodness

Now, we understand that it might help our case if we could unveil what the glass will, in fact, look like. We had hoped to do that in this update but it will unfortunately have to wait a little bit. Take this to heart, though: we are confirming that it won’t be a shaker pint. We’re waiting on a quote from the glass company, and we don’t want to announce a glass only to find out it’s twice as expensive as its peers. Another nanobrewery did announce in the past day that they’ll be using the shape, however. Hunt away if you’re really dedicated.

There’s no glass design, but how about a sticker? The iconic image at the top of this section was created by Craft Beer Talk‘s Chris Groves and will be adorning the sticker coming with every reward. Stick it somewhere and be reminded of your mission! Buffalo is going to be embeered, and you’re playing a part.

Next week: the total raised, and hopefully some more reward mockups.