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Posted by Chris Colby on Tuesday, 13 December 2011 in BYO Brew Blog

Beer Here and Beer There

This is blog entry about drinking beer here, and drinking beer there.

Beer Here (Austin, Texas)

I went to the Austin ZEALOTS' (my homebrew club's) Christmas party this weekend. It's been a good year to be a ZEALOT and we had a great party to celebrate. Our Primary Fermenter, Corey Martin, and his wife, Angela, host the party every year at their house in Round Rock.

For the past several years (eight now?), there has also been a chili cook-off associated with party and this year the competition drew 29 entrants. (How much electricity does it take to run 29 Crock Pots, I wonder?) Everyone at the party had the opportunity to try each of the dishes and vote on their favorite three. This year there were a lot of interesting chilis in the mix, but the winners were pretty much straight up Texas chilis (meat, no beans), and insanely good.

I'm not sure how many kegs of homebrew were present . . . but it was a bunch. Our Viking multi-tap board, which we use at club events and holds 11 taps, was full as well as Corey's kegerators, some portable kegerators as well as some stray kegs. And there were some tasty beers in the mix. Corey had the Munich lager that he won the Sam Adams Longshot contest with on tap. The most interesting beer of the evening was probably the coffee beer made by Dave Ebel and Keith Bradley. Served through a Randall of coffee beans and vanilla beans, it had a wonderfully enticing coffee aroma.

As always, there were a lot of spontaneous "verticals," as people broke out old commercial beers. And, club member Mike Simmons actually brought eight (I think) different types of honey for the meadmakers in the group to taste and compare.

In all, another great ZEALOTS Christmas party capping a great year for the club — we won both the Bluebonnet (Dallas) and the Dixie Cup (Houston) on the way to winning the Lone Star Circuit. Plus, the whole nation will be drinking ZEALOT beer when Sam Adams releases this year's Long Shot beers.

Finally, here's a picture of party host and ZEALOT Primary Fermenter (club president) Corey. What are we doing in Corey's garage with a funnel full of Cascade hops? Let's just say it's a cherished ZEALOTS tradition and not worry too much about the details.

Beer There (Turnout, Belgium)

As I mentioned in an earlier blog entry, I went to Belgium this summer. BYO's publisher (Brad Ring) took Kiev Rattee (our advertising director) and me there as a reward for 10 years of service to BYO. And it was awesome.

In later blogs, I'll run down all of the highlights. We toured some classic breweries, some old breweries and some brand new breweries. I'll also be writing a story for BYO on Belgian Tripel, including some information I got when we toured Westmalle Trappist Brewery.

For this entry, I just want to describe a beer cafe we went to one afternoon in Turnout, Belgium. On our trip, we certainly went to trendier beer cafes (including Moeder Lambic) and cafes with much larger selections (2004 beers on the menu at Cafe Delerium), but this cafe — In Den Spytighen Duvel — was one of my favorite "little" moments on the trip.

In Den Spytighen Duvel was a fairly small place, with a rustic interior. Not surprisingly, the walls were covered with old beer posters and related items. The beer list wasn't huge, but what they did have was good stuff — and certainly way more than we could have worked our way through in an afternoon. (And, like a lot of places we went, not everything on the beer list was available right then.)

As with every beer bar in Belgium, when you ordered a beer, it came in the glassware from the brewery. We had a few beers there and it was a nice, relaxing afternoon. It was nice to be somewhere where people took beer seriously, but without excessive affectation.

Across the street from Spytighen Duvel was this club. I thought that was funny.

I know I've been dragging my feet about posting the details of my Belgium trip, but it's still fresh in my mind. (I'm still telling people, "I just got back from Belgium," and probably will under next summer.) I'll get to the brewing and insanely cool stuff later, but today I just wanted to recall sitting in a Belgian beer cafe in the middle of the day, enjoying a fresh Duvel and appreciating how good beer can really make everything nicer than it would ordinarily be.

Last modified on Monday, 16 July 2012

Chris Colby

I learned to brew beer right around the same time that I discovered good beer. I started graduate school at Boston University in 1990 and quickly began enjoying the local brews — particularly Harpoon Ale, Sam Adams Boston Ale and Dock Street Amber (from Philadelphia) — that were popping up. There was even a brewpub, Commonwealth Brewing, with three or four regular brews and a new “seasonal” beer every other month or so. I also tried out imported beers, whenever possible. Coming from South Dakota, where Beck’s was an exotic import, this was an eye-opening experience.

A couple of graduate students in my department brewed beer and I was immediately intrigued. I learned the basic extract brewing method from them, but was hampered for a long time by substandard equipment — especially the lack of decent-sized brewpot — and having to brew in a small Boston apartment.

My early brewing efforts were also hampered by my lack of knowledge. As a graduate student in biology, I could have easily dug into the advanced homebrew literature at the time, but I figured I had enough things to study and just wanted a nice, easy hobby that ended up with me drinking beer. And, even though the stuff I made wasn’t great, it did get drunk on poker night with no complaints.

I got a nudge in the right direction from a friend of mine, John Weerts. I went to college with John and would see him over the holidays as my folks had moved to Kansas City, where he lived. I taught him how to brew on one of those occasions, but then he struck out on his own. He joined is local brewclub (Kansas City Bier Meisters), stepped up to all-grain brewing and started making some really good beer. Years later, he visited me in Boston and brought along a keg of rye beer, which was fantastic. I immediately knew I was missing out on something.

On my next stop at my local homebrewshop (The Modern Brewer), I bought every book they had, including George Fix’s “Principles of Brewing Science” and Greg Noonans “Brewing Lager Beer.” Armed with the knowledge from these books, a new brewpot, and a ridiculously cobbled together all-grain set-up, I brewed a mini-mash version of a porter recipe of mine. It was the best beer I had made so far.

Fast forward to today, and I still think that gaining the right knowledge is the most important step to brewing great beer. (My brewing set-up is still almost comically jury-rigged, but it works.) I have read a number of professional brewing texts (and recommend the two volume “Malting and Brewing Science” set by Briggs, Hough, Stevens and Young), keep track of many of the great homebrewing forums out there, and am a member of the Austin ZEALOTS homebrew club.

The best way to gain brewing knowledge, however, is to brew. And, I normally brew about 20 batches per year. In the 15 or so years I’ve been a homebrewer, I have brewed ales, lagers and sour beers. I have tried most of the common traditional brewing techniques and experimented with new techniques (including my reiterated mashing techniques). Although primarily an all-grain brewer, my interest in extract brewing has been rekindled due to new techniques (such as the extract late procedure) and I have recently experimented with ways to improve partial mashing (especially making dark beers with a partial mash procedure).