Congratulations to the Albany Pump Station for winning the gold me
dal for American Style Brown at the Great American Beer Festival in Denver. Trust us, Kick Ass Brown is a well-named beer indeed. This is the third time this beer has won gold in Denver. Not too shabby.
It's hard to find any real details, but the Adirondack/Saratoga chapter of the American Red Cross is presenting the 11th annual "Battle of the
Brews" at Saratoga Race Course on Friday, August 22, from noon to 4:30 p.m. It will be held in the “Big Red Spring” area. This is the biggest weekend of the Saratoga racing season with the 139th running of the Travers Stakes, aka "The Mid-Summer Derby" on Saturday.
Tickets for the event are $25 per person. That price includes a commemorative 2008 pint glass. Last year, tickets went for $15 in advance and $20 at the door, and the glass would have cost you $5 or $7 depending on your ability to plan ahead.
Sixteen breweries will offer approximately three beers each for sampling and voting:
Adirondack Pub & Brewery
Anchor Brewing Co.
Black Dog
Boulder Beer
Brewery Ommegang
Brown’s Brewery
Cooper’s Cave Ale Company
Green Mountain
Harpoon Brewery
Long Trail Brewing Co.
Magic Hat Brewing
Olde Saratoga Brewing Co.
Paper City Brewery
Saranac Brewing Co.
Sierra Nevada Brewing Co.
Switchback Brewery.
Awards for People’s Choice and Judge’s Choice will be presented. Looks pretty solid, actually. Seeing as I will be at the track already, perhaps a little "field research" is in order.
You can get more information by calling the local American Red Cross Adirondack Saratoga Chapter at (518) 792-6545, or e-mail reehlc@usa.redcross.org. Proceeds benefit the Red Cross.
Hey, if you're in the area, it's certainly worth a stop. Cheers to one of our favorite breweries on making it into their teens.
We here at Beerjanglin' are, without doubt, a baseball-loving bunch. Our loyalties are a bit divided, sure (Red Sox Nation, Yankees Country, and whatever the hell superlative Mets fans use to describe themselves as a collective are all represented among our numbers), but when it all comes down to nuts and bolts, we enjoy getting together to drink some good beer and enjoy watching our true national pastime.
So, when we were perusing this site, which lists the coolest promotions for the upcoming season of Major League Baseball, something caught our eye. It was this logo: 
That's right. The Oakland A's are hosting a beer festival. On June 21, the technical first day of summer, no less.
According to the site, "The game’s not until 6PM, but come to McAfee Coliseum from 11AM to 1PM and sample beers from 30 breweries and listen to live music. Then go to the parking lot and tailgate. Can you tailgate in Oakland?
Admission is free with a game ticket, but you’ve got to pay $10 for a souvenir acrylic mug and two tastings. When you think about it, those might be the cheapest two beers you’ll ever buy at an MLB stadium."
After minutes of painstaking internet research, we uncovered a partial taplist from last year's event: Deschutes Black Butte Porter, Corona, Dos XX Lager, New Belgium Fat Tire, Skinny Dip, Heineken, Heineken Premium Light, Deschutes Inversion IPA, Deschutes Mirror Pond Pale Ale, Red Hook, Singha Lager, Singha Light Lager, Tecate Light, Trumer Pils, and Widmer Hefeweizen. While there are lame elements to this list (do you really need to waste taps on Singha and Singha Light? On Corona and Heineken?), there are some interesting picks (we are now intrigued by these Deschutes people). It's not perfect - far from, but credit to these folks for trying something different in an attempt to bring beer-nuts out to the ballpark. The odd timing notwithstanding (11 AM to 1 PM before a 6 PM game? Seriously?), this makes us wish we were somewhere near Oakland in June.
As usual, I had to broker a peace agreement between Mark Tichenor of Beercraft blog and our own Willie Moe over Pilsner Urquell. I was glad to do it by extending an olive branch to Mark at the CNY Brew Fest this past weekend. Imagine that Willie is Anwar Sadat, Mark is Menachem Begin and I am Jimmy Carter.
The beer blogging world can spin again. Let peace -- and beer! -- flow throughout the nation.
Not sure how it slipped by our collective attention, but we somehow missed that the 12th Annual Madison County Historical Society Hop Fest was held this past weekend in Oneida. Upstate New York was once the leading hop growing region in the country, accounting for nearly 90% of the nation's total hop production prior to the Civil War. Seriously, 90%! Check out this article for plenty more information. It's from 1996, and focuses mainly on Otsego County - still home to a couple of pretty solid breweries in Cooperstown Brewing and Brewery Ommegang - and on some fascinating history. It is well worth a read.
The Hop Fest is a wonderful idea and it's almost unbelievable that we've never heard of it over the past twelve years. Oneida, after all, is located just 30 miles from Syracuse and a bit over 100 miles from the Capital Region. The three day festival started off with a beer dinner at Bouckville's Landmark Tavern on Friday night. Saturday began with a food pairing session matching a brewery with a local restaurant at the Historical Society's grounds, followed by a three hour beer tasting that included over 20 (mostly regional) breweries. Sunday featured an all day hop tour of Madison County, with stops at several hop kilns as well as periodic pit stops for sustenance at local taverns.
Pretty interesting stuff. This article from the Oneida Dispatch gives a solid rundown of the
events. It features a nice bit on Brown's Brewing Company's (Troy, NY) seasonal Harvest IPA, made with New York State hops. It's a once yearly wet hopped IPA made exclusively with hops from Seneca and Rensselaer Counties. We haven't tried this year's batch yet, but last year's was absolutely fantastic - fresh hop nose, great prickly body, bitter but balanced finish - a pretty perfect IPA. It's really a wonderful thing to see a local brew pub doing this. How is it that we only hear about it through an article in another town's paper? We may have missed out on the Hop Fest, but a visit to Brown's is still within reach. Developing...
We must have beer festivals on the brain lately, or perhaps said fests are just in a New York state of mind. Over the past month or so...
The Empire State Brewing and Music Festival hit Syracuse on July 20...
Belgium came to Cooperstown on July 21...
Rochester's 11th annual Flour City Brewers Festival took place on July 29...
We recently mentioned Saratoga's (admittedly small time) 10th Annual Battle of the Brews, held on August 24...
As well as the inaugural (and very promising) Ithaca Brewfest, scheduled for September 8...
August 26 marked the 6th annual Buffalo Brewfest...
Pretty impressive run, no? It's been hectic enough that we probably missed an event or two in there, but you get the point; it has been quite a summer. Anyway, now comes word, courtesy of Rick Lyke, that the New York State Brewer's Association will have a booth at the State Fair in Syracuse. The stated goal is to "showcase the 59 breweries in the state and educate the public on the economic importance of brewing."
A different brewery will be featured daily, with 2 oz. samples from that brewery given to adults of legal age from 4 - 6 pm. Granted, it's a small step, but the New York State Fair does draw over a million visitors annually. In our experience, many of these folks are not opposed to free samples of just about anything.
It won't change the world (or even the state) over the course of a week and a half, but let's remember that craft beer is a segment of the market that currently owns about 5% of overall beer sales by dollar amount. Every little bit of exposure to the habitual Bud or Miller drinker counts for something. Seriously, this may prove to be a very good thing. Just one more reason to lament having been passed over a State Fair assignment at work again this year.
As long as we're on the subject of beer festivals, the inaugural Ithaca Brew Fest certainly deserves a mention. Scheduled for Saturday, September 8 from 4 - 8 pm at Ithaca's Stewart Park, this event promises "3 Live Bands & 30 Craft Breweries", which makes for a very promising base on which to build a brew fest. The event is co-sponsored in part by the Ithaca Beer Company, and looks to be a well planned event with a very nice roster of participating breweries.
For those not in the know, Ithaca is a pretty funky college town of some 30,000 or so residents located roughly an hour's drive southwest of Syracuse or northwest of Binghamton. As home to both Ithaca College and the Ivy League's Cornell University, it is the stereotypical example of the small, rural city whose culture is shaped almost entirely by the universities' presence. In other words, a beer festival sounds like a great idea for this town. Need more? Let us not forget that Ithaca is Gorges!
Breweries:
Avery Brewing - Boulder, CO
Brooklyn Brewery – Brooklyn, NY
Butternuts Beer And Ale - Garrattsville, NY
Chelsea Brewing Company New York, NY
Cooperstown Brewing – Milford, NY
Ellicottville Brewing Co. – Ellicottville, NY
Empire Brewing – Syracuse, NY
Flying Bison Brewing Company - Buffalo, NY
Harpoon Brewery – Boston, MA
High Falls Brewing – Rochester, NY
Ithaca Beer Company – Ithaca, NY
Keegan Ales – Hudson Valley, NY
Lagunitas Brewing Company – Petaluma, CA
Lake Placid Brewery - Lake Placid, NY
Magic Hat Brewing Company - South Burlington, VT
Market Street Brewing – Corning, NY
Middle Ages Brewing – Syracuse
Ommegang - Cooperstown, NY
Red Hook – Portsmouth, NH
Rohrbach Brewing Company - Rochester, NY
Roosterfish Brewing Co. - Watkins Glen, NY
Sackets Harbor Brewing Co. - Sackets Harbor, NY
Saranac/Matt Brewing Co. – Utica, NY
Smuttynose Brewing Company – Portsmouth, NH
Southern Tier Brewing – Lakewood, NY
Spanish Peaks Brewing Company - Polson, MT & Denver, CO
Excellent representation from New York State breweries, especially from Central and Western New York, as well as a smattering of others from the Northeast and a few nice West Coast entries. Tickets are $25 for advance purchase, $30 day of the event.
For a nice package deal including lodging, check this out:
Ramada Inn Ithaca Executive Conference Center
$139.00 + tax which will include a room, 2 tickets to the Brew Fest, a 6-pack of Ithaca Beer and Sunday Brunch for two.
Nothin' wrong with that.
10th Annual Battle of the Brews
Saratoga Race Course
Friday, August 24, 2007
Noon - 4:30 pm
There is a tasting fee of $15 in advance or $20 at the door. Buy a commemorative glass for $5 in advance, $7 day of. Not sure exactly how the whole thing works, but any combination of brewfest and Saratoga Race Course can't be too bad. Proceeds benefit the Saratoga chapter of the Amerian Red Cross. Here's a link to a "postcard" of the event.
Late notice on this one, and there's not too much information out there. We can tell you that eleven breweries participated last year. You can probably expect a good number of entries from the following regional breweries:
Olde Saratoga/Mendocino
Cooper's Cave
Davidson Brother's
Adirondack Pub & Brewery
Lake Placid
Great Adirondack
Keegan Ales
Saranac
Cooperstown Brewing
Brewery Ommegang
Brown's Brewing
Albany Pump Station
Worth a look, especially if you're planning on attending the Travers on Saturday.
We were rummaging through some of our old beer literature (before we had refined our rating system) and came upon a small notebook we kept one year ago to the day at the Ommegang Brewery's Belgian Brewfest.
As is our custom, we tried to keep an ongoing log of our beer-tasting experiences. Predictably, the handwriting gets worse and worse as the event goes on. But here, for lack of a better post, and to mark the one-year anniversary of our trek to Cooperstown, I present our brief -- some might say glib -- ratings of each beer.
NOTE: Two different scales were used for rating purposes. Bill used a letter-grade system, Javen used a four-star (****) system. Hopefully this will not be too confusing. Due to our ever-worsening mental state on that date, we can't always read our own writing from the event; please excuse spelling errors and/or mislabeled beer. We had a very good time at the brewfest, but our penmanship suffered, partially due to our slight inebriation, and slightly due to the fact that I was writing n a 4.5 x 3.5 inch notepad which had been dampened by the torrential monsoon that came down about halfway through the festival.
The Beers:
Brooklyn Blanc
Bill: B+, Javen: *** (out of ****)
Victory Whirlwind
Bill: A-, Javen: ** 1/2
Flying Bison Barnstormer
Bill: B, Javen: ** 1/2
A'Chouffe Houblon
Bill: C+, Javen ***
Middle Ages 11th Anniversary (Double Wheat)
Bill: B+, Javen: *** 1/2
Stone (not sure which, just says "2006", maybe the Vertical Epic 06/06/06, possibly Old Guardian)
Bill: B+, Javen: ** 1/2
Avery Reverend
Bill: B, Javen: ** 1/2
Avery Salvation
Bill: B+, Javen: ***
Dogfish Head
Bill (Raison D'Etre): B-, Javen (Festina Lente): *
Otter Creek Holy Otter
Bill: B, Javen: ***
Otter Creek Otterbahn
Bill: B-, Javen: ** 1/2
The Shed - Hoppy Illumination
Bill: B, Javen: ***
Appalachin Hefeweizen
Bill: B+, Javen: ***
Appalachin Grand Cru
Bill: B, Javen: ***
Butternut Dark (or maybe Bark) Sleep
Bill: B, Javen: ** 1/2
Butternut Weinniessie
Bill: B, Javen: ** 1/2
Weyerbacher Prophecy
Bill: B, Javen: ***
Weyerbacher Merry Monks
Bill: B-, Javen: ***
Troegs Holiday
Bill: B-, Javen: ***
Troegs Naked Elf
Bill: B, Javen: ***
Iron Hill Belgian Wit
Bill: B, Javen: ** 1/2
Unibroue Fin du Monde
Bill: B, Javen: ***
Blanche de Chamble'
Bill: B+, Javen: ** 1/2
We won't be attending this year, however, we assume the festival will somehow soldier on without us.
The Third Annual Microbrewery Festival and Contest will be held as part of Lobsterfest '07 on Saturday, June 9, in Albany's Washington Park. The details:
Microbrewery Festival and Contest Schedule:
Day of event, limited tickets will be available at Lobster Festival Information Booth (cash, checks with I.D., Visa and MasterCard accepted) Or at Microbrewery Tent (cash only).
Live Entertainment in the Microbrewery Tent 2 - 6 pm
I went to it last year. It was pretty good but there were some disappointments. There were about 15 breweries or so and they each had three beers. They were supposed to have a light, a dark, and one in the middle but they kind of each brought what they had. You get a card when you get there and you can basically try a 3-4 oz sample of each beer once. At the end, you can vote for your favorite.
As, for the disappointments, Ommegang was there but didn't have Three Philosophers with them. Bummer. Also, the setup kind of sucks with a tent outdoors and very little seating or tables. The ground ended up getting kind of nasty too.
I'll probably go again this year though.
