Beer Diary...

Fellow Zymurgeek and assistant brewer at Boulder Creek Brewing Company Joe Yuhas was kind enough to invite me up to the brewery to sample some beer and talk to the head brewer Matt Heber about what it's like to brew beer deep in the redwoods of the San Lorenzo Valley. From Santa Cruz, I drove up the twisty highway 9 to Boulder Creek where today you can't tell that this was once the busiest logging town in California. Two billion board feet of redwood was hauled out of these hills by rail car beginning back in the late 1800's. By the 1940's the logging slowed and cabins were built, transforming Boulder Creek into a summer resort and hide out for those living in the bay area. Today, there are still a large number of vacation homes, but for the most part the houses and cabins that dot the wooded hillsides are permanent residences. Highway 9 becomes the main street as it straightens out down the center of town, and Boulder Creek Brewing is in one of the old commercial b...

I keep things pretty simple when in comes to using yeast, pitch a large, healthy amount. I feel confident in the beer quality if I can get a quick and vigorous ferment to occur within twelve hours. If I'm using the dry packets like Safale, which are inexpensive enough to be generous, I pitch three packets directly into ten gallons of aerated wort. I don't bother re-hydrating the yeast. If  I use Whitelabs liquid yeast I step the colony up a couple of times to about 200 billion cells for ten gallons. I have a plan in mind for subsequent beers to ferment that will get racked directly onto the yeast cake of the previous beer. Generally, I rack to the yeast cake two or three times. Subsequent batches ferment out withing three to four days because of the size and health of the yeast cake in the fermentor. If I decide to salvage the yeast after fermentation, I will use a sanitized utensil (Pyrex measuring cup) to scoop the yeast from the bottom of the fermenter into a saniti...

I've received requests for the syllabus of my five week brewing course that I teach here in California. I want to make the course available to those that would like to duplicate the system that I use by publishing the hand-outs that I provide the students when conducting the classes. These hand-outs contain all of the information that is covered during the classes, but it is up to the teacher to bring the experience, knowledge and confidence in brewing to the equation to make the class successful. The plan I've developed is a comprehensive course from the beginning brewer level and then builds on that information to the advanced methods of homebrewing. I have spent some time developing the curriculum and over the years, have honed it down to a very usable process and I feel it is complete at this point in time. I want to make it available to anyone interested in teaching a brewing class in this format or using the information to develop their own criteria. Kee...

Using homebrew to cook with is a great way to make some delicious dishes and additionally you can proudly say that the 'secret ingredient' is beer I brewed myself. It highlights the creative process and gives me just one more way of saying to my wife  "Hey, look at me, I'm like a modern day renaissance man! Right?" Or, just a way to be inventive in the kitchen and have fun using beer to make good tasting food. I'm not locked into just homebrew. I'll use commercial beer too but I tend to weight the cost of good commercial beer over the results expected in a dish. Often times I'd just prefer to drink the $5 a bomber beer. The other night, with the help of the wife (actually, she did all the work while I lurched over her trying to help but really just getting in the way), I worked up a recipe for BBQ sauce that is just plain good. Spicy with a plenty of heat offset with the sweetness of brown sugar and a bottle of under attenuated belgian tripel I ha...

My mother used to always say "if you don't have anything good to say, then don't say anything at all", so with that in mind, I kept this post about Cannery Row Brewing Company pretty short. This is a new establishment located in the tourist arena of Monterey. Occupying the building that used to be the Spaghetti Factory restaurant. They boast a huge selection of beers on tap (73?) and pub fare food. I connected with my daughter who lives in nearby Pacific Grove and we walk together along the ocean from her house to the restaurant. We're finally getting a break in the rain here in California and the opportunity to enjoy the gorgeous length of coast between Pacific Grove and the old cannery row section of Monterey was impossible to resist. We breathed in the warm sun and the smell of the deep blue ocean that crashed along the rocky shore and when we reached CRBC we chose to sit outside in the patio area where I ordered a sampler platt...