Thursday, October 29, 2009

Earth Bread + Brewery Delivers

I suppose you could take that title to mean a few different things, but this past Monday evening, it was quite literal! Indiana Homebrewer Co-founder Emeritus Jon (aka santoslhalper) came back to western PA for a few days from Philly. On Monday night, he stopped in Indiana to visit a few of us who remain in town. Jon is now an assistant brewer at Earth Bread + Brewery in Philly.

'Round about 7pm, Jon and the rest of the crew (Dave, Justin, James, and Joe) popped over to my house for a tasting. Jon brought with him four growlers of Earth Bread + Brewery beers: Durham Strasse (a Berliner Weisse), 2bok4sur (a Doppelbock), Resin 2 Smile (an IPA), and Biere de Septembre (a biere de garde).

After those, we opened up a bottle of homebrew from an acquaintance of mine from work - it was superb sour Belgian ale and I hope that we'll get more soon. Finally, we cracked open the last four homebrews that a few of us have been working on with the 10-gallon all-grain system. We had a bitter, a saison, a lager, and pale ale.

All in all, a great evening. A big thanks to Jon for hauling growlers across the state for us. He left with a case of our homebrew, but I think we still got the better end of that deal!

Monday, October 05, 2009

2nd RateBeer Pittsburgh Gathering

I didn't get a chance until now to write up something about the terrific beer tasting I went to back in August at the Sharp Edge Creekhouse. You can check it out at The Hop Press.

That was a good day!

An Oktoberfest Wedding

On Saturday, my wife and I went to the wedding of one of her former coworkers/classmates. The reception was interesting in that it was an Oktoberfest theme. After the mass, we all went across the road to the hall, and the attached pavillion.

Before dinner, we all gathered at the covered, outdoor pavillion where a polka band played various German-Polish music. There were hot pretzels with mustards, and a veggie tray, and two beers on tap (Bud Lite and Yuengling, not real German beers).

The reception hall was set up with 10 different rows of tables. Roughly four tables per row. Each two tables were given a German region name, and each table of the region was given a German city name. This was a cool way to seat guests - find your region and city. Once you found your seat, the wedding 'table favor' was a nice dimpled beer glass with your name on a ribbon. Voila, you automatically had a way to get your beer for the rest of the reception.

The food was OK - brats, roasted chicken, potato salad and potato pancakes. And, of course, a German-chocolate cake.

The final touch - it was held in New Germany, PA.

Sunday, October 04, 2009

The Hop Press

There's a new feature over at RateBeer, if you're not a frequent visitor. They've started a new blog/media service called The Hop Press for some of the more frequent contributors, rather than sticking with the weekly articles. It's still in some development, but the content frequency has increased and will hopefully offer more correspondences from beer geeks 'on the street'. The few articles I wrote (about one year) have been archived at Nate's Notes. I hope to add articles a bit more frequently now.