The Session No. 75: The Business of Brewing

Holy hell does it feel like last months Sessions post was just last week. April's was a good topic as is the one for May. I'm just not sure if I have much to contribute.

The May edition of The Session is penned by Chuck Lenatti of All Brews. His subject? The business of brewing beer. I've certainly assisted in many of mine and my father's homebrew concoctions. I've also certainly fantasized about being a brewer. After all, don't we look at a lot of our local brewers as if their athletes or celebrities? At least it comes off that way to me.

The closest I've come to gong all-in and starting a brewery is telling my father to stop being delusional and to snap back into reality. He'll consistently spew off into his own tangent claiming we should start a brewpub/brewery. That's definitely not happening anytime soon.

If the beer selection was up to me, it would mostly be pumpkin and blueberry ales. We would be running to the bank really fast. Thankfully there are braver people out there than I. They can also make some awesome beer.

To make it short and sweet, I have no business being in the actual business of brewing commercially. I'd much rather leave it to the professionals.

Monday Rant: White House Honey Ale isn't a Big Deal

Hope everyone got to have some fantastic craft beer while celebrating Labor Day yesterday. I obviously took the day off from posting as this is a Monday Rant on a Tuesday.

Over the weekend the White House finally released the infamous home brewing recipes involving honey from the Rose Garden. If you want to find the actual source, along with the actual recipes of what's being brewed in the nation's most famous estate just click here.

From what I can gather, there was an online petition put together in order to force the White House's hand so that it would release the recipes for what's being brewed. I just don't understand what all of the madness is about. Who cares?

Is it really that important that we know the actual recipes for these beers? Why should any of this be considered public record? I find it intriguing that there's brewing taking place in the White House for possibly the first time in history, but I don't feel the urge to demand that I have the recipe, too. I'm quite content assisting my father in developing our own pumpkin ale recipe.

Stout Paired With Cookies

A few weeks ago, I wrote a blog post about certain pairings with wine and how I looked forward to experimenting with wine/food pairings as well as continuing to explore pairings with beer.

Not long after I had completed the post I came across a handful of chocolate chip/walnut and peanut butter/Reese's Pieces cookies. We have plenty of homebrewed stout lying around. So, I decided to crack open a bottle to see how it went with the cookies.

Believe what you are seeing. those are Reese's Pieces in cookies.

I'm sure many beer fans enjoy the chocolate-on-chocolate pairing, such as the stout with the chocolate chip cookies. It wasn't bad, but the complementary flavors I got from pairing the stout with the peanut butter cookies was fantastic.

The chocolate and peanut butter flavors bounce off of the other wonderfully. It was kind of like a peanut butter cup infused with a shot of coffee.

I don't think I'm done with pairing experimentation with this beer. Since there's plenty coffee flavor as there is chocolate and malt, one would think this would be an ideal beverage for breakfast. I'll keep you updated if I can come across a stack of chocolate chip pancakes with a side of sausage links one day soon!

Beer Review: Beer Snob Sr.'s "Wurst" Lager

Serving Type: Home-brewed

ABV: Approximately 4.5 percent

Appearance: Wurst Lager doesn't exactly have the clarity of your typical American-style light lager, but has it's own characteristic golden-glow to it. There was plenty of fizziness and bubbles in the beer's body. The head was fluffy and white. I noticed the head's liveliness increased a few minutes after the initial pour, as compared to most head's fizzing off after time expires.

Smell: I got plenty of fruitiness when I smelled this. The main scent was a favorable aroma of apples.

Taste: The apple scent translates to a pleasant taste on the front of the tongue. The carbonation also feels very active once you take a swig. The body feels very bubbly. Oddly enough, there isn't any after taste to this beer. It seems like it's there for a slight second, but just disappears. I've never came across this before.

Overall Rating: 

Not a bad beer, for being home-brewed. It's named for the day Beer Snob Sr. started the initial brewing process on which he beer-boiled bratwurst. The smell is amazing, as I'm a big fan of fruit beers. The taste is pretty favorable, but the aftertaste pulls a trick better than Harry Houdini.

Easy Beer Label Generator

After a bit of experimentation

I recently came across an interesting link on CraftBeer.com which detailed a website that enabled anyone to create and download their very own beer label. Everyone used generators like the one that made yourself into a South Park character a few years back. This is essentially the same thing, but for people like myself that love their beer.

The generator appears to be fully customizable and would be perfect to the numerous home brewers out there. From what I can tell you can easily download your label and post it anywhere. It shouldn't be too hard to take the label that you made and run it through another program to mass produce it for a certain number of bottles.

They say that brewing is truly an art. After a quick dive into this application I see no way to argue that statement. This generator is worth a few seconds of time. Enjoy the label creating.