National Homebrewers Conference 2008

Acting completely professional on Pro Night

More Marylanders

Me & Randy Mosher

Mouthfulls

Eyefulls

Tom's updated packaging

Whatever that was was good

Non-stop pouring

Tom's updated credentials

My anti-Tom-smell nose-guard

Cincinnati bound!

Beer vacation!!

We're off to stay with our dear friend Thermos who lives as a recluse in uncharted northern Kentucky. When we're not making beer and/or bad smells at his country cottage, we'll be attending the 30th annual AHA Conference across the river in Cincinnati. The tentative agenda includes, but is not limited to: brewing, stewing, p.u.-ing, a visit to the Creation Museum, gorging ourselves on Goetta, a cheap beer taste-off, and completing the training of one insanely brutal one-eyed crippled pitbull for her return to the doggy octagon vs. the neighbor's elderly, gravy-soaked Pomeranian.

A full and tedious photo retrospective is pending our return home.

Secret Ingredients: Dragonfruit

This is the first of many short posts which shall document our secret brewing ingredients.

Enter the Dragonfruit.

Its debut was in Venom. 5 gallons from a DuClaw group brew were treated with Dragonfruit in the secondary.

The results: An amazingly fuchsia version of one of our favorite local beers.

New Brew: taIPAn

Taipans are large, venomous snakes endemic to Australia. The IPA is a style of beer endemic to our refrigerators. Plus, we're dangerously low on 71. As I am not yet brave enough to put vegemite into a brew, I settled on kiwi fruit. No Simcoe was spared for this one. It did all the work for bittering and flavor. At knockout, an ounce of Cascades went in to steep for twenty minutes along with sixteen kiwis which were brutally flayed alive and roughly chopped. A taste of the sweet wort set our anticipation levels to high. The current state of fermentation is one of most violent we've seen.

Okay, now let's get down to brass tacks. We've eaten a lot of weird things over the years, but sometimes the line of decency is crossed and all decorum vanishes. Yes, even I gave pause and nearly fell ill upon witnessing one of the most repulsive feats of gastronomic criminality to date.

SOMEONE PUT MAYONNAISE ON AN ITALIAN SAUSAGE

I can't even type it without gagging a little. And to make matters worse, a Janis Joplin song came on about mid-sausage. I contemplated getting down on all fours in the yard and eating grass in hopes of a cathartic vomit session. Sometimes great institutions arise from trauma, so check your mail for the first ever Porch Demerit.

OG=1.065 IBU=65 SRM=10

New Brew: Chico and the Mandarin

This time last year, we brewed Orangina Galena -- a hoppy pale ale with a goodly amount of Orangina added at bottling. Chicks dug it. This year's orange offering is Chico & The Mandarin. It's very pale (The Man) with a nod to witbier via some coriander and wheat, then finally fermented on some mandarin oranges. Chico, of course, makes his contribution as the tireless workhorse yeast of which we're so unabashedly fond. There are now unconfirmed reports of the mandarins actually turning the beer a very bright orange. Creepy!

I carried the theme over to a couple t-bone pork chops thinking we'd be the only two on the porch. They were marinated for hours in Mandarin Orange soda, soy sauce, Chinese 5-spice and Sriracha. As luck would have it...interlopers encroached! Fortunately, they made restitution with BBQ shrimp & mango skewers. And so it was. We gorged on grilled shellfish, turkey, chicken and pig. Someone who had slightly more pig than others coined the day's top phrase: "Oh my god. That pork is RETARDED!"

Warning: There was frank talk of pig tails, brains, tongue, feet and ears gracing future menus. Recipes are in the works.

OG=1.06 IBU=30 SRM=6?