Rattle'n'Hum Mug Club Mug

Back in Sept '09, I completed the challenge "40 Beers in 30 Days" in order to become a part of the illustrious Mug Club at the still-new, always-good craft beer bar Rattle'n'Hum. Since then, I've enjoyed Mug Club discounts every time I go in. One thing missing though? MY MUG!

First I had to wait because they place mug orders in large groups to cut down on shipping cost, then I had to wait because my mug was the only one to come back messed up. Well, this past week I was finally introduced to the finely constructed glass that will call my poured beer home (albeit very temporarily...its easy to drink beer quickly at RNH).





A bit self-indulgent as a blog post, yes. But it was a fun thing to do that pushed me to try much more beer that I might not have normally tried. So go get drinkin' and get yourself a mug!

Beer in My Inbox

A few weeks ago, right in the midst of my move from Brooklyn to Jersey City, I participated in another "Beer It Forward" with some fellow beer enthusiasts. The best part about the BIF in comparison with a straight trade is the surprise. You send beer off to someone, but they're not the one who sends beer to you. And in most cases, you don't know who you're receiving from OR what you'll get until the day the box arrives. For reference, here's a post regarding the last one I participated in.

As you can see above, the box I got was pretty awesome. I've never had the La Folie before, which I've been hearing about forever. Then you've got two excellent Russian River brews that you can't get here in NY/NJ. THEN there's the beers from Deschutes (which I'll be visiting in Oregon next month) capped off with Port, Ska and Oskar Blues beers. It was a great package.

I've already had the Ten FIDY, Gordon, Hop Hendge and Red Chair, but have been holding out on everything else. At LEAST one of those bottles is disappearing this weekend.

Cheers!

Makin' Chili with Award-Winning Homebrewed Smoke Ale!

Yes. Its been a long time. I've been neglecting. But we're back in business!

Just last month, my homebrewing team and I along with our lady friends traveled to Stratton, Vermont for a weekend of skiing, beer and food. One of our big priorities outside of hitting the slopes and drinking great beer was making chili with our First Place receiving homebrew "Smokey Smoke".


tim and jeff adding smokey to the chili

Tim along with Jeff's girlfriend Cinzia created a delicious chili from scratch that was clearly only missing one very important ingredient.



This was a great idea but there was one sole problem. We wanted to drink Smokey Smoke. And we wanted to drink a lot of it. So we were only willing to risk the "loss" of one bottle to the chili. For that amount of chili, it would really serve to add more to get more of the beer's flavor.



So overall, a delicious idea that would just need a larger amount next time around. Unfortunately the Smokey supply has been even further dwindled (surprised?), so it might be tough to do this season. We'll definitely be making the beer again though so here's to giving it another shot in Winter '10-'11!

Stone Skips Across the Pond

It's been awhile. I've been busy moving from Greenpoint Brooklyn to Jersey City, NJ. The move is now nearing completion and beer blogging will start to pick up again. For now, if you haven't seen them already, please watch Stone Skips Across the Pond. Its a well produced series of videos documenting the guys from Stone traveling to Norway to brew with Nøgne Ø then moving on to Scotland to brew with BrewDog.

NYC Homebrew Competition Results

This past Sunday was the NYC Homebrewers Guild "Homebrew Alley 4", their fourth annual homebrewing competition. As I stated in the previous post, we entered 5 of our beers.

In our testing of the beers the night before dropping them off for entry, we determined that our Number 2 English Barleywine and our Smoke Ale were our best attempts, and we hoped we would maybe place with one of them.



Well, I'll be! Above: (from L to R) Tim Bullock, Jeff Quinn and myself, John Kleinchester. Award-winning homebrew team! We were honored to receive First Place for our "Smokey Smoke" in the Smoke Ale category. We also took home Second Place for our "Number 2" English Barleywine in the Strong Ale category. At that point we were already more than happy with the results. But that wasn't enough! At the end of the ceremony, competition organizer Vlad Kowalyk announced that our Smoke Ale actually won Third Place Best of Show (out of 370 entries)! This was the crowning achievement.

Not only did we get to take home those awesome ribbons, but we also got PRIZES too. For the first two awards we got to select prizes from a table of wonderful choices from various charitable beer-related donations. In the end we took home a 50lb bag of grain (to make more homebrew of course) and a bottle of StarSan (a homebrew equipment cleaner, not cheap).



Before leaving we were able to get some score sheets for all of our entries, so hopefully for the ones that didn't do as well, we may be able to pinpoint where we went wrong and improve the recipes for the next time around. We split a cab back to Brooklyn (its hard to bring a 50lb bag of grain from Chelsea to Williamsburg) and celebrated our surprising victories with the very beers that got us there.



We also were delighted to learn that our Third Place Best of Show win actually garnered us an additional prize... a $50 Gift Card to Brooklyn Brew Shop. A timely prize as we're going to be expanding our homebrewing to 3 separate micro-nano-breweries instead of just two.



All in all, it was a great night and we're really glad we decided to enter. Thanks to the NYC Homebrewers Guild and all the BJCP judges AND thanks to those who came out to show their support for the Ten Dudes Brew Team: Heather, Cinzia, Jared, Pat, Charlie, Gille, Amy and Mike.

For a complete list of winners, check out the Homebrew Alley website.