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.

NYC Homebrew Competition: This Sunday 1/31 at Chelsea Brewing

Hey all! This coming Sunday afternoon, homebrewers and onlookers will converge upon Chelsea Brewing Company in Manhattan for "Homebrew Alley 4", the NYC Homebrew Competition presented by the New York City Homebrewers Guild. The beers in the photo above are the ones my brewing team and I (Ten Dudes Brewing) submitted:

"Number 2" - an English Barleywine that has been bottle-conditioned for 15 months
"Smokey Smoke" - a smoke ale brewed with weyermann and cherrywood smoked malt
"Wedding Wit" - a witbier created for fellow brewmate Tim's wedding
"Kölsch It" - an (unfortunately cloudy) kölsch
"Depressed Umpire IPA" - an American IPA that was just bottled the day before entry

It was $7 per entry with no limit, but since we were splitting the costs three ways we just picked 5 of our homebrews that we enjoy. We were required to submit 2 bottles (12 or 22oz) of each entry which was difficult because we only had a few remaining bottles of the likes of "Number 2" and the "Wedding Wit".

As for our chances? Eh. We could get lucky and place. Our Kölsch turned out too cloudy to win that category. I think our best chances are with our "Number 2" barleywine and "Smokey Smoke Ale". The "Depressed Umpire" could be the dark horse, but having bottled it the day before the dropoff, there's no telling for sure how that will turn out. Even without any wins, it should be a fun time. Hopefully we'll at least get some feedback to improve our future brews.

PS: Don't worry, the homebrews did not stay exposed to the light of that window for more than a few minutes!

Trap Rock Brewery & Restaurant, Berkeley Heights, NJ

Last weekend I visited the Trap Rock Brewery & Restaurant in Berkeley Heights, NJ. Here's how their website describes them:

Located in Berkeley Heights, NJ, Trap Rock Restaurant & Brewery opened its doors in 1997 and combines seasonal craft brews with seasonal, American food. Our reputation was shaped early by an “Excellent” rating by the New York Times in October of 1997. Designed by Morris Nathanson, Trap Rock Restaurant offers a working microbrewery and a comfortable European ski lodge atmosphere. Trap Rock Restaurant & Brewery was the first of six current and successful northern New Jersey restaurants run by Harvest Restaurants.

When I realized that they are the brewers behind the beers at Tabor Road Tavern (a new restaurant right down the street from where I grew up), I was disappointed, based on my one-time experience there. But thankfully, Trap Rock was a different story.



I decided to go with the sampler, which provided six 8oz pours of their brews. As I learned from our server, not every beer is made on site, as they have a somewhat limited capacity there. Some of it is contract brewed, although I failed to find out where. In the sampler was the Ghost Pony Helles Lager, Hathor Red, JP Pilsner, Folky Bob's Session Ale, Thorny Rye Pale Ale and Kestrel IPA.



None of the beers were A+s, but all of them were solid Bs. I'd be curious to see them try something a bit more adventurous, but I left wondering if beer was a bit more of a novelty to them. Not meant as an insult, but I just didn't get the feel that they were beer geeks.



All of their brewing is done in a relatively small room with glass windows. We came in on a Saturday so no actual brewing was going on. As a sidenote, the food was excellent. I would definitely go back if I was in the area, but I don't believe its worth a special trip.

Smuttynose Night at Barcade

I've been falling a bit behind on my postings lately, so I'll just briefly share these few photos from Thursday January 14th, Smuttynose Night at Barcade in Brooklyn, NY.



Here was the beer list that eve:

Baltic Porter - 8.7% ABV - Baltic style Porter
"oak aged" Big A IPA - 9.2% - Imperial IPA, aged in oak at brewery
Farmhouse Ale - 7.5% - Belgian style Farmhouse Ale
Imperial Stout - 10.0% - Russian style Imperial Stout
IPA - 6.9% - "finest kind", served on cask
Maibock - 6.2% - German style Helles Bock
Strawberry Weisse - 3.0% - German Berliner Weissbier
Terminator G-Bock 2008 - 9.5% - Doppelbock, aged one year
"oak aged" Terminator G-Bock 2008 - 9.5% - Doppelbock, aged in oak at the brewery
Tripel - 9.0% - Belgian style Tripel
Wheat Wine - 10.7% - strong Ale brewed with wheat
Woodward Ale - 5.0% - crisp Ale with hints of Curacao orange



The first and by far most interesting beer I had was the Oak Aged Terminator G-Bock from 2008. I don't think I'd ever had a oak aged doppelbock before, but the oak added a perfect woodiness to what was already a very good beer.



And of course, I left behind a few of my "business cards" aka pieces of thin cardboard i printed a few words on. They're super-informative aren't they? Don't they just want to make you make beertography your home page? heh.