2016 was a very good year for beer travel and beer education, so I thought I’d take a look back.
My wife and I rang in New Years 2016 in Savannah Georgia, which included a trip to Moon River Brewing. Right on the main drag, the building is reportedly haunted in typical Old South fashion. The third floor is vacant which otherwise would be primo Savannah real estate so even if you don’t believe, enough people do that they refuse to go up there. This concluded an East coast trip that included trips to several breweries in North Carolina and Georgia. The original post is HERE is you want to revisit it.
After we returned from vacation I jumped into my role on the Board of Directors for the Oregon Brew Crew, our homebrew club. I served as Festival Coordinator, which involved recruiting volunteers to work the OBC info booth at beer festivals, coordinating with festival organizers about when and where we could set up, actually setting up the booth and making sure it stayed occupied (which included myself at the booth for an entire day at one festival). It was fun and rewarding, but also very taxing. It took me well out of my comfort zone as far as being a leader and working with large groups of people. I learned a lot about myself and about group leadership and while it was very healthy for me to push and expand my boundaries, I’m very excited to step away and rejoin the club as just an average member.
In March was a very exciting event, the first annual Pacific Northwest Homebrewers Conference (PNWHC). Held in Vancouver Washington the conference was meant to emulate the National Homebrewer Conference, but focusing in on the PacNW. This years NHC was out on the East coast and a lot of us couldn’t make the trip, so perfect timing for something local. The conference was set up pretty much exactly the same as the national one. There were lots of seminars on every imaginable topic, an expo with equipment and ingredient vendors, a lot of whom are already based in this area anyway, a pro night banquet of all the local breweries and a club night banquet for all the local homebrew clubs. Members and clubs came mostly from Oregon and Washington, but there were representatives from Montana, Idaho, Northern California and even Canada. My wife volunteered to help run the conference since (at the time) she wasn’t brewing and not as interested in the seminars as I was and now is helping plan the 2017 PNWHC which should be even better!
In April, my wife graduated with her Masters degree and we went to Disneyland to celebrate. We only visited one brewery while we were there, but it was a pretty cool one. The Anaheim Brewery was in the Anaheim Packing District which is full of old citrus warehouses close to the historic downtown area. It was neat to walk around a quieter section of Anaheim, even though it wasn’t really that far from Disney and the Convention Center area.
June brought about perhaps the most exciting beer related event of the year as I started my new job as a Quality Analyst at Portland Brewing! One of the original Portland microbreweries along with Widmer and Bridgeport, PBCo has grown and partnered with Pyramid Breweries out of Seattle into a fairly large regional brewery. I’ve learned a lot in the last 6 months and continue to learn daily, but the coolest thing is I get to make beer for a living! I don’t do any of the actual brewing, but I work daily with the brewers and monitor the fermentations from brew day to bottling day to make sure everything turns out as it should. It’s amazing to see the difference between homebrewing and commercial brewing, especially large scale commercial brewing.
In July we celebrated my wife’s birthday with a trip out to Bend, which is a great beer town if you haven’t been. We visited two breweries while we were out there, one small and one very large. The small one was Cascade Lakes brewing, which we discovered by accident while we were out riding bikes, the large one was Deschutes. We took the tour at Deschutes which was really cool and left there with a super nice growler full of beer, compliments of a friend who works there as a birthday present for my wife.
In September I had the opportunity to meet Jamil Zainasheff, who came to speak at one of our homebrew club meetings. Jamil is pretty much a rockstar in the homebrew community. Long time homebrewer with many gold medals in the National Homebrew Competition and several homebrewer of the year awards, went on to found Heretic Brewing, where true to the name he pretty much does whatever the Hell he wants. I got two of Jamil’s books (and had him sign them) and got to speak to him briefly. I hope to learn from him and it was a super cool experience.
In October we traveled to San Francisco on a very non-beer related trip (friends wedding) but I managed to sneak a couple places in. While a large group went off of to be pampered at the spa, I took a stroll through the SoMa neighborhood headed towards AT&T Park. I stopped at 21st Amendment on the way, which was much smaller than I was predicting it to be. They obviously have a production brewery somewhere else for all those cans that make it as far as the East coast because the SanFran pub was small. Not a bad thing, just a little shocked when I got there. They didn’t have Back in Black on draft, although my coaster said otherwise. I got the Brew Free or Die! IPA and it was quite nice. As we were leaving San Fran (since it was near the airport) we stopped at Armstrong Brewing Co in South San Francisco, which is a brewery run by an NC State classmate of mine. We took several of our food science and bioprocessing classes together. I didn’t get a chance to see him, but it was super cool to stop by his place.
Also in October, my wife brewed her first batch of homebrew and joined the American Homebrewers Association, so that was exciting. She just brewed her second batch and is slowly dialing in a recipe for a Chocolate Orange Stout. It’s already good and just going to get better.
In November, I started a small beer cellar and taking some detailed tasting notes on beers that I want to drink now, and then drink again a few years from now and see how they evolve. This is a pretty drawn out, long term project, but the results will eventually make their way here on the blog.
2017 already has some pretty epic stuff lined up, so stay tuned!
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