Monthly Archives: February 2009

I have quite a few exciting posts to add including a new brewery opening here in NOLA and my latest batch of beer I am making….

But first, there is a movie coming out called “Beer Wars” and it is all about the current struggle the beer industry is going through. The war is between taste and waste. Between micro and macro. Between quality and quantity. It’s a war fought by good people who want to do good things in our capitalist society, I plan to be one of the good ones.

Check out the site for info and the trailer.

Let me know what your impression is on this war. Post a comment.

I belong to the culture of “hop-heads”. This has become quite the buzzword lately and I have to admit that it is a perfect descriptor. I choose beer based on hops like I, as a trumpet player, choose music based on horns. It’s not that I always choose hoppy beer or brass-filled music, but without fail, I NEED my fix every so often.

I live in the amazing city of NOLA (New Orleans, LA). I absolutely love it here. I came here to study the music industry and the city has been wonderful to me in that respect. It will always be a part of my future, if not hold my future in its embraces itself.

However, as a beer drinker and “hop-head”, I am always searching the city and the world for some hoppy beer. Though NOLA consumes an exceptional amount of alcohol (especially during the approaching Mardi Gras weekend…wow!), NOLA seems to lack for one…. a large selection of microbrews, and secondly, a good local hoppy brew.

I will list to you the breweries/brewpubs in the Greater NOLA area…. I believe I know them all.

Breweries:
Abita Brewery – Abita Springs, LA
Heiner Brau Microbrewery – Covington, LA
NOLA Brewing Co. – New Orleans, LA (brand new and brewing)

Brewpubs:
Crescent City Brew House
Gordon Biersch
Zea’s Restaurant (All beer made by Heiner Brau)

So that is the list I am aware of. I have tried just about all the brews from all of these places. Here is the hoppy beer breakdown for each:
Abita – Jockamo IPA
Heiner Brau – Basically just has the Category 5 IPA for Zea’s Restaurant
NOLA Brewing – Their beer isn’t released yet, but we can only expect a Brown and Blonde as of now.
Crescent City Brewhouse – Pilsner (hoppiest they got)
Gordon Biersch – Golden Export

So as a hop-head it is very hard to find a nice and super-hopped beer. The Jockamo IPA is decently hopped, but is easily overshadowed by the ever-popular Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. Now, I understand that Sierra Nevada has put Pale Ales and their signature West Coast hoppiness on the map as a standard. It is, however, an obstacle to be reckoned with while trying to make a unique and super-hopped beer. It can and has been done several times. I am talking Dogfish Head hoppiness (I’ll settle for the 90 Min IPA as a benchmark, the 120 Min sets pretty extreme standards). The Jockamo IPA does not exceed the Sierra Nevada Pale Ale benchmark.

Henryk Orlik and Brian the brewer of Heiner Brau do make a great rendition of an IPA with their Cat 5 IPA. I have tasted it straight out of the aging tanks as well as bottled in the restaurant. It is a legitimately hoppy beer and a nice smooth IPA. I would have to place this as my favorite IPA of the NOLA area. I would choose this over a Sierra Nevada due to its local production, noticeable hand-crafted qualities, and the fact that it is not an overkill of citrus Cascade hops….however good it may be, the world of hops is too deep to be limited to Cascades. As a traditional German brewmaster typically is, Henryk is low on hops, high on malt. I love his beer and will never say otherwise, but the hops just aren’t there.

As for CCBH (Crescent City Brewhouse), their Pilsner is the only hoppy beer they offer, barring an occasional seasonal that usually lasts for about 3-4 weeks. I would have to say the Pilsner is very consistent. I have been drinking their beer for about four years now, and the Pilsner has been great amongst all the batches I have tried. It’s hoppy, but its a Pilsner too. In my opinion, ales are best for accentuating hoppiness. Though it’s great to pick up a nicely hopped and ice-cold Pilsner on a hot NOLA day, it just can’t reach the hoppiness of a Pale Ale or IPA.

At Gordon Biersch, another fairly traditional German brewhouse, the only slightly hoppy beer is the Golden Export, a seasonal may come up but this is the year round one. It is described as being “lightly hopped with a refreshing finish” and I’d say that is accurate.

Overall, you can see, that the NOLA brew scene is ruled by the anti-hops Germans. To reiterate, I love German beer. I particularly enjoy Heiner Brau’s Amber Lager and Kolsch. But with my hops addiction, I find myself in a bind in NOLA to find my hops. Last week after a long shift at the Bourbon Street Cigar Factory (I do the cigar thing too), I wandered over to Beerfest, one of the few bars in the French Quarter that has a wide selection of beer, however it is insanely up-priced…. after a long day at work, it was worth it.

Wanting hops, I had basically three choices, Long Hammer IPA, Sierra Nevada Celebration Ale, and Flying Dog’s IPA. I chose the Sierra Nevada Celebration Ale, one of the best mass produced hoppy yet amber like brews out there. Long Hammer is no weak brew, but in such a bind for hops, I knew Sierra Nevada would have my back.

As I drink more new beers, though, I hope I don’t need to resort to Sierra Nevada as much. I love the local hoppy brews from the northeast, from the Denver area, out of Portland, from Southern California. Dogfish Head sets the standard for me and it might just get to the point that I need to order cases at a time of the 90 Min IPA or convince them to let me be their representative down here…. because if you are like me folks, you’ll agree that NOLA NEEDS MORE HOPS!

For a good list of ten great hoppy beers, go here….

Drunken Polack always represents.

Though I just stated a problem, there is a fairly simple answer… guess its time to start brewing my own…. to be continued…

Photo curtosy of mygutinstinct.com.

My boy up in Philly is doing a blog of his own. He’s an awesome PR guy with a love for beer equal to mine. Check out this review on Dogfish’s Aprihop here ….

Info is what makes the world turn…. check it out.

Due to the Mardi Gras holiday, as well as a technical difficulty with my yeast, the Belgian Blonde will need to be brewed next week… I am hoping to follow up the Blonde with a darker brew pretty quickly. Bottles have been collected, connections with other brewers have been made. More will come.

Dogfish Head Craft Brewery of Milton, DE has put out yet another awesome product, but this one is a video on beer, not a beer.

Go to this link. To see a great video about how the Palo Santo Marron brew is made. It’s quite a process and as Sam Calagione, the founder and major owner of Dogfish Head, said, it probably won’t make sense to most brewers when they look at the cost of such an endeavor, but man is it different and great to have such a rare touch to a great beer.

The Palo Santo Marron is aged in wooden tanks made from Paraguayan Palo Santo wood, probably one of the most dense woods in the world. It adds a very rich flavor to the brown ale and makes this beer truly one of a kind in the world.

The video is very well done and it gives a lot of info. I looked it up on youtube.com, but the video embedded in the Dogfish Head site is much better quality (my link will lead you there). It’s nice to see that Dogfish is promoting itself with multi-media too. Soon you will be able to view two documentaries I have made of about the same length. One if of Heiner Brau Microbrewery in Covington, LA and the other that I am currently working on is about the Cigar Factory New Orleans, the only cigar manufacturer in the state of LA. Both will be posted in the near future.

Enjoy the video and feel free to comment on my site or send Dogfish a comment. You can also share the video with friends by clicking on the share icon in the bottom left corner of the video.

Cheers!

Fermentation is somewhat of a natural phenomenon if you ask me. Yeast, which is alive, eats the natural sugars coming from malted barley to create the alcohol and different levels of flavors in beer. Everything is chemically restructured and made anew….. Check out this link to see 72 hrs. of fermentation happen in an 18 seconds clip….thanks Anchor Brewing of San Francisco (and my boy Steve for directing me towards this site).

It’s gonna be a Belgian Blonde my friends and its going down this weekend. The yeast packet has been popped (thank you Carluba) and the ingredients are ready to go. So we are gonna fill the propane tank and mash it down this weekend.

Hopefully this brew will be the featured beverage at my roommate’s and my Lechon (Cuban style pig roast) in March, more news on that soon.

For anyone who questions my brewership….. check this pic….

I place my fermenting tank in a box to reduce sunlight and let the fermentation go down naturally.

Peace y’all.

As students in the Music Industry Studies program at Loyola University New Orleans, we are encouraged to make connections with our peers to pursue our desired entrepreneurial goals with those whom we have battled through college with. My class is looking towards graduation this May and we all need to figure out what the next step is.

I have a lot of goals for the future, requiring quite a few steps to be taken. But these efforts need to be organized. I arranged to have a meeting with select members of my department who either brew beer or are interested in combining my beer efforts with their musical endeavors into one tasty and jammin’ project.

A fellow homebrewer of mine, whom has a few years on me in terms of experience, came over with his brewing ideas and several members of his band called “Blue Party”. Another beer enthusiast came in representation of another local New Orleans band called “The Revivalists”. Both bands are different, but great up and coming acts. Check them out for some young and inspired tunes. The rest of the crew were other entrepreneurs like myself or people that just wanted to taste the remains of my second batch of Old American Ale. The homebrew was a hit and so was the conversation.

Being people of many interests and talents as we are encouraged to be in our program, the conversation ranged from sparging mash as home to raising the embargo on Cuba.

The outcoming plan in terms of combining our efforts is as follows. I, Zacbrew the homebrewer, may well be seriously increasing my home brewing efforts along with Reid, the Blue Party brewer, to create a stock of beer that will last Blue Party’s week long tour over Spring Break in April, 2009. The goal will be to fill about 8 small kegs of homebrew, go on tour, make some great music, serve some great beer, be with great people, all equaling great fun….a college kids dream.

This may require more equipment and a fairly significant investment of both time and money. If the logistics can work out after we further discuss the details, it’s on. I would love to be the beer man on a tour, following a van filled with musicians and gear in a car filled with beer…. wow. I may also be able to use my video production skills to help document the tour and as I always do, I will be helping make sure the sound is taken care of at the venues…. as a sound engineer it’s just too annoying to hear the banjo but no vocals.

So the task is: 8 batches in 6 weeks. Time to TRIPLE the efforts!

It’s an epic feat of beer lovers.  My kind of thing.  I couldn’t stop laughing at the end.  Enjoy.

Go to this link if you love the extreme craft brews from Dogfish Head Brewery in Milton, DE.

If you don’t know about them, check them out and enjoy some of the most well-flavored brews you’ve ever had…. much more info to come about Sam Calagione, and the uniquely fascinating brewery business he has developed.

fullpint.com article on Dogfish Head Craft Brewery

(thanks Detective)

Or start from the source….dogfish.com

These will be in my links section as well.

Enjoy and drink up.