This weekend—Friday and Saturday the 8th and 9th to be exact—is the KLCC Microbrew Festival over in Eugene (Oregon). From 5 to 11pm each day, it's at the Lane Events Center Exhibit Hall (796 W 13th) and costs $10 admission. Tasters are $1.

(There's also a homebrew competition; it's a $10 entry fee but you get subsequently get free entry to the 'fest.)

This is a big deal for Eugene. KLCC is the Public Radio station over there, and they put on a good fest; just check out this list of beers to see what I mean:  read more »

I have recently returned from a few different trips. One trip was car camping in Mount Desert Island, Maine (think Acadia National Park and Bar Harbor), the second trip was a vacation up in Digby, Nova Scotia, Canada and the third trip was an overnight camping trip in the White Mountains. All the [...]

I decided to try to come up with a lager recipe that will still have some nice American hops in it. It seems that most Lager recipes have noble hops in them and tend to be less on the hoppy side. This would give a nice session beer (~4% abv) that should be a crisp tasting easy going beer with some nice big hops to it. The 2 oz of cascade at 0min would actually be added to the hopback.

I went with a mash temp of 151

What do you all think??

Center City Hop Lager

A ProMash Recipe Report

BJCP Style and Style Guidelines
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01-C Light Lager, Premium American Lager

Min OG: 1.046 Max OG: 1.560
Min IBU: 15 Max IBU: 25
Min Clr: 2 Max Clr: 6 Color in SRM, Lovibond

Recipe Specifics  read more »

Big cuts, bigger margins at Canadian brewer. Beyond some big promises, it's not clear exactly what InBev CEO Carlos Brito plans to do with Anheuser-Busch. He has said that he plans to keep all 12 breweries open, make St. Louis the company's North American headquarters, and the new company will be called Anheuser-Busch InBev. Beyond that, media reports suggest a lot of anxiousness at A-B and St. Louis. (And at A-B ad agencies, despite Brito's assurances that he'll maintain marketing spending levels.) The concern is likely that he'll make the same kind of cuts he did while he ran Labatt, the Canadian brewer that's a unit of InBev. The cuts were deep (including a brewery, which, as mentioned, he says he won't do with A-B) and boosted the bottom line. From a St. Louis Dispatch story earlier this week: Brito's reputation as a cost-cutter was affirmed during his brief tenure as InBev's head of North America. Within months of his arrival after the 2004 creation of InBev through the merger of Interbrew and AmBev, Brito shut Labatt Blue's Toronto brewery and fired 20 percent of its salaried work force. "My impression of Carlos Brito was that he came here to do it his way," said Guy McClelland, a former Labatt manager who left the brewer a year before Brito took over and now runs a beer import company in Toronto. "The one thing you cannot argue with is that he more or less doubled the bottom line (at Labatt) in five years," McClelland said "There was no question that there was an opportunity to cut some fat. It's hard to debate. If you're an employee at Labatt, you were not happy. If you were a shareholder, you were ecstatic." Back in September 2006, The (Toronto) Globe and Mail reported on how morale at Labatt suffered as company veterans were sidelined and as some functions were moved to Brazil or Belgium. From the story: "What really has Labatt veterans shaking their heads, though, is who's no longer part of the inner circle. Charles Oliver used to have Mr. Barbosa's job, and before that had been in charge of the brewer's massive marketing department. He arrived at Labatt in 2001 with an impressive rsum, burnished by success in senior roles at Walt Disney Co.'s Canadian unit and Unilever NV. Some Labatt insiders felt he would be a natural choice to become the company's president when Mr. Brito, an ambitious former engineer, made his inevitable move to Europe. "Charles is a really strong guy, a very good leader," said a former InBev manager with intimate knowledge of Labatt. "And as far as I know, he wasn't even spoken to" about the vacancy. "They just announced [it would be] Miguel." Mr. Oliver left the company weeks later. "There probably might have been opportunities for him to move elsewhere in the operation meaning, overseas somewhere and I think he just felt like that wasn't in the cards, and time for him to move on," said Labatt spokesman James Villeneuve. "It wasn't a bad situation he left in. We had a big party for him and it was positive when he left." But others say morale at Labatt is poor and getting worse in large part because of a perception that Labatt is finally feeling the downside of foreign ownership, 11 years after the company was taken over by Interbrew of Leuven, Belgium. While the brewer has hardly been decimated, it offers at least some proof that the hollowing out of Corporate Canada is a real threat." Here's the St. Louis Post-Dispatch story headlined "Brito, the would-be king." Here's the 2006 Globe and Mail story about poor morale at Labatt . Here's Brew Blog's coverage of A-B ad agencies worried that Brito will slash marketing budgets .  read more »

It was a sad day at sevenpack.net when our Beer of the Month Club (BOMC) membership ran out. One day out of every month an angel would come to our house as Ben and I waited with bated breathed to accept that beautiful brown box of liquid goodness. And then “her” visits stopped and we wept…not really. Apparently the BOMC folks liked what we were doing because out of the blue our angel showed up again. That means Ben and I are privy to 12 more months of bliss and you have the fortunate pleasure to read what we think about each month’s selections…everyone’s a winner.  read more »

There are great pressures on The Life Of Man. We had heard about the idea of getting rid of the beer fridge but at least here in Canada there were ads settting out that the beer fridge was costing almost 120 beer a year to run. There was a Net Beer Gain (or "NBG"). But this news coming from the Northern Territories of Australia has us dismayed and has led to the formation of the Anti-Anti Beer Fridge League to support efforts to introduce the green principles into The Life of Man:  read more »

Snapdatas Snapshots Canada Beer 2008 provides 2007 year-end market size data, with 2008 estimates, 5 years of historical data and five-year forecasts. The Snapshots report gives an instant overview of the Canadian beer market and covers standard lager, economy lager and premium lager beer. Market volume is based on consumption. The data is supplied in both graphical and tabular format for ease of interpretation and analysis. The Snapshots Canada Beer 2008 forms part of Snapdatas Alcoholic Drinks industry coverage.  read more »

CJ-

Last year you posted about a Vienna Honey Ale you were perfecting, I was just wondering how it turned out and if you had any comments on it!

Here is a version which i have created. What do you think?

<!--sizeo:2--><!--/sizeo-->Honey Vienna Ale<!--sizec--><!--/sizec-->

A ProMash Recipe Report

Recipe Specifics
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Batch Size (Gal): 11.00 Wort Size (Gal): 11.00
Total Grain (Lbs): 19.50
Anticipated OG: 1.047 Plato: 11.75
Anticipated SRM: 6.3
Anticipated IBU: 29.0
Brewhouse Efficiency: 75 %
Wort Boil Time: 60 Minutes  read more »

Years ago in Stirling Scotland I likely got my only true pint of beer. The fluid crested over the glass holding it through the miracle of surface tension and the bartender told me to lean over and take a first draw off the top to avoid losing too much. That was a fine pint. Every other of the 63,574 glasses of beer I've had, well, I assume they are pretty much near enough and don't really worry that much.  read more »

It's a funny thing about beer and Canada. Canadians have this relationship to beer that is based entirely around the idea - largely erroneous - that our beer is better. So much so that it becomes a principle of our national existence as this article reminds us:  read more »