The 50 States of Beer - Oregon

Oregon

Rogue Ales - Newport, OR
Best Beer:

Dead Guy Ale

You'll find that if I didn't discover a beer at the good ol' Old Chicago in Ames, then I probably first found it at the Crescent Moon while I was living in Omaha back in 2007. That's the story with Dead Guy Ale, and it's also the story of the first time I ever went to the Crescent Moon.

On Tuesday nights, the Crescent Moon has a deal where you can go, pay five bucks for a glass and fill it with the "beer of the night" for a dollar or two all night. Then, you get to keep the glass. Anyone who knows me, knows that I love things I can take home.

That first night, I was with my roommate at the time Garrett who suggested we go there in the first place. The "beer of the night" was Dead Guy Ale, and definitely had a unique taste. It was the first maibock I ever tried. I easily refilled that glass six or seven times that night.

This night was also the first time I ever heard of Rogue Ales. It wasn't long until I found Kessler's and their wide selection of Rogue brews. Which lead to me drinking several 24oz bottles of the MOM's Half-E-Weizen (with this picture on the bottle), Brutal Bitter, but I always found my way back to the Dead Guy Ale.

The only Rogue beer I don't like, is the rauchbier, aptly named "Smoke Beer". Nick bought it and we all tried some, and it is forever known as "Bacon Beer".

For more reading on Rogue Ale, go here.
And visit the official Rogue Ale website, here.

Also, here is a funny tour of the Rogue Brewery. Enjoy:


Up next, Pennsylvania

The 50 States of Beer - Minnesota

Minnesota

Summit Brewing Company - St. Paul, MN
Best Beer:

Summit Extra Pale Ale

So I was at Old Chicago. I don't remember exactly what the occasion was, but there was a bunch of us there. Cassada, Schenck and I (of course), and then Sellars, Artie, Alister and Emilie. We were all having lunch (I think) and I had just finished an Iron City Lager (in the aluminum bottle, fyi) and asked the waitress to surprise me. I got Summit EPA.

Since, I have always used it as a quick go-to beer. It never fails, and is perhaps one of the only beers I can safely say I like just as much out of a bottle as I do on tap.

Summit also makes an India Style Rye Ale, which I think just sounds wonderful. However, it's a seasonal beer, so I am going to have to find my way up to Sweet St. Paul (man, that must be the hardest luck Saint of 'em all) to get one.

I also recommend the Summit Porter, it's pretty damn good. Honorable mention for the land-o-lakes state: Granite City Food and Brewery's Duke of Wellington India Pale Ale is pretty good, but I haven't technically had it. I drank it in Cedar Rapids at a chain.

Also, for good measure, here is a shout out to Midwest Supplies where I get the majority of my Home brewing supplies, located in Minneapolis.

For more reading on Summit Brewing Company, go here.
And visit the official Summit Brewing Company website, here.

Up next, Oregon

Microbrew Adventures in Colorado

So, in March my friends Erick, JJ and I decided to go on a road trip.

We met up, packed a car and headed west towards Las Vegas (or as I like to call it, Lost Wages) to visit one of our other good friends and fellow home brewer, Joey Bag of Donuts.

Well, as luck would have it, there are several microbreweries between southwest Iowa and Las Vegas, so we decided to visit some.

1st Brewery: New Belgium Brewery - Fort Collins, Co

New Belgium was a great brewery. The three of us all gave it high marks. You could really tell they took a lot of time to make a visit to the brewery a well rounded experience.

The story goes like this:

We walk in, have our complementary beers, and then inquire about the tour. We are told that you need to go online to sign up for the tour, which we didn't do. We do get our name on the list though, just in case someone doesn't show.

I get a textual message from Nick saying that when he visited the brewery a few years ago they told him to write a haiku about New Belgium and that if we read it infront of the bar, we'd get a free beer... well JJ, Erick and I like free beer. So we put our poetry hats on.

They were fedoras.

We came up with this:

Sunshine Wheat, Fat Tire.
We All Love Mothership Wit.
Fifteen Fifty-Four.

Pretty fucking good, huh?

So I go up to the bar and ask the fella about the haiku, and he says he'd never heard of it, dammit. Haiku written in vein... the worse kind of haiku.

Then, as luck would have it, someone skipped the tour so we got in. Awesome.

So the tour begins and there is a table full of beers. The tour guide starts talking, makes a few jokes and gets some laughs. I make some jokes... get some half assed laughs but I can tell this guide works alone, so I decide to lay off the jokes.

Then, this fella with a hat that looked like a bear. (Bearhat = asshole, amiright?) starts talking. He was annoying, but harmless. Him and the tour guide developed a repour and I knew I was not gonna be the class clown of this tour.

The tour guide handed everyone a beer, and continued to talk about the brewery, and goes over some rules. Then Bearhat pulls every bodies favorite (read: nobodies favorite) trick where they point off into space and go "whats that" and then steals another beer.

Tour guide gets pissed. Bearhat looked like an asshole, and the rest of the tour was pretty great.

We asked if we could try a beer you can't get anywhere else, and the guide let us try the Biere De Marz, which was wonderful. JJ and I finished ours quickly, not realizing he wanted us to slow drink it, so he poured us another. (That's when Erick finished his and got another. We can work a system.)

Another cool thing was we got to try an Abbey, that had been bottled that day. It was good.

At the end of the tour, where they were very good about getting us a 3/4 drunk, we went down a slide and watched a video.

We bought growlers, and all in all the experience was great and a hell of a way to kick off our brew tour.

2nd Brewery: Coopersmith's Pub & Brewing - Fort Collins, Co

Coopersmith's was a brewpub. We were pretty drunk by the time we got there. The first thing I noticed walking in was the names of the beers, like Columbine Kolsch and Punjabi Pale Ale.

Now, to me those sounded sorta sketchy, but they both were pretty good.

We ate dinner at Coopersmith's and they (like any respectable Witherspoons franchise in Europe) had a 2 dinner special. I had fish and chips and drank.

The beer was very good, and the staff were knowledgable. We didn't take a tour, but did get a little history of the place, learning that it was started by 2 former Old Chicago managers.

My personal favorite beer on tap was the Punjabi Cask Conditioned Pale Ale. I bought a growler, and would very much like to go back next time I am in Fort Collins and drink some more.

3rd Brewery: Oskar Blues - Lyons, Co... I mean Longmont, Co.

Oskar Blues is popular for being the only micro/craft brewery that solely cans their beer. That sounds like a joke. It is not.

The whole place wasn't a joke either. We originally drove to the brewery in Lyons which is a brewpub, but no longer the major brewery. That is in Longmont. So we drove to Longmont, and passed another Oskar Blues restaurant, on the way to the new brewery.

The brewery was a giant warehouse looking building. We weren't for sure if it was the right place, maybe we should have stopped at the resturant, but then we saw this door.

And went inside. There was a tiny bar, called "The Tasty Weasel". We tried some beer, Dale's Pale Ale and Mama's Little Yellow Pils standing out in my mind, and then took the tour.

The tour was given by the cutest girl, and she was full of energy and willing to answer all our questions. However, she couldn't. She had only given a handful of tours, but she was cute, so we let it slide.

She also introduced us to the brewer, Eric, who did answer some questions.

Oskar Blues was very impressive, and the fact that they only can seems to be very controversial. We had never heard of the brewery, but they are in over 25 states.

After the tour, we got to hang out in the employee break area, drink and play this shuffle board style game.

At the Oskar Blues restaurant in Longmont, we ate lunch and drank some more. Also, JJ spilled a glass of water everywhere.

4th Brewery: Left Hand Brewing Company - Longmont, Co

Of all the breweries we'd been to at this point, Left Hand was the one I was most familiar with. I had drank a lot of the Left Hand Milk Stout and Sawtooth Ale in my time.

In my mind, the brewery was going to be a lot like New Belgium. Big, Fancy, Flashy. It wasn't. That isn't a bad thing though.

The bartender was great, and there was a couple sitting next to us who gave us a good history of the brewery as well as a history of themselves.

After having a flight of beers, we inquired about a tour. The bartender told us if she could find someone to give us one, we could go.

She did.

At the time I am writing this, I have forgotten his name. Because I was drunk. This was after we'd been to Oskar Blues and drank a lot at Left Hand already. But, what I do remember is that the tour was amazing.

He kept telling us that he wasn't for sure what we wanted to know, and that he hadn't given tours before. But then we spent about an hour and a half going around the brewery, learning everything and taking photos.

I don't want to publish everything that went on in the brewery because of OSHA restrictions, but ask me and you'll get the low down.

I was to drunk when we left to get a growler, but I still plan on going back.

5th Brewery: CB and Potts - Denver, Co

I will not dignify this brewery with information. Just stay away. If not for the picture below I wouldn't even believe we went there.

6th Brewery: Breckenridge Brewery & Pub - Breckenridge, Co
We went to the Breckenridge Brewpub the day after our adventures in Longmont. So we were all a little under the weather. That sucked, considering they had such great beer.

Breckenridge, famous for it's Oatmeal Stout, is no longer only made in the town it's named for, but is now in Denver. But, the brewpub is still supplied by it's on sight brewery.

We met the brew master, and he gave us a tour. He was a really nice guy. For a popular brewery, it was run small. I liked that. The brew master made all the beer, and there were only a handful of employees.

I wish we could have hit the brewery in Denver, just for comparison, but that'll be for another time.

As a whole, the brewery leg of our trip was pretty good. CB and Potts wasn't the only shit brewery we stopped at, there were a couple in Las Vegas that were bad. But still, we drank more good beer than bad.

St. Patrick's About a Stout!

So a couple weekends ago I went with Nick Lennemann to his parents cabin in Minnesota. During this weekend we consumed quite a bit of beers. Good beers too. None of that water down piss. (ok, some watered down piss).

The best beer of the weekend though, was Nick's very own Homebrew: "St. Nick's There Can Be Only One Scottish Ale". It tasted as good as it sounds (and thats a Highlander reference for those of you keeping score at home). I was surprised to find out it was his first attempt at beer making.

I decided that I wanted to make my own beer, so on the drive back he gave me tips. That is how I have come to this:

That is the label for my first brew, a stout. I went to the Midwest Supplies website, and ordered what Ineeded. They were delivered in just 4 days and I had what I needed to brew 5 gallons of stout.

What I got was this:
(The contents of which is explained here.)

After a few days, I was ready to start brewing. This is my step by step diary:

9/12/2009
8:30pm
-Sanitize 1 gallon of water and put into freezer in santized tupperwear dishes using Easy Clean No-Rinse Cleanser .
-Sanitize 5 gallon wert kettle, a bowl to use to keep supplies clean, spoon and thermometer using Easy Clean.
-Add 4 gallons water to Wert Kettle and place on heat. Bring to boil.
9:10pm
-Water is boiling.
9:14pm
-Pour grains on to cutting board and roll with rolling pin to "open them up".
-Place grains into sifting sock (much like a pantyhose) and set in the bowling water (like a tea bag in a cup.)
9:45pm

-Remove grains from kettle, squeezing the sock to help it drain.
9:47pm
-Crank the heat and let it boil.
10:00pm
-place the Malt Extract into a warm bath so that it becomes less syrupy and more liquid.
10:14pm
-At a rolling boil.
-Take the kettle off the burner.
-Add gypsum and malt extract (BE SURE TO REMOVE THE RING OFF THE TOP OF THE MALT EXTRACT JUG... OTHERWISE IT FALLS INTO YOUR WERT... NOT THAT THIS HAPPENED TO ME OR ANYTHING...IMJUSTSAYING!!!) Drench the bottle and be sure to get all the extract out of the jug. (AGAIN, REMOVE THE RING FROM THE TOP FIRST.)
- Stir well.
10:25pm
-Put wert back on the burner and bring to boil.
10:47pm
-Once boiling add bittering hops by placing them into the same sifting sock.

11:45pm
-Remove bittering hops and add aroma hops to the sifting sock.
-Place sock into wert and move up and down for 2 minutes.
9/13/2009
12:02am
- When it looks like this, it's ready.
- Remove wert from burner and place in an icebath in the kitchen sink. (I used 20lbs. of ice.) Add in the 1 gallon of frozen water.
- Coming off the burner, the temperature of the wart was 140 degrees F.
- Place lid on top.
12:17am
-Remove lid, Stir. Temperature was 130 degrees F.
12:21am
-Remove lid, Stir. Temperature was 102 degrees F.
12:33am
-Remove lid, Stir. Temperature was 86 degrees F.
12:40am
-Remove lid, Stir. Temperature was 80 degrees F. Perfect!
- Now that it is 80 degrees F, take wert out of ice bath and pour it into 5 gallon bucket for primary fermentaion. (use the bucket without the hole in the side).
- Place santized glass jar into the wert, scooping out enough for a Hydrometer reading. The reading was 1.046.
12:45am
- Add more sanitized water filling the bucket to the 5 gal. mark.
- Prepare the yeast by pouring the packet into 90 degree F water, let set for 10 minutes.
12:50am
- Begin whisking the wert with a clean sterilized whisk. That puts oxygen into the wert. Do this until it gets a nice foam on top.
12:55am
- Add in the yeast.
1:00am
- Place lid on top and put the airlock on the hole (filling it with half with water first.)
- Put into closet with thermometer on the side.
5:00pm
- I realized the temp was at 79 degrees F, a little to high for my liking, so I moved the bucket from the closet to right in front of our air conditioner placing a fan on it.
- For the next 3 days, it never got above 72 or below 69.
9/17/2009
8:26pm
- Opened the primary fermentation bucket, and noticed the foam from the fermentation had gone down. Leaving a dark ring about an inch thick above the beer.
- Took a small sanitized glass, and scooped out some. Tasted it. IT WAS GREAT! Stacie and I both had a taste, and were satisfied. No contamients!
9:05pm
- Prep the glass carboy by sanitizing it in the bath tub. (The heat and steam made the fire alarm go off. Awesome).
- Sanitize the auto siphon.
9:17pm
- Begin siphoning the beer from the primary fermentation bucket to the glass carboy.

- Once it starts to get low, tilt the bucket so as not to get the sediments at the bottom in the Carboy.

9:25pm
- Cork the carboy and add the airlock, filling it half with water again.
- I placed the glass carboy into the closet because the temperature does not bug me as much now in the secondary fermentation.

9/22/2009
7:59pm
-Began to steralize the bucket with spout, cyphoning tube, and hose.
8:10pm
- Took hydrometer reading: 1.114
8:15pm
- Cyphoned beer from carboy to bucket with spout.
8:22pm
- Began to bottle.
9:15pm
- Bottling was finished: 52 12oz bottles and 1 16oz bottle.

9:22pm
- Placed into closet in 2 boxes to let set for 2 weeks.


10/4/2009
10:30pm

-Opened first bottle of St. Patrick's About a Stout and drank. It was Great! Began labeling a few bottles for friends and family. SUCCESS!

That is all for my Stout (except drinking!). I am currently making:
"St. Patrick's Tastie Hastie Hefeweizen"