General Update	August 21, 2012
A bit more reorganization to the site, the recipes section has been totally redone (still being populated with the data). The Video Library area has also been expanded. Notes on this year's hops (fairly sad report), book reviews, and hardware experiements are still forthcoming.

Samuel Adams Brewery Tour

May 25, 2012

So instead of planning ahead like I did last year and brewing a "for competition" scheduled brew for the Samuel Adams Longshot Competition, I waited until the last second to decide to enter. Not only that, but I decided to do so while I still had over a week left, including a completely open 3-day weekend...but did I select, label, pack up and ship my brews? Noooooooo....I opened a few and kicked back instead. When I got to feeling a bit guilty about it, I just heard Charlie-P's RDWHAHB and followed his advice. I work the night shift as a baker (full-time yeast wrangler, baby!) and worked Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday nights....then decided early Thursday morning to pack up some entries and head in to drop them off Friday morning after finishing my Thursday night shift. Later, getting ready to leae for work, I remember that the printer has no ink! PDF labels go onto a USB drive, rubber bands and scissors go into the box and I manage to punch into work on time at 9pm with my entries safely stashed in the trunk. Finish my shift at 7am and set about trying to find someplace to print my labels...Staples, Office Depot, and Kinko's don't open until 8 or 9...drug stores can only print photos....finally find a FedEx office and get the labels. Oops! Back in for a black Sharpie for the caps! Finally hitting the rod and off to Boston! I manage to navigate traffic (to my shock, driving right past an in-law's house less than 2 miles from the brewery!), find parking, and lug my bottles to the brewery just in time for the tourist office to be opening at 10am. A cutie in a Samuel Adams polo shirt has my bottles whisked off to the cooler for registration confirmation and asks my overtired and slightly delirious ass the most delicious thing I've heard in the last 24 hours: "Would you like a tour of the brewery? It's free, there's free beer at the end, and a group is starting in just a minute." Ummm....gee, let me think..... The opening room is a space with several display cases filled with trophies, ribbons and medals earned by Samuel Adams beers - two display cases contain displays of their bottles. A more interesting case includes a number of bottles, photos, and old wooden cases from the early days of the Boston Beer Company. There is also a huge burlap sack hanging on the wall that must be 5 or 6 feet wide and at least 15 feet tall - I wasn't overly surprised by it, thinking it a large grain sack for international shipment, until I read the label and realized that the prominent word was Hallertau....one HELLUVA big sack of hops!!!! The only other truly historic artifact is the actual entrance to the "tour"....walking through one of the Boston Beer Company's early vessels, made of steel plates and lined with molten glass. Passing through the vessel, we were greeted by the wall of wooden barrels filled with aging Utopias. As we proceeded around the barrels, we passed these without comment. I found the presence of such a barebones 3-tier pilot system both reassuring and incongruous in this setting - however, if you look to the left, you'll see a more robust pressurized one: The tour then looped to a side area they called the "ingredient room" - more a segregated area to cut some of the production noise while they explained the basics of the brewing process and the ingredients. Watching people during this part of the tour made it clear who the small number of homebrewers were and that this was all brand-new information for most of the crowd. The tour then moved out to were we could see the brewing floor. To our left was a bank of (3) 68-bbl bright tanks with two auxillary vessels. To our right was a double-row of (10) 25-bbl fermenting tanks. In the back of the house, we could see the original 3-vessel 4-stage copper pilot brewery. After a basic discussion of the process, we proceeded to the tasting room (being presented with a tasting glass on the way in). Root beer was offered to the non-drinkers and a bit of banter ensued (including people saying where they were from....I was the only one there from New England....the next closest was a New Yorker...they were all tourists on vacation, including two that had never even tasted a Samuel Adams beer!). Our tour guide then explained how to (mostly) properly taste a beer and passed out a few pitchers of Boston Lager. Tasting and discussion of the flavors. Next, Summer Ale (not my favorite) was presented with less explanation/discussion. Then (the treat, as far as I was concerned), was that they still had some of the 26.2 Boston Marathon commemorative gose on tap that we got to sample....extremely light and crisp with a delicate flavor - yes, a perfect runner's beer. Unfortunately, at this point we were told there would be no further sampling. The gift shop was under reorganization and the shelves were stipped bare - we could buy the Barrel Room bottles of American Kriek, New World Tripel, or Thirteenth Hour Stout at $10/bottle. And they offered directions to a bar that serves Sammy on tap and diretions to two liquor stores. I know you don't get much for free and while the tour was nice, I was really looking forward to sampling some Sammys I can't get at home (less than 2 hours up the road!). I can get the barrel room series bottles at less than $10 without sales tax at my local Market Basket. Why no samples at the brewery? For that matter, if we can't get the limited release beers even at the brewery itself, why advertise them? I was ready to pick up (and desperately wanted to sample) some of the limiteds: Verloren, Griffin's Bow, Norse Legend, The Vixen, Dark Depths, and had really been looking forward to the very-limited Boston-only Brick Red. But no option to see, buy, or taste them. I'm still certainly glad I took the tour and it was a great way to finish off a week of night shifts! After breathing dough yeast all night, it was also wonderfully refreshing to walk into a high room filled with the scent of malt instead!

Site Update/Reformatting	May 07, 2012
As traffic has slowly increased, I've reworked the site's navigation and made room for more content. Still reworking my recipes and brewing notes at the current breaks between brews....let me know what you think!

Update

August 28, 2011

This website/blog is just getting set up and populated. First and foremost, it is a public place to log my beer-brewing activities, documenting my brews for those that are drinking them, as well as my own impressions in BJCP-style ratings (I am not a BJCP Judge and am obviously not without bias, but I'm trying to judge them as objectively as I can). This page will also document some of my various experiments in the world of brewing and fermentation processes, as well as equipment designs. I will be documenting my new hop garden and adventures into home malting and smoking grains. This will also be a place to find my beer-related experiments in cuisine, heading into the kitchen to discover hopped sugars, "hop drop"-style candies, uses of spent-grain "flour", and recipes for cooking with beer, cooking with beer ingredients, and cooking to accompany beer. All that said about beer-beer-beer (well, the web address URL does say "beer"), this will also be the place to find my wine and mead dabblings too. Finally, this will also eventually be the home for my BrewXML proposal. An XML schema named BeerXML exists and has become a standard of sorts for transferring data between brewing software apps. However, to do much with it beyond the most basic recipe logging requires much extension of the schema (which means that the added data is non-standard and possibly unexpected). What I am proposing will be essentially a BeerXML 2.0 - perhaps ProBeerXML is more appropriate - I am mentally sticking with BrewXML for now, as I wish to include process documentation options in the schema as well. I am currently working on the hops portion of the schema to include all relevant data from the hop suppliers (as a "side effect" of conforming to their data sets, I have their actual data as well and will be releasing a standardized database of ingredients with specs directly from the suppliers for use with the XML schema). This will allow not only a data format standard, but also a more standard set of base data than we brewers currently have properly agglomerated anywhere else! Please try to be patient and bear with me while I set this all up - it will appear in fits and spurts (and may face repeated layout adjustments). In the meantime, if you have suggestions or comments for anything here (especially if you want to offer me a brewhouse job!), you can email me at bsg@digitalgibson.com

QUANDO OMNI FLUNKUS MORITATI