Sept-Oct 2001

Volume 24

Number 6

The San Andreas Malts' Newsletter

Our 24th Year

STATE CLUB COMP COMING TO

STERN GROVE NOVEMBER 10!!

INSIDE &OUT:

a melange for your reading pleasure, including...

BHJ - A Mixed Bag

CLUB & STATE COMP INFO

PRESIDENTIAL RUMBLINGS -

How He Spent His Summer Vacation

It's that time of year again - our all-day annual bash is a tad more than a month away. Your current & a couple of recent former officers have been plugging away getting all the drudge work done, but we're still looking for folks to perform some much needed chores the day of the contest itself:

1. Bar Help w/Mike Porter

(Joe Byrnes is deserting us this year; we need folks who can switch kegs for the jockey boxes)

2. Stewards, including Head Steward

3. Someone to bring 300-400# of ice, depending on the weather forecast for the day

The judging starts at 11; we ask the judges & all the help to be there as close to 10 AM as possible to set things up & have some bagels & OJ on us. Plus, getting there early guarantees you a parking place.

After the judging finishes, it's party time - we'll have the usual array of sausages, etc., & you're welcome to bring stuff to grill. We ask that non-entrants/participants wait until 1 PM or so to arrive, so we can feed all the judges & the rest of the crew. Your Editor will be in charge of the kitchen as usual.

May the day be rain & relatively fog free & may all the brews be eminently drinkable!!

Seeya there!!! - MJK

2001 CLUB COMPETITION

For those of you who still brew to enter contests besides for personal consumption, our annual club competition is here!

WHERE & WHEN: Speakeasy Brewery, 1195 Evans, SF, 7:30 PM

CATEGORIES: Light & Dark Lager; Bock; Light, Pale, Brown, & Strong Ale; Mixed Styles (includes Steam); Porter; Barley Wine; Stout; Porter; Specialty.

BRING: 2 12-oz bottles of each beer you plan to enter, plus 3 more for the State comp. For the club comp, 1 650-750 ml is OK. We'll be using all attendees to judge categories in which they're not entered - we pair the novices with the "old pros".

DIREXIONS: Muni 19 Polk & 44 O'Shaughnessy lines stop at/within a block of the brewery. By car, the easiest route from the north or mid-peninsula is 280/101 to Cesar Chavez (Army), east on CC to Evans, R on Evans to the brewery, which isa about .3 miles east of 3rd St. From 101 Northbound, take the 3rd St Exit, follow 3rd about a mile to Evans, then R on Evans to the Brewery. Parking isn't a problem - lot has 20 or so spaces & there's plenty more on-street that relatively safe.

Call/e-mail an officer if you plan to attend, so we know how much pizza to order; ditto if you can't make it & want to enter a brew - we'll do our best to hook up with you beforehand.

2 SEPT/OCT PROST 2001

B^REWER'S

Comments & Opinions

Home Journal

SAN ANDREAS MALTS

P O Box 884661

San Francisco, CA 94188-4661

http://www.river.org/~mumbly/malts/

President - Dave Suurballe

415/759-6768 (h) suurb@apple.com (w)

Vice President - Jack Dawson

415/841-1433 (h) jsdawson@pacbell.net (h) Treasurer - Joe Byrnes

415/681-5901 (h) joe@byrnes.com (h)

Editor - Mark Kornmann

510/528-5351 (h) 510/466-3495 (w)

yupbashr@pacbell.net (h)

beerman49@msn.com (anywhere)

Webmeister - Jay Stanley

415/990-6951(cell) jaystan@well.com

Contributing Emeritus Officers

Pat Loughran Alec Moss Bill Stender Russ Wigglesworth

Honorary Lifetime Malt - Steve Norris

* * * * * * *

It's easy to become a San Andreas Malt. Dues are $15/year, renewable in January. Mail them to our PO Box or pay at any meeting/club event.

The Malts publish the Prost* semi-monthly. Our copy deadline generally is the 25th of the even-numbered months. You may reprint our articles as long as you cite the Prost as the source.

Editor's note: Send me material on the net/on 3.5" disk (< 1.44 Mb) in Word (< 7.5), WordPerfect (< 6.5) or ASCII (text only) files. If you send Word/WordPerfect files, send an ASCII backup just in case. Mail discs to:

Mark Kornmann

1621 Mariposa Street

Richmond, CA 94804-5017

* prost \pröst\ interjection, [German fr. Latin], used to wish good health, especially before drinking.

Forgive any sloppiness - I'm cranking this one out in a big fat hurry as I did last time. KUDOS aplenty this month: To Speakeasy for a fine anniversary party in late July; to Pat & Chris Loughran for again hosting the Pale Ale Bout (the results of which I'll print in the fat end-of year issue after the State Comp - El Presidente gave me a whole page this time); to Dave Weaver & his wife Julianne, now the proud parents of twins Philip (7 lbs 8 oz) & Nora (6 lbs 1 oz) born on 9-20; and, finally to all the rescue workers and support staff involved with the recent disasters at the World Trade Center & the Pentagon. And an A-bomb sized KABONG to all the Bin Ladens of the world!

Slow on the brew front lately - but the last time I was in Pyramid, the "Brewer's Handle" brew was an 8.2% ABV Imperial Stout - the first stout they've had on line in more than a year! And it was pretty damn good! They've tweaked the menu & raised the prices again - best meal bargain there now is the Brewer's platter - $15.95 gets you grilled chicken breast, half rack of bbq'd baby back ribs, & 3 large fried shrimp, with fries. Beer prices haven't gone up - yet - but the economy is taking its toll ... the place isn't quite as crowded as it used to be - I had the bar almost to myself on a Thursday nite.

TJ's now carries some AV products - Boont Amber & Hop Ottin' IPA were on the shelves in Emeryville last time I was in - price is $6.99 + CRV/6-pak, same as Bev Mo. Speaking of Boonville - I bought a couple bottles of He'brew Messiah Stout at the Monterey Blvd Safeway (2/$5 on sale) recently to take to a planning meeting - lo & behold, it's made up there (but there was no mention of AVB on the label, so who knows?). Right now, I eagerly anticipate November and all the holiday brews hitting the taps & shelves. In the meantime, I'll splurge on Big Daddy & other fine local products.

El Presidente is off to the GABF in Denver; I'm working overtime trying to spend your tax dollars before midnight 9/30 ... with all the recent fun & games, the first quarter of the new fiscal year looks not to be as quiet as it normally is for those of us in the contracting field. I just hope all hell doesn't break loose while I'm off hanging out with my roomie & DC-area pals in Myrtle Beach & hacking up some of their fine golf courses. As usual, Eric & I'll be stopping in VA Beach on the way down for a smaller version of the Oyster BBQ & probably will hit Liberty for a steak & some of the rare decent local micros in that part of the US. I'll be gone from 4-16 October, so if you have any club stuff to deal with, please call/e-mail Dave or Jack. Jay's updated the web site, but has yet to move it - more on that next time, I hope.

Peace & Good Brewing - MJK

3 SEPT/OCT PROST 2001

From Portugal, I flew up to London for the Great British Beer Festival. It's a five-day event with 350 draft British real ales, about a hundred ciders, and a couple hundred Belgian, Dutch, German, and Czech beers. There's also a couple dozen American drafts, mostly from the East Coast.

Time is short and beer is long. The ciders are good, but I must ignore them given the limited time. The Americans are unfamiliar to me, but I know the style, so I ignore them, too. I also ignored the British milds, because I don't like the style. (In general, milds are black and low in alcohol and flavor).

350 real ales. It's hard to say something general about them, except that they are in general less alcoholic than American beers. They are all fresh, probably brewed a week or two before the fest. They all have yeast in the cask, but the casks have been laying down for three days, so the yeast has settled. Half of the beers are served by handpump at the bar, and half by gravity right out of the cask on the stillage behind the bar. The bar is 400 feet long.

The beer is not fizzy, but not flat, either, and it's cool, not cold. By cool I'm guessing high fifties, which is five degrees warmer than ideal for this style, but there are technical challenges in cooling 1200 casks of beer in an exhibition hall in August.

I started each day with a different German pilsener, just to get my palate moving in the right direction, and then concentrated on the British drafts and the Belgian bottles. To-wards the end of each day, we bought several Belgian bottles and went back to the hotel and drank them. That room wasn't really big enough for three guys and their luggage.

I also bought beer to bring home. It was all Belgian except one bottle of a passion-fruit ale from Youngs for Kevin Johnson. The rest were fifteen bottles, half 750 and half 375ml. Some were lambics. A couple were non-lambic cherry beers, and one was an interesting 9% beer that tasted like a blend of Orval and Duvel.

I also carried home a 5-gallon Cornelius can of draft beer that I racked out of the cask in a pub. It was Harvey's Sussex Best Bitter. As some of you know, we drank that off the handpump at the August meeting.

Foreshadowing the next Prost, let me say that the biggest prob-lem with the GBBF is the glass size. Beer may be sold in the UK in pints and half-pints only, so I was drinking 10-ounce half-pints. A smaller size would allow tasting of more beers. The GABF in Denver has the opposite problem. There the taste is one ounce, which is not nearly enough. More on that next time.

PRESIDENTIAL RAMBLINGS

How I Spent My Summer Vacation.

Drinking beer, of course. Drinking beer in foreign places. And doing my best to develop some taste for the local stuff and identify some favorites.

I started with a week in rural Portugal, in a village of 700 people. There were two shops, three cafes and a fourth cafe that was also a pizzeria. We never ate there, though, just drank beer there in the afternoon a couple days.

Beer in Portugal is lager, and it varies much more widely than lager does here. And there's not a lot of different brands, so it was pretty easy to come up with a favorite. It was the hoppiest one, and I wasn't surprised. There are fairly malty ones, some medium ones, and even a couple black ones. The black ones are the weakest at around 4.2% abv. The rest are around 5 to 5.3%.

The oldest cafe in town is the one closest to the church, and that place is packed after Mass on Sunday. I think there's about three chairs inside, the bar is about eight feet long, and there's a couple tables outside. About three dozen men crowd in there after church.

It's the only place in town with draft beer. All the other beer is in bottles. The bottled beer seems stronger than that single draft. Even the bottled version of that draft tastes more alcoholic. I mentioned this to a local, and he didn't agree, so I don't know what the truth is. However, it wouldn't be the first place I've been where draft beer is traditionally weaker than bottled.

It was that draft beer which was my favorite, and oddly enough, the bottled version of it wasn't as hoppy. Another beer was my favorite in bottles.

Beer was cheap in the village. I can't tell you how much the delicious draft was because the cafe is owned by a cousin who never let me pay. (Another cafe is owned by another cousin, but that one had no trouble accepting my money!) Bottled beer comes in 25cl and 33cl bottles, most commonly, but I did see a couple 20cl bottles around. (Why bother?) I was paying thirty cents a bottle in the store and fifty cents a bottle in the cafe for 25cl bottles. That translates to about $2.55 per six-pack of 12-ounce bottles and a buck a pint here in the US.

The labels on the bottles list the contents, and that was interesting. This is from a 5.2 abv pilsener: water, malt, unmalted cereal, glucose syrup, hops, antioxidant E224. Sounds like a normally-adjuncted light beer, but I wonder what that E224 is. A 5% amber lager identified its adjunct: water, malt, corn, and hops. My favorite bottled beer said, "Extracto primitivo 11.8š plato". Most brewers could translate that. My favorite black beer con-tained coloring E150. The labels are pretty informative, and I think we should have labelling like this in the US.

4 SEPT/OCT PROST 2001

CALENDAR

Recreational/Educational Activities: Devise a weekend "road trip"/outing! Call an officer/attend a Planning Meeting/post details to the PO box to run it up the proverbial flagpole! WE HAD A DEAD Y2K - LET'S MAKE 2001 BETTER!!!!!

Wednesday, October 17, 7:30 PM - Club Comp @ Speakeasy,

1195 Evans, SF. See Page 1.

Saturday, October 20 - Entries Due for State Comp @ Landmark Signs. Drop-Off Time 10AM - 2 PM

Saturday, Nov 10, all day - STATE HOMEBREW CLUB COMP @ STERN GROVE (no confusion in 2001 like there was last year!).

Early December, site TBA - Xmas Party (perhaps your editor will host)

1ST CLASS