Upcoming Competitions

The preliminary results are in for the Sam Adams Homebrew-B-Que competition that Eric posted about a few days ago and we did not advance to the finals. We entered Brains Explosion and Honey Brains and we had high hopes for them, but given the time of year of the contest and the preference of the judges (Eric knows that some of them are "hop-heads"), we probably shouldn't have been surprised by the result. IPAs and other mostly hoppy beers moved on to the finals. We are awaiting the judges comment cards, which we should receive within a week, but we will chalk this up as a learning experience. I still think we have two pretty good barleywines which should only improve with age and hopefully they will perform better in future competitions.

Next up is the 19th annual Spirit of Free Beer competition sponsored by Brewers United for Real Potables (BURP). We have entered Honey Brains and Weizenheimer for this competition. Weizenheimer should be ready to try and Eric sampled one last night and gave generally positive feedback. It was bottled two weeks ago, so it could probably use a little more conditioning. Judging for this competition takes place on May 14th, so hopefully the extra week of conditioning will allow the flavors and carbonation to fully develop.

We are still in the planning stages for our entry in the Pilsener Urquell Master Home Brew competition in August, although we have all the equipment we need to get started now and we will be brewing soon.

Unwittingly Appropriate

I just found out about this from following the Port City Brewery's Twitter account (@portcitybrew). I'm not sure how I missed it in the paper, but it turns out that the day before we brewed "Theros", the planet Earth lost a craft brew pioneer famous for reviving and popularizing the Belgian witbier style of beer. Theros isn't exactly a Belgian wit, but we did tweak the recipe for a German hefeweizen in a way that might make it taste a little bit more like a wit. Typically, hefeweizens do not use flavoring and bittering hops in their recipes, whereas Belgian wits do, and we decided to add some, mostly because we had some extra hops that we weren't going to need for Brains 2.2, but also because we thought it would make for an interesting beer. Although we did not intend Theros to be a tribute, it is somewhat fitting that we did what we did the day after Pierre Celis, the original founder of the Hoegaarden brand (among others) and a proponent of craft brewing, passed away. I think I'm going to have a Hoegaarden tonight...

Read more about Pierre Celis here.