Big Brews and Blues

This Friday, check out Dayton's first outdoor beer festival of year: Big Brews and Blues. The event runs from 5-9 on the 20th, and features samples of 30 craft beers and live music by 4 local blues bands. Tix are $20 in advance/$25 at the door. Proceeds go to Dayton Diabetes, a local non-profit who help those whose lives are affected by diabetes. You can see my full write-up this week in the Dayton City Paper.

Technorati Tags: Big Brews and Blues, Dayton, blues, beer, craft beer, brewing, homebrew

Pints for Prostates BrewTensils Brewout

On May 7^th from 9 am to 5 pm, in collaboration with National Homebrew Day, Miami Valley BrewTensils will be hosting a local brewout to raise funds for Pints For Prostates, a national charity designed to raise awareness of prostate cancer screening through the universal language of beer. Local homebrewers will be making their beers in the parking lot behind the store, and BrewTensils will be selling the Brewer’s Best PSA IPA ingredient kit, with a portion of proceeds for each kit sold going to Pints for Prostates

The event will include a local raffle for prizes from Belmont Party Supply, BrewTensils, Trolley Stop, South Park Tavern, Pizza Factory, Chappy's Tap Room and Grille, Boston's Bistro, and King's Table Bar and Grille. In addition, enter into the national Pints for Prostate raffle for a vacation in the beer capitals of Europe! The trip for two goes to Prague, Bamberg, and Munich for 9 nights, September 9-19 and includes airfare, hotel, brewery tours, Oktoberfest, pubcrawls and transportation (a $7,500 total value). Tickets for this raffle are $10 each, three for $25, or seven for $50 (all proceeds go to Pints for Prostate) with the drawing held nationally on July 31, 2011. For more info please visit www.pintsforprostates.org or www.brewtensils.com.

Prepping for brew day

Stopped by BrewTensils this morning to prep for my DCP homebrew feature and to pick up ingredients for tomorrow's brew session. Good talk with Darren Link, BrewTensil's manager, about the community aspect of brewing, and with Mike Schwartz, Belmont/BrewTensils owner about upcoming events. Also met several all-grain brewers at the Belmont brewout. Good group.

Trying a few new things tomorrow. Going for an all-grain RyePA. We'll see how gummy malted rye really is. I picked up some rice hulls--hopefully that will help. This will only be my second IPA, despite over a decade of brewing (the first was a Victory HopDevil clone and my first partial grain).

At Jim Witmer's advice, I also picked up 5.2 mash stabilizer--buffering salts so that I don't have to muck with pH levels. Heard that I'll see better efficiency rates. That's great, but I'm happy just to not have to worry about the pH level.

Finally, trying dry yeast for the first time since my first brew. Built up a starter using Goya Malta - the hop and malt based soda. We'll see how it goes. More notes tomorrow.

Cavalier Distributing Earthquake Relief

Cavalier Distributing is donating $2 to a relief fund for every new email address added to their weekly newsletter. Cavalier is one of the two or three local distributors responsible for the great craft beer selection in the Miami Valley and their newsletters are always interesting and informative, so this is a can't miss. Here's the text of their release on the project:

Cavalier Distributing will donate $2.00 to tsunami relief efforts for every new subscriber to our email newsletter between now and March 25, 2011, up to $10,000. Please forward this message to fellow craft beer fans in Ohio to make this effort a success.

If you are receiving this email as a forwarded message, please click the following link to subscribe: Subscribe to Cavalier's Weekly Newsletter

Update: So far we have added 632 email addresses to our weekly newsletter. Please help get the word out so we can reach our goal of donating $10,000.

Technorati Tags: Calavier Distributing, Japan, tsunami, earthquake, beer, craft beer, brewing, homebrew

Fizzy Green Beer is for Wussies

Happy Saint Patrick's Day! The family is clad in green and the boys ate their customary green-dyed breakfasts (this year, it was Blarney Cereal, which is just regular cereal with green dye in the milk. Gross, but the kids love it).

Green dye is fun for the kids, but it has no place in beer. To avoid it, check out my alternatives to green-dyed Budmillercoors in this week's Dayton City Paper. All are good alternatives, but my personal favorites are Guinness Extra Stout (I know, obvious choice, but classics are classics for a reason) and Conway's Irish Ale from Great Lakes Brewing Company.

Technorati Tags: St. Patrick's Day, Murphy's, Guinness, Great Lakes, Heavy Seas, Wexford's, Saranac, Irish Stout, Irish Red, beer, craft beer, brewing

Lenten Beer

As a follow-up to my recent article about the connection between beer and food, here's a story of a newspaper editor who plans to emulate European monks by limiting himself to only beer and water for the 40 days of lent.

Technorati Tags:Lent, monks, Abbey ale, Trappist, food, beer, craft beer, brewing, homebrew

Beer and Food Pairings

I'm late in posting this due to an insanely busy week, but this week my article on beer and food pairings ran in the Dayton City Paper.

Big thanks to Gina, my wife, who took the photos. Only cost me take-out at Taqueria Mixteca and a chocolate torte (which the kids actually ate most of). There were two other photos that I really liked that didn't run, so I've posted them here. The cake one is my favorite.