johnlittle.com

When will we ever be spared from having this ignorance spewed into our living rooms during the Super Bowl? In this one, Budweiser tries to get a laugh out of a bunch of idiots preferring to die drinking piss over calling for a rescue. Yeah, I know it’s supposed to be a Lost parody, but when you begin to understand what real craft beer is and when you begin to realize what kind of company InBevAB is, and the tactics it and its distributors use to control market share, none of the commercials are funny anymore (except the ones that try to seriously tout how good the beer is… those are laughable). All the other commercials are nothing but branding and make budweiser drinkers look like idiots.

One thing Anat Baron does a pretty good job of in Beer Wars is to try to expose this company for what it is. Stream the film and see for yourself.

Then, for some encouragement from the craft beer segment (only 5% of the current market), take a look at I Am a Craft Brewer, which features up and coming successful craft brewers more interested in pursuing the noble craft than in gaining/retaining marketshare through anticompetitive efforts and brainwash. ABI sales were down 12% this January over last January. Let’s hope they continue to decline.

This audio is from the Alabama House Tourism and Travel committee hearing yesterday. I didn’t do such a good job with my audio recorder. The first one is ok because I had the recorder with me at the podium, but I was 2 rows back on the others, so the quality varies based on how loud and clear the person talking was (and how much I was shifting the paper in my hands). I don’t know the names of a couple of folks who spoke, but if you do, leave a comment and I’ll edit. I also missed the opening intro to the bill by Representative Robinson because I pushed the wrong button, but he spoke again at the end.

ws110071.mp3 – me
ws110072.mp3 – Joe Godfrey
ws110073.mp3 – Stuart Carter
ws110074.mp3 – Dan Ireland
ws110075.mp3 – Dan Roberts
ws110076.mp3 – ?
ws110077.mp3 – ?
ws110078.mp3 – Oliver Robinson

After many, many months of having imagery in mind for Southern Farmhouse Ales, we finally have a logo. I’ve taken lots of pictures of structures in rural Alabama, particularly in Lee County, and spent a good bit of time down at Auburn University’s College of Architecture Library, trying to find examples to help me communicate with a graphic artist about what I was looking for. Many thanks to Jeff Cutrer down at Master Graphics in Auburn. I think he did an awesome job.

The font is based on a set of leathercraft tools my granddady left me when he passed away back in the early 80s. It has been over 25 years since he stood over my shoulder teaching me how to carve leather, and it was a real pleasure to find all those tools again recently and practice carving the text into a raw leather belt strip to show Jeff the type font I wanted to use.

I’ve finally been able to put something up other than a blank white page at http://www.southernfarmhouse.com, as well as to finally add the logo alongside other Alabama breweries and breweries-in-planning at http://www.alabamabrewersguild.org.

Seen in the Oct/Nov Great Lakes issue of the Brewing News… nice work, very poetic.. in a dark way. Discussing the early 80s:

American beer had bottomed out in a puddle of colorless swill, flamed out in pursuit of the lowest common consumer.

Hey Surly Runners. Y’all look cold! If you’d had that run down here, you be in gym shorts and tank tops. I saw this pic in Surly’s email newsletter and thought it was cool. I need one of those shirts.

Surly is an awesome brewery. Yet another story of a passionate homebrewer starting one of the nation’s highest quality craft breweries. Check out this interview by their Alma Mater newspaper.

Rebecca Ansari ’94 and her husband, Omar Ansari, know how to combine business with pleasure

Not too many years ago, if you lived in the United States and wanted a really good beer (something other than a Miller or a Bud), you had to either travel to Europe or brew something yourself.

Omar Ansari was such a home brewer. After receiving a small home-brew kit as a gift, he began sharing his homemade beer with friends, who were thrilled, he says, either because it was great beer or because it was free. Whatever the case, Ansari was bitten by the brewing bug. One day while he was flipping through a home-brewing catalog, he spotted a larger kit that would permit him to brew six beers at one time. And that was the genesis for Surly Brewing Company, the small brewery started in 2005 by Omar and his wife, Rebecca Sheldon Ansari ’94. In fewer than four years, Minnesota-based Surly has become one of the nation’s fastest growing and most acclaimed breweries.

Seen at beernews.org. Monster Energy Drinks has issued a cease and desist order to Rock Art Brewery, demanding that it stop using the name Vermonster for the brewery’s American Barleywine. Rock Art has decided not to roll over and be screwed, and it is making the news in a big way. Watch the video below and send your thoughts to suits and ties that made such a stupid decision to go after a small business that has done nothing wrong.

[original video deleted from YouTube, since Hansen dropped its demand in response to the public campaign in favor of Rock Art.]

More homebrewers going commercial. Chris and Christina Collier and some partners have been working hard to start up the Nantahala Brewing Company in Bryson City, North Carolina. I can’t wait to visit.

Chris and Christina have been active in the Mid-South homebrewing scene for many years. They’re members of the Covert Hops Society in Atlanta and managed the Peach State Brewoff for a couple years. They write the homebrewing column for the Southern Brew News, and they’re regulars at the Auburn Brew Club tailgates.

Best of luck Chris and Christina!

Via the Huffington Post:

After massive rains and flooding in the area, rainwater isn’t going to waste at the the 5 Seasons Brewing in Atlanta, GA. The local brewery uses 100% filtered rainwater that’s captured on-site to create their “green beer” (not to be confused with the St. Patrick’s Day type). The brewers believe that rainwater is cleaner and softer than city water, which makes their beer even better.
Check out this CNN video about the green beer that’s not only good for the environment, but also “smooth”:

posting this left over from resipsaloquitur.auburnbrewclub.org… just posting this because I don’t want to lose it. I’ll update the links sometime and do a new About page.

**** Last update June 2008

I love homebrewing. It is my only hobby, and I find that piddling around in the brewery, sitting in the recliner flipping back and forth between homebrewing books, planning my next brews or equipment tweaks are some of the only things that really take me away from work at the end of the day.

First Craft Beers
I was first introduced to craft beer in 2003 by a friend who lives in Memphis. He and I were hooked on the MMORPG game, Star Wars Galaxies, and used to talk to each other with headsets and microphones while playing. He’d always tell me what beer he was drinking, and it was always a good gourmet beer. He introduced me to ratebeer.com, which lists thousands of beers and allows users to rate and comment on the beers. I decided to give good beer a try and went to the Whip Inn in Austin, which carries about 400 different brands of beer, and began to pull singles off the shelf. I didn’t know what I was buying, I just wanted to get a variety of things. Each night, I’d get a few out of the fridge and look them up on ratebeer.com to learn what exactly it was I was drinking. I don’t think I would’ve ever been able to discern choclate, plum, banana, raisen, biscuity, fruity, citrusy, nutty, toffee or any other flavors without the power of suggestion I found on that site. I was immediately hooked. Later my friend kept talking to me about his interest in homebrewing. I was ambivalent at first but kept the idea in the back of my head. We joked about creating Star Wars themed beers and cool labels… Lokian Wild Wheat Ale, for example. And just to clarify, I’m not a Star Wars nerd, but the game was fun for a while after it first came out.

First Homebrew
I attended my first homebrew club meeting in 2004, that of the Louisville Area Grain and Extract Research Society (LAGERS). It was incredible. I loved the homebrew, and it wasn’t long before I went to the local homebrew shop and bought my first brewing equipment. (I still use some of this equipment, but my brewery has come a long way since then.) One of the guys in the homebrew club invited me to come over to his house for a brewday on a weekend soon afterward, and I brewed my first batch, an extract batch with steeped specialty grains. After bottling that batch, I just stored it away for a while, and around this time we relocated to Alabama for work reasons.

Rocket City Brewers
Right away, I discovered the Rocket City Brewers in Huntsville, a very active club with over 40 active homebrewers. The club has won Mid-South Homebrew Club of the Year several times. I began to attend their monthly meetings and received an amazing education at each meeting. Their format of tasting one homebrew at a time, with extensive discussion of each, including a discussion of the BJCP style guidelines where appropriate was very valuable to me over the next 2 years. I immediately upgraded to all grain brewing and have brewed somewhere in the neighborhood of 83 different beer, mead and cider styles (as of June, 2008). My original goal was to not brew the same style twice and to make my way through the BJCP styles until I had brewed them all, but I fell off the wagon somewhere around batch #77. Each new style has been a real educational experience for me. Some of them have accidentally turned out quite good too!! I got involved in entering the Mid-South Homebrew Series competitions, together with the other RCB brewers, and have managed to get lucky and win a few ribbons. The competitions have been exciting and have encouraged me to brew more often and to brew different styles.

Auburn Brew Club
I moved to Auburn in May, 2007. There wasn’t a homebrew club here; and, after asking around, I wasn’t having any luck getting any names. I was beginning to get worried, because there’s nothing like getting together regularly with good hombrewing friends. So I put up a website, registered the club with the AHA, and posted messages about the club on the brewboard, beeradvocate, morebeer and northernbrewer. That helped tremedously. The club has 20 active brewers so far (as of June, 2008) and another 60 or so on our announcement list. We hope to have 30 active brewers by the end of the 2008. I commute to Montgomery for work, and I’ve been listening to podcasts from the Brewing Network and Basic Brewing on the way to and from, which has been very rewarding and makes the drive not only tolerable, but enjoyable.

Brewing and Work
Since 1992, I’ve worked exclusively on healthcare and public health issues. My online resume is here. I became licensed as an attorney in 1997 while pursuing a Master of Science in Public Health and have primarily worked for hospitals, physicians, residential care facilities, medical equipment companies and the like. Over the past few years, because of my involvement in the brewing community, I’ve had plenty of opportunities to answer questions from homebrewers and commercial brewers and retailers. I’ve always tried to maintain a focus on healthcare and public health issues, and I don’t think my forays into alcohol manufacture and serving issues takes me away from my focus. These are public health issues after all. So it has been a real pleasure to answer questions from beer brewers, consumers and sellers. There’s nothing like being able to combine work and the issues you get most excited about.

My Memphis friend never followed through with his interest in hombrewing, but I picked it up and ran with it. It has been a blast!! Thanks, Dany!

Cool news from Bill Rose at Cask Brewing Systems. Cask is the exclusive supplier of Ball Corp. aluminum cans to the craft brewing industry, and they also produce some great small canning machines for the small craft brewer. (Watch this interesting video.) I’d love to can some beer one day! But, I’m starting with bombers, and they’re cool too.

Cask Brewing Systems is pleased to announce a new customer – The first microbrewery in Virginia to can its beer. The Blue Mountain Brewery in rural Nelson County will become the first Virginia microbrewery to can its beer. Using our hand-operated filler and seamer, owner Taylor Smack will package his Full Nelson Pale Ale in 12-ounce aluminum cans.

Why cans? “People say, ‘What about the metallic taste?’ But that problem was solved years ago,” Smack says, noting that cans are lined with an epoxy-based resin. He enumerates the advantages: Cans are opaque, so there’s no need to worry about skunky, light-struck beer. They’re lighter and more compact than bottles, making them a convenient tote for bikers, backpackers and the beach crowd. They ice down faster than glass. And consumers are more likely to recycle cans. “I’m a huge believer that this will be a big medium for craft brewing,” he says. (Excerpt from: www.washingtonpost.com, June 17, 2009)

Smack also states that cans are extremely environmentally friendly. This is even more important in Nelson County since the county discontinued its glass recycling program last year due to market conditions. However, its can recycling program remains intact.

Blue Mountain Brewery sits in the shadow of Appalachia’s Blue Ridge Mountains in Afton, Virginia. They are a farm brewery, growing their own hops, and proudly crafting real American beer. For more information go to: www.bluemountainbrewery.com.