Yeah but I'd have to go alone. Weekend time without kid and wife is pretty hard to come by. You're right, though. I would fucking love that.

Any of these places closer:



Seems strange that they would come all the way out to LA for this beer festival and then have so little distribution even in MA. I was under the impression that everyone at the festival used Shelton Brothers for distribution. I guess it's just very limited supply right now?

Not positive, but I have never ever seen Tree House in or around Boston, so I sorta suspect they're just

- Really new, and
- Finding that they don't NEED to distribute if their reputation is so good that everyone drives to their front door, like Alchemist.

Just a guess. And I am trying to put together a motorcycle ride with Neuro and another friend for saturday the 22nd. I'll go alone, actually, if they can't make it. Need to get out one more time before SNOW etc.

And no, those places are all in middle Mass, or west of center.

Probably that or that they just started distributing through Shelton Brothers and maybe will be easier to find in the future if they can manage to increase production. I was surprised how many of the brewers didn't know much about if and where I might be able to buy their beers so I stopped asking well before I got to Tree House.

Just read the "Distribution" entry in the Oxford Companion to Beer last night (I'm all the way into the D's...) and yeah, there doesn't appear to be anywhere on earth that has a simple distributor system. On a rare MURICA note, as much as I pan our system, England's sucks balls in comparison with tied houses and whatnot. It's hard enough to get good at making really fucking exceptional beer. Then you're supposed to become an expert at navigating the dist channels...

So I opened this last night after liking the Saison I had from Side Project at the Shelton brothers festival and holy crap was it good. Maybe the best saison I've ever had good. Light and effervescent with nice fruit and spice notes from the saison yeast, subtle floral and tea-like flavors from the chamomile and an ever so slight honeyed sweetness. I really loved it. Luckily it's still in stock at my store so I just bought two more. I thought about buying more but I don't think anyone knows Perennial out here and they still have a pretty good supply.

Thanks again for the recommendation.

That belgian quad the neighbors got me for loaning them my parking spot last weekend was GOOD. "Klevere Tien" I think it was called? From Het Nest. Purported to be made with anise, but I honestly couldn't taste it. It did have a slightly more complex flavor than most quads, which taste like dark raisins and booze burn (in the best way).

I was walking by a liquor store on my way back from lunch and decided to go in and see if they had anything new and special. I did a double take when I saw one lonely bottle of Hill Farmstead Arthur in their beer section. We've been getting the Grassroots collaboration beers for about a year out here but I've never seen Hill Farmstead's own product here other than at the Shelton Brothers Festival. Not sure whether this means. Their website still says we currently only ship to the local Vermont market.

The strange thing is this isn't even that great a store where I found it and I'm guessing none of those great stores have it/had it or they would have posted it to facebook and sold out their stock of it in 20 minutes.

I've run into things like this (not on the level of Hill Farmstead) in random stores, particularly in like middle/upper middle class black areas since {sweeping generalization time] black folks don't give a fuck about craft beer.

Black market. Happens occasionally in chicago... you'll see the random New Glarus or even bottle of Dark Lord on the shelves. I guarantee H/F would be pissed if they found out. This is a brewery that banned a trader for ebaying one of their bottles.

If only Cory King starts distributing his Side Project sours... if only.

Holy FUCK. No, that bottle was NOT supposed to be there. Good for you.

Kinda like that bottle of Russian River I found in Jamaica Plain last year.

They just poured a week ago in LA at the Shelton Brothers festival. My guess is there was beer leftover that made its way into the local retail market on a one-time basis. Probably just doesn't make sense to pack up leftovers and send them all the way back to Vermont. Maybe even done with their approval. Still a surprise to see it.



The thing I like about this store I found it in is that they have enough taste to stock a small selection of good stuff but not a large enough selection to be on the radar of the total beer nerds. They usually don't have anything rare but they get some stuff that isn't super rare but popular enough to sell fast (eg Pliny The Elder, Beachwood releases) and it actually will stay on the shelf/in the refrig for a couple of days because they don't have the foot traffic the best stores do and they don't go posting it to Facebook whenever they get something good in.

The brothers may not like craft beers but I've found that the mexicans really do. One of the best and largest craft beer selections is in a store in East LA. I sometimes luck out into rare whiskey there though because while they like their craft beer and their morrissey music they don't know much about whiskey.

So I am going to Tree House Brewery this saturday if it kills me. Gonna load up on warm gear, fire up the bike, meet up with a friend (Neuro backed out, doesn't have warm enough riding gear) if he stays in, and if not I'll go it alone. Should take a couple of hours to get there, will stay for an hour? then ride back. Looking forward to being out on the motorcycle again, even if it will be cold.

Aaaand the beer news continues.

A friend here in town is getting a job with an organization that happens to be hosting the Craft Brew Fest in Boston friday night. It's $50 a pop, so I wasn't going to go... just don't often want to be that crowded and wait in long lines for beers I can (usually) get at stores. But the friend wrote me yesterday to ask if I could be the event photographer for it, in exchange for free entry for me and First Mate (and The Girl). So I'm doing it. I'm not a professional by any stretch, but I think I can do it justice. A little nervous, but mostly excited.

I'll be interested to hear what you think. I only tried their Julius IPA but I thought it was pretty great.

Did this trip happen? If yes, thoughts?

No. -sigh- When saturday morning came, it was going to be

1. Me going alone
2. 34 degrees out
3. Me missing out on a nice brunch with friends at our place
4. Me not fixing the flat tire my bicycle got the night before


....and I just didn't feel like it was going to be more fun. The wife was all fine with it - she assumed I was going. I just flinched.

The craft brewfest the night before was fun, but I barely drank. I had 3 tiny 2oz samples all night, because I was scrambling to photograph the event. The first time I've ever come home from a beer festival, and immediately cracked open a beer.

It's about time but still good news (or would be if I ever flew Delta):



Haven't had too many new things lately but from what I can remember:

Le Trou Du Diable La Saison Du Tracteur - a saison from Canada that was poured at the Shelton Brothers festival. I bought a bottle instead of having it there and just got around to drinking it last weekend. I'd be happy to drink this all night long but I've had some better ones recently.

Belching Beaver Peanut Butter Milk Stout - I've had this before and loved it. Still really good but it was better on tap than in the bottle.

Almanac Dogpatch Sour Wild Ale brewed with Cherries then aged in Wine Barrels. Probably one of the best sours I've had from them.

I also went to a sour symposium that Eagle Rock Brewing held with the woman who runs the barrel-aged sour blending program at New Belgium. Was pretty cool event tasting through some of their limited release sours and talking about how they approach making them.

Some interesting takeaways:

* All of their sours are built from two base beers: a dark lager and a light lager. She claimed that the more complex the base beer, the harder it was to get a sour right and the longer it would take to make. She said you want to give the "bugs" a simple diet.
* The key to making good sours is blending. She said a single barrel of sour is rarely great.
* They participate in looped barrel program with Leopold Brothers distillery in which Leopold gives New Belgium the barrels it uses to age Fruited Whiskeys (they make a Mt Cherry Whiskey, a Peach Whiskey and a Blackberry Whiskey) after they bottle each batch. New Belgium adds Brett and the various bacteria to the barrel and then their beers and returns the barrel when they are done aging the beer back to Leopold and the cycle starts anew. Must try some of these fruit whiskeys. The bugs can't survive in a barrel with cask strength whiskey but i'm still curious to taste whatever impact the beer and bugs have on the whiskey. We tried their Cherry Felix beer aged in a barrel used to make the Cherry Whiskey and it did taste like cherries. She told us that all the
cherry came from the whiskey barrel. There was no fruit added to the beer.
* They've been making sours for a long friggin' time. I think she said 17 years? She said that it was extremely hard to find the right types of bacteria commercially and that some of the starter bacteria came from a fat tire keg that a customer returned because of off flavors. The bar hated the keg but they loved the off flavors and dumped some of the kegs in a foudre to create a starter culture.

Pretty cool stuff and all of the sours were much better than I was expecting them to be. I've never been a huge fan but some of them were pretty great.

Very, very very very interesting. So here is New Belgium's actual souring room...

KBRX0891 by gordopuggy, on Flickr

...and our tour guide, Marie. The spiel we got was that they use these gigantic wine barrels permanently. The Brett bugs are in them, and they load the light or dark starters into each of them, wait til they're properly funky, then blend. They didn't mention anything about barrels (like normal sized barrels, as opposed to these monsters), and I don't think I saw any. So I'm curious about that wrinkle.

Oh and the barrels came from wineries. again, ... -shrug-

Those giant fodres house are used to make the base beers, Felix and Oscar, that are blended into all of their sours. They might also be used for the small handful of sours that they do in regular release in large quantities. We didn't talk a lot about those beers and I'm not sure that those see any barrel time after they are blended but they are made in the quantity where those in theory could be used.

Those foudres are neutral barrels, meaning that they've because they've been used for so long that the wood itself (as opposed to the bugs that live in the barrels) imparts no flavor on the beer and the impact of the wine on the beer was only there for the first batch of beer they made after getting the foudre from the winery. They have had some of those foudres in operation for 15+ years. They are supposedly in the process of doubling the number of foudres in operation.

Smaller barrels are acquired for use when they want the barrel itself to have an impact on the beer. In the case of the Leopold barrels, its the whiskey that was aged in the barrel which imparts flavor to the beer. Those barrels have been used enough that the wood has no impact. They also acquire other barrels from other sources though where it might be a wine barrel and perhaps the wine and the wood affect the flavor of the beer. There's also the issue of having a barrel be the appropriate size for the batch of beer they are making. If there is too much oxygen in the cask, it will turn the beer to vinegar. She talked a little about how green they were when the first started and how many basic mistakes she made in the beginning. For example, she said that they need to be able to sample the base beers to decide when it's ready but no one put any thought into how often they should sample taste it and how to properly extract it. As a result, they sampled too often resulting in more air than ideal in the casks and sampled from the top of the barrel disturbing the flora which the yeast forms as a protective cap against oxygenation. They figured out after awhile that what they were doing must be wrong, and she sent Vinny from Russian River an email saying "you don't know me but I was wondering..." and he sent detailed information and diagrams on the proper way to extract beer samples. They also use smaller barrels when adding flavor adjuncts like the lychee fruit that they add to the Tart Lychee beer. The foudres never get cleaned so that they don't have to reinoculate them so you wouldn't want to use them that way. They refill them with new beer almost immediately after emptying them.

Another thing I thought was interesting is that she said that they only keg their special release beers. She said that she was dead set against bottling them because she believed too many rare beers get collected rather than consumed and she wanted their beer to be drank, not collected.

Finally got around to trying this last night. It wasn't bad but it doesn't really change my opinion of Stone and I wouldn't put it anywhere near on par with Prairie Bomb! I've bought a lot of stouts over the last year and a half and the weather here rarely makes them feel like the right choice to drink. I know I have well over a half a case of Bomb! in its various formats including 6 Christmas Bombs! I have so much stout that I was walking around a store with a 4 pack of Bourbon County a couple of weeks ago that I ended up putting it back after thinking about how much stout I have and whether I really needed more.



I was really disappointed that I didn't get to try any of their beer at the Shelton Brothers festival but I was restocking my refrigerator yesterday and came across a beer that I'd bought about a year ago called "Joey Pepper" which is a Belgian blonde with peppercorns and brett made by Evil Twin in collaboration with Sante Adairius. I don't think I'd even heard of Sante Adairius when I bought it so I never made the connection that I had one of their beers after the fact. Look forward to trying it.