September 14, 2013
Good Afternoon Ladies & Gentlemen,
After the festival, we ran some errands, ate some Nation’s with her mom & Uncle Ed, then went back to my place to start batch number two of our Homebrewing Adventure – Smashin’ Pumpkin Ale!!! Here are some pictures of that…
We start by taking the Red Ale from Chapter 1
and siphoning it into a 2nd fermentor...
Then we clean out all this stuff from the first
carboy for the next batch...
Pumpkin Ale - Sh*t smelled like pumpkin pie...
Now they ferment for about two weeks side by side...
or until Chapter 3 if you prefer that terminology
A little something to hold you over...
Maple Bacon kettle chips
Anchor Steam's Autumn Maple Red
We watched “Beer Wars” which of course struck us personally. The documentary was made by a former CEO of Mike’s Hard Lemonade (Anat Baron) who basically showed the back-story of the cutthroat world of the nearly $100 billion industry of American beer. Obviously the direction of the movie is a little biased, but the main theme is that there are the BIG BOYS of Anheuser Busch (about half the market share) and the new Miller-Coors-InBev conglomerate (over 40%) and then all of the other little guys (including Samuel Adams, Blue Moon, Sierra Nevada & all the other microbrews and “supermicrobrews” COMBINED) make up the remainder (about 4-6%). Of course, because they’re the big boys, they increase profits by cutting down on the quality of beer, increasing advertising to compensate & muscling out the little guys making the quality stuff by having a major lobby in congress & using still illegal tactics of cutting out the wholesaler distribution options whenever possible… so basically it’s just another big business in America! It’s a very interesting story complete with interviews with some of the CEO’s & owners of other small guys like Jim Koch with Samuel Adams, Sam Calagione of Dogfish Head, Kim Jordan of New Belgium & others. Basically what I pulled from it is that if I’m looking to get into the industry, I have to focus on my product & keep my expectations realistic… because it’d be like opening up a Ma & Pa shop next to a Walmart… with even more government regulations & restrictions. I’d recommend it for anybody interested in the subject of Beer & seeing how it gets from the brewery to your fridge.
Sunday was mostly football & cleaning up around the apartment… but yeah, pretty fantastic weekend overall. How was yours? Please leave a comment & let me know. I’m not sure who all actually reads this stuff anymore so it’d be nice to know who’s interested in this jibber jabber. Have a great day everybody!!!
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