SF Beer Week 2011 Part 1

We're pretty excited that SF Beer week is in a few weeks.  Mark your calendars for events that are happening from Feb 11 - Feb 20, 2011. 

Here's a few venues that have special menus or are showcasing products or tastings each night of the week in addition to all of the other scheduled events.  What's great about these is there's no admission fee/cover to attend.

Even if you can't make any of the special activities, you'll still be able to participate in SF Beer Week by dropping by these locations during most of their business hours.

Free admission events recurring each day of SF Beer Week:

• Strong Beer, Strong Salads @ Social from 4pm-10pm
• Beer Ice Cream @ Humphry Slocombe from Noon - 9pm
• Speciality Food and Rare Beer Pairings @ Delarosa from 11:30am - 1am
• Beer Cocktails @ Alembic from Noon - 2am
• 3-Course Menu Paired with Magnolia Beer @ Alembic from 5pm - 1am

Check back for our next post as we will highlight a single day free-admission event for each day of SF Beer week.

2011 Lineup

We already have plans to attempt another apple cider.  This time we want to produce something a little sweeter.  The great thing about cider is that it's ready to drink in just a few days of fermentation.  We only gave our last batch about a week of fermentation time, and that may have been a bit too much.

For our first beer, however, we'll be trying our hand at a California IPA.  Details on that to come, but it will be nice to try something a little higher on the bitterness scale.

We also want to try a dark ale, and with a little more planning this time, we'll tackle another seasonal ale.

Off and Running - 2011

From our last post, here's an update to what we've been up to (see below for a little more detail):

1. Apple Cider - brewed
2. Mead - brewed and still aging in bottles
3. Beer - We chose to brew a pumpkin ale!

1. Apple Cider

We got 3.5 gallons of cider, with the juice of one lemon into the primary fermenter, and 2/3 package of dry wine yeast.  Left that to ferment for 3 days and racked it off to a glass carboy.  Then bottled after 4 days in the glass carboy.

ABV ~8%

Taste: Light, dry, refreshing with a light apple flavor.  Good carbonation.  The flavor was a bit closer to champagne than a typical cider.  I rather liked it!

2. Mead (1 gallon batch)

14 cups of water to a boil and added 2 lbs of pure honey and juice of one lemon, added 1/8 tsp. DAP (di-amonium phosphate).  After the honey solution cooled down to 120 F, we added 1/3 package of dry wine yeast.

3. Pumpkin Ale

This was a fun one to make, even though we got started a little late in the season.  After visiting family before Thanksgiving, we brought back a home-grown pumpkin with the hope of turning it in to beer.

We didn't realize, until we spoke with Griz, that it would need 6 to 8 weeks from brew-time to drink-time.

It's been about 6 weeks since we've brewed and we're finally ready to taste.

This was a much more involved brewing process, so we won't go into the details now, but keep an eye out for a future post devoted to our Pumpkin Ale.

We also separated the batch into two portions; one spiced, one not spiced.  I'll admit that I was a little afraid to go all-out and spice the whole batch so we only spiced about a gallon worth.

It was definitely a lesson in taking some risks because the spiced portion turned out to be delicious!  The un-spiced portion is not bad by any measure, but after tasting the nice pumpkin-pie flavor of the smaller batch, I regret not being bolder with the whole batch.

J&M