Since I haven’t cried in over two months about dumb stuff, I figured I might as well give it a try.
Yup, bitch work time again. Why on this fine Memorial Day weekend did I find time to hide in my basement and clean a bunch of crap, you got me!? So for a couple of hours I blasted my iPod and cleaned and sanitized. First I did the 6 carboys, which really weren’t that bad, but playing with glass and chemicals and moving heavy stuff gets shady after a while. Three were secondaries, one was a transfer vessel for lack of a better term, and two were primaries that had been soaking for at least two weeks. After that came the kegs, which again weren’t horrible. When I released the pressure valve on the Imperial Amber keg it still smelt so hoppy good, yum.
One of the kegs was the keg from the Gnome Root Beer. I have heard horror stories about how everything will smell like root beer forever and how it is the hardest smell in the world to make completely go away. And sure, the keg smelt overwhelmingly like root beer at first, but after everything was busted down and cleaned up the root beer smell was pretty hard to detect. Well, actually the seal on the lid still smelt of root beer. But it makes me wonder, if just that one seal, or maybe all the seals were replaced, could the keg be used as a normal beer keg and then swap in the root beer seals when a root beer was wanted – I think so.
After everything was cleaned and I took a break for dinner I had the lovely chore of making a yeast starter. Garrett has the equipment to use a pressure cooker to properly can starter wort and has offered me the opportunity to use it, but some how time is not on my side . . . until I make a yeast starter and then I have little visions of canned starter wort dancing in my head. Honestly, it’s just time consuming and boring, not hard. I used the starter on a vial of WLP004 Irish Ale Yeast. It was unfortunately 3+ months past its best before date. It really should be fine since it was stored properly and I am building it up with a starter, but I will have some dry yeast on hand as an insurance policy. I am planning on brewing an Irish Red tomorrow. The good news is, I really want to brew and am looking forward to it, the other news is it is an after work in the evening/night brew session with a 30% chance of showers. Of course I’ll try to make the best of it. If all goes well I’ll have flame to kettle before 5PM and be tiding up janitorial duties before 11PM.
So I just kegged the APA with Wheat ale and ir sure tasted good so far.
Things went basically fine with the kegging of the beer, but I still have issues kegging after dry hopping with pellet hops. Twice I have transferred over enough debris to clog a keg, so I am uber paranoid about doing that every time. To the point that this time I transferred from secondary to a tetrary for only about 30 minutes and then to a keg. Hopefully there wasn’t any additional oxidation. I think about 5% of the original dry hops carried over to the tetrary and about 5% of that to the keg, so about what like 1/4 of a percent from the original dry hops . . . ? Better than nothing.
I also learned an important lesson for my kegging set-up. I already can barely squeeze in three corny kegs into my kegerator, but I realized tonight that if on the modified keg (see picture above), if the lid is facing the incorrect direction, it doesn’t matter any longer if it’s modified, it won’t all fit. So I had to do some fancy floppin’ if you catch my drift. Lesson learned.
Also, last night the last keg in the kegerator and the first keg of three of the Scottish 70/- kicked last night. So in addition to kegging the APA I also cleaned and sanitized my lines and put three new kegs on. On tap currently are the Hop Scottish, the Simcoe ABA, and the Scotch Scottish. With both the Hop Scottish and the Scotch Scottish on tap there are blending opportunities for a Hop Scotch – nice! I pulled samples of all three, and they were small and warm, but they seemed OK – the Hop Scottish was more mild than anticipated, the Simcoe ABA was a little catty (go figure), and the Scotch Scottish was more oakey than I realized.
So other than that it was a pretty chill night, though I realized I have mad bitch work to do, six carboys and three kegs waiting to be cleaned, ugh. Hopefully on Monday I’ll brew, but I think a lot of it will depend on what time I get home from the beach on Sunday in order to get my stuff situated. Oh, and BTW, I am enjoying a 16 month old Palo Santo right now, smooth with a capital SMOOTH!
This may not look like your traditional root beer float, but that’s OK, this ISN’T your traditional root beer float!
THIS is a root beer float made with homemade root beer AND homemade vanilla ice cream – sweet! About a month or two ago I finally got around to making a batch of Gnome homemade root beer inspired by the success Garrett had with his root beer. I discovered a few things: I don’t drink enough root beer/soda to make a keg (5 gallons) without having a plan to get rid of a lot of it, I need to over-carbonate my soda to run on my system since I only have one dispensing pressure which is below typical soda carbonation levels, and I need to tweak the recipe to help with head-retention. I am actually looking forward to making it again, I just still have to make it through this first batch. The batch was on tap pretty long, so I decided to bottle it to make room for real beer. Even after being on tap for as long as it was I got almost a case and a half of bottles, which means I only drank just more than a 1/4 of the keg, sheesh.
But, after making root beer I had to make a root beer float! I was going to go out and buy a pint of some premium vanilla, like Haagen-Dazs or Ben & Jerry’s or something else I like that I never get, but then I remembered that I had an ice cream maker at my mom’s house which I never use. So after getting everything ready with the maker I followed a recipe and went for it. The first time I made ice cream (like 5+ years ago) I remember it tasting like eggs (yuck!), which is kind of what turned me off of homemade ice cream, so I searched for a recipe with no egg (normal ice cream base contains milk, cream, sugar, egg yolk, plus flavoring). I found a recipe on the Food Network website from Alton Brown, who is one of my favorites, that didn’t use egg, so I went for it. Here is the recipe:
Ingredients
* 2 cups half-and-half
* 1 cup whipping cream
* 1 cup minus 2 tablespoons sugar
* 2 tablespoons peach preserves (not jelly)
* 1 vanilla bean, split and scraped
Directions
Combine all ingredients (including the bean and its pulp) in a large saucepan and place over medium heat. Attach a frying or candy thermometer to inside of pan. Stirring occasionally, bring the mixture to 170 degrees F. Remove from heat and allow to cool slightly. Remove the hull of the vanilla bean, pour mixture into lidded container and refrigerate mixture overnight to mellow flavors and texture.
Freeze mixture in ice cream freezer according to unit’s instructions. The mixture will not freeze hard in the machine. Once the volume has increased by 1/2 to 3/4 times, and reached a soft serve consistency, spoon the mixture back into a lidded container and harden in the freezer at least 1 hour before serving.
Looks kind of weird, right – peach preserves in vanilla ice cream? I poked around online and it appears as if the preserves substitute the action of the egg yolks through the pectin in the preserves. I’m not sure how it all works, but I do know that the vanilla ice cream did NOT taste like peach or eggs – bonus. Actually, the ice cream was very vanilla flavored and quite good for my “first” attempt at home made ice cream. It was a little bit grainier than I like my ice cream and our freezer kept it a little bit softer than I like mine, but all in all – major success.
So, thus the true homemade root beer float. No I didn’t use all crazy roots and suck to make my root beer, but I also didn’t milk my own cows or make my own preserves. And on that note, the homemade root beer float got me thinking what else I could make “from scratch”. I think I will try to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich all from scratch, I think that would be cool. Make my own peanut butter (have done it), make my own jelly (have done it), and make my own bread (have done it) all together and see how MY sandwich compares to what I would make from the store. I have a sneaky suspicion that this is going to be a lot more work with lack-luster results, we shall see.
“I Am A Craft Brewer” is a collaborative video representing the camaraderie, character and integrity of the American Craft Brewing movement. Created by Greg Koch, CEO of the Stone Brewing Co. and Chris & Jared of Redtail Media…and more than 35 amazing craft brewers from all over the country. The video was shown to a packed audience of 1700 craft brewers and industry members at the 2009 Craft Brewers Conference as an introduction to Greg’s Keynote Speech entitled “Be Remarkable: Collaboration Ethics Camaraderie Passion.” As is tradition for the CBC Keynote, a toast to the audience was offered. This time, the beers offered for the toast were all collaboratively brewed craft beers including Isabella Proximus, Collaboration Not Litigation, AleSmith/Mikkeller/Stone Belgian Style Triple, Jolly Pumpkin/Nøgne-Ø/Stone Special Holiday Ale, and 2009 Symposium Ale “Audacity of Hops.”
Here it is, the official internet release of our short film World Wide Clout. It is the third place winner in the 2009 Dogfish Head Off-Centered Film Fest. The basic criteria for the DFH Off-Centered Film Fest were: “Films which will be considered for the Off-Centered Film Fest must be no longer than five minutes in length, must include a story-line containing the concept of an underdog, and must include a reference to Dogfish Head in the script or have Dogfish Head product placement in the film.” That’s it, and we ran with it!
The basic idea behind World Wide Clout was we wanted to take both of the given criteria requirements and basically be obnoxious with them. So for the concept of an underdog we tried to make it both extremely impossible but yet still a totally probable scenario plus blow the hell up out of DFH while trying to not be full on tacky. We referenced 26 DFH beer in the film (see if you can count them all) and had mad DFH product placement, again as Sam said, “these guys had a Dogfish Head reference like every two seconds.” Exactly. So after we started drinking, and thinking, and drinking, and thinking a little bit more of what we wanted to do for the film festival we came up with almost the entire idea of World Wide Clout from start to finish in one night – it was too funny. After we were finished and looked at what we had on paper, we realized that there was a large enough of a story-arc to create a full length movie, but that wasn’t possible. So how do you wean that down to five minutes? Turn it into a preview to a movie of course! So World Wide Clout is actually a preview to a movie that doesn’t exist, you got that?
Anyway, because I know everyone will be wondering, I’ve also hunted down the second and first place winners short films here and will provide a link here so that you can check them out if you are so interested.
Second Place was a short animated commercial called “Psychedelic Dogfish Head Beer Cartoon Commercial” by Dax Norman. It clocked in at 1:09. If I remember correctly Dax said he was an art student from Florida who enters short film competitions “all the time”.
First Place was a short film/commercial just called “Dogfish Head Commercial” by Chris Rose. It clocked in at 1:58. If I remember correctly Chris is a local to Austin and is a DJ in town who actually missed the first night of the film festival (the beer tasting portion) because he was in Brooklyn, perhaps DJ-ing.
All right, well there you go, World Wide Clout for the masses. Please let me know what you think in the comments section either on this web site or on YouTube, we’d all love to hear your feedback may it be good or bad, we’re ready for it. Though this process started in January and it is now almost May this has been one of the most fun little projects I have ever gotten to work on. Big thanks once again to Erik Mitchell, Robert Desjardin, Karen Moore, Corey Bonser, and Sharon Wienckoski and everyone else who contributed there time and energies, may it be through help with the soundtrack, donations of props and equipment, or use of a filming location – with out everyone’s help listed in the credits, this would not have been possible, please watch the credits.
Saturday: Saturday was the slow day. We all sort of woke up at our own speed. I originally set an alarm so we could all get up together to grab the free breakfast at the hotel, but when the alarm went off no one budged, so I just rolled over and went back to bed. And then minutes before the breakfast was suppose to end Erik and Robert jumped out of bed and ran to go get breakfast, only to return to be lazy again. I took my time to get going, took a shower, and rolled out to get some coffee and something to eat.
While I was out I stopped and grabbed a gross breakfast sandwich from under a heat lamp at a WaWa type gas station place, I made it two bites in and the rest went out the window to the birds. I also scooped up some Starbucks coffee which I typically do not enjoy too much but found to be a nice change after the shitty hotel coffee. I also took a short drive around to check stuff out. I found a decent little liquor store that we could buy some local beer at, though the clerk suggested I go down the street to the H.E.B. if I wanted an even larger selection – OK, I won’t shop at your store. The liquor store that I found was in a funny location, it was a liquor store, gun store, and a bank all in a row – it made us laugh every time we drove by.
When I got back to the room, nothing was still going on, Erik was lost in his iPhone (Shit Pickle) and Robert was getting twitchy. There was talk of going down and hanging by the pool with some beers so that got us slightly motivated. We drove out to the H.E.B. (we pronounced it “heeb” the whole time, the the locals said the initials) to check out the beers. We had the video camera out again and were rolling through the store checking out the beers. For some reason the manager came over and told us we couldn’t film in there, and we said “OK, we were just being stupid, no problem”, and he was all “I bet you were” – damn totally got punked. Unfortunately we didn’t get that on tape, it would have been classic. We picked up three sixers, some water, and some snacks – what we really should have picked up on Thursday, but hey, better late than never.
After the H.E.B. we went back to the hotel with the intent to hang by the pool, but we all realized we wanted food and decided Mexican was what was called for. We walked from the hotel to this little Mexican place we passed a bunch of times walking back and forth to the Alamo. When we went in we were the only white people, sweet, this was probably going to be a good spot. They brought out some chips and hot-ass salsa, it had Robert sweating and we barely even had anything. We all looked at the menu for something different, but that we thought we would like. The special for the day was Barbacoa, which none of us knew what that was so we asked – beef cheek – yum, cow face. So, of course we all ordered a barbacoa taco with the rest of our food, and, in my opinion it was delicious – tender and well marinated. We also each had a huge ass plate of food that was delicious.
When finished stuffing ourselves, we talked again about possibly hanging at the pool, but when we went by the pool (very small) there was a man and his little daughter hanging there, so to be polite we chose not to go down and hang there. The funny thing is, we all got back to the room and fell out – I know it sounds really exciting and all, but between the traveling, and the trip the day before to San Antonio, and all the drinking we were all whooped-up. So after a spontaneous two hour nap we tried to get ready to go out to the Alamo Draft House again for the world premiere of our short film World Wide Clout. Getting ready involved drinking beers for some, taking showers for others, and repeated cigarette breaks.
We finally went over to the theater about 6PM for the 7PM start time. This time we ordered some DFH beers and hung at our seats waiting for the event to big. After it started, Sam from DFH was the emcee again, things got rolling in a more film and less beer oriented way. First, sort of to warm up the crowd, Sam showed a bunch of DFH short films they had made like the music video for the Pain Relievaz song “Pinchin’ Pennies” and the DFH mock-campaign against the new MADD stance called “Lupulin Madness” based roughly off of the stoner flick “Reefer Madness”. They both were hilarious. After that they showed about 12 short films from the runners-up that didn’t make the top three. Some were funny, some were a little lame, and some had a good idea with a bad translation. One was a local Austin guy who had a whole crew with him, so that was very cool for him.
After the also-rans were done, they started with the winners from third on up. So, Sam was like “where’s my Delaware crew at, come on up here!” and Erik, Robert, and I rolled up on stage to talk about the movie. Of course we had the video camera rolling, which initially Erik was shooting, but eventually I was, which was OK. Since Erik was listed as the director Sam focused his questions on him, and since Robert was the closest to Sam he answered some too, I sort of got “stuck” on camera duty which wasn’t a big deal, I just felt slightly disconnected at the time. I actually can’t wait to see the film we shot while up on stage, especially since the pictures (see the link above) from us on stage turned out a little crappy since we were so far away. Basically Sam asked us how we came up with the idea and asked Robert how long he worked with the bottle-chucks and thanked us. He also mentioned to the crowd that we had called the brewery and asked to film on the roof and he “had to say no to that” and told the crown to pay attention during our film because “these guys make a Dogfish Head reference like every two seconds” – really cool.
They actually started the film while we were still on stage, so we rushed to get back to our seats so we could watch it, again filming the whole time. The crowd reacted, with laughs mostly, at all the appropriate times so that was good. We sent in two versions of the movie with two different sets of music, one was all music we didn’t own the rights to (like Led Zeppelin) and the other was all original music (like stuff Erik wrote), they used the version with original music which was cool, but weird to hear Erik’s stuff blasted through the theater, though not as weird as actually seeing all of us full size on a movie screen – really, really weird in a really cool way. I think the movie was well received and everyone laughed and applauded. Afterward several people said to each of us separately how much they liked different parts of our movie so that was really nice. Then they showed the second and first place winners, treating them the same by calling them on stage and letting them speak. Second place was a weird psychedelic DFH beer commercial animation and first was a two minute DFH beer commercial with 25%+ archival footage from public domain, I am going to try and find a link to both and put them up. I do not want to argue with the judges, but if there was a fan favorite based on the people’s reactions in the crowd, ours appeared to be the clear winner.
After the movie session we wound up hooking up with Sam and Claus from Dogfish Head and this time we did go out. Sam’s broth-in-law, Pliney, lives in Austin so he suggested a pizza place that wasn’t too far that had OK beer. The place turned out to be almost half an hour away and there was mad traffic getting there, but the parking was free and the place was welcoming. Sam seemed genuinely grateful that we had come out to hang, it was probably a group of 15 or so, a little big to be intimate, but not so big as to be anonymous. We wound up eating some really good pizza and having some OK local beers for about two hours bullshitting with essentially Sam’s crew for the night; him and Claus, our crew, a couple other beer geeks, and some locals from the beer industry – it was pretty neat. We got a pretty decent picture of us hanging with him too, which is cool because I rarely ask to get my picture taken with people I don’t know. After the pizza and beers it was heading on 1AM and we chose to go back to the hotel to get some sleep instead of heading out to a club where a bunch of the group was going, it was actually a club where the first place winner was the DJ, go figure. When we got back to the room the intent was to go to bed, but we had just bought a bunch of beer earlier in the day and couldn’t take it with us, so we started drinking beers. Robert lasted for about two and then kind of drifted off, and Erik and I were too stupid to be smart and drank until after 3AM, fun times.
Sunday: So Sunday we woke up with the main focus of catching our flight back to Philly, always a drag and comforting to go home.
BUT, we couldn’t go out with out one last hoo-rah! So while Erik was poking around he came across something listed as a Gospel BBQ Brunch in Austin on Sundays – sounds like fun. So we made reservations for the Gospel BBQ Brunch at Stubb’s in Austin at 1PM, which was just enough time to catch our flight at 4PM. When we got to Stubb’s we had to wait to get in which was OK, but after we got in I was ready to grub. They had all sorts of BBQ and smoked meats, and grits, and biscuits and gravy, and sweet pecan pie – it was so good I had to work really hard at not gorging myself. The gospel was more bluesy, which was perfectly fine with me. Unfortunately where we were seated where we couldn’t see the stage, but we could hear the music, and we all made frequent trips to go check it out. Stubb’s was a really cool place with a really cool vibe with good BBQ, but I think I preferred the BBQ from San Antonio on Friday better – just saying.
After Stubb’s our objective turned into travel mode: fill up the tank in the Yaris rental car, return the car, and get checked in at the airport and then wait. Usually this part of the trip isn’t worth talking about, but another funny thing happened. As we pulled up in our car and started to unload we here “hey guys!”, it was Sam and Claus again – are these guys following us? So it was cool to go out seeing those guys again. It would have been really funny if we were on the same flight, Sam even started to follow us to check in and Claus had to kind of reel him it, it was too funny. Other than that it was a “normal” flight, nothing special happened, and then suddenly we were back in Philly. Thanks for reading.
(Come back soon, I have a really sneaky suspicion that you all will be watching World Wide Clout on the interwebs by the end of this weekend!)
Friday: So Friday morning found us all a little groggy from traveling, but at the same time full of energy and ready to take advantage of our trip. Before we left Erik had mentioned possibly going to San Antonio to go see the Alamo. Originally Robert and I were totally not into it, but after some changes, things changed. For one, we decided to rent a car while in TX which totally broadened the possibilities of what were were able to do. For example, San Antonio was approximately an hour and a half from Austin, wouldn’t have been able to do that. After realizing we didn’t know what else we were going to do with our day and deciding to make our focus San Antonio the city and not just the Alamo, we were on our way.
Like I said, San Antonio was approximately an hour and a half away, we made it down in about an hour and ten minutes – whoa! Our car was a little Toyota Yaris that I basically was driving 80MPH everywhere, but considering the posted speed limits were 70+ it wasn’t that far of a stretch. When we got to San Antonio it felt like everything was the Alamo something or Davey Crockett something and kind of felt cheesy, I didn’t think I was going to like this city. After we parked we figured, well, let’s go find the Alamo and start our adventure. I assumed the Alamo was going to be a big tourist attraction (which it was) that we were going to have to pay money to tour, but it was actually free, which made it nicer to me. There wasn’t much to see, but there was a decent amount of well kept landscaping which made it enjoyable to tour. Of course, with us knuckleheads, we couldn’t stop referring to Ozzy being arrested for peeing on the Alamo and Pee Wee’s Big Adventure and the “where’s the basement” references. So eventually Erik had to ask the clerk at the customer service booth if the Alamo had a basement. We tried to tape it, but it didn’t work out, but the way the guy reacted we all thought he was about to tell Erik off for a second, but instead was totally like “Have you ever seen Pee Wee Herman’s movie? You can look it up on YouTube.” It was too funny.
After the Alamo we kind of be-bopped our way up and down the side streets and window shopped a little bit and briefly checked out the River Walk on our way to Tower of the Americas, which was in view from almost everywhere you went. This was a big-ass (750 feet tall) tower with a 360 degree observation deck at the top and glass elevators that ran up the outside of the tower. It looked really cool, though Erik and I were a little shady about going up, but after we got up it was cool. I think it cost like $12 bucks and you got to go up in the elevator to the observation deck and check out the city from above, it was actually really neat. There were two levels to the deck, an inside informational area, and an outside full on windy experiencing area. I think we checked things out for about 20 minutes and then went back down. Part of your admission cost also included a 4-D movie about San Antonio after the deck, though the 3-D glasses part was broken so it was 3-D. Basically what made it 4-D was it was like a regular 3-D movie (with glasses and all), but they also had moving seats and water that sprayed on you, and fog in the theater to add to the experience – think like the Disney Muppet 4-D movie at MGM if you have ever been there before. It was mostly interesting, but that’s about all.
After the Tower of the America’s experience it was time for food. We wanted true Texas BBQ so that is what the hunt was for. Oh yeah, literally days before the trip Erik bought an iPhone, dude, that thing was super-fly and a total helper in this type of scenario. For example, we just typed in BBQ in relationship to our location and it pulled up spots for us and directions – the one we chose was called the County Line BBQ and it was ri-dic-u-lous. We all grabbed a local brew and some local BBQ: Erik got the BBQ sampler, a plate full of like six different kinds of meat, Robert got ribs and corn on the cob, and I got a brisket sandwich with fries. We tried everything, and it was all bangin’, but my brisket was the bomb. After lunch we walked the River Walk back to the car so we could get back to Austin. That night we had our Dogfish Head beer and cheese tasting which was suppose to start at 8PM, it was already 4PM so we had to go because we wanted some down time before things got started again. I’m glad we went to San Antonio, it was a cool city, reminded me in parts of Washington DC.
This time, because of traffic and maybe an accident, it took us almost two hours and a half to get back to Austin, this totally messed with our timing. Plus, I had noticed that the sign at the theater yesterday said the event started at 7PM. So on our way back we called to confirm if it was 7 or 8, and of course it was 7PM. So we got back to the hotel about 6:30, freshened up quickly, and walked over to the theater to catch the 7PM beginning of the tasting. When we got to the theater they brought out our first beer which was kind of a warmer-upper beer, an 8oz of 60 Minute IPA, and told us to hang-out and relax because things weren’t going to get started until 8PM – wha, wha, what!? Damn, we lost some time there. Regardless for the beer and cheese pairing that night the idea was that they were going to show old school beer commercials from the 60’s and 70’s while we enjoyed 12 beers and 8 cheese while Sam from Dogfish Head and another gentleman representing the cheeses talked about the pairings. Let me quickly say that the Alamo Draft House is a cool movie theater. The basic concept is imagine a movie theater with every other row of seats taken out and a low bar replacing the seats. The theater has waitresses and a full menu, plus all the normal movie theater junk food, plus plus they serve beer! I thought it was a great idea. We got to try a ton of good beers and a ton of good cheeses. Basically they had it matched up as a flight of three beers to two cheese and we voted which beers we thought went best with which cheese, and in between each flight is when they would talk. I must say Sam is a natural at entertaining a crowd, truly everyone was waiting to hear what he was going to to say next. A few of the beers I can remember off the top of my head were vintage (aged 2 to 5 years) versions of D’Extra, Fort, and 120 Minute IPA – it was a fun delicious night.
After the beer and cheese night we had talked about getting into something else. We had arrived at the theater at about 7PM by the time it was finished it was almost midnight, so like five hours long, we weren’t too buzzed and feeling twitchy. Erik and Robert had talked to Sam and Claus from DFH while on smoke and pee breaks and there was talk of going out with them, but when the night was over they were done. We tried to go back to Hooters since it was close and they had tater-tot-nachos (sounds so good!), but they closed at 12AM. So we asked someone out front where we could go to buy beer and we were informed everywhere stopped selling beer to-go (even the gas stations) at 12AM (though they start selling beer at 6AM!?), but that there was a near by bar called Pluckers that they suggested, so Pluckers it was.
Pluckers was like a cross between a busy TGI Fridays and a local college bar, kind of a weird vibe, but it worked, plus we were the only ones sitting at the bar so that made our lives easier. We had two bartenders that we were bull shitting with and they were pretty funny adding some local flavor. I’m pretty sure we video taped most of the time there so there should be some funny stuff coming out of it, let alone the one-liners we’re still quoting (“I was on acid, and I still saw it” – Duece). We also were introduced to one of the most awful shots I have ever tried, Rumple Mints and Dr. Pepper – like poopy-breath blown with liquid-fire-ass freshness, ugh. Pluckers was weird, but Pluckers was fun. After the bar we basically rolled back to the hotel and called it a night.
(Originally I was going to do the whole trip as one post, now I think I am going to break out each day separately.)
I’ll kinda try and go through each day without it being too boring or stupid. So, as part of the prize for coming in Third Place in the Dogfish Head Off-Centered Film Competition was a flight for one to Austin, TX to see the “world premiere” of out short film, World Wide Clout, plus three days two nights in a hotel, plus some spending cash. So, we took the spending cash and bought two more plane tickets so all three of us, Erik, Robert, and myself, could go down. We started pricing out tickets for the flight and realized it was actually cheaper for us to leave a day early and pay for an extra night at the hotel then it was to pay for all three of to go down on the original day. So we turned a Friday to Sunday trip into a Thursday to Sunday trip, sweet!
Thursday: So Thursday started WAY early for me. We had a 6AM flight to Austin, which meant we should be at the airport like 4AMish, which meant I was getting up like 3AMish, which meant I should be going to bed like 9PMish the night before, which meant I really went to bed like 12AM – so I got about 3 hours sleep before the trip began – did you follow me there? Fortunately the beginning of the trip went off without a hitch: made it to the airport on time, the flights were easy and lazy (about 5 hours of flying, 6 hours with layovers), and no one appeared to stress too hard which can happen with lack of sleep and traveling. So essentially we arrived in Austin, TX at out hotel around 1PM, too early to check in, but late enough for some lunch. Our hotel was near a Hooters and we were beat, so that was stop number one. We were all out of it, kind of just staring at each other and being like “I don’t believe we’re in Texas right now”, while everyone in the restaurant was kind of just staring at us and looking like “Those guys aren’t from Texas” – it was surreal. Anyway, we drank a couple beers, had a sandwich, some wings, and some fried pickles. The fried pickles were the thing that sticks out, tasty but way salty.
We finally checked in after lunch and relaxed a little. I think we talked about what we were going to do and then we all fell asleep without discussing it. By the time we woke up it was starting to get dark. We talked a little bit about whether we wanted to stay in and chill or go out and do something – going out won over, though we all really just wanted to chill, but why stay in and eat pizza when you can do that any night, we may never be in Austin, TX again! A couple people had told us about a bridge in the city that over a million bats lived underneath, and supposedly at dusk all the bats came out and it was supposed to be crazy. It sounded a little weird, but that was about our speed. We finally made it down to the bridge; there was a barge in the water with a bunch of people, a deck at a restaurant with a bunch of people, a ledge near the water with a bunch of people – we were definitely in the right spot. We waited, and waited, and waited until it was almost dark – I think I saw like 20 bats, for real. A lot of people said it may have been too early in the year, but it was lame.
After the bats we went to 6th Street which is suppose to be the big party/hang-out spot. We walked up and down 6th Street once, it was very . . . college-ish, dirty, fake . . . I don’t know, I wasn’t picking up on the vibe. Basically it was like: bar, blues bar, souvenir shop, bar, blues bar, tattoo parlor, bar, blues bar, pizza spot, and so on and so forth – very not where I was at. On the way into town we passed the Ginger Man bar which I had heard good things about on BeerAdvocate and Robert had heard good things from Garrett, so we figured we’d give it a shot, it was only a couple blocks away. The Ginger Man was MUCH more our pace and mentally where we were at. It had about 50 taps plus a nice bottle selection, room at the bar, no live band, open air seating in the back, and darts. We tried a few different beers and we all kind of agreed on this rye beer that was on cask as the fan favorite. So we grabbed a couple casks, a set of darts from the bartender, and picked our own music off the jukebox – very cool. Later we went out back and enjoyed another beer in the nice weather of early April in TX, pretty sweet. After the Ginger Man we cruised through a jazz bar briefly and then I think we just went back to the hotel and fell out, Erik and Robert sharing a queen bed and me on a pull out couch.
(Originally I was going to do the whole trip as one post, now I think I am going to break out each day separately.)
It has been WAY TOO LONG since my last post, I apologize.
I have a TON of stuff I want to talk about regarding out short film, World Wide Clout, but I’m going to try not to vomit all the information at once and instead try to spread it out over the next couple of days so everyone can enjoy it. So since we have gotten back from our Austin trip for the film festival I have been sick, 14 days as of today. I am finally on antibiotics (a Z-pack) and will hopefully find my way to health soon. That’s part of the reason for the lack of posts, I also have been training for my annual Half Marathon run that Robert and I do with the Trail Dawgs. Training for a half marathon while totally sick with a sinus infection do not go together, take it from me. And with all the lovely rain we’ve been getting, let’s just say it has been optimal training conditions all the way around. Plus, there have been some technical difficulties with getting thing all lined up with post-film production.
But, no more excuses, time for more information! Obviously, as I have all ready stated, Erik, Robert, and myself came in Third Place in the 2009 Dogfish Head Short Film Competition with our short film World Wide Clout. Many, many thanks go out to all that helped in their own way, but especially Shay, Karen, and Corey for their help in front of and behind the the camera. The whole experience has been surreal; from coming up with the idea, to realizing we were actually going to do it, to spending way to much time on a five minute film, to waiting, to winning, to Austin, to now – all of it. In preparation to the big internet premiere which appears to be lined up for this week, I am going to release droplets of information and see where their ripples carry us. Below is a post to a photo album of mostly pre-production/behind the scenes type stuff from our film. It’ll give you a rough idea of what some of our costumes looked like and some of the locations we filmed. Later I’ll post a photo album to pictures from our Austin, TX trip for the film festival and talk all about that. And finally I’ll make sure I post (and probably email too) the link to the film itself – too funny.
Oh, and since this is a homebrew website, I have also been up to a little bit of brewing stuff too – I brewed a new batch of a Pale Ale (33% Wheat), transferred some beer to kegs and secondaries, saw the movie Beer Wars, yelled at myself about hops, and have set up a couple trades too. More on all of that later, this week: film stuff!
I’ve been way behind again for brewing, making more excuses than I should, but at least I have my first batch of root beer to share!
So, I’ve been slacking hard on brewing, and being a guy with three taps in his living room it always feels a little “boring” to not have something pouring from all three. I knew my most recent batch, the Brown Simcoe, was going to be at least two more weeks so I wanted to do something. That’s when I remembered I had an old root beer kit down in the basement.
After being inspired by Garrett brewing his Big Daddy’s Root Beer with his kids and how good it turned out I figured this could be an easy solution to have three beverages available. I went to grab the kit, let’s see here, yeast expired in 2002, no problem I won’t be using that, and what’s this, the honey is solid (!), hum, we’ll have to make that work. I did some brief poking around on line and came across information that essentially said honey (as itself) can not go bad. So basically I tried to heat the honey from the outside to see if I could get it gooey again – not so much, around the outside a little bit (see picture above).
So basically I followed the recipe I had: 2 gallons 160+ degrees water, 3 gallons of cold water, 2 oz of Gnome Root Beer Extract, 3 pounds of honey, 2 pounds of cane sugar, and 1 tsp of vanilla extract. I boiled 1 gallon of water and used our hottest tap water (maybe 140ish) for the second gallon, then slowly dissolved the hard honey into the hot water. After the honey dissolved, it took some “chopping” to break it up, I added the rest and kegged the root beer. Originally I was just going to mix everything in the keg, but with the way the honey was I wanted to make sure it was all dissolved.
I now have a designated keg for root beer so hopefully I do this a few times a year. Basically (I am told) that the root beer flavor is so strong it essentially leeches into the rubber gaskets of the keg and is quite difficult to completely get rid of. I did taste the extract straight (2 oz of extract to 5 gallons of water, it is strong!) and boy was it bitter, it really didn’t even taste like root beer though it definitely smelled of it. I wasn’t ready to designate a tower line to root beer so I essentially have a picnic tap inside the kegerator for the root beer, I think this is a good alternative.
So, I’ve got 5 gallons of homemade root beer on tap, anyone who has kids who likes root beer this would be a great time to visit – how exciting would it be to “finally” (for some) get to try one of my “beers”.
