Author: Merideth

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Year in Beer Side Trips

We have received an overwhelming positive response from the story about us that ran on the Associated Press wire. A heartfelt thanks goes out to everyone who contacted us.

Included in all of the well-wishing were invitations to beer festivals around the country. While we would love to be able to attend them all, the reality is that time and money are huge constraints on our ability to attend events outside of the YiB schedule.

With that said, we would like to announce two YiB Side Trips:

February 22-24: We will be in Denver for the Beer Drinker of the Year contest. Our friend, Matt Venzke, is one of the 3 finalists and we will be in Denver to cheer him on. I believe Matt has even agreed to wear the “Girls are beergeeks too” Thong during the swimsuit portion of the contest.

May 13-15: After our Franconia and Bergkirchweih Beer Festival travels, we will be meeting Ute and Wolfgang in Cologne for three Flogging Molly shows on successive nights… Cologne, Munich and Vienna. You will remember Ute and Wolfgang from our Bamberg episode of beergeekTV.

When other YiB Side Trips are finalized, we will let you know.

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Another Great Day!

YiB-01 Most of the 17 tasters at Moose's Tooth.Our first day here in Anchorage was certainly no fluke. We had another amazing day yesterday! It almost seemed like a slow start, since sunrise was not until 9:52am, but things quickly swung into action. We walked around the downtown area a bit, then hooked up with Jim Roberts aka “Dr. Fermento”. Jim has been a very welcoming goodwill ambassador for Anchorage and Alaska as a whole.

Since we don’t have a car, he actually picked us up and drove us to the Moose’s Tooth, a pizzeria that brews it’s own beer. The pizza was yummy and the beer tasty, too. Unfortunately, they do not brew on the restaurant’s premises, so we did not get to count it on the list. The actual brewery does not have regular tours and was a little further away.

Left>Right - Jim Roberts (Dr. Fermento), Chris, Shaun O'Sullivan of 21st AmendmentWe opted instead to go to the Midnight Sun. There we ran into Shaun O’Sullivan from 21st Amendment and had a grand ol’ time tasting 2 of the beers in Midnight Sun’s 7 Deadly Sins series. We tried Sloth and Lust, in case you were wondering. Jim had to get moving along, since he was judging barleywines for the festival, so we had time to rest in our room before the festival.

Before we knew it, it was time for the festival to start. Now here’s what we actually came up here for! One of the many cool things about this trip is that we are just a few short blocks from the festival venue. Matter of fact, we can look down at the venue from our hotel room!

Merideth with our friends and fellow beer travelers Matt and Michelle.We went over with our new friends and fellow beer travelers Matt and Michelle. Matt had emailed Chris about a year ago during the Chief Beer Officer campaign and they have been internet friends since. This was the first time meeting them in person. Matt and Chris are amazingly alike and I know that if we lived closer, we would all be hanging out quite a bit. Later we met up with Michelle’s brother Jason and his girlfriend Kristina who live up here. By the end of the night, my cheeks were sore from laughing so much!

Anyway, as far as festivals go, this is a good one! We seemed to spend most of our time in the Alaskan beer section, which was just fine with all of us. For several hours, we drank great beer and hobnobbed with the likes of Tom Dalldorf from the Celebrator, Chris the brewer from Fort George Brewing in Astoria, Oregon and the “chicken man”.

Tom is everywhere!This morning, we are off to shop at the Brown Jug to pick up more beer for our Alaska beer tasting. The connoisseurs session of the festival begins at 2pm and the next (and last) general session begins at 6pm. In between sessions we will be having a brand new experience…volunteering. We were not able to pour beer, so we are getting the less glamorous job of “bread cutting”. In an apparent effort to stem the puking, each brewery has a little basket of bread cubes. That’s where we come in. We’ll be sure to let you know how it turns out!

Here’s to another great day in Anchorage…it’s currently 14 degrees…

 

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I’m Published!

Okay, so maybe not a huge deal, but I wrote a little piece for our (very) local magazine. I think they pretty much print anything submitted. Unless, I suppose, it was completely wacko, racist, defamatory, etc. We all have to start somewhere, right, and it looks like that somewhere was Carmel Valley! Check it out. . .

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Chilly and Festive Munich

We arrived in Munich yesterday to discover what cold really is… okay, well, I know that we could experience a lot colder in Alaska next month, but it has been in the mid 20s, which is cold for our little California butts! It really hasn’t been that bad and the chill in the air adds to the holiday spirit that we love so much.

Last night, we had a bit of a mixed bag arriving from London…the Marienplatz Christmas market was jam packed – I mean really jam packed – so we made our way out to the Augustiner Braustubl, which was also jam packed with private Christmas parties! So, a bit frustrated, but undeterred, we ended up in an old favorite…the Wirsthaus Ayinger near the Hofbrauhaus. We got in no problem and had some beer and food and then we were well on our way to getting acclimated to Germany! Chris especially enjoyed the doppelbock as well the helles from the wood cask. I enjoyed my beloved helles.. the regular kind though.

And Chris got to ice skate too.

Today started with a return to the Christmas market which was much more manageable and a visit to another one of our Munich favorites; Weisses Brauhaus. We arrived at 11:30 (on Sunday) and the party had already started!! Chris, to ward of the cold, had Aventinus, an 8% wheat beer that is made just for these occasions.

The major highlight of today was going to Aying to visit the Ayinger brewery. It turns out one of Chris’ clients is friends with the owners Angela and Franz and he was nice enough to set up a time for us to meet Angela (thanks David!) so we could get to meet her and learn more about the brewery. Not only did we get a great meal and drink the amazing Ayinger beer, but we got to learn the brewery lore from one of the owners. On top of that, we got a mini private tour of the brewery.

Located only a half hour outside of Munich, Aying is a beautiful Bavarian town that is well worth a visit. And the brewery has rooms too!

Since it was so packed last night, we finished off the day by going back to the Augustiner Braustubl. We accidentally went the wrong direction and discovered an odd fact. If you get off at the Hackerbrücke S-Bahn stop… Go either right or left from the station. When you reach a ‘T’ intersection, go right. No matter which way you went leaving the S-Bahn stop, there will be a Augustiner beer hall a few blocks down on the left. Really weird huh.

No matter what Augustiner beer hall you end up at, you will get great beer… I recommend the helles (go figure) and Chris says try the dunkel… or all of them.

Tomorrow we head deeper into Bavaria… the Bavarian Alps to be exact and we’ll have more beer adventures to talk about.

Click here for all our Munich pictures.

 

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350!

Even though I am still a few behind Chris, I hit a major milestone yesterday: I visited my 350th brewery at Fuller’s here in London! There were 5 of us on the tour and we were all beer people.

This was good because the guide, Jane Peyton (she has a pub architecture book called Pub Scene), didn’t bother with all the finer points of the brewing process that we have heard a bizillion times before. Instead, she gave us Fuller’s history, breezed through the tour, and then let us spend the rest of the time tasting beer. She even opened a bottle of the Fuller’s Vintage from 2005! It was 8.5% and had a strong alcohol taste. The hands down favorite, however, was the Chiswick Ale.

Another highlight on the tour was when we approached the fermenting room. At the door was a CO2 meter, which was blinking red and beeping! That meant that the CO2 level was too high to go in. However, as we stood nearby, continuing the tour, the meter suddenly turned green and stopped beeping. It was apparently now safe to enter, which we did. I made the others go in first since I wasn’t interested in being the canary.

The Fullers tour is something everyone should try to do when they are in London. Fullers is the last of a dying breed… not only are they still a family-owned independent brewer (a dying breed in itself), they are also the last of the historic London breweries. Oh, they also have the oldest wisteria in England.

As usual, we started out our trip with a bang. Today, I think, is the beginning of not feeling so groggy. . .just in time for Germany. I have to admit, I am looking forward to moving onto Munich. Don’t get me wrong, London is really starting to grow on us, but I personally can only take so much real ale. I think I am ready for some cold, carbonated helles!