HOPS! represents at the BOSS Chicago Cup

A guest post from our competition guru, Michael:

The BOSS competition results are up [in PDF form here] and the club made a very strong showing, taking home 17 ribbons! These included a number of 1st place beers! Brian Keyes took first with his Dortmunder Export and Matt & Meg took 2 firsts with their American Stout and their Barleywine. Nate Baker took a1st in Spice/Herb/Vegetable, and Brian Eich took home top marks in the always difficult IPA category. Bob, Klavs, Russ & Leah, and myself all took home assorted seconds and thirds; the people mentioned above took a number of other awards as well.Having 8 brewers take home 17 ribbons completely tops our 5 club ribbons last year. If you are keeping score, HOPS! took home about 20% of the total ribbons up for grabs. Check out the scoresheets for a full breakdown of who won what: http://www.bossbeer.org/BOSS_2011Winners.pdf

A number of us went down to judge including Bob, Tom, Noel, Brian Eich, Nate Baker, Lovey, Klavs, Matt, Meg, Gary Gulley, and myself. We had a great time and the guys from BOSS continue to be the most gracious and awesome of hosts, as does the mighty Maple Tree Inn in Blue Island. We had a number of great beers during the comp and a ton of great beer at their amazing bar. The Muffuletta sandwiches were still amazing and Charlie Orr's memory was justly celebrated throughout the day. Our good friends from Iowa, Scott and Karen Schaar, came out to judge and it was nice to see them and the usual cast of BJCP characters from around Chicagoland. The multi-award-winning Rod-K even shared some homebrew secrets with us all as the beer flowed freely over lunch and afterwards.

I'd like to send a heartfelt congratulations and thank you to all the brewers who have entered, participated in club meetings, and were on the competition team this year. This was a great result and we will build on it in years to come. Back in October we set up the comp team to have members brew widely to get beers into as many categories as possible and have people brew styles they haven't brewed before. Happily this worked and we look forward to doing the same thing next year. Anyone is welcome to join in the comp team as long as they agree to try and enter at least 5 beers into BOSS, have a few of those cover empty spaces in our line-up, and bring beer to the comp team get togethers.

Most importantly, I'd like to thank everyone from the club for being such eager, engaged, and vocal homebrew connoisseurs during the meetings and especially the homebrewers' corner that Steve, Noel, and Brian run each and every month. It can be thankless organizing that but they do a great job getting everyone to focus on a beer and help our brewers get better. These sorts of successes are only made possible by drawing on the knowledge of everyone in the club, be they novices or homebrew hoarders with all the newest toys, theories, and avant-garde hops.

Thanks again to everyone. Now get brewing for Nationals, The Puget Sound Pro-Am, and The Sam Adams Longshot!

Thanks, Michael, for the summary. I'd like to also give a big thanks to Michael for leading the push to put our best brewing foot forward at the BOSS competition, and also thank the folks at BOSS for putting on a great competition (as they do every year).

Getting your blend on

Yesterday I posted on my personal blog about my recent experience with blending beers. If you want to read the whole thing you can check it out here, but for purposes of this blog I wanted to briefly discuss the various purposes of blending (at least the ones of which I'm aware).

Blending has probably been around as long as people have been brewing beer. Historically, brewers blended old sour beers with fresh, non-sour beers to dial in the exact level of sourness (or simply make them palatable). Similarly, partigyle brewers would sometimes blend the various gyles; rumor has it that Newcastle is still a blend of an older beer and a newer beer. And for the record, I'm no expert, so feel free to correct any of this in the comments if I've been mislead or am not telling the whole story.

For those who like to win medals in homebrew competitions, blending can allow you to create new entries from your existing stock (is it cheating? sounds like the kind of pointless debate that Beer Advocate is known for!). While this is most commonly done with British beers, I tried it with German lagers. Did it work? I'll know after this weekend!

For the average beer drinker, blending should bring to mind the ubiquitous black and tan, though there are plenty of other blends out there that are simply intended to create something new and exciting (not to mention commercial examples like Ommegang's Three Philosophers).

Anyway, I was curious to see if anybody has experience with blending. If you have, please post in the comments what you blended, why you blended (competition? an experiment? you were drunk?) and how it turned out. My personal results with blending a Helles with a Dunkel (50/50 blend for a Vienna lager and 2:1 Helles:Dunkel for an Oktoberfest) has got me thinking about how I can get three different styles out of two brew days. More variety is never a bad thing, right?

Monthly HOPS! Meeting - March 15, 2011 @ 7:45 PM

Just a reminder that tomorrow is our monthly HOPS! meeting @ the Bridgeport VFW Post 5079 at 3202 S. May!

We're going to have a lot of business to cover so the meeting will start promptly at 7:45 PM.

Style of the Month - 3 a Vienna Lager

So, to keep you on your toes, this month we're going to do a lager that is far more ubiquitous than meets the eye. If you were to ask a random person what a Vienna lager is, you'd probably just get a blank stare. The style is really something of an anachronistic name, relying on the fact that the whole lager brewing craze began with Anton Dreher after the isolation of S. pastorianus (formerly S. carlsbergensis) in Denmark. Curiously, the story goes that he studied at Barclay & Perkins in England and fathered the adoption of lager brewing in continental Europe. However, as a result of his studies in England, he also brought with him the English malting processes and adapted English pale ale techniques to his lager brewing, resulting in the copper-colored beer that we know as Vienna lager. Originally, it was called Märtzen by Dreher because it was brewed in March, when the weather remained cool enough for the fermentation and ice remained available. Eventually, it came to be known as Vienna style due to Dreher's proximity to Vienna, Austria.

So, what is Vienna lager and where can I find it? Oddly enough, it is all around you and goes by curious names such as Negra Modelo and Victoria (the Mexican one) because of the influx of Austrian immigrants into Mexico (and Latin America) in the late 1800s, led by Santiago Graf. Unfortunately, the vast majority of amber lagers in Mexico tend to be heavy in the adjunct department and get away from (quasi) traditional aspects that made this a desirable style. There are also a ton of great American craft-brewed examples that are available from a wide breadth of brewers as lager brewing among craft breweries has become more commonplace.

Ultimately, what make a great Vienna lager is the use of Vienna malt, which falls somewhere between Munich and English Pale malt in terms of character. It tends to have an increased sweet melanoidin character but preserves and nice and biscuity toast character. Utilization of this robust malt lends a certain richness while maintaining enough of a soft hop balance to keep it quite refreshing. The beer should finish dry and be medium bodied. Think of this sort of as Oktoberfest light. It should have no roast or caramel character and a very clean lager fermentation. And, in a nutshell, that's Vienna.

HOPS! t-shirts are on the way; pre-order yours now!

ZZ Top once sang, "Every girl's crazy 'bout a sharp-dressed man." We suspect sharp-dressed women get their fair share of action as well. So in an effort to keep everybody as fashionable as possible, HOPS! is excited to announce that we are in the process of ordering two brand new t-shirts which will be available for the low cost of $15 for non-members and the extra low cost of $10 for members.

The first shirt we have to offer is our Classic Black T:


The second shirt we have is our South Side Heritage T:


Both shirts are available in size S-XL (XXL may be available for a few bucks more; email for details). For the time being, you'll have to either pick up your shirt in person at a HOPS! meeting or have a HOPS! member pick one up for you... in other words, we're not shipping. (Hey, we're a homebrew club; not UPS!) To reserve yours today, send an email to hops.shirts (at) gmail (dot) com with the following information: name, which shirt(s) you would like (Classic Black or South Side Heritage), what size, and whether each shirt is for a member or a non-member. You can also send any questions you might have to the address above. We only plan on taking orders through this month's meeting (March 15) so hurry up and get your emails in now. It's time to look sharp!

BJCP Exam Class is AWESOME!

Photo was taken at the most recent BJCP exam class on Mar. 1, led by BJCP instructor, Steve McKenna (shown in photo). Yesterday's class covered German/Czech styles in the tasting portion.