As craft beer becomes more popular, San Diego has risen as one of the top craft beer cities —- it was even named the top beer city by Men’s Journal magazine in October. And now, the county’s 33 breweries are coming together for San Diego Beer Week.

More than 200 events are planned over the 10-day “week,” and Melody Daversa, who works for Karl Strauss but is representing Beer Week, said more are being added throughout the week.

“The cool thing about Beer Week is it’s not just for beer geeks,” she said. “We’re trying to get lots of people into craft beer.”

San Diego is one of the first cities to hold a Beer Week featuring craft beer, or beer made by smaller, independent breweries. Daversa said a couple of breweries in the San Diego Brewers Guild brought up the idea of doing a Beer Week earlier this year, and the guild, which is sponsoring Beer Week, eventually picked early November to tie in with the sixth annual San Diego Brewers Guild Festival, which was planned to begin Friday.

The rest of Beer Week will be full of all things hoppy —- from discounts on local brews to beer dinners to classes on brewing. And though all the San Diego-area breweries are participating, there will be a few special out-of-town guests, such as New Belgium Brewing Co., which brews the popular Fat Tire Amber Ale.

The week will kick off with the Brewers Guild Festival, which will host two general admission sessions on Saturday (1-4 p.m. and 5-9 p.m.). All the guild breweries will get together for the festival, which will feature 80 beers on tap, food pairings from bars and restaurants that are Allied Guild Members, live music and more.

“This is kind of like a one-stop shop for getting all the breweries together,” Daversa said.

The week will end with a Chef’s Celebration of San Diego Beer on Nov. 15. Eight local breweries will team with 16 local chefs, who will create a food item that pairs with the beer. The more intimate event is $65.

In between, Beer Week events can be found all over the county. There will be a Disc Golf Tournament with local brewers at Morley Field Disc Golf Course, a home brewing class with Ballast Point Brewery, a seventh anniversary party for Vista’s Green Flash Brewing Co., dessert pairings, beer and chocolate pairings, a hop-on/hop-off brewery tour bus, and more.

“There’s everything, from if you just want to have a beer to a dinner,” Daversa said. “All over town, there’s a pretty good spread of events.”

“When you say ‘Beer Week,’ it just sounds like a fun time,” Daversa said.

The Brewers Guild is looking to make Beer Week an annual event, and based on the interest this year, it could become one of San Diego’s most popular annual events.

“We really just want to raise awareness about craft beer in San Diego and let people know about all the good beer in our backyard,” Daversa said.

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http://www.nctimes.com/lifestyles/food-and-cooking…

OG 1.067
FG 1.012
ABV 7.3%
IBU 25
SRM 14

5.5 US gallons
90 min boil

Grains
4.5 lb    2 -Row
4.5 lb    Marris Otter
1.0 lb    Munich
0.5 lb    Crystal 15L
1/3 cup    molasses @ 15 min
1 cup    brown sugar @ 15 min
10 lb    pumpkin (cooked before mashing)

Hops
.5oz    glacier 5.9% leaf @ 90min
.5oz    willamette 4.3% leaf @ 90min
.5oz    glacier 5.9% leaf @ 10min
.5oz    willamette 4.3% leaf @ 10min
1 oz    centennial 6.9% @ 1 min

Spices
1 tbsp    cinnamon @ 90min
.5 tbsp    nutmeg @ 90min
1 tbsp    cinnamon @ 20min
.5 tbsp    nutmeg @ 20min
.5 tbsp    allspice @ 20min
1 tbsp    Irish moss @15min
1 tbsp    cinnamon @ 2min
1 tbsp    nutmeg @ 2min
.5 tbsp    allspice @ 2 min
1 tbsp    coriander @ 2min

Yeast
White Labs WLP001 California Ale Yeast

spice mix (for pumpkin)
1/2 tsp    cinnamon
1/4 tsp    nutmeg
1/4 tsp    allspice
1/8 tsp    coriander

Cut pumpkin into wedges and sprinkle with brown sugar and spice
mix and bake @ 350F for about 1 hour.

Then scoop out and mash with grains.
Mash @ 152F for 75 min

2. Midnight Project:
Terrapin and Left Hand released their second collaboration in September,
called Depth Charge, an Imperial espresso milk stout.

3.  Collaboration Not Litigation:
This one has been on the market for a while, a delicious blend of Avery
Salvation (strong golden ale) and Russian River Salvation (strong dark ale).

4.  Collaboration Evil:
In 2009, nine breweries (Lucky Bucket, Fifty-Fifty, Flossmoor Station, Valley,
Sacramento, Fatheads, Oakshire, Silver Peak and Speakeasy) each brewed a
strong dark Belgian-inspired ale and put their own twist on it. The beers were
available for sampling at the GABF festival.

5.  Life & Limb:
A brand new collaboration between Dogfish Head and Sierra Nevada [read more...]

6. Wheelsucker Wheat:
After a mind-boggling bike tour to Colorado (six days & 426 miles from Boulder to Durango), brewers from Avery and Ska Brewing tapped this collaborative beer in late July.

excerpt from zymurgy vol 32 no.6 Nov/Dec 2009

The two beers are part of the growing “collaborations” among craft brewers. The beers are “dedicated to the family of beer drinkers and enthusiasts worldwide who continue to support the little guys, entrepreneurs and pioneers who risk life and limb to shape the vibrant craft brewing community.

Life & Limb is a 10% ABV strong beer brewed with maple syrup and estate grown barley at the brewery in Chico, Ca. It is fermented with a blend of both breweries’ house yeast strains and bottle conditioned for added complexity and shelf life. In addition, it is naturally carbonated with birch syrup from Alaska.

Limb & Life (the draft only beer) is a small, low gravity beer made from the second runnings of Life & limb.

excerpt from zymurgy vol 32 no.6 Nov/Dec 2009

Despite their low alcohol, these are flavorful beers. They tend towards maltiness, reminding some of our tasters of bagels and malted milkshakes, which is not really a bad thing. English-style brown ales aren’t heavily hopped, but they manage to avoid being sweet or heavy.

They’re perfect for fall, with a whisper of chocolate and walnut. Our favorite brown ales would be delicious with roast pork tenderloin or chops. It’s worth considering serving brown ale at your Thanksgiving dinner: the toffee flavors in the beer would pair well with a crisp-skinned turkey and any caramelized bits of mushroom in the stuffing.

Wychwood Hobgoblin Dark English Ale
Oxfordshire, England 5.2% ABV

This flavorful, drinkable beer is almost red in color. Rich malt and caramel flavors are prevalent, though a touch of bitterness keeps things balanced. A hint of chamomile seemed to mingle with the yeasty, bready notes. This mellow and smooth ale was our favorite among this bunch.

Newcastle Brown Ale
Dunston, England 4.7% ABV

Fresh, smooth, and well balanced—we could drink this rosy brown beer all day. Malt and toffee flavors blend pleasantly with a light bitterness. Some tasters noticed a hint of orange-peel flavor. This is not a super complex brew, but it’s perfect for fall: It’s crisp, warm, and refreshing. This could be a good entry-level beer for folks who like their beers mild and fruity.

Samuel Smith’s Nut Brown Ale
Tadcaster, England 5% ABV

At first sip, we tasted toasted malt and a hint of juicy pear. Bracing bitterness followed and cleaned the palate. The finish is a minerally and dry—supposedly a result of limestone sediment in the brewery’s water.

Moorhouse’s Black Cat
Lancashire, England 3.4% ABV

Black Cat, indeed—this beer is seriously dark in color, though it’s surprisingly light-bodied. The roasted malt in this beer crosses the line over to smokiness; this is almost like a Rauchbier. “It’s like they waved bacon over the barrel,” remarked one taster. Peaty flavors mingle with dry chocolate—this could be a good beer to drink with meat you’ve charred on the grill.

www.seriouseats.com

Considering beer is the most popular alcoholic beverage in the world, there are still precious few books on the subject.

Guides to breweries and their beers - technical tomes aimed at the advanced home brewer or craft-brewer market, are growing in number, as well as the usual jokey, blokey beer-themed books that arrive in time for Father’s Day each year.

Wine has spawned its own publishing industry but beer seems to be somewhat neglected in the ”general interest” category.

Froth! The Science of Beer goes some way to filling that void. Written by ‘’semi-retired” physicist and home brewer Mark Denny, it aims to combine maths and beer, which might sound about as incompatible as ”garlic and ice-cream”, the author warns.

And while it will certainly appeal to the beer geeks among us, it also works on enough levels for some broader appeal, with general beer history mixed with quirky scientific data.

The mathematical equations scattered through the text were pretty well impenetrable for the likes of me, who seems to have misplaced the necessary data files acquired from distant lessons.

However, Denny suggests you can skip over these doodlings without missing much, or stay along for the mathematical ride and then reward yourself with a beer at chapter’s end.

The chapter sub-heading ”From Mass Production to Macroswill” signals the author’s allegiances, and throughout the book he champions the cause of home brewing, real ale and craft beer at the expense of ”macrobreweries”.

For a scientist, Denny’s approach to home brewing is delightfully down to earth, or ”minimal”, as he describes it in the chapter entitled ”How to Make Good Beer at Home”.

A couple of his idiosyncratic suggestions swim against the tide of prevailing instructions - he suggests allowing the hot wort (or unfermented beer) to cool down naturally over a six-hour-plus period, before pitching double the supplied dose of dried yeast while the wort is still warm.

The author assures us his methods are proved but it would have been useful to know the appropriate temperature range on Vancouver Island, Canada, where he lives.

Having softened up the reader with a couple of fairly basic and light-hearted chapters on the history and making of beer, Denny wheels in the scientific juggernaut.

The physicist - or should that be ”fizz-icist” - emerges to take us through detailed descriptions of yeast population dynamics, brewing thermodynamics and the formation of bubbles.

The latter is of great interest to macrobreweries, he tells us, because the presentation of a consistent collar of foam may be their beer’s best selling point.

Apparently, boffins everywhere are writing papers dedicated to the most obscure areas of bubble science and Denny breaks down beer pouring into sub-categories: bubble generation, beading and disproportionation, also known, gloriously, as ”Ostwald ripening”, whereby bubbles exchange gas with other bubbles. Denny also identifies ”anti-bubbles”, which he says are common in Belgian beers.

Did you know that the average batch of home brew produces 35 billion bubbles, or that the world’s beer production accounts for about 100 billion billion bubbles annually?

How beer gets from the brewery to drinkers’ mouths is the subject of the ”Fluid Flow” chapter, which includes some interesting trivia, such as when the hand-pump beer engine was invented (1785), when the crown seal cap first appeared (1892).

Froth! The Science of Beer by Mark Denny

Article from TheAge.com.au