With the National Homebrewing Conference coming up those of us bring beer want to bring something special/unique to the conference. I’m bring a bunch of beers including Brauphroiag. Brauphroiag is a whiskey barrel aged peat-smoked porter. I’m a huge fan of peaty scotch, so I thought I would bring a beer inspired for my love of peaty scotches’. Bonus points if you can guess where the name comes from, it’s not that tough!
I’m wicked excited to go to the National Homebrewers Conference, this being my first year I’m not sure what to expect. What I’ve heard and seen on YouTube club night looks to be the highlight of the conference, although there are some lectures I’m looking forward to hearing. My club, Glen Ridge Homebrewers Association, is making our first appearance at NHC and we still haven’t figured out our space at club night, but we have figured out most of our beers. But what is more important, good and interesting beer or cool space? I figure it is the beer, so I’m pulling out the Greasy Pig Bacon Brown Ale. Who doesn’t love bacon???
About a year I got my brew stand and have been doing little things here and there to make it work for me, keep in mind everything is manual on it; I don’t have any controls or starters, just manual gauges and 2 pumps. I’ll eventually get fancy like my buddy Billy over at Homebrew Academy with his recent Brutus build, but for now I there isn’t enough free time to go that route. However, I can imagine that I have $1500 laying around that I could spend on the Blichmann Tower of Power.
So you have decided to make the commitment to growing your own hops. You bought the rhizomes, you put them in the ground, and now they are starting to grow like Audrey in the Little Shop of Horrors. What to do now, it is actually pretty simple. The first thing is to build a trellis, there are many different types, most have some type of twine that the bine can wrap around up 20-30′. (I’m building a new trellis this year, so I will discuss that in another post.) Hops grow very quickly, up to 12″ a week so it is best to be prepared.
Tuesday had us homebrewers all geared up to register our beers for this year’s NHC, National Homebrewers Competition. There are only a limited number of spots for each region of the country and many of us wanted to get our registrations in early so that we could get our beers in to our local region of choice and avoid getting shut out, like many did for the National Hombrewers Convention. With thousands of homebrewers slamming the servers at 1pm on Tuesday, the AHA’s new registration site just couldn’t take the load, shutting most homebrewers out of the site for over an hour.
Finally after many years of wanting to attend the National Homebrewers Conference, I’m finally going to make it. This year I have no excuses since it is going to be right down the Turnpike from me in Philly. I’ve been wanting to attend NHC for years, seeing many of by brew friends attend, there tweets and Facebook posts; I wanted to be right there with them. But it had never worked out for me, be it timing, money, or just life.
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