All-grain vs. New House

When I told my Husband I was ready to take the next step with him, I was referring to making the transition to all-grain brewing. Little did I know that we would be possibly undertaking a new home purchase. With the all-grain on hold for the time being, I have been focusing my time on finding the right home for us with attention paid to home brew ease when evaluating potential homes. 

House #3 would need a change from an electric stove in the kitchen to a gas stove. (Try cooking a stir-fry on an electric range- impossible! The Chinese in me cringes at the thought.) As this would be the first change we would make (literally, in week 1 of moving in), perhaps we can pick a nice range and stove top that would offer high BTU’s and be able to handle the quick boils of a 10 gallon brew pot? The shiny silver stoves are all the rage right now and they do look nice but I value functionality over all else.  If our stove selection simplifies my brewing process or even allows me to do all-grain in the comfort of my home (instead of outside in the elements), I think that is money well spent. 

House #3 happened to have a fence-mounted bottle opener adjacent to the patio in the backyard. Perhaps that is a sign? Maybe the previous owners just liked soda pop or maybe one was banished out into the backyard to drink? The bottle opener was strategically located where the cooler full of home brew would be placed for backyard soirees. And the storage shed could be replaced with a nice outdoor bar/cabana. Maybe I am reading too much into it, but House #1 and #2 definitely were not home brewer friendly. 

I am first and foremost a wife/mother/home brewer/dancer/dietitian so I need a home that will equally nurture, encourage and allow all these things to happen seamlessly. Now THAT is a tall order! 

幹杯  

-The Beer Dietitian

To hear my latest beer musings, house hunting stories and what I am drinking, follow me on Twitter!

Pumpkin Beers, 2011

Fall is my favorite season. It used to mean soccer season for this aged former player, Halloween with the required carving of the pumpkins and also the beauty of the changing fall leaves. Now, as an adult, there are some additional bonuses to the Fall season: eating my favorite candy from the loot my kids haul in from trick-or-treating and sampling the pumpkin-flavored brews. 

Over the years, there have been more and more pumpkin brews available. I decided to try them all (or at least all that were available in my geographic area). As a dietitian, I, of course, had to make the tasting process one that would stand up to scientific scrutiny. By instilling rigorous procedures, I made a simple tasting party into one of redundant procedures and unneeded steps. Luckily the fellow tasters infused some spontaneity and good-natured ridicule (well-deserved) at my attempt to host a double-blinded pumpkin brew tasting evaluation. 

For the record, I scoured 9 stores in 3 towns for the 6 pumpkin brews available. I met a new friend (Lori, who sold me one of the pumpkin brews and heard my tale of woe for all the stores I had visited for that particular type) and hit only one skunk with my car (it was already dead). Overall, the pumpkin brew procuring process was a lot of fun (and the skunk-stink did not persist after about a half a mile)!

I will now describe my procedures (as that is what would next follow in a scientific study) to describe what lengths I will go to for a good beer in the name of science (and also to give you a peek into my beer madness).  

Procedures:

I covered each type of beer in tin foil (including the neck label), blacked out any distinguishing marks on their caps with a Sharpie, assigned each type of beer a number and then chilled them in my beer refrigerator (yes, I have a fridge for the sole purpose of keeping my beer chilled). I asked a good friend that does not drink alcohol to be the Master Pourer and gave her the list of my numbered beers. She then assigned a letter to my numbers and poured each type for us.  She prepared the beer to be tasted in another room and brought out one type at a time. Us tasters had a beer placemat that had 6 circles with the letters A through F. As the Master Pourer brought each type out, the beer would be placed on the corresponding spot on the placemat. We also had a simplified scoring sheet that had us rate the presentation, taste, body, drinkability and the empty glass factor with a spot for the total score. Crackers (and bananas for the gluten-free dude) and water were available to cleanse our palates between tastings. 

Now here is where things get a little crazy. 

I am not an informed taster. I am more of a “I like it or I don’t like it” kind of a gal. AND after drinking less than 2 ounces (total) of the beers we were sampling I was already starting to feel the tell-tale signs of getting heated. Try infusing scientific scrutiny and scientific study rigorousness into that kind of situation! I quickly abandoned my fussy score sheet and merely ranked the 6 in order of “My Likiness”. 

One of the other tasters, we will call him The Judge, took the task to heart and composed the most eloquent, informed, jury-proven descriptions and evaluations of the beer that it sounded like he missed his calling as a beer judge! As the table declined into a pumpkin-haze of tipsiness, this taster continued to conjure up quotes that could easily be used in a Quentin Tarantino film or a clever beer commercial.  

Another taster, BrewBro, gave up almost as quickly as I did and just focused on the ones he did not like. 

My fellow lady taster, The Beauty, quickly abandoned the scorecard for a star-based system. 

Our last taster, Husband, diligently filled out his scorecard but seemed more interested in arguing each beer’s faults and strengths with the other tasters. Always the competitive one, he wanted the opportunity to guess which beer was which. 

Overall, we all had a few beers in common as our top 3. It would be tedious to publish each and every comment of every beer we tasted and what do we know anyway? We are not trained Beer Judges but we do like to judge beer. Plus we were comparing ales and lagers and one big boy boasted a 9%ABV (Hello!) so we were really comparing apples to oranges. 

But we all liked (in no particular order):

Blue Moon Harvest Pumpkin Ale

Buffalo Bill’s Pumpkin Ale

Shipyard Smashed Pumpkin

Dogfish Head Punkin Ale

Bottom line: most of the pumpkin ales are good so try one! I did enjoy trying all available types at once although I would recommend 6 types as a maximum at one event if you will be hosting your own tasting party. It may be fun to see what type of tasters your friends are (do they abandon the scoring system, compose ballads to praise the tones of apricot or turn every instance into one of competition?).

For our next tasting, I will tone down the Dietitian nerdiness and instead focus on making the tasting fun (which thanks to the group happened despite my attempt at nerding it up). Or maybe we will just give The Judge a bunch of beers to taste and see what poetry he composes as a result.

Sante!

-The Beer Dietitian

(Disclaimers: None. All beers were purchased and none were provided for free by the manufacturer. The Beer Dietitian and BeerBro Tasters did not receive any compensation, financial or otherwise, to conduct this taste-test. )

MyPlate- Where Does Beer Fit In?

This past June, the USDA abandoned the Food Guide Pyramid as their premier teaching tool to help consumers plan and portion out their daily diet. They replaced it with the simple and logical MyPlate, which is a place-setting graphic that shows a plate divided into unequal parts consisting of vegetables, grains, fruits and protein-rich foods. The beverage-type image off to the side is the dairy group (but remains optional in your daily diet). 

The notable change between the MyPlate and the Pyramid is that the MyPlate can be more easily used on a meal-by-meal basis instead of the Pyramid assisting you to plan your diet over the course of the day.  Just by looking at the Plate, you can see the groups that you should be including in your diet and can easily see which foods portion size should be large or small compared to each other. As individual calorie needs vary, the size of the plate would be a way to limit or increase your overall intake and therefore calories. (Your Beer Dietitian says to use a small plate whenever dining!) Also, if you were working on losing weight, the vegetable portion size would likely be larger than the percentage shown. 

You probably have noticed that there isn’t a pint glass of frothy, cold beer next to the plate in the MyPlate place setting. This is no accident. The USDA continues to recommend that you should only drink alcohol in moderation, if at all. This generally means one drink per day for women and 2 drinks for men and portion size does matter! One drink is equivalent to: Twelve ounces of regular beer or 5 ounces of wine or 1-½ ounces of 80-proof distilled spirits. In addition to the potentially harmful effects of alcohol, it can easily and quickly add to your calorie intake. So omitting and/or limiting the amount of alcohol you drink can help with preventing future weight gain or help you lose weight. 

Despite having a new tool to help us plan our daily diets, the message remains clear: moderation is key. Limiting foods and beverages that provide a lot of calories but not a lot of nutrients is important and beer and other alcohol drinks fall into this category. By making fruits and vegetables, whole grains and lean protein-rich foods the focus of every meal, you will enjoy a healthier, happier life. As a result, you will have many more years to enjoy a beer or two (drinking responsibly, of course)!

In the meantime, your Beer Dietitian will be working on a high-fiber, nutrient-rich, calorie-free beer that makes you more handsome/beautiful and keeps you fit without doing any exercise. Until then, please fill your plate with lots of fruits and veggies and break a sweat now and then! 

To your health!

-The Beer Dietitian

To hear my latest beer musings and what I am drinking, follow me on Twitter!

Anchor Brewery Tour, San Francisco

One of the highlights of my summer was taking part in the Anchor Brewery Tour. This tour has a wait list of literally 6 months so if you are local or will be traveling to the San Francisco Bay Area, get on the tour list 6 months before the date you want. They do not take reservations for the tour before the 6-month mark (I tried). This tedious planning is well worth it.

The tour was led by a very handsome local guy (who played college football at a local Pac-12 university- quarterback,  if I remember correctly) who exuded the cool and confidence of the lucky few that got to be on the Anchor Steam premises and got paid for it! His knowledge of the brewery history and delivery of ancient tales was compelling and enthralling for a group of beerists like us. (The group on the tour was comprised of mostly tourists. We were the only locals.) We were able to access all levels of the brewery, from the literally chilled basement through the staff break room to where all the mashing, lautering, and sparging occur plus the state-of-the-art bottling area. 

Some of the highlights of the tour were hearing the possible origins of the Anchor Steam name (take the tour to find out, I am not a story-buster!), learning about the production of their whiskey (which is distilled across the street but not sold at that site nor anywhere near San Francisco) and watching the Beer Folks doing their duties as if we weren’t there. Every single one of us beerists wanted to be one of them!

The Tap Room was the ultimate conclusion to the tour as we were allowed to sample quite a few types of beer, including some rare brews. All us beerists would receive a tasting glass of a single type of beer. Once that was poured, our fearless guide would start pouring the next. As a gal of “low volume” (I coined this term at the Anchor Steam Tap Room: “Guys, I am “low volume”, so someone will have to help finish this beer for me because Dude is already onto the next one.”), it was hard for me to keep up. Luckily I had a little (ahem, a lot) of help from my friends and I was able to taste everything! 

The only drawback of the tour was that we were unable to buy any merchandise, and you know how much I love me a good beer shirt. Just with my party alone, we estimated that they missed out on purchases totaling about $150 of their Steam Gear. We could buy it online but who has that kind of follow-through?! I would strongly suggest to Beer Folks that they allow their patrons to shop while in a beer-haze. That is just good economics. 

Bottom line:  if you dig beer and you are anywhere near San Francisco, go on this tour! It is so worth it and “the beer flows like wine”. The Anchor Brewery Tour may have ruined me for future brewery tours as every subsequent tour will be compared to this one!

Bottoms up!

-The Beer Dietitian

To hear my latest beer musings and what I am drinking, follow me on Twitter!

Beer Desert

As I mentioned in a previous post, I spent about a week in beautiful San Diego. Part of the trip was vacation and the other part was work/nutrition related. While I was still knee-deep in the vacation portion of the trip, I found myself at the hotel pool, parched and in need of refreshment. 

The fellow hotel patrons and I were blessed to have poolside bar service so I motioned for the waitress to come over and inquired about the tasty brews they offer. The reply was: Corona, Bud Light, Miller and Heineken. As I stared at the waitress in open-mouthed horror and surprise, I realized that we (the fellow hotel guests and I) were in the middle of a beer desert. 

I had to make a choice but really the middle two were not really an option. I mean, I am not in high school anymore. So then that just left Corona or a Heiney. I do dig both but they are never my first choice. So as the impatient waitress stared back at me with her own open-mouthed horror and surprise (as I was taking way too long to make this decision), I gave a nod to our neighbor whose border was less than 10 miles away and chose the sunny Corona. 

It was the perfect way to enjoy the pool, the remaining sunshine and my proximity to Mexico. 

¡Salud!

-The Beer Dietitian

To hear my latest beer musings and what I am drinking, follow me on Twitter!

Beer-Findy Apps

As you all know, I made my recent smartphone upgrade for the sole purpose of finding beer. So on Day #1 of owning my new iPhone, I decided to check out all these apps that people rave about. I searched for beer apps and was presented with quite a few to choose from (12 to be exact). I read each description and tried one of the free ones. Once I was able to get in there (i.e. it was installed and able to be utilized), I found it did not meet my needs. Basically I wanted to be able to ask my iPhone where I could score a good beer no matter where my travels may take me. I didn’t want to enter, sort, rank and categorize all my favorite beers in all the establishments that I find them. I wanted a Beer Concierge. 

And then I found the Find Craft Beer app by Micro Integration Services, Inc (cue angelic-operatic music). It was pricey: coming in at a whole 99 cents (joking) but in light of how much I already threw down for the new phone, data plan, re-upping my contract for 2 years, what did it really matter? I was getting good beer, whenever and wherever I would be. That, my friends, is priceless. 

The app is simple and awesome in its functionality. You type in your location, planned location or allow it to map where you are and it provides a comprehensive list and map of Brew Pubs, Breweries, Beer Bars, Beer Stores or Homebrew Stores with ratings.  I wish I thought of it. 

As Husband will be traveling soon, I am sending him on a beer quest. The Jackalope Brewing Company and Yazoo Brewing Company sound promising. Plus they may have some cute tank tops. 

So if you need a Beer Concierge, check out the Find Craft Beer app and you can buy me a nice cold one to thank me!

¡Salud!

-The Beer Dietitian

To hear my latest beer musings and what I am drinking, follow me on Twitter!

I Heart Beer Shirts!

When I visit a particularly good brewery, I like to take home a souvenir. This accomplishes several things: it helps me remember the visit, remember the beer and also surround myself with beer-related items, which makes me happy for those times when I cannot enjoy a cold brew. (With my responsibilities and dedication to responsible drinking, this proves to be the majority of my week.)

I do judge a brewery by their beer, their food but also their wares. I particularly love places with slogans that make use of double meanings and cleverly employ the play-on-words concept. Some highlights in my collection include Knotty Barrel’s “I Heart Knotty Pleasures” (my latest addition to the collection) and Great Basin Brewing Company’s “Real Women Drink Real Beer”. Please check out the great schwag that SweetWaterBrewing Company offers for examples of not-so-subtle awesomeness. Unfortunately, the best of what they offer does not come in a ladies tank top. (Beer folks: What better way to help advertise your beer than having ladies trot around in your tank top?)

 I have found that most beer shirts do come in women’s sizes.  I always thank the establishment for carrying these, especially if they have a variety of ladies sizes. Not all beer lovers are men of the XL variety, as you know.  So if you have any great beer shirts with funny sayings, please share them with us! Pics are welcome- just e-mail them to me and I’ll post them. Perhaps I’ll put that brewery on my must-visit list, as I am always in need of a new beer shirt and a good brew!

Cheers!

-The Beer Dietitian

To hear my latest beer musings and what I am drinking, follow me on Twitter!