After Pro Night and Club Night, on the Saturday of the National Homebrewer’s Conference I was finally able to attend some educational sessions.  Let’s dive right in, shall we?  Below you’ll find pictures and notes from sessions on Champagne beer, brewing with chocolate and brewing with anything else Tomme Arthur can get his hands on.

BRUTal Brewing with Drew Beechum

First up was a session on preparing beers using Champagne riddling techniques.  In this case, it means a demonstration of how to help your yeast drop to the cap of the beer, then freezing it using a combination of dry ice and acetone, removing the frozen plug, and then corking the whole thing. The Maltose Falcons did a nice job of making this big task seem approachable, and even worth attempting at home.   To prove its worth, they were also very generous with samples.

Chocolate and Beer with TCHO and Triple Rock

Next up was a panel discussion on chocolate and beer, hosted by TCHO chocolate and Triple Rock Brewing.  TCHO was on hand to discuss how their chocolate is made, specifically focusing on two points: their interest in being a human focused company, paying decent wages for high quality work, and technological innovations that allow them to closely monitor and record the process of their beans fermenting from halfway around the world.   Several beer samples were poured including a cocoa nib infused stout from Triple Rock and a Porter from Speakeasy.  Most interesting was a plain kolsh, poured as a control, and a cocoa nib infused kolsh, which allowed tasters to isolate out the additions of chocolate in beer. As Rodger, the brewmaster from Triple Rock put it, “If this was a water conference, we’d pour water.”   As an added bonus, I landed a four ounce bag of cocoa nibs, which is just enough to infuse a five gallon batch of home brew. It should be done in a few weeks.

Ingredients 5-10 with Tomme Arthur

The last session of the day just happened to be the booziest.  Tomme Arthur of Pizza Port / Lost Abby presented on alternative ingredients that you can include in beer.  His examples included thousand degree granite rocks in his Hot Rocks Lager, citrus peel and turmeric in a saison, and honey, raisins and rosemary in the Ten Commandments Ale.  His presentation is best summarized with these two images.  One – his railing against the Reinheitsgebot, a German beer purity law which limits beer to water, malt, hops, and after it was discovered, yeast.

And two – a cork flying across the the room.

Of course, there are lots of other great images from Tomme’s presentation:

Sadly, that was my last educational session of the conference. All that was left was dinner with the Homebrew Chef.

PS – If you’re still reading this, then you just might be geeky enough to want to know that the powerpoints from these and all of the other presentations are made available online.  Right now this page only has the 2008 presentations, but after the AHA wakes up from it’s NHC hangover, I’m sure they’ll get up there.

Tags: chocolate, homebrew, lost abbey, NHC, tcho

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