Belgium Comes to Coppertown

The Ithaca Beer Co

The bride and I were out crashing around Cayuga Lake for work Friday and Saturday.  As they say all work and no play.  Stopped at the The Ithaca Beer Co.   What a dump.  Young filthy hippies everywhere. Old hippies with bags of hops and empty growers. Why and where they got the hops is unknowable.  When you pull in to the drive it looks like you are at an old beverage center.  Then you see the out of state plates.  The place needs more than a lick of paint.  There are plans on the wall for a beautiful new brewery.  Tasted all the hop head beers on tap. Ended up with two growers of Flower Power for $10.ea. What a steal!    

Quick Look Graney's Stout

Graney's Stout is across the street form Wolfs Bier Garden on Broadway.  Great old Albany building (old being relative in Albany since anything really old they raised years ago).  Any who.  The Translator and I stopped by for lunch on Monday.  This again was a quick look as I had to go back to work.  So I could only have one.  A Victory Donnybrook Stout poured on nitro. At 3.7% it’s a good beer for the lunch goer.  Very nice to see someplace pouring w/ nitro on something other than Guinness.  They are taking the Stout name thing a little far.  Most of the drafts are stouts. With a few Irish reds which need trying.  They have one guest  IPA.  Which had run out.  Hummmm.  The place is in very big and clean and the staff warm.  Lunch was good but boring.  What no Graney's Stout famous Shepard's pie?  Graney's needs a closer look.

Hop Crops: Madison County and other New York state hops are in demand for specialty beer industry

Published: Wednesday, June 22, 2011, 12:49 PM     Updated: Wednesday, June 22, 2011, 1:20 PM

 By The Post-Standard 

Maria Salatino/ The Post-StandardSteve Miller (Left), New York State's First Hop Specialist and Larry Fisher (right) a Foothill Farm hops farmer stand near a Chinook variety of hops plant at the Foothills Farm in Munnsville, NY. The crops from this farm get distributed to a variety of brewers, including Empire Brewing Company, located in Syracuse, NY.

Steve Miller wants to make hops, a key ingredient in beer, a cash crop in New York state once again.

And with the re-emergence of hops, he wants to make New York state beer as big a tourist attraction as New York state wine has become in the last 35 years.

Cornell Cooperative Extension of Madison County hired Miller as the state’s first hops specialist this year.

“My role is to work with the growers to get the information they need to produce a quality product and make money at it,” he said. “I don’t work with growers just in Madison County, I work with all of New York state.

“On the West Coast, you’re looking at 29,000 acres of hops. In New York, it’s 50 acres,” Miller added. “Less than 10 acres are in Madison County (once a nationally recognized hop center).”

The advent of refrigeration decimated the hop fields. Before refrigeration, there were hundreds of small local breweries because beer couldn’t be stored long or shipped far. By the 1950s, hops had disappeared from New York’s agriculture map.

Miller said with refrigeration and the opportunity for longer storage and wider distribution, “Bigger breweries got bigger and a lot of smaller ones disappeared. We’re going in the opposite direction now.”

Rick Pedersen re-introduced hops to the region on his Seneca Castle Farm in Ontario County in 1999, and Kate and Larry Fisher’s Foothills Farms in Munnsville followed with the first larger scale Madison County hop fields.

“There were hops in this area a long time ago, and I felt that because of all of the microbreweries in the area, there was potential for hops to be a cash crop again,” Miller said.

Hop fields are expanding gradually, side by side with the craft beer industry, which today sells 10 percent of the beer consumed in New York, he said. Craft brewers are eager to use the high-quality aromatic hops grown in New York fields, he said, but they have to be sure they can get a steady supply.

“I’m working with 100 people who have hops planted or will plant them this year or next year. At least half are not in the commercial bracket (more than 1,000 plants),” Miller said.

The rest are growing at least a half acre of the flowers, but even people who have only 100 to 200 plants “are selling to home brewers and microbrewers (who are) looking for a special product,” he said. “Microbreweries have expanded by 20 percent over the past 10 years. Some microbreweries are planting their own (hops).”

Growers get from 1,000 to 1,500 pounds of dried hops per acre, or enough to make between 5,000 and 7,500 31-gallon barrels of beer, Miller said.

“There are thousands of types of beer,” he said. “That’s part of the interest now. People are looking at beers having individual qualities and trying a lot of different varieties. We want to make New York a destination for people looking for the (beer) products.”

Farm winery legislation passed in 1976 allowed small vineyards to start selling under their own labels, creating a booming tourist industry. Legislation being considered at the state level could do the same thing for the beer industry, Miller said.

“We’re looking at setting up farm breweries across the state. That would require that a large portion of ingredients be grown in New York state,” he said.
That means hops.

By R. Patrick Corbett 
Contributing writer

Quick Look The Cask And Rasher

Put your boat in at the Coxsackie boat launch .  Have a lovely day of boating on the mighty Hudson.  And on your way out of town be sure to stop at the http://www.thecaskandrasher.com/.

16 good beers on draft and good food.  We could only stop for a short one.   They had a firkin on the bar with a little coat on it.  We will be back for a closer look.

Water Front Ale House, Brooklyn

So you are in Brooklyn and you want a craft beer with lunch.  Well its going to be the http://www.waterfrontalehouse.com/.  As far as I can tell nothing else opens until 4:00


Let's start with The Water Front Ale House is not on the water.  But it is open for lunch and has a large image of Micheal Jackson on the wall. I found that comforting.  The lunch menu was short but interesting.  I had the venison burger with IPA sauteed  mushrooms and hand cut fries.  The Bride had the chicken nachos.  Both very good.  Burger was cooked to perfection.  Loose Canon IPA went well with the burger.  Wanted to have Avery's The Reverend.  Barley Wine seemed a bit much at lunch.  Man I'm getting old.  They had all the Brooklyn locals on tap.  Sixpoints, Kelso and Brooklyn EIPA.  I wasn't ready for a Brooklyn tasting by myself.  There is that old thing again.  So I had to settle on a "LAH-GOO-KNEE-TUSS" Undercover Investigation Shut-Down Ale.  Feel my pain.

Sierra coming East

 

  Stan Hieronymus at www.realbeer.com is reporting

The Blount Daily Times and other new sources in Tennessee are reporting extensively about the possibility that Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. will build a brewery in the city of Alcoa.
Alcoa City Manager Mark Johnson said Tuesday the brewing company is also looking at two other eastern U.S. sites in other states.
“Not just Alcoa, they’re looking at the entire region. Once they landed here, literally, they liked the community,” he said.
To enhance the city’s chances of landing the brewery, the state Senate Finance Committee on Tuesday voted 10-0 to advance a bill establishing state guidelines for high-alcohol beer to a full floor vote. The measure would ease laws restricting the production of beer stronger than 5% by weight (6.25% by volume).
Sierra Nevada currently produces about 800,000 barrels a year and may reach capacity at its Chico, California, site within three years. Sierra Nevada Communications Coordinator Bill Manley said the company began considering a second brewery several years ago because of the environmental impact of shipping across the entire country.
“We started with a couple of hundred sites, and have narrowed it down to a handful,” Manley said.
The second brewery would brew many of the beers currently also made in California, but not necessarily all specialty beers. It would also be a hub for east coast distribution.
Representatives of Sierra Nevada recently toured potential sites in Alcoa. Manley said they were impressed by the closeness to the mountains, just like the California brewery, and an attention to environmental concerns as exemplified by the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) requirement for the Pellissippi Place business development park.
Alcoa City Manager Mark Johnson said the company wants its eastern facility to be a tourist destination, and the proximity of Great Smoky Mountains National Park is a natural fit. Other pluses include an abundant water supply and logistical issues such as interstate connections and McGhee Tyson Airport.
“Quality of life, conservation issues, being green. They’re a very environmentally conscious company,” Johnson said.