Back from AHA Convention - WOW!

[Chris Alvey]

I'm back from my first (and definitely not my last) American Homebrewer's Association convention. About 1000 homebrewers attended the conference held on the North side of Cincinnati. It was well-run and the vast majority of the attendees were very cool and excited about beer. Sorry Chris, no medal for you this year but, still, great job.

• Hospitality/Vendor Suite - plenty of vendors to talk to and most of the time homebrew clubs serving beers. Met lots of vendors and people. Got to check out one of those Brew Magic systems up close including a demo of the electronics system - wow! Very very cool, definitely good for reproducibility of a batch.
  
  Pro Brewer's Night - big open room with 25+ commercial breweries serving the good stuff. Upland and Barley Island were there from IN. Highlights for me included Dogfish Head's Black & Blue, a sour beer (something with fire on the label) from Ommegang, and plenty of very nice Saisons (both sour and not.) We met Justin, Doc, Chat and JP from the Brewing Network and talked to them for quite a while. Really nice guys one and all.
  
  Club Night - I'm not exaggerating this, 600+ kegs available with tons of clubs. They all had a theme for their booth and most of them went all out because there was some sort of vote for best club/theme and another for best beer. There were spontaneous parades (with beads, music, a bullhorn) and another club had this big goat made of a barrel. Seriously, more than I can describe here. I hope they have pictures on the AHC site soon.
  
  [more next post]

[Chris Alvey]

Talks - I think the best talk was from Jim Koch from Sam Adams/Boston brewery. The gist was that this is currently one of the most exciting times and brewing and homebrewers are a major factor in the expansion of worldwide and experimental styles. He was very cool, laid back, frank (even dropping an f-bomb or two), and appreciative or at least supportive of homebrewing. A

Saw Denny Conn talk about batch sparging. He was laid back and just sort of explained the thing. Denny showed some other research of his regarding first wort hopping and other things where he was trying to show that taking great pains often yielded very negligible results with a blind panel.

A brewer associated with the BJ's brewpub chain (there was one right by where the hotel was) talked about hop substitutions and encouraged both efficient use of hops and non-hop substitutions like wormwood. Pretty neat. He too seemed to not be too keen on mash/first-wort hopping saying that the volatiles do, in-fact, volatilize anyway and you are just left with the bitterness of a 20 min addition without all the aroma/flavor that you might be expecting. He also said to hoard and store hops correctly because he thought conditions would be bad for about 3 yrs or so.

Lastly, I went to a talk on Brettanomyoces that was very informative. It was from Chris White (White Labs) and he showed some studies and gave samples of different sour beer treatments. The best one seemed to be where they put the bugs in the secondary and used a moderately dry finishing yeast. I will have to get the notes to give you the lowdown. This talk convinced me once and for all that I am going to give a sour beer or two a try.

[Chris Norrick]

I'm glad you had a great time. I figured it would be a blast. I really wanted to go but it just wasn't in the cards. I hear it's going to be in the bay area of California next year. San Francisco maybe.