Hugh Sisson of Clipper City – Heavy Seas

Well well folks!  Lots to talk about today!

 

First, I had a great meeting with Georgia Crown and will most likely have their location data in our website in a week or so.  You can expect Unibroue, Flying Dog, Brooklyn and a bunch more!

 

Then,

I met Hugh Sisson of Clipper City and he loved us!  He wants to put all his location data on our website as well as flavors and ingredients and really roll this thing out!  Location data for Clipper City is already available in Georgia.

 

Now, I have my first official Brewpot banner on a brewery website

The great folks at Red Brick (Atlanta Brewing Company) have put our banner on their website!  Thanks Bob and Co.

 

Find Beer in Atlanta

Hey guys,

You can find where to buy beer in the State of Georgia on http://www.brewpot.com for the following breweries:

Allagash
Avery
Bell’s
Boulder
Clipper City
Corona/Modelo (Savannah area only)
Dogfish Head
Great Divide
Highland
Lagunitas
Left Hand
Mendocino
Samuel Smith
Ayinger
Lindemans
Orval
Moon River (Savannah area only)
North Coast
Oskar Blues (Dale’s Pale Ale and others)
Otter Creek/Wolaver’s
Southampton
Lao
Pennichuck
Brewdog
Coopers
Magic Hat (limited data)
Mikkeller
Shmaltz (Coney Island/He’Brew)
Smuttynose
Stone
Duck-Rabbit
Thomas Creek
Uinta
Victory
Delirium
Weyerbacher

Red Brick  – Atlanta Brewing Company

Jim Koch, founder of Samuel Adams, possibly the nicest man on the planet?

How many companies do you know that when supplies are high in demand, they help their competitors by giving them excess supplies that they have?  This is exactly what founder of Sam Adams Jim Koch is doing and its called the Hops Sharing Program.  As you may already know, there is a huge hops shortage right now where supplies aren’t just much higher but often times unavailable.  This is when Jim looked at his own supplies and decided that he could afford to sell some of his hops at cost to help out the industry as a whole.   If this isn’t one of the nicest things a competitor has done for his competition, then I don’t know what is.  I challenge the other big guys out there to look at their own supplies and do the same thing, you know who you are.  That being said, I know what beer I will be ordering tonight!

Big Breweries trying to get smaller, smaller Breweries trying to get bigger!

I wrote an article back about the macrobreweries, namely Anheuser-Busch (AB), Miller and Coors all trying to act smaller with lines of their beer trying to be marketed as craft beer. AB has taken it to a whole new level deciding last month after 111 years that Michelob is now a craft beer! If you watch football at all, perhaps you have seen these new commercials. I think its pretty funny that the big guys are trying to do this and just shows how desired Brewpot.com will be even by the big guys, who I originally thought would have no interest in me. The article I read interviews Gary Fish the owner of Deschutes Brewery out in Oregon, whom I have talked to on several occasions, and has advised me well, as well as Julia Herz the Director of Craft Beer marketing for the Brewers Association who is helping me market Brewpot.com. Gary states that he is not bothered by the big guys thinking small because if they can convert typical Bud drinkers to try other styles then it will be easy to bridge the gap from AB’s Longhammer IPA to a much more delicious Inversion IPA made by Deschutes. You can read the entire article here.

Highland Brewery at Muss & Turners
Last week, I wrote an article on the beer tasting events at Muss & Turners, and I must say that those people are on the front lines of the craft beer industry. They have beer tasting events every week and last Monday, I had the rare treat of a food & beer tasting event. The owner of Highland Brewery in Asheville, NC, Oscar Wong drove down and allowed the head chef of M&T Ryan Hidinger to sample each and every beer and use his expertise to pair it with the food. The results were absolutely fantastic!! Besides Oscar being a fun and interesting man, who interestingly enough was an engineer for 22 years, the pairings complemented themselves far better than I could have tried to do! I will try and remember this the best that I can:

Gaelic Ale paired with steamed mussels (of course, I cant remember what sauce was used but the flavors went very well)

Kashmir IPA which had a very noticible bitter sawgrass flavor (which I love by the way.. I am becoming a total hophead) paired with this most amazing green salad with a creamy aeola dressing

Tasgall ale (scotch-style) that had a very dark and rich flavor paired excellently with Scotch eggs (hardboiled eggs wrapped in a spicy sausage)

I may have these next two confused and I promise to take much better notes from now on. As you can see this is the first time I have really been doing these things, so I am learning what I need to remember and what I don’t, and frankly after I got to this part of the night, remembering specific details became a little more difficult!

Oatmeal porter and the Black Mocha Stout paired with smoked pork and a chocolate cake a la mode with spiced and candied peaches.

Click here for a listing and description of Highland Brewery’s beers.

Soon, when the website is up, I will be taking FAR better notes and I will use a flavor wheel on each beer that I try. I will also be having weekly tastings at my apt, so if you want to drink some free beer and don’t mind adding your thoughts to my website, contact me and I will try and get you in!

Here is a picture of Oscar Wong and me.

Site updates:

As you saw in my last post, I got a design spec from Solar Velocity, my web developers. I was a little worried about all the blank space of barley (which a lot of people thought were wheat, or corn btw) and talked to the head of design and he told me that that would be the area where I would have rotating blurbs of featured bars, restaurants, breweries, site news etc etc. I know I asked you guys to tell me your thoughts but there is a lot of things that the picture just did not do justice. For instance they are going to animate bubbles, ever so subtly of the beers on the front page. The background is also going to change with the seasons. I promise to show you everything new as it happens! As for today, I am driving out to Athens, GA to speak with the owner of Terrapin Brewery who I met last Thursday at Muss & Turners to see how we can help each other out. Cheers for now!