(This post is Rochester-centric)

Last night’s official grand opening of the Rohrbach Brewing Company’s new downtown brewery was quite the success. Mayor Duffy came in on his Duffycopter, slid down a rope, tackled a perp, then delivered a charming, eloquent speech about how important it is that businesses move back to downtown Rochester. Unfortunately, before I could ask him any post-interview questions, the Duffysignal lit up the sky and the poor guy had to race out of there.

Anyway, I have a ton of pics, some of which I will post as soon as get of my butt and edit them.

Also, bars with the potential for coolness are going up all over the place. I intend to hit Abilene, on Liberty Pole Way, for the first time tonight. Owner Danny Deutsch has over 100 American micros in bottles. The place isn’t on the main strip, but I urge everyone to give it a try. This is a bar that will be shaped by the customers who choose it. let’s make sure it’s beer folks.

Meanwhile, The Magpie is opening soon on Park Avenue, in the spot formerly occupied by First Taste. I have no idea what to expect, but it sounds like a chill place and I don’t get that kiddie-bar/meat market vibe from the exterior.

-Mark

I’m a huge soccer fan, and a huge fan and season ticket holder for our local professional soccer team, the Rochester Rhinos.

Local Rochester readers will know of the team’s financial struggles, and near demise, over the past couple of years. Now, thanks to the team’s purchase by Utica banker Rob Clark, our season is saved. Our stadium is saved.

Our team is going to be out on that pitch.

For many fans, one of the most glaring issues was the ineptitude of godawful concession company Delaware North.  They’re the ones who tried to carge me the import price for a bottle of J.W. Dundee’s IPA, brewed half a mile from the stadium, last season. Well they’re gone, and Clark is looking for a more local approach to concessions.

Mr. Clark, in addition to the historic High Falls Brewery, we have two local breweries who’ve just invested in Rochester the way you’ve invested in the Rhinos. The Rohrbach Brewing Company and Custom Brewcrafters have each built new, larger facilities to produce more and better beer than ever before. You need this beer in your stadium. With growth rates of up to 40% last year, these beers are now the beers of Rochester and of Rochesterians.

Who’s with me?  If you want to see the best local beer at PTP this summer, leave me your comments, and I’ll forward this informal potition to the PTP front office as soon as it looks impressive.

-Mark

I was going to write about my adventures brewing “5 Cooks English Pale Ale,” this weekend (so named because I had 4 homebrewers and 1 commercial brewer in my kitchen “helping”). But I’m sick- that achey, fluey kind of sic that makes it impossible to leave one’s bed.

For what it’s worth, the ale is bubbling merrily away in a downstairs closet, and a full report is due on my first homebrew. In the meantime, I’m curled up with Beer School, Bottling Success at the Brooklyn Brewery by BB founders Steve Hindy and Tom Potter. I’m actually learning quite a bit about the business from this book than I expected. It’s kinda reinvigorated my excitement and enthusiasm for the American craft brewing industry.

I hope to be all fine and dandy for tomorrow night’s Beer Social at the Tap & Mallet, where High Falls Brewing Company Head Brewer Dave Schlosser will take us on a magical journey through various interpretations of Bock. I’m gonna need a clear head for that one.

-Mark

From Prokofiev to Pilsner
By Mark Tichenor and Bruce Lish

What could be more cultured than a night at the symphony? An elegant concert hall, timeless works of compositional art performed by virtuosos, tuxes, tails, all the stuff most beer lovers avoid. Thankfully, John Sullivan is there to prove the world of high culture and beer can live in (excuse the upcoming terrible pun) harmony.

Sullivan, 53, plays violin with the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra. He’s also the winner of the Upstate New York Homebrewers’ Association’s 30th annual Empire State Open Homebrewers’ Competition.

During the competition, over 300 home-concocted beers from across New York State were judged on aroma, color, mouthfeel, flavor, and a boatload of other categories. Sullivan came out on top of the pack with his Symphony Pilsner. As part of the prize, the Rohrbach Brewing Company will brew his beer, which will be available at the Buffalo Road Brewpub.

A homebrewer on and off since 1980, Sullivan’s first taste of the hobby came when his father attempted a batch of beer. “It was terrible,” he said. “I thought, if this is the best you can do homebrewing, I don’t think it’s something I want to get into.”

Bored with the watery mass-market lagers, which were pretty much the only beers available at the time, Sullivan took solace in the occasional Import such as Heineken Dark, the first beer he ever liked. It was while browsing a long-defunct Rochester winemaking supply store and discovering a slim booklet on brewing by Leigh Eadle that he decided to take a stab at liquid gold.

“The first brew I made turned out pretty well,” Sullivan said. Encouraged by the results, he brewed whenever the urge struck him, using readily available canned malt extracts as the basis for his beers, but it was when he finally joined the 20th century, bought a computer, and started finding homebrewing resources on the internet that he took his brewing to a new level.

Making the jump from canned malt extract to all-grain is a milestone for homebrewers. Suddenly, instead of simply pouring syrup into the brew kettle, they’re milling whole barley and undergoing the entire mashing procedure, in which the grain’s starches are converted to fermentable sugars in preparation for brewing.  It requires mastery of a totally new set of procedures. The rewards however, are great. By tailoring every ingredient in the recipe instead of using a premix, the brewer gains total control over the beer.

At this point, many brewers get kinda wacky with this newfound power, inventing new styles, fusing styles together, and generally pushing the envelope of taste, form and flavor. Sullivan however is more of a purist, and it shows in the traditional character of his Pilsner, a tricky style that, unlike hoppy ales, does nothing to hide any mistakes by the brewer.
“Pilsner isn’t so much a recipe because it’s very basic,” Sullivan explains. “It’s more of a procedure.”

He suggests that newbie brewers do some research before heating the water. “Read at least the first few chapters of John Palmer’s How to Brew,” do a basic extract beer and make sure that sanitation is a priority, as induced bacteria ruins beer more than anything else.

Sullivan currently has an Altbier, strong Scotch ale, blonde ale, and pre-prohibition lager in the works. One wonders what he plans to do with all that beer.

We think he feeds it to the rest of the orchestra.

In other beers:
On Thursday, March 27th, The Rohrbach Brewing Company celebrates the official grand opening of its new brewery on Railroad Street, adjacent to the Public Market, from 4 to 8pm. Brewers Jim McDermott and Bruce Lish will give brewery tours and answer questions, and of course there will be beer and food sampling. And of course Rochester Mayor Robert Duffy will be there to exhibit his zero-tolerance policy on a fancy ribbon.

Bruce is a certified beer judge and commercial brewer. Mark owns a laptop and likes beer. For more on beer, check out the beercraft blog, updated regularly, at http:://www.beercraftsite.com. Send your questions, suggestions, or comments to beercraft@rochester.rr.com.

Until recently, the American beer scene had a deserved reputation for homogeneity. From the ’50s to the ’80s, brewing was dominated by a few huge conglomerates, all making basically the same watery lager. Bland American beer became the butt of epicurean jokes the world over.

So why does Ireland get a pass when their beer scene is exactly the same thing, except the beer is black? That’s right folks. Irish brewing is overwhelmingly dominated by a sort of mass-market, nitrogen-carbonated beer chiefly produced by three brewing names: Murphy’s, Beamish, and of course Guinness.

Americans have a tendency to overromanticize anything Irish, and the Guinness (or should I say parent company Diageo) marketing machine has run with that, spending tens of millions annually to link the Guinness name with St. Patrick’s day and all other things Irish, such as hurling and the Catholic church. They’ve even been able to create their own pseudoholiday: the much ballyhooed Guinness Toast, in which Guinness drinkers around the world toast simultaneously at a prearranged time. It’s as underwhelming as it sounds.

So here’s to Guinness for making their dry, creamy opaque stout a ‘cool’ beverage among the only market that matters in America: 18-34 year olds. A trip to Ireland will show you the brewery has failed miserably at accomplishing that feat on its home turf. The only people who drink Guinness on the Emerald Isle are oldsters and tourists. Most pubgoers are content with Bulmer’s Cider and (gasp!) Budweiser, because Anheuser-Busch spends tens of millions of dollars to make them think it’s cool.

Here’s to breweries without a marketing budget.

-Mark

Join us once again tomorrow night at Monty’s Korner for a taste of one of Germany’s most renowned beer styles. We’ll be tasting Bock beer from Germany and the USA, and I just might drone on about Bock’s history, at least enough to debunk the stupid myth that it’s made from whatever’s left in the bottom of the kettle after other beers have been brewed.

The fun starts at 7:30. And don’t forget your goat.

After four years of yapping about beer, it’s about time I established actual credentials. This coming weekend, I am going to make my first batch of homebrew.

I’m not a complete stranger to the basement brewery, having assisted several other homebrewers, mainly by standing next to a simmering kettle and drinking their beer. But this will be my first time in the driver’s seat and, even with a decent amount of knowledge of ingredients and processes, it’s a little intimidating. All the experienced, all-grain, full decoction mash homebrewers I know advised me to start with a kit. Baby steps. One can of malt extract at a time.

Anyway, we’ll document the potentially hilarious results of the upcoming brew session for your education and amusement. Cheers!

-Mark

The virtue police are striking again, and this time it’s hitting close to home. New York Upon his recent visit to Rochester, State Assemblyman Felix Ortiz announced a proposal for a 25 cent surcharge on every bottle of alcoholic beverage sold. The money thus raised would go to fund substance abuse treatment and after-school programs.

Ortiz was quoted as saying “It will probably be an unpopular angle as I stand right here, but I believe if we don’t pay today, we pay tomorrow.”

Such nobility! Such willingness to take an unpopular stand! Such a pantload!

He’s definitely right about the likely popularity of the proposal, not just because of peoples’ resentment at having to pay more for their booze, but also because it’s a blanket punishment of every New York Stater over age 21 for the irresponsible actions of one segment of the population. Ortiz’ words veil a fallacious belief: that those who enjoy alcohol in any form are part of the problem, and that, by buying wine beer or liquor, they share some of the moral culpability for those who allow alcohol and far more physically and socially damaging substances (crystal meth, I’m looking at you) to take over their lives.

Ortiz is essentially levying a punitive tax to subsidize abdication of personal responsibility. And he wants to do it by funding programs that work for only a small minority of people who enter them.

I’d also like to know exactly how Ortiz thinks we’ll “pay tomorrow.” More DWI? By lowering the legal  .BAC to levels where it’s almost illegal to drive past a bar ad through increased funding for enforcement, New York State is doing everything in its power to increase DWI anyway.  We’re already paying to pay for tomorrow. More addction? Is the high relapse rate of addicts who went through rehab purely a result of underfunding, or is it that addiction is a psychological labyrinth from which many people never really break free?

Thanks to Client 9, I guess it’s a good time to make a splash as a defender of public health in New York State. Yankee Stadium has less grandstanding than the Ortiz proposal. It behooves New Yorkers to give it the attention it deserves:

Substantially less than this piece,

-Mark

Well, tomorrow is the annual St. Patrick’s Day parade in Rochester, and once again our Irish band, the Sisters of Murphy, will be playing at High Fidelity, on East Avenue along the parade route. If you like Flogging Molly and Pogues-style pub rock, and you like Irish heritage, and you like to act like a drunken moron in public, you’ll fit right in so come on down. We’re on all freakin’ day.

If you’re actually Irish, you should probably stay home. How much fun can it be, watching your culture get stereotyped and dragged through the booze-sodden gutter by every ignoramus who owns a green shirt? Isn’t that what the Irish do all day? Drink, fight, and quip some witty James Joyce quote? Of course, we’ll be abetting the process by playing every cliched “Irish” tune you’ve ever heard, from “Whiskey in the Jar” to “Beer Beer Beer” to “Streams of Whiskey” to, oh hell, you get the idea.

Of course, the beer will be Guinness, although I’d prefer Beamish or Magic Hat Irish Stout, both of which I Think are superior to the Ubiquitous black beer in flavor and body, if not in presentation. This year, even the Belgian Brewery Ommegang threw its hat in the stout ring with O’mmegang. I tried it at the Old Toad last night, and found it way too…sour? . They should stick to the Belgian beers.

The O’mmegang starts out phenolic and dry with an astringent yet sour finish. And not sour in a good way.  No one bats .1000 all the time, and this is Brewery Ommegang’s first real strikeout. It’s enough to leave Bruce wondering “Where’s Randy?”

Brewers and Uber beer geeks will get that reference.

-Mark

Poor Andrew Strohlein.

For his 40th birthday, the Brussels resident took up the monumental task of drinking a Belgian beer a day for 40 days, and blogging about the experience, as a way of raising money for charity.

How this raises money for charity is a mystery to me. If I drink 40 Spatens, people just look at me like I’m a social deviant or something. I can tell they’re wondering what happened to my pants.

Anyway, as you could imagine, 40 days just wasn’t enough for Andrew to provide an adequate cross-section of Belgium’s beers and so he kept going, writing about the brews of his adopted country in his blog, 40b40. Best of luck for the future, Andrew. I’ll be reading! -Mark