Brewventure: Homebrewing Class at the Brooklyn Brewery.

Last night I took a trip into the city for a homebrewing class hosted at the Brooklyn Brewery. I had some time to kill before the class was set to start, so a side quest was in order to the restaurant Eleven Madison Park. This place has quite the reputation as far as fine dining in NYC goes, but I wasn’t there for the food, I was there for a special beer on their bottle list (this is a beer blog after all). They recently partnered with the Brooklyn Brewery for two new beers that would be exclusive to the restaurant. Local 11 and Nine Pin Brown Ale are Brooklyn’s Local 2 and Brown Ale respectively, and each was aged in barrels previously used to make Pappy Van Winkle 20 year. As with all Brooklyn cork and caged 750s, they were then bottle conditioned with champagne yeast. Having had a barrel aged brown ale from Brooklyn before (Dark Matter, a previous release in their Brewmaster’s Reserve series), the Local 11 was tops on my priority list for this visit

It was impossible for me not to have high hopesfor this one, as I’m already a big fan of Local 2, but this beer met and even exceeded my lofty expectations (I haven’t reviewed this one on BA yet, but that’s forthcoming). There were still plenty of Belgian characteristics from the base beer, as vanilla notes from the barrel served to highlight the dark fruit flavors from the dark Belgian sugar and yeast esters. This relegated the clove and pepper phenols to the background, but they were still easily appreciated. This was all swirled with the wonderful flavor and aroma of what’s clearly a very smooth whiskey. The spirit influence is a bit more smoothly integrated in the aroma than the flavor, but I’m really splitting hairs. It was a killer beer, and worth the trip just to try it. Hopefully I’ll be posting sometime in the coming weeks about another trip to tackle the Nine Pin Brown Ale.

After that it was a mad dash (figuratively, I guess a mad sit on the L train) into Brooklyn as I arrived at the brewery just as the proceedings were beginning. First up was a presentation by Erica and Stephen from the Brooklyn Brew Shop. It gave a basic overview of every step of the brewing process (similar in content to my post from a couple weeks ago). They managed to make it a lot of fun and get a lot of laughs though, with a highlight being them highlighting the differences between ale, lager, and wild yeasts via a series of Craigslist casual encounter posts. After their piece was done, they went to the back and started pouring samples of one of their homebrews, a saison made with jalapenos. It was good (though I don’t think I could have had more than my 4 or so ounce pour), but all the heat from the jalapenos (and there was plenty) did a number on my palate that left it kind of wrecked for a little bit after. Part of me wishes they had either saved that beer for the end, or brought a different one. Next up was I Ben from Bierkraft, a beer store in Brooklyn. His talk was focused on hops, how they act in the boil, and how best to utilize them. The most interesting part for me was the end of his talk, where he touched on the topic of growing one’s own hops, which is something I may look into next spring. Appropriately enough, he was pouring a homebrewed IPA afterwards, that was pretty good. It used a relatively new strain of hop called Apollo, and the beer had a definite juicy, almost Hawaiian Punch thing going on (although that may have just been on my mind since Dan used it as an example several times in his talk). Last up was Dan, one of the brewers at the Brooklyn Brewery, whose talk was focused on yeast and fermentation. It was interesting to hear a professional’s take on things like pitching rates and the need for a yeast starter, given that most of what I’ve read comes from people who are solely homebrewers. Brooklyn was also pouring their regular draft lineup all night and I got to enjoy a couple great beers, Brooklyn Weiss and the BLAST! double IPA. Overall the event provided both great information and beers in spades, and I would have been willing to pay a bit more than the $5 cost of the ticket to attend. Hopefully with Brooklyn Brewery’s recent expansion these types of events will become more frequent.