Pic(k) of the Week: Beer Discussions

New Year's at Mekong Restaurant: a Vietnamese restaurant on the west side of Richmond, Virginia, that specializes in Belgian beers, with many on draught.

Owner An Bui (l) gestures as patron Evan Setzer (r) responds. Eric Delia (c) —author of beer blog Relentless Thirst— observes. Discussions about beer can be animated!

1 January 2011.

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Pic(k) of the Week: one in a weekly series of personal photos, usually posted on a Saturday, and often of a 'good fermentable' as subject.

Port City Brewing ships, opens

Port City Brewing Company began shipping kegs of its beers this week to a few select restaurants and pubs in Virginia and Washington, D.C. That makes Port City the first production brewery to operate in the city of Alexandria, Virginia, since 31 October 1916, when the Robert Portner Brewing Company last extinguished its kettle.



Port City will have four 'flagship' beers.

Optimal Wit is already available in a few outlets. Essential Pale Ale and Porter (and, that's the name!) will be shipped next week. Monumental I.P.A. is being dry-hopped today, using a hop cannon, a device designed by lead brewer Jonathon Reeves. Monumental will be shipped when he deems the aromatics ready.

To ensure that those pubs which get the beer will have an uninterrupted supply, owner Bill Butcher and head brewer Jonathan Reeves plan to take things slowly at first. The short list, for now, includes Argonaut, Big Hunt, Black Squirrel, ChurchKey, and Smith Commons in Washington, D.C., and, in northern Virginia, Columbia Firehouse Restaurant, Evening Star Cafe, Food Matters, Galaxy Hut, and Rustico. More will follow as production is ramped up. At present, the beers are kegged only; the bottling line will first be used on 14 February.

Port City Brewing is NOT a brewpub; it is a production brewery. However, the facility WILL be open to the public today from 12-5 and tomorrow, Sunday, from 12-4. Owner Bill Butcher and lead brewer Jonathan Reeves will be on hand to offer sample tastes of Optimal Wit and Essential Pale Ale, and, yes, to fill growlers. (Open as well for a preview on Friday evening, the tasting room was filled with nearly 200 people, Butcher told me.)

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UPDATE: The tasting room is now officially open, but only on weekends:
Friday 4-8pm
Saturday 12-5pm
Sunday 12-5pm

Public tours begin at 2pm and 3pm on Saturdays; reservations are not required. The cost is $5 and includes a tasting glass to keep and a full tasting of all the beers on tap. Growlers (take home re-usable glass containers) can be purchased. Growlers from other breweries will be filled, for a fee, as well.
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For more details, go to Facebook, Twitter, or the website: www.portcitybrewing.com. The physical address is: 3950 Wheeler Avenue, Alexandria, VA, 22304.

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• More photos from the preview tour: here.
  
• Photos of the brewery under construction: here.

Pic(k) of the Week: Tiny Bubbles

The release of a stream of bubbles of carbon dioxide in this sight glass indicates an active beer fermentation within the tank. When fermentation subsides, and the beer is lagered, it will be a Golden Export Lager at ...

Gordon-Biersch Brewery & Restaurant
Tysons Corner, Virginia.
4 February 2010.

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Pic(k) of the Week: one in a weekly series of personal photos, usually posted on a Saturday, and often of a 'good fermentable' as subject.

FREE Beer & Cheese

Wendy Buckley owns and operates Screwtop —a wine bar, café, and shop— in the Clarendon district of Arlington, Virginia.

Wendy also sells —and likes— cheese and beer. Wednesday, 2 February, 2011, she'll pair those two in a demonstration she calls a Super Bowl Beer & Easy Cheesy Appetizers Class.

Participants will taste five beers with five cheese-based appetizers. Prepare-at-home recipe cards will be available. Here's the lineup:

• Prairie Breeze Cheddar.
  Served with Stoudt's Winter Ale.
  Hoppy red ale. 6.2% alcohol-by-volume (abv). Pennsylvania.
  
• Red Dragon Mustard Seed Cheese.
  Served with The Raven Special Lager.
  Amber lager. 5.5% abv. Baltimore, Maryland.
  
• Morbier Cheese, Spicy Chorizo Salami, and Beer Mustard.
  Served with Allagash Dubbel.
  'Belgian abbey-style' ale. 7% abv. Maine.
  
• Buttermilk Blue Cheese/Roqufort Dip on Endive.
  Served with Heavy Seas Siren Noire Imperial Chocolate Stout.
  Strong stout, brewed with chocolate nibs. 8% abv. Baltimore, Maryland.
  
• Fondue prepared with Gruyere and Comte Cheese, and Beer.
  Served with Brooklyn Brewing Local 1.
  Strong 'Belgian-style' pale ale. 9% abv. Brooklyn, New York.

I'll be on hand to assist Wendy, to talk a bit about the beers, and to offer some enthusiastic suggestions on pairing beer with cheese.

So, how much would you pay for all of this? $40? ... $30 .... $20? Well, how about zero, nada, nothing!

Wendy is offering all of this sipping and nibbling for free, but with one proviso. For that $0 price, you have to be a member of Screwtop's wine club. Otherwise, the cost is five dollars.

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• Easy Cheesey Recipe cards: here.
  
• More on beer with cheese: here.
  
• Caveat lector: As a representative of Select Wines, Inc. —a northern Virginia wholesaler of beer and wine— I sell all of the beers in this event.

We're the lesser without Don Younger.

Don Younger has passed away, and the beer world is the lesser for it. Mr. Younger was, for years, the publican and owner of Horse Brass Pub in Portland, Oregon, which All About Beer Magazine selected as one of 125 places in the world in which to have a drink before you die.

I never met Mr. Younger, but I have heard several stories about the man. Some were about his prodigious appetite for good beers, but all were about his example leading the way for what a publican should and could be. He wouldn't just pour a beer; he lived the beer. Visitors to his Horse Brass Pub were made to feel part of a special brother-and-sisterhood.

As Pete Brown, a gentleman of beer in his own right, put it:

Last night the brewing world lost one of its best, someone who summed up everything – every last little wave and particle – that is good about the world of beer and pubs.

Don Younger (1941-2011)

I reached out to a Washington, D.C., based beer writer for his remembrance of Mr. Younger. Here is what Steve Frank had to say.

When I think of one-of-a-kind, broke-the-mold people, the first name that comes to my mind is Don Younger, who passed away yesterday. Younger was a warm human being and an iconoclast, who helped raise the awareness of craft beer, first in Portland and, from there, throughout the U.S. From his renowned and revered Horse Brass Pub in Portland, Oregon, Don helped many of the industry’s notables get started, including the Widmer Brothers, and Rogue’s Jack Joyce.

I first met Don through his desire to help anyone appreciate good craft beer. Preparing for a trip to Portland, I found the Horse Brass website and called to ask for suggestions of beer places to visit. Don wouldn’t hear of it. His response was “We’ll pick you up and take you around to the places you should see,” and he did just that. What a marvelous evening that was.

On another trip to Portland, I stayed with Don, who told me, when I woke up in the morning, to come to the Horse Brass for breakfast. It was closed in the morning, but Don was doing his chores and took me back to the kitchen. Having once been a short-order cook, he insisted on making me a sumptuous breakfast, and then joined me. Before he sat down, Don went behind the bar to the long line of taps, featuring Pacific Northwest and European beers, and pulled two pints of a high alcohol Hair of the Dog release. When I downed that, he pulled two Belgian tripels for the next round. Needless to say, by the time my cousin came to meet me at 10 AM, I barely recognized her.

Since that time, I have co-hosted several beer breakfasts in the area. However, it was Don Younger who first introduced me to beer for breakfast, and, to paraphrase WC Fields, 'I never stopped to thank him.' Don will be sorely missed, but great memories of him will last a lifetime.

Read more about Don Younger: at the Horse Brass Pub website, at the Beervana blog, at the Brookston Beer Bulletin, and at Pete Brown's blog.

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Steve Frank and his writing partner, Arnold Meltzer, have been writing about beer under the pen name Brews Brothers for over 15 years. They currently write for the Gazette newspapers, Mid-Atlantic Brewing News, and American Brewer.