The Topic: The Death and Rebirth of a Beer Tasting
Ken Carman is a BJCP judge; homebrewer since 1979, club member at Escambia Bay, Salt City and Music City Homebrewers, who has been interviewing professional brewers all over the east coast for over 10 years.
I think the first Beaver River Beer Tasting was in 2006, at The Beaver River Hotel: now called Beaver River Lodge. During those years, for a brief time, the tastings expanded to three different locations. The Labor Day beer tasting was always the most successful, with Millie, my wife, counting about 60-70 people at one point. For a town with no roads going to it, only accessible by boat, barge or trail: that’s incredible.
Beaver River Beer Tastings have always been a mix of commercial beers and homebrews: commercial examples bought, by myself, from stores like Yankee Spirits in Sturbridge, Beers of the World in Batavia, NY, Marcy Discount, in Marcy, NY, Tully’s in Wells, Maine and Midtown in Nashville. Basically stores all over the east coast: from Mississippi to Maine.
A few were from brewpubs who bottle their own or do growlers. All commercial examples had already been taxed and almost all had gone through distributors, the few exceptions: growlers and bottled examples from brewpubs. This year I had three, out of probably 200 different brews. Most years all were bought from stores who were supplied by distributors.
Of course, being a homebrewer and a member of three clubs homebrew was part of the mix. Continue reading “Brew Biz: Werts and All”