Author: Ken Carman

Ken Carman is a BJCP judge; homebrewer since 1979, club member at Escambia Bay and Music City Homebrewers, who has been interviewing professional brewers all over the east coast for over 10 years.

The Topic: Category Conundrums

 

I judged beer in Lexington, Kentucky a few weekends ago. I also entered a Braggot, but an odd one.

Who me? Brew odd? Who woulda guessed!

Anywhosie…

The judging went well. I enjoy judging as much, or maybe more, than brewing. It’s like a very specific, directed, tour through styles of beer and the differences in judge’s palates. I swear I learn more practical information about beer from judging than I did studying to pass my BJCP exam, because it relies more on diving into a style on a one on one level with other judges… less with memorization that sits in the brain and rots, or flows out the other end sooner or later.

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This week’s topic: Judging Specialty Wonderful-Weird vs. Specialty Slightly Abnormal

“Whose brain did you get?”

“Somebody named Abby Normal.”

“You’re telling me we gave him an… ABNORMAL BRAIN???”

-paraphrased exchange between I-Gor and young Victor Frankenstein; or “steen” as he preferred at first, the movie and the musical

Yes, maybe I was the one who got Abby Normal’s brain when it comes to judging what some may consider “Abby Normal beer.” Apologies to fans of Christopher Moore and homebrewers like myself who love to brew “Abby Normal” beers, braggots and explore other fermented concoctions, perhaps, even more odd.

A topic came up on JudgeNet, a Yahoo group, and I immediately went where no one else has gone before. Or maybe I just have a slightly off kilter look at Specialty brews…

(Hmm… “Off Kilt-er Kolsch?” I’d better get to brewing another Specialty!)

A brewer wanted to enter a Session IPA and thought maybe he/she should enter it as Specialty. I’m sure some judges are traditionalists: it’s neither an APA or an IPA, so Specialty should do. Others thought the category for APA would be better.
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This week’s topic: An interview with Bailey Spaulding

This is an interview I did for The Music City Brew-Score: a publication of The Music City Brewers. Bailey Spaulding is part owner, head brewer for Jackalope in Nashville, TN. I have added notes for the readers here so context of the comments and questions is more apparent to readers who live elsewhere. Before we start the interview; the day after the interview I swung by again and asked Bailey about her being part of the new wave of women brewers in craft-brew world…

Ken Carman is a BJCP judge; homebrewer since 1979, club member at Escambia Bay and Music City Homebrewers, who has been interviewing professional brewers all over the east coast for over 10 years.

Brew Biz is a column written by Ken Carman for Professor Goodales

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This is my first in a series of columns on lady brewers, but I wanted to make sure she knew I wasn’t intending to “ghetto-ing” her as if being a woman brewer was weird, different: in any way less an accomplishment. Or that she, and other women brewers, needed to be set to one side. When I returned the next day she thanked me for mentioning that before she told me what’s below. I not only asked Bailey to update her brew-story for us after our last interview, but if felt she was treated differently as a woman brewer…

Bailey: “Among fellow brewers? Not usually… which is great. It’s like perfectly normal; if I get treated different it’s more from an outside perspective. Sometimes they come in here and, well…. But then they have our beer and then it’s OK. Now there’s Pink Boot Society: for any women in the brewing industry; doesn’t matter if they’re brewers or involved in another way. Now they’re starting regional groups, like here in the southeast and we also have Barley’s Angels.”
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We’d been here before, me: across the table from Bailey. Bailey of Jackalope, Nashville, Tennessee; one of the new wave of lady brewers and distillers in the country.

  I’ve covered Bailey, Robyn and Steve’s story; where they came from and how the brewery started before.  Asked and published her story: how and why she became a brewer. Their web site tells their story in depth. So what’s left to ask, but…

After all this time, what have you learned?(Jackalope went from a small Brew Magic system to a big, somewhat automated, system since I interviewed Bailey last.)

Bailey: Where to begin? Well, I really couldn’t have imagined it would have taken seven months to set up the new equipment. I couldn’t have imagined I would have brewed 180 times on that Sabco system.  Your survival skills just have to kick in. You do whatever it takes to make it happen.

Anything you would have done differently?       
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Written by Ken Carman for Professorgoodales.net

Review: Chardon BrewWorks

205 Main Street
Chardon, OH 44024
Ph 440-286-9001
Fax 440-286-1240

Tue – Thu ~ 3 pm – 10 pm
Fri – Sat ~ 3 pm – Midnight
Sun ~ 3 pm – 8 pm
chardonbrewworks.com
brewer@chardonbrewworks.com

Ken Carman is a BJCP judge; homebrewer since 1979, club member at Escambia Bay and Music City Homebrewers, who has been interviewing professional brewers all over the east coast for over 10 years.

You may have heard the bad news about a school shooting at the beginning of the year in Chardon, Ohio. I even wrote a column about it. I also remember it, not only because it happened on my birthday, February 27th, but because I pass through Chardon every year on the way to Cleveland for work. Well here’s some really good Chardon news…

Chardon, Ohio sits atop a ridge that’s not too far from what Jim Blum: local public radio personality who does a folk show at WKSU, calls, “The Mighty Cuyahoga River;” legendary in folk idiom. Perhaps only slightly less famous than Pete Seeger, the Clearwater and the Hudson. Both rivers have been cleaned up, one after it caught fire.
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Written by Ken Carman for Professorgoodales.net

Ken Carman is a BJCP judge; homebrewer since 1979, club member at Escambia Bay and Music City Homebrewers, who has been interviewing professional brewers all over the east coast for over 10 years.

The Topic: Amber Waves of Grain Homebrew Competition

I know Buffalo fairly well. My brother-in-law went to college there, and I had clients in western New York for years. I even had one in St. Catherine’s, across the Canadian border, and one on Grand Island. But… I haven’t been to either of those two in years. Buffalo? I went there during my yearly tours for quite a while, and still pass by twice to three times a year: on my way to other destinations.

Being from New York State originally also helped, as well as passing back and forth with my wife to our place in the Adirondacks.

I was planning a short tour up north: I’m a musical storyteller and educational service provider by trade, and noticed the Buffalo area was having a homebrew competition. So I worked out a few things and headed north early, clunking out in my old tour bus that’s stored in northeast Ohio for the night. Then I headed to New York: waking up at 3:30am so I could be sure I’d arrive at The Knights of Columbus on Grand Island at 8:30 where the competition was being held, with well over 600 beers entered! I felt bad: I could only make half of the affair and made a smaller dent in those entries than many judges there. Performing a program Wednesday in Nashville kind of cut my time short.

I got there about an hour early so I hopped on the net at the McD’s around the corner.
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Written by Ken Carman for Professorgoodales.net

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.

The Topic: Tasting for the Test

For the uninitiated, let me start here with a very brief: incomplete, synopsis. Judging at BJCP beer competitions is somewhat regulated by the BJCP who has a test that ranks you as a judge. I am Certified: which is in the middle of the rankings. One does not have to pass the test to judge, you become an apprentice. One doesn’t even have to take the test to judge: you simply check “experienced,” or “unranked,” or whatever they happen to have on the current official judging form. Most of the time you won’t be head of the table, which technically means you have a boss: the highest ranked judge at the table. I don’t tend to run it that way unless necessary, and I’ve never had to. The only time we came close is when one judge insisted we sit in utter silence through all 11 or so beers… (A bit high for one round of judging, but that’s what we had.) ..and only go back over; adjust scores so we’re within a certain spread… often 3-7 points. I thought it not the best approach, so the other Certified judge and I compromised.

Recently the BJCP has changed the test, at least the parameters on the test, again. I’d like to focus on one aspect of that change.
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Written by Ken Carman for Professorgoodales.net

Ken Carman is a BJCP judge; homebrewer since 1979, club member at Escambia Bay and Music City Homebrewers, who has been interviewing professional brewers all over the east coast for over 10 years.

The Topic: Brew Ghosts

One of the most haunting things about getting older is the ghosts. Oh, I don’t mean the obvious: parents, pets, the bullies we buried in our backyard. Shhh… don’t tell the police. I mean floors we used to walk that don’t exist anymore, places we and our friends used to play, walk and, yes, even drink beer: like The Barber Shop in Utica, New York. When I was in college it was a fun place to go drink dark beer for a 50 cents a glass and eat small paper trays of shelled peanuts for free.

The Barber Shop advertised “Where John and Mary meet.” Well, like my ex-girlfriends who I took there, John and Mary don’t meet anymore: the streets rerouted like our lives, as time tends to do. Or the fact that one such ex… short redhead… was a total b…

Never mind.

Then you have breweries. I used to hang around Newman’s in downtown Albany, NY: one of the first craft breweries when the trend started to nibble on the northeast in the 80s and 90s. Newman’s was in a somewhat disgusting part of downtown that, since Newman’s is long gone, has probably gone to “brewing” less legal substances.

Sorry. That was a not so funny… crack… I just made.

Cough Cough.

Then you have Laughing Pines in Slidell, Louisiana, and many other breweries long gone.

I think that’s why the following story caught my interest from syracuse.com…

The Otisca Building, a historic but hazardous former brewery that looms over a block of Butternut Street on Syracuse’s (NY) North Side, is destined to be demolished within weeks.

City officials plan to seize the rambling two- and three-story brick complex for back taxes and sell it to a company controlled by St. Joseph’s Hospital Health Center and Home HeadQuarters, which will pay for the six-figure demolition.”

But the story doesn’t end there…

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