Reposting my July 22, 2008 rant…

A cut and paste from my note on Beer Advocate

Barkeeps OPEN your windows!!
If I could recoup all of the gas cash I’ve spent driving between Bukowski’s, the thirsty scholar, PJ O’Ryans… only to leave because the windows and garage doors were shut. Is 71 too hot for you? Too cold? What the hell!?

GOSH DARN IT why can’t we be more like Burlington VT who LOVES for the beer drinker to enjoy the brew outside in the fresh air?

Somerville open your windows! Mikes? Joshua Tree? PJ O’Ryans? Bukowski’s!?

I think Redbones nailed the windows in the upstairs bar shut?

We find ourselves ending up at CBC & Miracle of Science. Cheers to you with your great beer and fresh air.

Claustrophobically,
beerglasstripod.com

Republishing the November 30, 2007 post for Jake:

With a strong Russian accent, this gentleman proceeded to tell us how he was part of the team that created the aspect of Hubble telescope which has the focusing defect.

http://www.rohrbachs.com/
Food: Pub+or-
Beer: X-Ale
People: worth the trip! (or were they they the trip?)
Bartender: Local soccer mom with a seriously fun attitude. A+
BGT: Phew… 3.25 of 5, but it’s the best you can do on a Saturday night up there.

We’re off to San Diego – Going to Stone Brewing and heading to O’Brien’s Pub.

Our friend Aaron from Taza Chocolate recommended Fette Sau in the Williamsburg neigborhood of Brooklyn. The food was amazing. The beer was GREAT and the whisky and burbon list can’t be beat.

I’m uber happy with the picture. Aaron I’m making a huge print for you at the studio.

Fette Sau, Brooklyn

My good pal the amazing photographer (and brewer!) Frank Siteman invited me to submit my amature snaps to The American Society of Media Photographers, New England Chapter’s upcoming event – Pints ‘n’ Pixels New England Style. What is this? Their chapter meeting: “What’s better than looking at photography and downing some pints? Come to the Pints ‘n’ Pixels meeting at 6pm at Harpoon Brewery and do both!”

Here are my submissions:

Summer night at Cambridge Brewing Company, Caitlin Jewell

Miracle of Science, by Caitlin Jewell – Beerglasstripod.com

A strange and little known fact about me is that I sleep walk during the night, a lot. People would probably find it disturbing to wake up at the fridge in the middle of the night drinking milk. For me this has been a weekly occurrence for as long as I remember. The upside is that I generally don’t remember middle of the night trips to the bathroom or letting the dog out at 5am.

 

I’m in Chicago this week. I wouldn’t call this the greatest beer city in the world, but I’ve had some wonderful Goose Island Seasonal on draft and was very excited to find fresh New Belgium Fat Tire.

 

I never really got around to blogging about our most recent trip to Colorado this year for GABF. The highlight of our trip was a 5 hour VIP tour at New Belgium Brewing with JR, one of their Cellar Men. JR generously spent the afternoon sharing his journey in brewing and his experiences working for New Belgium. Of course the beer is wonderful, but perhaps the most fantastic take away was the Brand Evangelism surrounding their company and their community. “To create a profitable business in which our love and talents manifest” is lovingly tiled at the top of the large Merlin brewing kettle. It’s a sentiment that I can’t stop thinking about. Owning a marketing strategy, technology and design firm, Silverscape in Boston means trying to find the balance between the art of design, technological solutions and profitability.

 

It is said, that as the economy goes south, the profitability and sales for stress reduction products, beer for example, go up. This doesn’t surprise me. At Silverscape, we recently completed the getting to know you process and have begun work with a new client Taza Chocolate in Somerville MA. What we’ve realized in our discussions with Taza is the power of creating a full life cycle hand-crafted experience. As artesians, we have much in common. For Taza, it’s Chocolate, for Silverscape our output of love and talent is marketing solutions for our clients including large enterprise-class websites. Our service solutions are crafted by an entirely in-house team. Just as our new friends who create a bean-to-bar sensory experience, we deliver full branding and sales solutions though engagements but our goal is just the same to engage and delight.

 

I’m so excited for our new Silverscape site. One of the whiz-bang innovations will be a community blog. A blog, by general definition is the musings of one writer. Occasionally, a blog will be the thoughts of four to five writers but generally not more than that. But how does a whole community, team or company blog as a common voice? We’re developing a new Adobe Air application. Through this technology our entire team will have the ability to easily blog small bits of what we’re working on in real-time thus bringing our clients and prospects closer to what we’re developing. You might be thinking that you’d never let your company have a fully democratic blog for worries that someone might say the wrong thing. Our solution allows our team to, as a group, select posts that we as a group do not feel entirely reflect the company’s goals and spirit. This is a new paradigm in inbound/outbound communication with clients. For too long websites have been about having an online brochure, job posting board and tomb stone or news announcement device. “We’re pleased to announce this new client; we’re pleased to announce the culmination of a project with client B.” Snore.

 

There’s a lot of writing and thinking about what web 2.0 is and will be. Now, our site visitors will have a very easy way to comment, query and interact with our team members who are directly shaping the vision and execution of our client marketing strategies. Our goal is to create a convenient way for our whole company, our prospects, our suppliers and our clients to interact and have meaningful discussions on what we’re working on in real-time and while ideas and challenges are being attacked head on.

 

Creating brand evangelists requires a two way conversation. We’re looking forward to learning more from the outside world and having more meaningful conversations. Most corporate websites barely achieve sleep walking. Sleep walking is dangerous. Sometimes you don’t discover the milk is sour until you’re already drinking it.

So many postings to do but no time. The day job is ruining my {beer} life.

4 things I remember from the 2008 GABF:
PITCHERS OF Pliny the Elder with our friends from Boston at Falling Rock.
Will from CBC won a gold medal!
World’s greatest VIP tour with JR at New Belgium.
Most inspiring team/story/product: Stranahan’s Colorado Whisky.

(Will elaborate and all soon.)

Happy at Brekenridge , Denver Colorado.

How are we? Hmmm???

Happy. No ingrates, no posers, no DBs or ingrates… just deep meaningful conversation with people and beer. It’s 80 out.

Leaving tomorrow!

GABF Blinky thing!

twitter: twitter.com/caitlinjewell
No marketing tweets for 3 days… beer only.

Total Blog Visitors to date: 5,240
That’s more than the line for a session at GABF.
A google search for beer advocacy result #3!
Blog visitors for 2008 so far 3,674.
Corporate sponsors (free beers) improving.

Lucky 13 a GREAT dive bar in San Francisco we hit last year.
Yes, that’s a dog at the bar. 
No real URL for them so I’ll list Yelp page for Lucky 13.
IMHO most yelpers are just Dou***Bags.

Our visit to New Belgium Brewing confirmed for 10.11.

Staying to enjoy Ft. Collins Co that night and may meet up with a Silverscape client Dr. Dan of Alden Lab   & the Missus.

BGT heads to New Belgium after GABF

Work has been particualarly entertaining lately. I’m so ready for a vacation. Off with Slumbrew to The Great American Beer Festival.

Each session of GABF is 5,000 people

Belgian Beer Festival 2008, by Beer Advocate left to right: BGT, Slumbrew, Ang the Canadian & Dr. Sammie of Bermuda

It poured all weekend in Boston. What better way to deal than with a Belgian Beer Festival and a few great stops for beer in the Boston area?

My cousin Dr. Samantha and her best pal Angela are not what you’d call beer familiar. In Bermuda, their home, there are two types of beer Heineken or Amstel Light. Pha! Bleah! We made it out to their one brew pub The Frog and Onion. The Hef was drinkable but this pub caters to the beer desperate American tourists and has no traction with the locals.

Samantha discovers she likes Belgian Beer!

The Belgian Beer Festival by Beer Advocate was perfectly well run. The selection was excellent and the people were friendly, well mannered and well behaved. The afternoon session 1 to 4 pm is much calmer and polite than the evening sessions. The attendees were obviously connoisseurs.

After a number of samples we finally discovered that our Bermudian and Canadian guests loved Unibroue. Unibroue Chambly Noir is one of my favorite 5 or 6 beers. The Apple Ephmere was the favorite.

Angela from Canada discovers Unibroue!

After the festival we headed to Deep Ellum for a few bottles of Ephmere and a Wyerbacher Simcoe Sunset.

The hit of the night was our trip to Public House Provisions and then to The Roadhouse BBQ and Beer restaurant, newly opened by The Public House of Brookline. The public house is undisputedly one of the Boston greats. I think it is the closest we have to the Horse Brass Pub in Oregon.

Arriving at 7:30 we were given a 90 minute wait. With slightly restless guests and our buzz beginning to decline, we took the reservation and went next door to kill some time at the new Public House Provisions Store. Now that they finally have their license to sell the store is stocked with wonderful yummy treats, epicurean necessities and a fine selection of cheese.

Picnic at The Public House Provisions

Our guest Dr. Sam decided to procure a LARGE amount of cheese for us to snack on and the staff generously offered us a platter to create our own Ploughman’s Platter! We sat in the little table in the front window and enjoyed a large selection of beer cheeses by Rogue, Chimay and others. Sam wanted us to mention that the $26 purchase would have been well over $100 in Bermuda and many of the choices were too rare of finds to even get.

As soon we got back to Roadhouse to check our status on the list, we were seated immediately. Keeping with our Belgian style theme, our table shared a very nice bottle of Brooklyn Local 1, Belgian Strong Pale Ale style beer from Brooklyn Brewery. It was delicious. I don’t think (prior to the festival) our guests would have enjoyed One and after a nice educational fest they really enjoyed the bottle. I ordered a Berkshire Coffeehouse Porter on Nitro.

Brooklyn Local 1

All 4 sandwich Entrees and a Chili Appetizer came out quickly and hot and perfect. Our corn on the cob sides were not hot. The much criticized cornbread was delicious. This is the second time I’ve had the extremely fattening and delicious Mac & Cheese. The only true problem with our meal was that we were just disgustingly full with the cheese and a full day of beer sampling. By 10 we were out the door with our leftovers nicely boxed up.

The Roadhouse has a great ambiance and a thinking drinker’s American Beer tap offering. I suspect they are short on heat lamps and have heard many kinks in the kitchen are going to be worked out.

2008. Hop season! Wet hopped beer and Great American Beer Festival & Colorado, here we come!

 

Blog needs some updating. Let’s do lazy marketing bullet points:

Portland Maine: Slumbrew covered our recent trip to Portland Maine but I have to say that Sebago’s Barleywine was wonderful and worth the trip.

 

The lovely team at Silverscape is letting us take our “summer” vacation to head out to GABF again. I’m so excited. We’ll be doing the Thursday night with our good pals Suzanne & Kate from Cambridge Common and Friday’s BA Crawl with the good peeps from Beer Advocate.

 

Hopchick and Lil Bro at Snooze GABF 2007

We’ll be visiting:

# 9am – get our bases on Snooze
# Breckenridge
# Great Divide
# SandLot @ Coors Field
# 4-6pm Flying Dog Brewery Warehouse

Looking forward to arriving at Flying Dog to meet Josh and Neil who I’ve met through twitter. IMHO: Neil is the original marketing noggin behind the resurgence of PBR. Lots of grateful fans like Max.

 

Lil Bro has had some nice inquiries via the Probrewer.com boards. He’s had some great conversations with top breweries and is getting closer to finding his next gig as a North East Sales rep for one of them. (Closer but NOT accepted offers yet, so if you’ve got a brewery, I’ve got just the guy for you.)

 

Need to stop by the great Newton MA Marty’s beverage shop (next to BGT’s house) to pick up a 5 gal log or two for our office 3-line kegorator which has been sadly too empty as of late.

 

We harvested ALL of my hops. I think I got about 0.35 ounces of Northern Brewer. Not bad for a yearling Rhizome but hardly enough for a whole batch of wet hop.

 

Had a WONDERFUL experience at the new Roadhouse by The Public House in Brookline MA. Problems are getting worked out and the American Draft line selection is bar none. This could be the Horse Brass of the Northeast in a few years.

 

Slumbrew’s birthday present was a day of “interning” with the very generous and genius Will Meyers of Cambridge Brewing Company. I hope Will kicked his butt! Last tweet was cleaning kegs.

 

Will Meyers, CBC

Sept goals: New BGT cards, update my 2007 & 2008 where I’ve been listing and hydrate for October.

Day 10 of BGT diet. Doing my part to correct the global hop shortage.

Traveling with SlumBrew, Lil ‘bro & HopChick to Portland Maine next weekend for Flogging Molly and the a very big beer tour of Portland. Hoping to get to Allagash & Grittys as well.

Other news: went to The Roadhouse by The Public House- sadly not open yet despite their Thrilllist Boston html email.

16 cones and what do you get? I have 16 cones of Northern Brewer Hops. What should I do with them?

My AHA (American Home Brewer’s Association) Card is about to expire. Must renew. I particularly like this one because it is signed by Charlie Papazian. I call it my Charlie card. Chris got his signed by Garrett Oliver as well as Charlie. Ours have MORE than paid for themselves though the discount program.

2 of my 4 rhizomes grew nicely. The Northern Brewer is producing cones.

True story: In my baby book, my mother notes, that my first full sentence was “Ahhhhhh! That’s good beer!” Evidentally my grandfather was having some fun teaching his first grandchild to talk.

Of couse I’m a craft brew snob, beer travel enthusiast and bottle-capping bucket washer for a home brewer but I must admit that the Budweiser my grandfather gave me Monday … well it was one of the best beers of my life!

(After my car broke down FIVE times in four hours across the span of over 90 miles… )
Thanks Pup!

Slumbrew … mobile blogging, pundit of the pint, BGT bad influence.

At John Harvard’s Cambridge.

For craft beer at Fenway park there are few choices for the beer geek. There are a few Sam Adams kiosks but they are not accessable to all seats.

The best, local fresh hoppy IPA is by Harpoon Brewing. The problem is that it is only available on Yawkee Way before you go in the gates. Hopchick demonstrates how to deal with this:

Beagle loves CBC chicken … BGT does not!

Bailey enjoyed BGT’s flavorless and overpriced chicken leg.

My favorite things. Bailey the beagle, visit to Cambridge Brewing Company on a warm Saturday night.

 

Went to dinner on Sat night at Cambridge Brewing Company specifically for quality time with BGT’s best friends: Man, Beer and Beagle. (In that order?)

CBC is very generous in that they are dog-friendly. (I’m sure this is breaking some Cambridge laws somewhere.)  Bailey was pretty happy to clean up the salmon and peas from the last tenants of the table.

The beer of course is fantastic. I’m a big fan of the Petit Trippel. The return of the famous buffalo tenders was surprisingly accurate to the original version: tough and cold.

Beer joke {repeated from a tweet}

Two home brewers walked into a bar …

You’d think one of them would have seen it.

Photo below: BGT with grain sack wearing brewer we met on BeerAdvocate tour of Denver at 2007 GABF.

Congrats to Slumbrew.com for finally getting to the Interweb. So much trash talk to get to this point. Too bad you don’t own one of Boston’s top web design and development firms… Oh right.

The labels are beautiful. You could be a graphic designer.

I changed the page title for BGT Sidekick to Slumbrew but you’re still my sidekick.

One of my favorite photos from Miracle of Science, Cambridge.

I think I took this last winter.

Nice day yesterday at Red Hook & Portsmouth Brewing Co.

Using the new iPhone WordPress Ap now!

 I forgot to mention that June 18, was the first anniversary
of Beer Glass Tripod, the Blog.

Since that time:

I have destroyed zero cameras.

3,385 Real Human Beings visited my blog!

Beer Glass Tripod now comes up #3 for the
Google search Beer Advocacy.

NEW!! Check out the Chris Jewell tab about the lil’bro!

I’ve been meaning to:

Write about Burlington VT Trip – Breweries galore.
Install “subscribe” to BGT feature.

The Fuggles made it to the top of the fence and wins.
Take that Cascade you slacker.

Jeff the Brewer

10 Gallons of Slummerville Wit! 07.13.2008

BTG Sidekick invented an iPhone Beer Fest application. 

 

Fuggly & the Hops are hitting 2 feet tall. Willimette didn’t make it.

Have you been to Cambridge Common lately? Boston could not be more grateful for the interesting and diverse selections coming in though this well researched and well connected team. CC is one of the places you can find So. California rare finds like Ballast and Green Flash and there are always some impressive limited offerings on tap.

If you are an eat at the bar person, the service is beyond exceptional and you’re likely to run into the local beer-glitter-ati who are friendly for Boston and knowledgeable.

The Wikkid Local tap is fun, there’s always an impressive IPA-hipster of the moment and a hard to find cask.

Recommendations: switch your side to tatertots!
Ask for a small side of the divine Mac & Cheese
Sunday nights go to see AMY the sweetest bar keep in Boston.

PS – In their efforts to help the newbies in beer CC will ask you if you’d like a chilled glass or not. Respecting beer is good, respecting and loving the customer is GREAT!

I did a few things right this week including sending props to Andy Crouch.

I promised Susanne at Cambridge Common I’d get a nice blog up about them.

I consistently watered my hops… well the rain did but I didn’t kill them yet… well actually the Williamette is probably gone.

I got tickets to the Beer Advocate fest for Sat night. BGT Lil’ Bro turns 30!

Still waiting on VBF – Vermont may be ruined by the Californians.

Starting to plan a Hoptastic Adventure for August.

~

July: BeerGlassTripod turns 1 and will surpass 3,000 REAL HUMAN BEINGS that stopped by for a read. Thanks human beings! You rock.

Home field for BGT is CBC in Cambridge MA.  This is also the source of 20% of the food BGT and BGT Sidekick eat per week.

SO IF YOU’VE HEARD ME DEMAND THAT YOU MAKE CBC A KEY DESTINATION IN YOUR NORTHEAST BEER TRAVELS… You should cut them a bit of slack…

The good news is the awful old chef has left and we’ve been promised great new things and some of our old favorites. In the meantime… things are…. not so good.

 

New goals: VT Brewer’s Fest, Avoid bottling 10 gal the new Hef since it’s 95+ degrees out, start planning the Washington, Oregon, Cali 2008 Trail Trek.

Coming up: BGT’s little blog turns 1 and with just a few more visitors will surpass 3000 visitors in year 1.

One of my favorite Boston area beer bars is Deep Ellum. The tap list is always great and the owners are quick to greet every regular. Last night Aaron (one of the owners) gave us a look at the outdoor seating area they’re adding for spring. It looks great. I sugested they do big pots of Hops.  Photo: Hops at Walking Man Brewing in Stevenson Washington. Peace, love, puppies & hops. 

 

 

In related news, my Fuggles hops came up, 1 inch. Williamette, Cascade & Hallertau are clearly freaked by the New England cold nights.