Literacy Coalition Beer Ride/Walk

The Kokomo Literacy Coalition will be holding their 2nd fund raising Beer Walk on June 2nd.  This time a bike ride portion has been added that will ride from the start at Cook McDoogles to the Half Moon Restaurant & Brewery where you will get a 4oz beer.  Then cycle on to Kokomo Cycling & Fitness where the Howard County Homebrew Club will be serving up some locally crafted homebrew.  The ride then will return to Cook McDoogles where you can take part in the walk to Ned's Corner Pub, Stella's & the Oasis for their beers.
The bike ride is 11 miles round trip and feature many of Kokomo's new bike lanes.  The ride will start at 3:00 on June 2nd from Cook McDoogles and the walk continues on till 6:00.
A map of the bike ride can be seen here;

View Beer Ride in a larger map
Tickets are $10 and sign up is at Cook McDoogles where you will receive your wristband, beer ticket and 4oz glass.  There will be a Poker Run for an additional fee available for those wishing to participate.

We're Mobile! Beginning immediately mobile device users should notice a change in their HCHBC blog experience. We have enabled the mobile version of our blog here on Blogspot. PC and Mac viewers shouldn't notice any difference, but if you access the blog using a mobile device you should be directed to the mobile version of this website. Let us know if you encounter any problems using the website as a result of this change. If you have us bookmarked this change may not take place without some additional action by the mobile user. What that action might be....I dunno. I don't use a mobile device!

December Meeting

The December meeting this year was quite the event.  Once again meeting at the Barnhart's house instead of our Half Moon home.  Taking advantage of being "away from home", we explored the world of commercially produced porters & stouts with a few homebrews thrown in for good mesure.  After all, it is a homebrew club meeeting.

20 people in total were in attendance.  15 took part in the brew club meeting, 4 were taking part in the "Occupy the Homebrew Club" drinking wine & 1 was  a double agent.  It was a good thing the garage had been prepared for the event by turning it into a Christmas themed room complete with faux brick walls, massive picture window and festive skull chandelier, a holdover from the Halloween room, but one of the skulls did have a Santa hat on.

The beers outnumbered the people.  A total of 21 different beers were in attendance.  They were;
          Porters
Samuel Smith Taddy Porter
Utenos Premium Porter
Aldaris Porteris
Zywiec Porter
Thirsty Dog Old Leghumper Porter
Bumble Bee Porter (Gary E.)
Great Divide Smoked Baltic Porter
       Oatmeal Stouts
Oatmeal Stout (Jeff G.)
Samuel Smith Oatmeal Stout
La Corinveau Oatmeal Stout
        Coffee Stouts
Founders Breakfast Stout
Clay County Coffee Stout
    Russian Imperial Stouts
Grunt Stout Extra (Cary K.)
Boulevard Dark Truth Stout
RIP Stout (Larry B.)
Bells Expedition Stout
Goose Island Bourbon County Stout
Shoreline Lost Sailor Imperial Stout 2008
      Misc. Homebrews
Dodo Bird (Cary K.)
English Barleywine (Jeff G.)
Spiced Ale 2009 (Jeff G.)

King Krausen

Thought I would share a picture of my carboy busy fermenting a Winter Ale. The jug to the left is my blow off tube which I had put on the night before. A bit too much pressure built up and blew the bung, airlock and blow off tube off the carboy. This is what I found when I came home, krausen was climbing pretty slow so maybe 90 minutes after it happened. The life of a homebrewer is never boring. Another way to look at is... open fermentation is pretty popular in Europe.

Breckenridge Brewery Ads

Found these great Breckenridge Brewery Ads, because of a link at Beer-Universe.com. These were made for $10,000 supposedly as opposed to the millions the BMC's spend on advertising. Here are a few of the ones I found funny.

Evolution of the Beer Geek

Found this chart on Facebook, a post from Road Trips For Beer, that originally came from BeerandWhiskeyBros.com. This is meant as a joke, except Beerdouchicus actually does exist. 

Cary Kirkmeyer and I met him at the Indiana State Fair Brewers Cup dinner this past July. Beerdouchicus' come in many forms, that's probably why we didn't recognize him. We barely managed to get away with our lives from him. Scary stuff. :-)

Study the chart and avoid the pitfalls. Your taste buds, having friends who don't want to kick your butt and enjoying good beer may depend on it.

Craft Brew IS Affecting the Big Guys

Interesting article on what is happening to some mass market American brews.

http://247wallst.com/2011/09/09/the-eight-beers-americans-no-longer-drink/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+typepad%2FRyNm+%2824%2F7+Wall+St.%29&utm_content=My+Yahoo