The Burist Podcast at the American Home Brewers Association Rally recorded on November 9, 2013 at Jesterking Craft Brewery in Austin, Texas. And it's a beautiful day. It is so nice. I'm actually wearing a jacket here in Texas. I know. And it's not even like super jacket weather or anything. It's t-shirt weather for most of the rest of the country. But since we are lizard people in Texas, yeah, this is jacket weather for us. I'm doing it more as a fashion statement, I think. I mean, you look like a Harry Potter kid. Yeah. That'll work. Damn it. I'm John Rubio and with me today. Grant Davis. And Mike Lambert. Yeah. And we're sitting outside here at Jesterking Brewery because the AHA, the American Home Brewers Association invited us to come out and record a little on-site stuff here. So we're going to try some home brewers beers and tear them apart? I hope so. Yeah. That would be a lot of fun. It doesn't like healthy criticism, especially if it's not constructive like we get. Right. Yeah. But sitting here with us in the fourth chair, we have Gary Glass and he's the director of the AHA. How you doing? I'm great. Nice. I'm wearing a t-shirt. This is perfect weather for me. You fuck. You're from Boulder, right? Colorado, yes. Oh, that makes sense. We were just in Boulder for a little while also. It was delicious. I barely remember the trip because it was the Great American Beer Festival. But awesome. Like I love Boulder. I don't really remember Boulder, but I think it was really cool. Yeah. Good story. I remember it tasting very well there. Lots of things tasted good. But tell us a little bit about this event. So this is a rally that you guys put on in different parts of the country, right? Right. This is a... We'll actually do 15 rallies through the course of 2013, hopefully doing 30 next year. But what it is, is we partner with a local brewery, and they provide beer in the venue. We get a bunch of home brewers to show up. We're signing up people for membership to the American Home Brewers Association. They get a discounted membership at the door. It's a gathering of home brewers and kind of a celebration of the close ties that we have in this beer community here in the United States between the amateurs and the pros. What does AHA do then? I know you guys do your home brew, but is it like a meeting to share beer together? The rallies? Yeah. We definitely have home brewers who are bringing out their home brews so they can share them here. We're a membership organization, so we have 40,000 members across the country, and really actually throughout the world. Get a subscription to Zheimer's U Magazine. We put on the National Home Brew Competition, which is the world's largest beer competition. National Home Brewers Conference, and we provide a lot of resources to home brewers to help them make better beer. Awesome. So tell me a little bit about your background. Like, how did you get into this thing, and how did you find yourself as the director of this organization? I started home brewing 20 years ago when I was in college, and actually when I was in graduate school. I picked you for like 30. So he started brewing when he was eight? Yeah, no. Wait, that's not math. That math doesn't work at all either. But I like being pegged at 30. That works for me. Yeah, that's the first time I got pegged. Sorry, go ahead. Now I lost my train of thought. I'm back at 30. I'm back at it looking at Rubio getting pegged. I started with the American Home Brewers Association 14 years ago, started out at the bottom of the ladder as the AHA administrator, got promoted to director, oh gosh, seven years ago. Okay. Yeah, that's what I do. Very cool, man. That's awesome. What brought you to Texas? What brought you to Austin specifically? I mean, Chester King's a really badass brewery, but what made you guys go, oh yeah, this is the place to come. Well, Texas actually has a really great home brewing community statewide, but Austin in particular, there's a lot going on beer-wise in Austin. So really, for us, it seemed like a natural fit to try and get a rally here. And Chester King is a brewery that hasn't been around that long, but has quickly taken off and gained a national notoriety as one of the great breweries in the country. The really exciting stuff is coming out of this brewery. And I really like the fact that they're doing something in Texas that has taken a lot of Texas breweries a long time to kind of warm up to, you know, people start new breweries here and they start out with a red ale and an IPA and a pale ale and all these other things, you know, but they came out of the gate doing wood-aged and oak-aged barrel beers and stuff. And it's a great, great brewery. Yeah. Well, it's great to be here. I really appreciate them putting this on for us. I'm excited to be in Austin and particularly here at Chester King. And what a beautiful venue they have here. Yeah. It's very picturesque and this leads you about what Austin and the rest of Texas might be like. And actually just dry wasteland a lot of Texas. And drinking their beer on this piece of land, you kind of understand the beer a little bit better. Yeah. You can actually taste the influence of the area in the beers and it's wonderful. So how far ahead do you plan your rallies and do you guys have any other events coming up anytime soon? We try and plan them out as far in advance as possible. So we had lined up Chester King at least a few months before now. Cool. I know we've got some already lined up for January. We've got one coming up in two weeks or no, it's next week at Great Lakes Brewing Company in Cleveland. And then in January, we've got one at Mission Brewing Company in San Diego. Very cool. Where can our listeners find out more about this? Homebrewersassociation.org is our website and we have all the information you could possibly want about rallies and everything that the American Homebrewers Association does. Very cool, man. Thank you so much for talking to us. Absolutely. My pleasure. Thanks for having me on. That Gary Glass. Really nice guy. Definitely. Yeah. He sounds a lot like me. No, he doesn't sound like you at all. I mean, he was sitting in my seat wearing my dress. The Anastasia and her impersonations. You're just like, what's his name, the guy that does impersonations? Gilbert Gottfried. Yeah, that's him. And these hallucinations of-- What's a deal on airline for-- Why would you say Gilbert Gottfried? He does like, that's so weird a second ago. We were comparing you to Gilbert Gottfried. Geico duck. Is it the Geico duck? Affleck. Yeah, Affleck. Affleck. It was a Geico. What? What? And a tsunami. Yeah, so Gary just got up and-- No, I'm not getting a beard. At a good time, apparently. Yeah, he got away from us real fast. Run away. And the stage had brought us all some beers. I'm drinking an atrial rubicide. I guess it's the batch, too. And it's delicious. It's always delicious. It's always delicious. Just tastes like the raspberry little seedlets. Yeah. It's fucking incredible. And Grant, what are you drinking? I have a das Wunderkind. He likes to break all the rules. And what do you guys have? We just said. Well, Ruby is the way he had. Everybody's got the same thing. Look, it looks the same. So how's that das Wunderkind? It is great. I always love this beer. Yeah, me too, man. That's a fabulous beer. Yeah. I always have like one or two of these still laying around my house under my bed or like in a drawer. So my wife doesn't know. I like hiding alcohol around my house. Are you that girl from Girl Interrupted? Brittany Murphy, who just like hides the food underneath her bed? I am that girl. A good sign of having an alcohol abuse problem is that you hide alcohol in place. Hiding alcohol is a good first step into a lifetime of darkness. Yeah. True story. That's never a good thing. The darkness. His mom had to push extra hard to accommodate the bottles that followed. Apparently, drinking alone is supposed to be another bad sign. So have you guys ever drank alone? All the time. All the time. Drinking when you're emotionally upset to try and like feel better? Yeah, I do. I actually do the opposite. I get away from the alcohol when I'm emotionally upset. Having more than two drinks a day or in a week. So that'd be like 15 or more drinks in a week. So I think we've already broken that rule. That is a sign of alcohol abuse and alcoholism. Oh shit. So we're going to stop this program forever. We're never going to make another podcast. Because apparently we're the problem. In what world does somebody only have two drinks a week? Maybe normal world. A day. Okay. Yeah. So 15 and a week. Which is funny because I was talking to my doctor and they run down the list of like alcohol things. And I was like, but this is Austin. Surely you guys have to have something differently for Austin. This is the Austin exemption. We need to, you felt this form, please. I'm sure if I was in like bumpkinville, Texas. There's a mean dream level. Do you guys adjust to that? Yeah. See, when you talk that way, I can't hear you at all. So I mean, isn't there like a mean? It's kind of worth it. Oh fuck. Fuck this. I'm out of here. Yeah. And the station just walked away. She just walked out into the bush. Like we were saying, this piece of land is awesome. Like there's so many trees and it's beautiful. Hill country. Texas Hill country is gorgeous. It all smells really nice too out here. Ryan mesh just put his dick on my shoulder. Oh man. It appeared. How are you doing, Ryan? You're doing great. You have to get closer to that. Talk directly into it. I'm doing very well. Thank you. The wild meshicus drunkicus, roams around the plains of Jester King, naked with an erection, rubbing it on Mike's shoulders. Yeah. He told me that we were talking about the Great American Beer Festival. He said right after that interview with Hoppenfrog, he just blacked out. Like he was completely black out and drunk for the rest of the trip. I can't judge him. No, you're black out and drunk at the start of the trip. All right. So we're going to bring on a home brewer, I think. I hope so. I hope that works out. And we'll see how that interviews. Let's hope the home brew is really, really awkward. They're not called outside of their house brewers. They're called home brewers. How many times have you made that joke? 25. Shit. This is the first time we made it on Mike. Yeah. Thanks. Why'd you guys call him out? Thanks. Why'd you got it? Pull back the curtain and expose the wizard. It's like, oh god, oh god. We'll be back. So who haven't you found the home brew dudes just now? Ryan loves me a lot and he brings me beards. Oh, OK. Ryan brought a couple of bearded dudes over to talk to us. One of them is named Ricardo Ricardo. What's your last name? Ruiz. Ruiz. Good to meet you Ricardo. And Dave. Dave Moore. Dave Moore. Awesome. And you guys brought up some beer for us to try and tell us about this. It's a peanut butter blonde, you said? Yeah, it is a blonde, very simple blonde base. So we just thought we'd have fun with, actually got inspired a few years ago at a GABF, tasting blue moons peanut butter beer, and thought we could do it one hand up. So we threw a bunch of Jeff peanut butter in the dry hop, gets a lot of nose, and then two, three sips, you'll start feeling it. Yeah. It actually tastes really well. I was really excited that you actually get that much peanut butter out of there, not just that weird peanut that you get from some peanut butter beers, you know, it's kind of like this weird, dry nuttiness that doesn't ever really work very well. But this is brightly peanut butter, like this is delicious. Yeah. Sometimes it comes across a little, like, boiled peanuts. Yeah. This is really, really, actually, really tasty. Just for fun, we mashed in with a little bit of cat and crunch peanut butter cereal as well. Bad ass. Nice. Just to say that we did it, it doesn't add much to the beer, but it's in there. It does smell like peanut butter cookies. Yeah. It really does. And I think Blonde is a really odd base for a peanut beer, but it worked out a lot better than I thought it would. Yeah. We kind of wanted to go with a blank canvas. So Blonde was our choice on that. We went back and forth on a couple of different styles, but Blonde eventually won out on that. How did you guys get your start in home brewing? Was it just for the hell of it? Hey, let's get drunk. This guy's been doing it way longer than me, but he taught me a lot. Oh, yeah? Yeah. I don't know how long have you been here? Got me a Mr. Beer Kit maybe seven years ago. Okay. That went out the door quickly and we got an official mash done and started doing all grain, probably about two, three years after that. So it was just a lot of internet searching, a lot of blogs and boards and kind of figuring our stuff out now. What blogs and boards did you go to? Homebrew Talk is a pretty good resource for us pro brewer on occasion just to pick up tips and hints, but pretty much those two. What do you guys prefer brewing? I mean, is more experimental stuff like this, or do you guys stick to regular styles or single hop stuff? We enjoy the experimental. Yeah, definitely. Definitely. We like thinking around with new flavors and finding things that we don't see on the market, definitely. Right. And I think that's the fun of home brewing for us is really to find out things that we would want to do. Like we brought another one for you guys to taste here. It's an or china style ale. Oh shit. Let's do that. We're really, we're really trying to branch out with some of these things and get what we want that we can't find. So that's a big push for us. That's a really nice way to approach it. I see you both wearing definitive ale shirts. Are those, is that what you call you too? Yeah. It's a featured home brew club. Okay. Okay. We're on the team. I don't know what the thing is for me. Yeah, definitive ale is our home brew club, a couple of buddies and my wife and I started it. These guys are out of El Paso, my wife and I are in Austin and we got some friends in Orlando that do it as well. Awesome. What was the, what was the first beer you guys home brew? First beer. If you can, if you can think that, that far back. Mine was this, this one way that we did back the cucumber chili, that was a, just like a nice drinkable cucumber chili beer. It was pretty good. Yeah, not enough people are fucking around with cucumber. Yeah. I think that that's a underutilized area and beer. I know, you know, I've had like cigar city cucumber season, I've had quite a few cucumber beers, but not as much as I wish I had. That electric cucumber? Oh, yeah. From, what was it? Trinity? Yeah. What was that like? That was really tasty. What did we have that? How did it, a tasting that you didn't show up to? Right. The electric cucumber, it was, you were invited, I don't know why. So you know how, how that cigar city cucumber says on is more like brightly cucumber, like it tastes like fresh cucumbers in there. The electric cucumber was more like the cucumber peel, so it was a little bit more bitter and maybe a little sulfuric. But it was still a very good beer. And I think that just like lemon flavors in beer are kind of a natural match. I think cucumber is also another one of those things that sings really well. Yeah, it just blends well with the hops and really kind of freshens it up. So yeah, that was a good one, man. Yeah. I forgot about that one. We're going to definitely do that one again, but I've got some ideas to tweak the recipe a little bit. Take care. So this second beer that you poured us is a horchata. Yeah. Orchata style ale. We really wanted to replicate orchata as best we could. So our mash water, we actually poured about two pounds of white rice the night before into our mash water. And then we strained out the rice and we mashed in with that chalky rice water as our initial mash. A lot of rice extract in that as well, obviously a lot of vanilla and cinnamon is in the try hop. It's delicious. I mean, it's the rice, of course, but it's got a slight little sake hint to it also. Yeah. And, you know, sake is pretty much just rice beer essentially, but there's as much that as the horchata, you know, and all of those awesome spicings that you get with one of those drinks. Yeah. I love this. Thank you. That's awesome. Thank you. Yeah. That one went to the dry hop for about a month and a half. We actually aged it on maker's Mark Oke Staves. Oh, wow. We also put a little bit of vanilla beans, a couple of vanilla beans in there along with a couple of cinnamon sticks. We didn't want it to overpower, but it's a. Yeah. And that's a good point because I'm not getting beat over the head with any of that stuff. It's all just a seasoning to add to the base beer, the base rice beer, I guess. It's all in balance. Really nice. I'll take a case. No shit. I could drink this all the time. Thank you guys for talking to us. Yeah. Absolutely, man. Absolutely. Really appreciate it. All right. Thank you guys. Okay, we're sitting here with Corey Martin. How you doing? Pretty good. Pretty good. Sweet. And on Mike, we also have Mike. Mike Lambert. And his mouth's full of chicken chicken. We also have Ryan Mesh. Ryan Mesh, hello. How you doing, buddy? Good, man. It's such a beautiful day. I'm psyched to have Corey Martin here. It's just a nice day. I'm glad to be here. It's hard to know whether he's more famous for his homebrew or his laugh. But most people say the laugh, I would say, but you did a long shot, right? Yeah. I won a long shot two years ago with Dark Knight and Munich. Yes. It was really good. It was delicious. I did like that. Yeah. He's our Austin homebrew hero. I don't know if I go that far, but tell us a little bit about how you got involved with that. What did you have to do to? Yeah. It's really, it's a free competition. You entered every year. I entered three beers just to get the T-shirt, the swag. I did it every year for a while now and just got lucky. I mean, the first time I made that beer and was like, "Well, it's good. I'll send it in." Wow. How much? How much went out? I mean, Sam Adams is a big company. Oh, they went nationally. I know in Texas they sell more cases than they did in the past, I think, obviously, because I really promoted it big. They had some people that were really psyched about getting it out there, but yeah. Yeah. Just stroking me. Yeah. You're already inflated ego. Yeah. I've got posters at the house that are left-sized of me, and I'm like, "What do you keep in these four? I don't want to see them." You just cut a hole in the back of one of them and you're thinking, "You put eyes in it. Put your face in it. You're just heavy." I was like, "Whoa. That poster." I think that poster is alive and that you can just jump out. You can have me. Like a haunted house. It's going to creep me out and see my face around the house, though. I mean, it would creep me out and see in your face around my house, too. I'm kidding. Give me a poster if you want one. Oh, yeah. I love one. I'd actually really like one. But we're currently drinking an awesome paleo from you. Yeah. It's my first-ever endeavor on trying to do a castile beer with a pen. It's a small version of a cast, basically. Nice. I kind of messed up on it a little bit because I didn't realize what I did realize. But when I was kegging it at the time, you're supposed to keg them to one volume or one and a half, and I put enough priming sugar in there to go two and a half. Oh, shit. So in the middle of night, it sounded like a gun went off in the house. It's still quite foamy. It's finally calming down now. So two and a half is what you normally use for a bottle of beer, correct? Well, it depends on style, but yeah. It has berries, but yeah. American pillows. Well, I thought say, oh, two and a half. Right. Not realizing retrospect. Oh, it's a cask. And I can't believe it blew that pen off. They're really hard to get out. They're probably the bung off the pen. It's like, right. So tell us a little bit about this beer. It's based on the Mission Street pill clone recipe, but I changed the hops up a bit. Mission Street uses a Centennial Cascade. I just used Centennial and Citro then dry hopped to half ounce each at conditioning. So very nice. Yeah. You could taste the Citro quite a bit there. It's gorgeous. I love Citro. Citro's next to Galaxy, one of my favorites. I love Galaxy. Yeah. Mosaic also. Really awesome. It's hard to say. There's so many. No. Damn it. So many new great hops are coming out. There was one that I tasted that I forget what it was. It was still just a number, but it was very peachy. And I think a pint house used some of it on one of their experimental. I've seen that number around the podcast. Yeah. It was awesome. Remember about the pint house? I think they released it today. They're the dude. Yeah. I heard of one anniversary. It sounds really interesting. I know. I know. White Russian Imperial South. Yeah. I'm going to try the dude. It's really good. Yeah. That's what. White Russian so like what just lactose sugar and what else? It's an Imperial milk stout. Didn't they use chocolate too or some form of chocolate nibs or something? I think so. Like coconuts or something. Yeah. Yeah. It should be delicious. Yeah. So how did you get started in home brewing? Oh, it's been many years. The first endeavor. Actually, I've been pretty good at it. Well, not pretty good at it. I started 20 years ago seriously about it. Nice. Right. After I got married. No coincidence. I mean, I've been married before. Yeah. I originally did it once with a friend while it just turned like 20. Right. If you want to try to make some beer, it was horrible. That's why I won't even start because I know that I'm just going to waste a lot of time and it's going to be shit. But there's so much more information now about them back then. I mean, there's. Yeah. And also, so many more people making beer that can do it that I could just drink from. Like this. There you go. This is delicious. And it looks like hell. Yeah. It's pretty cloudy. It's supposed to let them set for like 24 hours in one place and when we didn't have the option here. So we'd drug it down the hill and drove it in my truck here. So I'm kind of shook on it. It's gorgeous. I love this so much. What aspect of the home brewing industry would you say is most greatly improved over the last 20 years? Or would you say that you're most thankful for? The quality of ingredients. Yeah. For sure. Yeah. It's like back when I started the hops were like brown. You see them on the store. Now you order them fresh. Like people order of wet hops when they come into harvest. So that's amazing. You just never be able to do that. I say quality ingredients. We're good to have Austin Homer supply here. Oh, yeah. I mean, that's a great source. I know people who live in great guys where they get to plan way ahead and melt everything out. Yeah. Huge improvement. I could assume that the amount of information out there and the communication. Oh, yeah. Is also just incredible. Internet. So yeah. Shows like this and shows like just podcasts in general. Right. Shows not quite like this. Yeah. Because we're just complete assholes to everybody and I'm surprised we have as many listeners as we do. Yeah. Thank you guys. Yeah. It's all right. They come for the beer. They stay for the mesh. What did you get involved with the AHA? Well, how long have I been involved with them? My number is pretty low. So I've been over 10 years. Easy. Yeah. Because we talked to Glass and he was like pumping it up. Is it good? Oh, yeah. He's just trying to sell. He's trying to sell you. He's trying to sell more memberships. He just sell like a sales pitch. I got it. Yeah. He's really cool. Not cool. I mean, they got, they fought for homebrewers rights. I can say they got all the states legal finally they had some hand in that for sure. Yeah. It's about damn time. Damn right. God, I don't live in Alabama. Yeah. Shit. Every day I'm alive. I think that. Well, you know what they say in Leviticus about homebrewing. No homebrewers should lie with another homebrewer or touch pig skin. I think that's what you can't blend two different ingredients together. It's correct. Yeah. You got to be really careful with that. Yeah. We really got our club like a bacon porter one time. We're actually just putting the bacon in the bottle and put porter on it and carbonate it. I'm pretty sure that's like a Leviticus. You're probably pretty, very much so. I'm probably very much so. Oh man. I love bacon so much. I know you can tell. I know you can tell. Just before you say anything fucking asshole Lambert. This is an audio podcast. We need to illustrate it for him. No. No, it's not. We also just saw a little tribute to our buddy Walt Powell who died recently. And that was, you know, started bringing it down just now. But he's a good guy. Oh, he was a really great guy. And he had a gigantic cellar and there really brought a bunch of beer that was left over in his cellar after they doled it out to a bunch of his friends. I don't think this is the first time this is happening. I've heard he's had a few. There's been a few cellar raids. Yeah. Yeah, it's been incredible. And his parents are here and they're just super psyched to see all these people honoring their son. And yeah, he was a great guy, a really good friend and miss him dearly. Really, really well loved by the community. And that guy had the fucking meanest sense of humor in the world. I mean, that guy and that's the reason he and I bonded was because we're both horrible people to each other. And we could just sit around and make fun of people around us all day. Yeah. There was lots of snorting and laughing and beautiful this. What a fucking horrible person. I was making fun of him at his funeral with, he probably appreciated that actually. I'm sure he did. There was an urn there and Josh came with me, Josh Cole, who you might remember from the now gone forever episode one, he was there, he was there with me. And he was like, did they cremate him? And there's clearly an urn over on the grave site. And I go, no, dude, he's just standing upright in that thing because well, maybe five feet if he was tippy towing on his on his stilettos, but miss that guy. What's up, Brian? You look really sad. Yeah. Hey, I'm a little bit. You know, the perkiest of conversations that good friend gone. I know. I know. Well, yeah, it's ready to bring you now, Corey. I'm fine. This is what happens to all of us. You're like, oh, man, we started out with like, man, Corey, this beer is great. Congrats on launch y'all. And then we end up just death of a friend. Oh, thank you so much for talking to us, Corey. Oh, no worries, man. No worries. Yeah, we really appreciate it. No worries. Yeah. So we're sitting here with Matt and Nick, and how are you doing, Matt? Pretty good. We're home brew, beer brigade. Texas beer brigade. That's right. What is that? What is the beer brigade? We are a home brew club. We started about a year and a half ago in a Fort Hood area, Colleen, Carpascove, Harker Heights area, and I got about 40-some mod members at this point. And it's going pretty good. They're still new, though. Kick ass. And you brought us some of your beers to try. That is right. Tell us about it. It's a sessionable rye IPA. It's a first-run, first recipe that I've done on this one, and I knocked it out of the park, I believe. You did. Yeah. The nose on this beer is absolutely incredible. Thank you. Home growing hops from my own backyard here in Texas without a cascade. Wow. That's right. Really? So that whole myth about cascades not growing in Texas is bullcraps. Yeah. What's your setup for growing in your backyard, then? It is about a 50-gallon drum feeder that sits in the back. I simply just put dirt in it and let it go. Really? Do you have to water it, especially with our drought that we had? Yeah. To be honest with you, I did. I was a little nervous. It's not going to grow. I watered it about twice a day, early morning in the afternoon came back. That's good. That's good. It's impressive that we can grow here in Texas. It works. Did you have a decent yield of flowers? Because from what I hear, that's the problem with hops in Texas. You don't get enough. A lot of us in our club did get a bunch of rhizomes from different shops online. Sure. And I don't know who's... If you'll have a sponsor, anything I don't want to read, but I went through morebearer.com. We have no sponsors. We have no sponsors. Okay, good. So I can just sit there and plug everybody over. Yeah. Yeah. More beer. I got the cascade rhizomes to them. The rhizomes put them both in two different 50 gallon drums to grow in the backyard. And one of them took off. The dog got the other one. So I just said goodbye to that one and go, "Oh." The dog got the other one. That's right. Texas got problems. So what brought all y'all military dudes, mainly army, I guess you were saying, together? The majority of our club is active duty. If we're not active duty, we're somewhat affiliated with the military in some point away. Well, really active duty. Because Fort Hood is such an outpost for shipping overseas. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. I mean, being able to commit to doing home brew. That's right. It's interesting. Well, that's a beauty of it though, is like myself, I was stationed in Germany for six and a half years, right there in Bavaria, near the Vines de Fon, you know? Oh, you poor bastard. Oh, it's horrible. Let me tell you, it was horrible. And it's not just the overseas. We had people from Italy. We had people from the Netherlands, as well as all over the United States. And the beauty of our area in our club is that the majority of people are not active and not from Texas. Right. I happen to be from Houston though, and that's the beauty of it. Everybody has different experiences from different from the west coast, east coast, north south, you know, for the home brewing experience. That's kick us. How long have you been home brewing? About seven years now. Seven years. So this sessionable rye IPA isn't absolutely delicious. I love the amount of spice that's coming through. It's got such a good bite on it, yeah. Thank you. It's gorgeous. And what other types of beers do you like to do? I mean, do you stick mainly to traditional styles? Not necessarily. I do like to go more sessionable than anything else. I enjoy a good barley line or a good double IPA here and there, but I like to get a drink from like, you know, noon to about five, you know what I mean? Yeah. And not just be done the next day. So you like to drink from about noon to about five AM. Yeah. And you can do that with barley wine. Yeah. This guy's a machine. This is my glamour. You guys should get him in the army. We'll take it. Yeah. If you need somebody to drink all of the enemy's beer, convert op, that would be great. This is the worst covered op. He would just smoke all their weed and drink all their beer. So what type of stuff does the Hombreu Club work on together? Are there a lot of group projects that you guys do? Yes. We get together every month. Every month there is some type of, you know, it might not be necessarily giving to charity or whatnot. You know, we're not to that point yet. Every other month we do some type of a competition between each other and just knock it out of the park at that point. That's all the AHA or is that just the Texas beer brigade? This is a Texas beer brigade. We do get together for about every lone star circuit competition that goes on and do our best at that. So you guys like sharing recipes as well and uh... Oh, absolutely. We're open books. We'll give everything to anybody. And they're probably also very regimented. Yeah. Yeah. They follow recipes very meticulously. Yeah. As you should. If you do, yeah, you do push ups and shit. Hey, thank you so much for talking to us, man. Ah, no problem. Thank you for having me. Website or anything for the Texas beer brigade? We are on Facebook, Texas beer brigade. You can go on there and just like us and follow us from there. That is. Thank you so much, Matt. All right. Thank you. All right. We are here with Eric Lowe, who is a homebrewer who does need, I believe. Yes. He's beyond homebrewer. Yeah. What? Was that like Super Saiyan? Yeah. He's like entrepreneur, homebrewer. Oh! Professional. Well, do go on. Please tell us about yourself. Yeah. So a couple of friends and I got together and actually we started our emittery a couple of years ago at Just Your King. Yeah. So this definitely brings back some memories of that day. Evan Whitehead and Mike Simmons are my partners and I'm the man, I mean manager. So, what are we drinking today? This is a berry something. Yeah. I brought out a, this is my version of the Superberry mead. This is a variant of a recipe from Kurt Stock, who is a well-known mean maker and a really nice guy. I see every year when I go to the Humber's conference. This one's 12%. I turned it down a little bit. His version is a little bit busier, but it's still quite nice. No bigger go home, I say, when it comes to Melamel's and means like that, the key is to get a lot of flavor in there because you want flavor and body and four pounds per gallon of fruit will do that. That's what you have right here in front of you. Wow. You nailed it with this. This is fantastic. Oh, thank you. Yeah. This drinks amazingly well. What exactly is a Melamel? Melamel is a fruit mead. It's any kind of fruit added to honey and if you add spices that would be called a methaglin or a methaglin, depending on how you pronounce it. This is just because I'm very unfamiliar with it and these guys might really know and this is a dumb question. How is mead made and how is it different from beer then? Mead is really wine, fundamentally. It's a honey wine. That's the definition of it. You start with honey and water and usually a champagne type yeast is what's most commonly used. Some commercial mean makers even here in the state of Texas use ale yeast, believe it or not. The beer is reduced. So Eric can work as well. You might not know it, but the beer is a nationally recognized award winning podcast with thousands of listeners. You should definitely drop the name of your brewery, which you haven't done yet. Yeah, it's Meridian Hive Metery in Austin, Texas. Yeah, in Austin, Texas, you can find us on Facebook at Meridian Hive Metery or on Twitter at Meridian Hive. And things seem to be going pretty well, right? We were just saying you're about to do some distribution. Yeah. We're going to do our commercial launch next Friday, and so it's quite exciting. We're releasing a dry hop to mead. It's called Frontier. It's dry hop to Meridian hops. Sweet. And we had a really hard time picking that hop, but where are you guys unveiling everything? We're having a launch party at the hi-hat on ESX. That's our buddy Habib's voice, yeah. That's Habib's voice. He's a frequenter of the beer. Yeah, Habib is known about our plans for a long time. And he kept pulling on our leg, and so we decided to have the launch there. It's a nice little quiet place to go sit on the patio. I love the hi-hat. It's a great bar. Yeah. Are you guys planning on doing bottle releases or anything like that, or is it just going to be mostly on tap around town? Yeah, we're starting out with hydromels. That's what you call a mead that's under, say, 10%. We think that there's an opportunity for that here in Texas because, well, most of the year, it's hot. Right. We're supposed to drink a 17% mead that's really smart. This guy. It's all right. It's all right. Well, OK. Yeah. I mean, I... He's an alcoholic. I love you. Sure. You're saying, like, it's a bad, like, it's impacting my life in a negative way. Why are there tears? I can't stop. That's a pretty high compliment, actually. Where do you guys source your honey? We source our honey from multiple places. Right now we're using orange blossom honey, which comes from Pennsylvania distributor there. It's actually all Florida orange blossom honey, and that's kind of our workhorse honey. We would say a lot of mead are easy to use wildflower as their workhorse, but we really enjoy orange blossom because there's this beautiful citrus flavor to it, and it just has the most wonderful aroma of any honey that, in my opinion, I think, is just wonderful. And you immediately recognize orange blossom when you smell it. Well, it smells great in this. Yeah, this is incredible. So I've always wondered, for the two minutes since I've realized that mead people are also at the HA, what's the rivalry, like, between beer brewers and mead people? Like, do you guys really have a lot of hatred for you? Do you drink beer? Or do you hate it? Like, what... Do you guys get into knife fights in the parking lot after every meetup? They strap their wrists together, and, like, Eddie Van Halen does, like, a guitar solo. Well, so far, I mean, most of the brewers, you say, "I'm starting a metery," they just kind of give you a blank stare for a second, and they're not quite sure how to react. It's really not that common. There are about 150 metries in the United States and 2,400 crapperies, something like that. Yeah. So we're kind of new on the scene, but at the same time, every time I give me to somebody who's never had it before, the reaction is just like, "Oh, my God, what have I been missing?" That's really good. I mean, I had some cheap knockoff meet a long time ago that put meat in some other different mindset for me. I was like, "Oh, it's just kind of like some weird alcoholic honey drink. This is completely not that at all. This is so good." Yeah, this is a beerist first, right? Yeah. Having a meat? It's pretty exciting. I mean, we-- Meatists are going to win a national award. That's what we're going to say. Our rival is the meatists. We hate those guys. We hate them. Maybe we can bridge that gap and come together a little bit more. No. Fuck those guys. No. Well, thanks again for coming and hanging out with us, talking about your beer. Once again, could you plug your meat? I'm sorry. Your meatery. Midlery. Yeah. Could you plug your site? Yeah. It's a Meridian Hive Metery on Facebook and Meridian Hive on Twitter. Our website will be going live at meridianhive.com on Friday with our launch. Absolutely. Awesome. And good luck. Thank you. [MUSIC PLAYS] [MUSIC PLAYS] [MUSIC PLAYS] [MUSIC PLAYS] [MUSIC PLAYS] [MUSIC PLAYS] [MUSIC PLAYS] [MUSIC PLAYS] [MUSIC PLAYS] [MUSIC PLAYS] [MUSIC PLAYS] [MUSIC PLAYS] [MUSIC PLAYS] [MUSIC PLAYS] [MUSIC PLAYS] [MUSIC PLAYS] [MUSIC PLAYS] [MUSIC PLAYS] [MUSIC PLAYS] [MUSIC PLAYS] [MUSIC PLAYS] [MUSIC PLAYS] So we're here to sit. Steve and Sin, another home brewer. How you doing? Good. Good. So where are you from? I'm from Austin, Texas. Oh, awesome. A local, eh? Absolutely. Yeah, most of the people we've talked to you haven't been local. Yeah. A local Austinites are fucking unicorns, really. It's weird because we're at the Austin, or no, it's not the Austinovers. It's an American home person. Yeah, what you said is null and void. Everything. Let's just believe that. This brought us a beer that's a Russian imperial stout, right? It's actually my tribute to Texas beer. The recipe is the black metal stout here from Jester King. Oh, cool. And it was aged for two months on bourbon barrel right out of high Texas. Garrison brothers. Nice. Well, I mean, just smelling it is fantastic. Like, I love the way this smells. The bourbon, the chocolate, it's just delicious. Lots of vanilla. Vanilla. Oh, and then when you taste it, all of those things. But then there's a nice caramel undertone to it as well. Oh, yeah. Which I'm really digging. This is really, really tasty. Yeah, just taste of this. It's fucking fantastic. Yeah. So this is about a, you said a year or so old now? It's about a year and a half old now. Okay. It aged for two months on the bourbon barrels. It's been sitting in the bottles for about a year and four months now. So how did you get your start in homebrew? Because I've been asking all of the home brewers that question. Yeah. And it's been interesting hearing their stories about that. So my, my story is probably pretty atypical. I started with a Mr. Beer Kit, which is the traditional $30 kit. That's actually a common theme. That's one other guy. Who said that? Yep. Started with a Mr. Beer Kit after about two batches. I decided that I really liked doing what I was doing. So I graduated to five gallon batches, did extract for about two batches, and then started doing all grain. All grain? I've been doing it ever since. Nice. What kind of beers do you typically make? That's another question I've been asking everybody. So I just had this conversation a few minutes ago. I actually, I love hoppy beers, but I don't make hoppy beers. Okay. I don't make them because there's so many available in the store. I like to experiment with probably more malt, malt-forward type of beer. Okay. So your Russian imperial stouts, big beers. Next beer, I think, on deck is going to be a, a double that'll go into the same barrel this came out of. Oh, nice. That sounds great. And there's still some beer in that barrel I presume. Right now there's a, also about a 10 and a half percent barley wine that's been sitting on this since last November. Oh, wow. Nice. Okay. I'm going to have to get your information because I want to try that. Man, if it turns out anywhere near as good as this imperial stout turned out, it's going to be fantastic. If there's any left, I've been taking samples off that barrel for the last, almost 12 months now. Yeah. Shit. Just a few sand. Oh, it's all gone. All the samples are gone. No one else got to try it. That's fine. Are you a part of any homebrew clubs in town? Absolutely. I'm a member of the Austin Zellitz. Nice. Which, you know, their entry platform is kind of difficult. You just need to say that you're in Austin Zellitz, so. Done that. And now I'm officially a member. So did you just become a member right now when you said it? He said it a few months back. That was a few months back. Yeah. I've won a couple of competitions with them and competition brewing in Austin Zellitz is huge. Nice. So I guess they meet up and then they have local local competitions here in Austin. So there's quite a few competitions in Austin, but most of the Lone Star circuit, which is kind of the main circuit of homebrew competitions, is all around the area. So Dallas, Houston are the big areas. Oh, cool. All of Texas. Yep. How you enjoying this event? I mean, I love the AHA. They do a great job. Jester King is one of my favorite breweries. It's, I don't think a lot of people around here realize how lucky we are to live right down the street for no kidding. Oh, there's so supportive. A friend of mine. I like telling this story to some people. A friend of mine was talking to them about one of their, one of his home brews that hadn't worked out so well, the fermentation hadn't gone so well, it didn't ferment out as much. It hadn't attenuated as much as you wanted it to. I think he was talking to either Jeff or Ron and they disappeared into one of the back rooms and came back with a vial of their yeast and say, here, give this a shot. See how this works out. Just that amount of passion and support and advocacy. Yeah. Yeah. Here, just take a vial of our yeast and try this out on your homebrew. Like, that's a big deal. I mean, I love that they make amazing beers, but they're really doing a lot for the Texas beer scene and that's infinitely more valuable. It turns out that that vial of yeast fucked up that guy's entire house. It just exploded everything in the whole process, but it was really nice of them. Didn't do that. Didn't happen. I don't know. I know you mentioned that you've listened to our show before, Brian, but Grant is notorious for just saying shit that isn't real. Rubio is an awesome guy. He's a great guy. He's a stand up class guy. Oh, fuck. Love this guy. You know, you're a dickhole, but yeah, Brian, I'm really enjoying this beer quite a bit. I wish there was more. This is awesome. You know, and when you mentioned stuff like there's a lot of hoppy beers out on the market and you like to make stuff that you just like that you can't really get easily, there aren't a lot of imperial stouts available in Texas compared to other parts of the nation. And not a lot of good ones at least, and this is a really, really good one. Yeah, I fell in love with the recipe, which was the black metal stout and these guys do a phenomenal job and frankly, they're completely open with the recipes as a home brewer. Oh, yeah. You run into breweries that some will allow you to get the recipes some won't. Stuffings is great. He just sends you the whole recipe. You get to do whatever you want with it. What's your best resource for doing your recipes? Like, do you go to online forums and usually I think the best resource that at least where I've had luck is either other competitors. So like, you know, Jamil Zaneshaft does a lot of good recipes, but frankly, the breweries, if you like a beer and you can get a recipe, the cool thing about homebrewing is is that you can brew it however you want. So you can take their recipe and tweak it a little bit. So this isn't black metal stout. It's just a little bit different than black metal stout. It's actually quite a bit different. And I really like that idea where people can take recipes that already exist from breweries and then tweak them just a little bit so they can get a handle on what their augmentations do to the final beer. I mean, there's what their methodology does. There's really nothing to lose by sharing your recipes because most people aren't going to have the same setup. Oh, yeah. It's going to be completely different every single time that you make it. And Jester King, they published all of their recipes really early on. I mean, they put all of their recipes online back when they were only making like four or five different beers. Yeah, and he'll even tell you today, if you like one of his beers and you want the recipe, all you got to do is email him, he'll send it to you. Yeah. Jeff stuffing is at Jester King. I don't know if that's his email address, but they've got an email address on the Jester King website, jesterkingbrewy.com. I just love the fact that brewers all over professional and amateur are so forthcoming with their methodology and collaborative too. That's a big fucking deal. The idea that love of beer trumps protection of your own personal craft, and I think that's so great among the home brewing community. Yeah. And it's something that's pretty unique to brewing because I mean, you don't find a lot of that in wine or another passion to mine cigars. And cigars, especially, like they keep secrets like crazy or distilling. I would say in business in general. Yeah. I mean, there's almost no other industry that I'm aware of that just openly shares basically what it takes to run their business, which is the recipe. I mean, at the end of the day, Jester King is Jester King because of the beer. Oh, absolutely. I wonder how long that's going to last. I mean, I hope it lasts forever. I hope that doesn't change as craft brewing gets bigger and gets more part of the mainstream because this market segment is growing at a rapid, rapid rate. Exponential rate. Yeah. I wonder how long that's going to stick around. I hope it sticks around. I mean, I think a lot of things in all industries seem to be moving toward an open source, but respect of the original creator, and you know, just taking and spinning things off because, you know, direct plagiarism, I don't think benefits anyone like plagiarizer or the creator. So they don't really do it. It's just like taking something and learning from it and continuing on. It makes everyone a lot more competitive and they have to drive to keep continuing to create great products. So it's better all around in the industry, I think. Yeah. And beer people will actually say, well, you know, we got this from these people and we got, you know, this inspiration from this beer, this brewery, and it's all very thank you very much and a huggy. And if a beer is not holding up, you need to keep evolving. But then everybody benefits. Oh, absolutely. That's the best part is that it's all about whoever's drinking it. It's all about the quality of the product and the love for it. All right. We're going to end this on some kumbaya, right? Yeah. Ready? Everyone hands, come on. Just be glad you're not Corey Barton because we ended that conversation with talking about how our buddy won't died. And now you're trying to do it again. Oh, shit. Sorry. You can't bring that. I, for once, I'm just, I'm just going to say this for once in the last two months. I'm not the one bringing the showdown. You know what? Mike, could you liven this up? What? My life is over. Hey, hey, hey, hey. Can we end on titties? Yeah. Oops. Well, you didn't take them out. Got to. Oh, Brian. Just so you know, Mike's life left them. It's magical. Listen to the show, it's a, anyway, thanks, Brian. This imperial stout was fucking fantastic. We got to end it on that note. Yeah, dude. Delicious. Great job. Delicious. Cheers. It was wonderful. Thank you so much for talking to us. You bet. Another news. The end of stage equips the bearers. What? No. I don't even know where you were this whole time. Yeah. You're just kind of vanished. You just showed up like fucking, what's that? Shira. The grape legu. Glomer? No, that was, uh, Glomer was fucking Brewster. She had a chicken coma. Shira. Yeah, there was a, uh, finewy little cat. What was that? The great gazoo. The great gazoo was a different thing. He showed up with, uh, French four stuff. Yeah. So she was like the great gazoo. Yeah. And she showed up and didn't grant any of her wishes. You all have seen my boobs. I have not. I've seen them. They're great. They're worth it. We're always quick to remind you that we haven't had them. It hasn't happened. This is bullshit. If you, if you get the opportunity to buy a ticket for that, I would. It's better than fun, fun, fun, fast. It's like fun, fun, fun bag. Yeah, fun, fun, chest. So we're just going to wrap things up because we've been here for a while. It's a little chilly outside and everybody seems to be drinking quite a lot. I'm tired. I'm cold. I want ice cream. Okay. I would say that we got to talk to some pretty cool home brewers, uh, but it's clearly kind of their event right now and, um, yeah, what he's trying to say is that we're unwanted. They're trying to kick us out. We're sitting in a corner by ourselves. They all have, uh, put ourselves in this corner though. We did. I think a baby put us in a corner. I put us in a corner because it was getting sunny and... We're the baby. I thought it was gonna get hot. You never called me baby before ever. This is... I was a calling you baby. This is a disaster. No, this, uh, rally, this AHA rally was a lot of fun to attend actually and yeah, we got to drink a lot of great beer and talk to a lot of cool people. So thanks to them for having us here and thanks to the Jester King guys. It was a lot, a lot of fun. It was a great time. Absolutely. Thank you so much, Jester King. Thanks everybody for listening. Okay. Thanks for maybe listening to this extra. Yeah. I think once Rubio edits the fuck out of this, it's gonna be a great episode. It'll be snazzy as fuck. Hell yes. Thank you guys. Uh, bottoms up. Bottoms up. Bottoms up. Bottoms down. You always have to do that. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yeah, 'cause he did the bottoms down. When I get drunk, I fall and my bottom goes down. Oh yeah, you fall like a toddler. It's true. And then I flail my legs and I can't get up and I won. You wear that diaper which kind of makes your body into like a weeble wobble. It's true. It's a diaper. I am wearing ruffled shorts. You are. Can't stop showing them to people. 'Cause they're amazing. They are amazing. Hey guys. See you later. Can I? Bye. That's a great ending. There we go. For more information on the Beerist's podcast, including show notes and pictures, visit TheBierists.com. For more information on the Beerist's podcast, visit TheBierists.com or visit TheBierists.com. Like us on Facebook at Facebook.com/TheBierists and follow us on Twitter at Twitter.com/TheBierists. I'm John Rubio. Thanks again for listening. [BLANK_AUDIO]
