Brewtopia World Beer Festival - a brief recap

Last weekend I attended the afternoon session of the Brewtopia World Beer Festival on Chelsea Piers.  The festival was set up like a runway that never ended with tons of stations representing breweries, beer bars, and beer organizations.  If you are interested in becoming part of the craft beer movement, beer festivals like the Brewtopia World Beer festival are the place to go.  You can find local homebrew groups, talk to actual commercial brewmasters who have often recently made the transition from homebrewer to commercial brewer, you can meet other craft beer enthusiasts, and you can drink 100 types of beer in an hour.  As my brother says, “It’s like an adult candy store.” 

If you want to go an extra step, I would highly recommend trying to volunteer at these events.  When you do this, you can arrive early to meet the brewery reps and VIPs before the rush of thirsty beer drinkers.  I myself volunteered this year and got to talk to several brewery reps.  

I specifically spoke with Ray Hill of Hill Brewing.  He brews a Pre-Prohibition Pilsner that was a completely new style of pilsner for me and it was quite delicious.  I spoke with him about how he got into brewing, which was quite interesting to me because I have always had dreams of being a successful brewer.  He said he started out brewing as a hobby and as more and more of his friends kept asking him if he sold his beer, he eventually decided to make the leap of faith and quit his IT job to buy the equipment and start brewing commercially. 

I asked him how he initially started to come up with recipes for homebrewing because to date I have mostly used the homebrewing kits and exercised very limited improvisation.  He said that his best strategy for developing a beer that he liked was to brew a clone recipe that mimmicks a commercial beer that he likes and then brew the clone several times altering certain components of the process to single out the specific part that he likes.  Essentially you start out with the framework of a commercial beer that you like and you accentuate the flavors that you like through trial and error and go from there.  I asked Ray Hill what books he would recommend to an amateur homebrewer like me and he said there is a book with clone recipes, which I found on Amazon here.

As always, people in the craft beer industry were incredibly friendly and interested in helping out anyone interested in taking part in the craft beer movement.  Mr. Hill inspired me to experiment with brewing a hefeweizen last night, which I made sure to improvise with.  Time will tell how it turns out. 

Coming soon will be a guide to homebrew stores in NYC.