Monday, August 29, 2005

August 20th: BA 9th Anniversary Gathering at HFB
High Falls brewmaster Dave Schlosser put out an enticing event signup:
   "The event will include a history of the company, tour of the
   brewery, and a tasting at the end of the tour.
   In order for me to coordinate the event, BA's must RSVP to me.
   Proper footwear (no opened toed shoes or sandals) is required!!
   Anyone not wearing the proper footwear will be ridiculed and not
   allowed to go on the tour.
   After the event, we can grab a bite to eat at MacGregors
   (downtown) to continue the festivities."


Attendees included: archonadept, BlastTyrant, Dschlosser, Foxual, jacabral, jmalin, lizardc213, mgross50, murtyman, Petertosh, rugbycritic, ryanweber, SweetBooze73, wailingwench, YardBoy. And yes, one beerman screwed up on the footwear, got ridiculed, but Dave cut him some slack.

Others can post their Comments below, but here's my take on the tour:
We got started in a conference room with introductions. WailingWench was highly outnumbered by the beer belly gender, but she held her own. We had lots of questions for brewmaster Dave on the current line of HFB products which he graciously answered. Having been a brewer, I thought he was just technical enough to capture our interest. The tour then took us by miles of piping, giant vats and long canning lines. Just before returning to the conference room, we poured off three different samples of test porters. We tasted the entire gamut of HFB products and then had two pleasant surprises:
   1. Dave pulled out some bottled test brew of a future "seasonal
        pale ale"

   2. Some blended recipie of the porters will also become a seasonal.

Dave sent us home with some of the test ale and gets many thanks for a great afternoon. I went home, but if others went on to MacGregor's, be sure to Comment.

Sunday, August 28, 2005

After Rochester's BeerAdvocate 9th Anniversary Gathering (High Falls Brewery tour), I had pictures to post. To no avail, I scoured beeradvocate.com for a means to tie in their website Event with simple photo hosting. I emailed the 16 Event attendees for ideas and only two responded. The bottom line: beeradvocate.com has great databases relating to beers and establishments, basic forum and calendar features, but nothing related to the followup of local events. I've been around the web biz long enough to know there are many free alternatives. I chose BlogSpot for several reasons:
   1. It's free
   2. It hosts pictures
   3. It allows authorship by multiple people
   4. It's templates are easy to use after just a little reading.