3000 Glasses of beer on the wall

Steve's sister again, deciding to give it up with an update. Steve's at Barrymore's tonight, not celebrating Beau's win of Best Local Brew in the Ottawa XPress. We'll get you next year!!!

I earned my beer stripes a few weekends ago, when an undesirable beer task came up. Beau's had 3000 fabutastic pint glasses made up a while ago, which were deemed less fab and tastic after we noticed (okay, apparently Phil noticed) that on every couple of glasses, the S... just... faded away. The ink must have run out in the roller. At least, that's how I'm picturing the process, they make glasses using a web press, right? So we debated a bit on the whole "craft" concept, where individuality is good thing and if the glasses were unique that was okay... but in the end, they just looked like we didn't care. And the thing is, we do. Reaally. Care.

So, we pulled a few more out, and about every 3rd or 4th was messed up. Bummer. So we put a call in to the folks who arranged the glasses for us, and they said that they would in turn contact the co. who manufactured. And the mfg. co said that there was no possible way that many were messed up. If we wanted a credit, we would have to inspect the glasses and give them an accurate # of how many were ACTUALLy misprinted.

What's that? You need someone to correct errors and bring justice and order? Enter Jen! Professional editor! I find mistakes for a living! And so I spent a dusty, icky, paper-cutty, glass-cutty (I think I broke 3), lonely weekend inspecting 3000 glasses. Open a box, pull them out, sort them out, return to box, stack boxes, lather, rinse, repeat. I dreamed in glasses that night.

But as it turned out, the error rate was even higher than we suspected. So the moral of the story is, if somene says you screwed something up, admit it quickly, so they don't find the rest of your mistakes too.

FYI, I'm still waiting for my agreed-upon $50 for the job. (2 1/2 times less than my hourly professional rate.) But that's better than what I get paid for maintaining the blog. Maybe that's why it's been 2 months since the last update. Cheers!

Steve's sister :)

Marathon Man

My buddy Sam is in London (England, not Ontario) right now studying rock n’ roll. I sent him an email last week apologizing for not being able to email him right now, on account of being too busy. After searching my sent box for something else, I came across it, and thought it would make good blogging. So, here it is, with some of the cuss words cleaned up a little bit…

OK, so I gots some sleep in me. London sounds super cool - its good to hear that school of rock is going well - Does Jack Black get annoying as an instructor after 90 minutes though? Brewery [stuff] has been great, but what a crazy lifestyle.

As an example… Thursday I got up at 2:30am to do some reading for an OCB meeting in Toronto at 10. Hit the road at 3:30am and landed in TO around 8:30. Slept in the car for 45 minutes, found a Tim Hortons, bought a pint of coffee and went to the meeting.

These meetings are seriously marathon sessions - no bathroom breaks, 10 minutes for lunch, finish usually around 3:30. Meeting finished up, did some schmoozing with some of the industry veterans (including the Bill White who is responsible for Keith's being so [gosh-darn] popular) and then booted over to Jordans (web-guy).

We finished off the design for the mural we'll be installing next week outside the brewery then went to Sneaky Dee's, where Buddy Disease [that really is his name, seriously] was already waiting for us. Ate a burro favorito with a pint of Amsterdam Nut Brown, said bye to Jordan and then took off to Home Depot with Buddy to buy the paints for the mural. Pain in the ass slow service made us change course and go to RONA instead. It literally took over two hours to match the paints because their scanner couldn't register the colour swatches we brought in and we had to guess our way to the right colours in some cases.

Finally left RONA at 10pm, dropped buddy off at his place and started the drive down. Couldn't keep my eyes open by the time I got to Kingston, so I pulled over at the rest-stop and slept in the car for another hour. Bought a disposable tooth brush to scrape the gunk off my teeth, bought another pint of coffee and got back on the road.

Got home at 5am, crawled into bed and slept till 8am. Got up and started getting ready for a meeting with the director of commercial lending for the Caisse Populaire. Meeting was at 9 and finished around 10, then visited the place that is making up t-shirts for us to go over some details for our next run of shirts, then got back home.

Spent an hour hanging out with Ruby [my two-year-old], took another hour nap and then things got busy again. Lots of coordination with deliveries, events going on for the weekend etc. Jamie and I delivered a couple 50 litre kegs to Deja Vue, ran into Dale MacDonald and Jason (forget his last name, but pretty cool guy we went to school with) and shared a pitcher of Beau's with them. Then booted back home, picked up Nicola and Ruby and drove for 2 hours to get to a tasting event we were doing at the Baldachin in Merrickville, a fantastic beer bar.

Had a couple pints with the manager of the joint, ate some chow, and started heading back at about 11pm. Had a sneezing fit while driving and got pulled over by the police in Alexandria for swerving too much while I was driving (my allergies are totally kicking my ass these days) after he checked to make sure I wasn’t drunk he let us keep going. Got home about 1am, put Ruby to bed and hopped in the shower, and finally made it to bed around 1:30.

The scary part is, I end up pulling a marathon session like that at least once a week and some weeks are just non-stop like that; 2-4 hours is becoming a normal sleep, 6 hours is like taking a vacation. But at the same time, in the course of two days, I made it out for a pint 3 times. So its kinda like I'm never really working either. Some days I devote the day to visiting accounts, i.e., pub crawl.

Jen & Kev are moving up in the next couple days (Jen flies in tomorrow with the kids - new baby is named Rhett). Kev is driving the moving truck up and should land in H-bury by Thursday. Jordan is coming up Monday and Buddy is coming up Thursday to start the mural. Max RNR drummer Mike & Rachel should be up for the weekend and on top of that work still needs to get done. I tell you, this is one crazy life, but man does it have a lot of perks.

Cheers,
Steve

Long Live the Kölsch Bock... Or The Little Bathtub Beer That Could

Ok. So we’re well on our way through batch 2 of Lug Tread. Sales are still going very well, and it looks like our initial gamble to release the high-octane version of Lug Tread was the right decision. It seems that most people get the fact that we’re new and that one batch is going to taste different from the next for the first few rounds through (insert huge sigh of relief, wipe sweat from brow).

Part of what made this work for us, I think, has to do with our “Not So Corporate Philosophy” which is emblazoned on our coasters and website. “We brew interesting, tasty beers using the highest quality all natural ingredients…” Our first batch was certainly interesting, very tasty and used the highest quality ingredients – there you go; no lie. Did it match the style we said it would? No. But it had a story to tell, and for the open-minded, it carried a taste that was both familiar and completely different at the same time.

So many weeks ago, before even the first batch was out, we were invited to bring our beer to the beerbistro at the Golden Tap awards, an Ontario award event hosted by BarTowel.com, a really cool website that I’ve been reading for many years. I accepted the offer immediately as a spectacular way to get our beer to Toronto for the first time.

So, this was the big time, baby. This was the Beer Bistro, Stephen Beaumont's place. [For those who don’t know, he is Canada’s foremost authority on beer, and therefore Canada’s scariest.] A quick scan around the room had my heart racing as many of the brewers and entrepreneurs of Ontario’s finest chatted casually while tasting some of the incredible beers at the event and munching on fantastic beer-based cuisine.

Instead of bringing a keg from batch 2 – still not exactly where we want the final product to rest, but a much smoother beer, definitely moving in the right direction - I had an idea a bout a week earlier, which I ran by Matt (our brewer): “What if we brought the bathtub beer?” This was a nickname we had given the last remaining keg of our Kölsch Bock, the unaltered part from the first 700 litres we kegged before finding out about our ice-up in the aging tank.

You see, en route to deliver the keg to Pub Italia, we found out they were not able to put us on tap right away and asked if we could deliver it the following week. What to do with the keg??? We had a walk-in cooler that was not operational yet, and, desperate to save the beer, we put it in Jamie’s bathtub, filled the tub with ice, and hoped it would survive.

Knowing that the Golden Tap crowd would a) recognize good beer and b) be interested in something different and new I thought to myself, what a great way to use up the rest of this keg. A week before the event Matt and I tapped the keg to give it a test. I was convinced that the beer was fabulous, but Matt was worried. Would these aficionados forgive the beer for not being what it had originally intended to be and judge it simply on what it was? Or would they write it off as a pitiful attempt at a very specific beer style? Matt reminded me that the brewery’s fortunes aside, his reputation as a brewer was at stake, something I had not considered up to that point.

We both had several night's sleep to think it over, and with each passing day, I grew more and more convinced the bathtub beer was the one to use. This beer was not only tasty and interesting, it had a story to tell. And when I thought about what would appeal to me as a beer consumer – the Kölsch Bock was totally cool. But, to appease Matt I arranged for one more pre-tasting with John Graham (owner/head brewer/cool dude at Church Key Brewing). One of his brewers (Matt), our Matt and Jamie all tried a glass. None of us could spot any infection, problem, or flaw in the beer, as long as you didn’t call it a Kölsch.

So I went down to Toronto with little hand bills that were to get handed to each person who ordered a sample of LugTread, explaining the genesis of the beer. It didn’t apologize for the change in taste, but it also didn’t try to hide the fact we were new at this and we were quite surprised by the turnout of the beer.

Was I nervous? You bet. If the beer was poorly received I alone would have to live with my decision. The company’s financial health; Matt’s reputation; and the livelihood of my family, my parents, my brother and my best friends would be at risk. Three different times, I left the beerbistro out of sheer nerves. But each time I came back, forcing myself to live or die by the crowd’s opinion.

At about 8 o’clock I ran into Michael Hancock, owner and head brewer of Dennison’s, and Matt’s mentor of sorts. He congratulated me on the beer, which he thought was excellent. “I would have done the same thing,” he said of my decision to release it. I suddenly was able to pull my heart out of my shoes (where it had been parked most of the day), and walk around and chat with people. If Michael Hancock liked my beer, that’s all I needed.

Around 10:30 I got my first ever "Cinderella moment." Cass Enright, the man behind The Bar Towel, came to announce the winner of the award for “Best Beer at the Fest” as voted by attendees of the night. “Beau’s All Natural’s Kölsch Bock” he announced, and I stood in stunned silence for what felt like 30 seconds. After accepting the award I got to spend the next half hour calling up the family. I got Micheal Hancock to call Matt to tell him the good news.

From being frozen to sitting in a bathtub to winning a really cool award, that little keg sure has made me proud.