enjoyed... and the verdict is NOM NOM!

I'm heading to Minny to visit family over X-mas break, will these be hard to find around that time?

Abrasive should be easy(ish). Any store with a decent microbeer selection should have it.

Darkness would be pretty difficult. You'd have to find a bar that is tapping a keg while you're here. mnbeer.com is a good resource for keeping up on such things.

Thanks...I'll be closest to St. Cloud so I'll look around there

Looking to transition into the beverage industry, I passed the exam for the Cicerone Certified Beer Server today! Celebrating with a bit of homebrew.

what do you want to do in the industry? Before I say anymore, understand that you are gonna make **** for $$$.


I work retail and I know that RDH is an assistant brewer. So, both of us can give those perspectives. I can't give much info about being in the bar/restaurant side of things, but there is the bar talk thread in OOT

Although the certification focuses on service, I am more interested in entering through the brewing or sales/distribution end of the business. My current career is in advertising/marketing and I think I could really do good work on branding and promotion.

great lakes Christmas ale anyone??

good **** imo

my advice then would be to get some experience in retail. Most distributors (that you would likely want to work with) will want some sort of beer sales experience. The certificate certainly helps, but going from retail into distribution is usually the step that is taken as they just really want to know that you can sell beer. There are plenty of beer geeks that get into the industry and can't sell for a damn. The same thing happens in wine a lot too.

RDH would be the best person to give advice on getting into the brewing side.

IME, most small breweries (those under 20k bbl/yr, ie 99.5% of breweries) could care less about advertising, and those that do don't have the money to do anything about it. Certainly not enough money laying around just to hire a marketing guy. If you can weld SS AND do marketing, you'll be in high demand... for the welding.

Distributors do much more of that type of stuff. Big brewers do much more of that stuff, but of course everyone wants to work for New Belgium or Sierra.

And to add to this, you will need beverage sales experience to land these jobs. A friend of mine tried to land a Deschutes gig here in Chicago. They are officially here on 1/1/13, but even he was passed over for those that had more experience. He too has the official beer server certification along with a beer buyin track record at my store.

Things obviously depend in the market you're in, but if you are gonna do what you are saying you're gonna do, you're going to have to have retail experience.

Thanks for the advice guys.

I thought about this some more and may have something more helpful than, "Don't bother," which is kinda what my last post sounded like. It's true that small breweries don't really do any marketing. A consistent POV/artwork for the brands is about as far as it gets.

An oft-repeated piece of advice to those that want to work in a brewery is to just show up, and ask the owner/head brewer to volunteer filling kegs, cleaning floors, cleaning spent grain, whatever. As the brewery grows, they'll need more help, and if you're a volunteer on the reg, they'll most likely pick you to get paid $10/hr than look for another candidate. Maybe you can put a twist on this using your own strengths and volunteer to do some sort of marketing. You could think up an event, kind of plan it out, and then get a meeting with the decision maker and pitch it. It has to fit in with the brewer's current efforts: New Belgium has bikes, but I'm not so sure Three Floyd's would give two ****s about putting on a bicycle tour. But you could try something like that. One bit of marketing that just about every brewer does is beer festivals. You could offer to kind of become a volunteer head of those. Be in charge of jockey box prep/break down, tent or booth set up/break down, merch, etc, all those little pain in the ass type things that go into beer festivals. Typically fests are a big pain in the ass and cost for the brewer with very nebulous return. Offer to volunteer doing some of that stuff, and you get your foot in the door.

I think the key is to talk to someone face-to-face and bring something to the table. It can't just be, "I love to drink beer," or, "I brought my homebrew," because those honestly don't differentiate you one bit. But if you thought up a really cool event to put on and offered to run it, I would think that'd definitely give the brewer something to think about.

Although if you did do something like that, I guess you might want some email trails, just in case they tried to rip you off. Brewers are people just like everyone else.

Also, Northern Brewer's cyber Monday deal is a free starter kit if you buy an ingredient kit - specifically Dead Ringer, their Two Hearted clone - and a 5g kettle. Pretty sweet deal for those interested in starting homebrewing. The kettle isn't really big enough if you stick with the hobby, but it isn't so big that if you don't like homebrewing, you'll feel you can't use it for cooking. So if you're thinking about starting, you'd need ingredients and a kettle anyways, and then they throw in the fermentation buckets, bottling stuff, etc.

link

I was down in Tampa two weekends ago for my cousin's wedding, so I hit up Cigar City Brewing after getting of the plane. Got dayum, their premium beers are outstanding. I was there with my bro. We got samplers to start. We each got their bourbon barrel aged Scotch ale, their imperial stout, and a beer that the bartender described as a "sour" but that was really more of a strong pale ale that had been aged in Spanish cedar. Four our fourth beer in the sampler, my bro got their winter warmer, and I got their strong red ale. All 5 of these beers were A+ and excellent examples of their styles, with the possible exception of the "sour," which didn't really have a genre. The "sour," for lack of a better term, was as excellent as it was unique. The cedar aging gave it a unique spice character that I thought was delicious. My brother liked it, but he wasn't as high on it as I was. The Scotch was the best Scotch ale I've had to date, with layer after layer of flavor from both the malt and the barrel without being either cloyingly sweet or too hot from the alcohol. The imperial stout I'd put up with the best of them, although perhaps just shy of the Dark Lord. The red was a 7.5% red that was hopped in a manner similar to Pliny. Delicious. And the winter warmer was tasty and deceptive. I thought it was around 8% by taste. Turns out it was packing 11%. Tasty, but probably my least favorite of 5 excellent brews.

Unfortunately, the rest of their lineup wasn't as impressive. They had on special 4 different pale ales, only one of which was any good. Their brown was pretty good, but spectacular. Their white was better, probably their best beer under 7%. Nothing else we tried was too memorable. Still, if you're in the area, hit this place up, and while they don't distribute much outside of Florida, if you see anything from them north of 7% ABV, buy it immediately.

Damn, I could have met up with you. I love excuses to go down to Tampa! I'm in agreeance wrt the pale ales, it's unfortunate they didn't have a crazy variety of their IPA on instead. I've had peaches, mango, papaya, cedar/berry, cedar, and tangerine (I think that's all?) varieties of their IPA and they have all been just excellent. I think my favorite beer of theirs I've ever had was their tocobaga red ale which sat on some peppers for a while and got this really awesome smoky/non-hot pepper taste. It was delicious. If anyone can make it down for their next Hunahpu day I'd highly recommend it, I think last year there was over 60 beers tapped throughout the day and it's just a giant party where you can get your beer nerd on.

Tocabaga red is the red I was describing, btw. It was sans peppers, though. I don't really go for pepper beer.

Hunahpu Day TLDR Beer Club meetup? I'll be there again this year. As Wraths said, it was the highlight of my beer year last year.

@RDH thanks for the second round of advice. TBH that first bit kinda killed my buzz!

Wine Enthusiast's Top 25 Beers of 2012

Interesting list, there are definitely some beers missing there but nobody is ever going to agree on a top 25 list.

Its tilting the hell out of me that they dont have pictures of the labels for every beer, whats up with that?

Got an infection on my peanut butter brown ale. I'm thinking it was with the powdered PB I added. I just racked my cooled wort onto a jar of it, didn't do anything else and I thought it would be fine. Apparently it wasn't.

Ouch, I was just thinking about asking you how it came out too. Definitely give it a taste before dumping. Was there a reason you used cool wort instead of just adding powder at flameout?

I spent a lot of time reading about using PB and the consensus was that adding it in the primary fermentation helped retain as much PB flavor as possible. I tasted it and it was sour and pretty gross, so I had to dump it.

Ah, damn. I'm wondering if maybe you could bake the PB powder and that would have prevented it?