Today marks one of the most stressful events in my year-bottling competition beers for the GABF. A brewer can spend hours planning, brewing, and tending to a fantastic beer, just to see the long wait in a package create havoc in your creation. As most people know, bottling beer can be devasting to the life of a beer. Light, Oxygen, heat and handling can all influence the taste of beers. The GABF judging happens in exactly one month, and in that time, it will sit in my cooler this weekend, travel to Portland until Tuesday and then head to the AB distributor in Denver where it will await sorting, pouring and judging. Ugh! It will certainly seem like an eternity.
This year, our good friends at Ninkasi Brewing (yes we do play nice and love each other infact), have graciously allowed us to bring kegs of our beer to their brewery to package. This is the alternative to hand bottling one at a time which would certainly add more oxygen to the package. We’ll run 5 beers through their little maching in about an hour I think.
This year we are entering 5 beers, Watershed IPA, Overcast Espresso Stout, Line Dry Rye, Collaborative Evil (a Belgian Strong Ale), and Bourbon Barrel IPA. Right now they are tasting fantastic. We’ll see how they hold up in a bottle on their long journey to Denver.
Finally, on Tuesday September 15, The BierStein in Eugene is holding a “going away party” of sorts as we put all five of those beers on. Come out and send us off to the Great American Beer Festival.
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Good luck! I know I’ve enjoyed several bottles of the Overcast Espresso Stout that I purchased at the Coop here in Corvallis.