The weather seems to be getting worse in San Diego, but that’s not stopping anyone from enjoying the conference. Everyone seemed to recover from the welcome reception for another day of beer and brewing fun.
My first seminar of the day was Blending and Post-Fermentation Adjustments for the Homebrewer by Kyle Kohlmorgen. He comprehensively covered his methods for blending beers and altering the flavor profile of a beer. Kohlmorgen gave tips on getting started with blending and was quick to point out that these are methods to enhance your good beer not fix your bad beer. I really enjoyed this talk and recommend checking it out when released by the AHA.
The next seminar was my favorite for the day and possibly the conference so far. Jamil Zainasheff’s Managing Yeast: Better Fermentation at a Lower Cost talk was full of actionable information and he is a wealth of info regarding yeast. His presentation demystified the process of harvesting and repitching yeast. It is something I will likely start trying out this year.
I almost skipped the next session of seminars, but on a whim decided to go to Tasting Beyond the Scoresheet by Master Cicerone Rich Higgins. The description of the talk seemed a little out there and abstract, but I’m glad I went. It was a very interesting talk about deconstructing the way to experience a beer as a drinker and can build a beer as a brewer. He broke down the way we experience the aroma and the taste to create flavor and how we can use that to create the desired drinking experience as a brewer. I recommend this recording but you can get away with only listening to about the first two-thirds of the talk. Once they start pouring the beers to taste it will probably lose value without tasting along.
My final talk of the day was Send in the Clones: Sensory Analysis and Recipe Formulation Techniques for Homebrewers by beer writer Amahl Turczyn and guests Mitch Steele and Jamil Zainasheff. This seminar was a bit of a disappointment. The information was very general and quite a few times we were just told to read or listen to another source. At the start of the talk Turczyn pointed out that he was going to have an article in the next printing of Zymurgy magazine. I don’t know if he just stripped too much information out of the article for the presentation or maybe just didn’t organize the presentation well. If you are interested in the topic you may just want to read the article. To his credit, Turczyn did get really close on his best guess clone recipes (Stone IPA and Heretic Evil Twin) as confirmed by Steele and Zainasheff. So I think the knowledge is there and hopefully it comes out in the article. If you are interested in some of the techniques and processes used at Stone and Heretic there is some info from the two brewers sprinkled throughout and may be worth a listen.
As usual, club night did not disappoint. Southern California is host to some of the oldest and largest clubs like the Maltose Falcons and QUAFF. I truly believe I had more good beer at this years club night than previous conferences. The Arizona Society of Homebrewers had printed up their own beer-centric version of Cards Against Humanities cards and had a game running at their booth the whole time. My favorite beer of the night was a mild with coffee from the DOZE club. I wish I could remember the brewer, but, hey, its club night… There was beer involved.