Great American Beer Fest Pro-Tips

First, read PJ Hoberman's Surviving GABF. 

1. Water. You'll find water coolers spread around the floor of GABF. Get a glass of water every time you see a hydration station. You'll feel much better at last call.
2. Glass holsters. For most sessions, you'll get an "unbreakable" plastic tasting glass for your beer. The first time a glass rattles on the floor, prepare for the entire conference hall to react. Embarrassing! You'll find various booths offering necklaces for safe glass storage.
3. Alka-seltzer. Bring your favorite hang-over cure for the next morning. I like a little plop! plop! fizz! fizz!
4. Maps. You can download the GABF map early. Print it out and mark the breweries you want to visit. Make tracks to your favorite booth as soon as you get in the door.
5. Eat! Visit the food vendors, or bring a snack necklace. Eating helps with hangovers, and can help you stay hydrated.
6. Participate in the other activities. Tasting beer isn't the only fun thing to do at GABF.
7. GABF is short and there are too many beers. Focus on beer that you haven't tried before, and beer that isn't available where you live. If you focus on your favorite beers, you'll miss discovering new stuff.

Name some other tips, comment!

The Beer Blotter Plans for GABF

The SeattlePI.com's Beer Blotter has posted part 1 of their suggestions for booths to visit at the Great American Beer Festival in Denver. You should check out the Beer Blotter's list and reasons, but here are ones that overlap with my own list:

• Dry Dock Brewing - I really enjoyed their vanilla porter last year. A well balanced beer, especially since vanilla usually means "too sweet" in my vocabulary. Yum.
• Pizza Port - The several different locations were buried under medals at GABF 2009. Don't let the name fool you.
• The Bruery - I ran into these brewers at the Cheeky Monk last year, where they generously poured us lots of delicious Autumn Maple. Fun crowd!
• Cigar City Brewing - I'm not sure I've ever tried this beer, but I grew up in Tampa. Cigar City is a reference to Tampa's historical Ybor City, where Cuban, Italian and other immigrants used to hand-make cigars in the late 19th / early 20th century. I've got to check out beer from the old neighborhood.

I wish I knew the Beer Blotter's name to give him or her proper credit, but I couldn't find it under SeattlePI's blizzard of ads. I look forward to reading the next installment.

**Update**

The Beer Blotter is better found at beerblotter.com and @BeerBlotter. Also, the next installment is already online!

The Story Behind 33 Beers

Dave of 33 Beers penned a nice story about how he started a business selling beer journals. I love hearing the story behind a successful entrepreneur, especially one who seems into two of my other interests: beer and making things.

In case you missed my earlier post, 33 Beers makes a pocket-sized diary for recording all the critical data about each beer you drink. It has little stars to color in, a place for notes, and "flavor wheel" for quickly recording the beer's flavor profile. I reckon that if you spill some beer on the page, it'll save the stain for posterity too.

I hope that Dave and I have a chance to talk at GABF. Perhaps I can pry some insights from him to help with my book sales.

Canning Craft Beer: is it Cheaper?

There are many technical benefits to beer in cans: no light, less oxygen leaking in, lighter and cheaper to ship, less breakable, and less damaging to foreheads. The beer heads have started to sing the praises of canned beers, but there still aren't too many craft beers available in them.

My initial thought regarding bottling versus canning was that canning would be more expensive for a small brewery. A recent article in the Houston Chronicle contradicts my theory and claims that canning lines are cheaper than bottling.

Canning lines are cheaper? As a home brewer, I've filled a lot of bottles. Bottling can be exhausting, but it doesn't require much of an investment to do it by hand.

Let's look at the can equivalent of crimping caps. Cask.com offers a manual canning system which has a nice video of a "manual" canning process.

To my untrained eyes, the "manual" canning process doesn't look much better than bottling by hand. In fact, it looks a lot worse, since those fancy can filling, seaming, and 6-pack ringing machines probably cost a bit more than my red plastic bottle cap crimper and leaky filling wand. At this level of automation, I don't think there is any way cans are cheaper than bottles. I'm going to declare bottles the winner. 

At a larger scale the equipment becomes automated. Cask's automated system makes for a much more impressive canning video. It fills and seams at the impressive-to-me rate of 30 cans per minute. Unlike the manual canning line, chill background music is paired with the clanky machinery for the automated system. Nice upgrade!

Could this be cheaper than the equivalent bottling line? I'm not sure. This slightly higher capacity bottling line looks larger and more complicated. The canning line has a 1800 cans per hour rating. The bottling line is rated for 2000 bottles per hour, about 11% faster.

I'm not equipped to do a cost comparison for the more automated systems, but I think I can believe the canning line might be cheaper. Sorry, without getting quotes, I can't say for sure. I suspect that the biggest consideration for the craft brewer will probably be the marketing concerns of cans.

My suggestion for the marketing issues? Put your beer in big cans like Guinness or Young's, or in tiny cans like Red Bull. Another idea? Package the cans in cardboard carriers like bottles have. Hang a paper tag from the pull tab. Ship the cans in coozies or with a shoulder strap. Canned craft beer will need to do something a little unusual to pull attention away from the bottle section of the beer cooler.

A Few Interesting Exhibitors at GABF

Hop Candy

A Beer in the Hand is Worth Two of AnythingOne of the universe's most lingering mysteries involves two of my favorite ingredients. What do you get if you combine chocolate and hops? Now we know: you get Hopolates!

I have no earthly idea what these candies will taste like, but I hope to learn at GABF. Hop Candy Inc. well be selling their hop-infused chocolates at booth 123.

Unfortunately, Hop Candy's Website seems to be having a few issues, but you can find a review of the Hopolates here.

33 Beers

33 Beers may sound like a competitor to 37 Signals, but the 33 Beers apps run on paper instead of Ruby on Rails. Sorry, nerd humor.

Judging from their website, these guys make nice looking beer journals. The Moleskine of the beer world, perhaps. Each page has space for beer hipsters to record the vital statistics for a beer, including a cool flavor-profile wheel to rapidly record your impressions of the flavor.

I joke, 33 Beers won't turn you into a hipster. I hope. With more than 2,000 beers to try at GABF, taking notes is the only way to keep track of what you like. I expect to see many beer heads filling these out as they wander the floor of GABF.

Extra points to anyone who profiles the Hopolates in their 33 Beers.