Mint Chocolate Porter

Now that I’m back from my trip out of town for Thanksgiving I’m happy to be able to start posting again!

One of the great things about Thanksgiving is all of the old friends and acquaintances that come back into town for the weekend. I caught up with all kinds of people I hadn’t seen since high school. That meant that while they described their bank jobs, positions at insurance companies, or careers in the exciting field of human resources I got to talk about driving around the country drinking beer with the brewmasters who make it.

Needless to say, I’m still happy about my decision to write a book about beer!

I don’t know about you but when I’m around old friends we tend to scheme. A couple of people tried to talk to me about the possibility of someday opening a brewery. I had to explain that more than anything else you need two things to open a brewery. Money, and talent as a brewer. I have neither. Although I still have little to no desire to open a brewery I’m still working on my talent as a brewer.

One specific friend of mine, Connor Krause, wants to start brewing and has some unique ideas to try out. We batted a few things around and finally landed on the decision to make a mint chocolate porter. Assuming it comes out well I think it will be the perfect drink for a cold winter evening, especially around the holidays. Connor lives about forty five minutes north of me but we’re trying to figure out a time that works out well for both of us to brew.

I’ll keep you updated on the process as it comes along. Also, the Bavarian hefeweizen turned out very well. It feels strange to drink a hefe in the winter but beer is beer and I’m still proud I managed to brew a decent one regardless of style.

Trumer Rube Goldberg

This video has been floating around the internet for a couple of days now and I thought it was WAY too cool not put up. It's a Rube Goldberg machine made by the people at Trumer International. Watch to the end, I think I might need to install one of these at home!

Yes, I know the video overlaps the side bar. However, you can still watch the video and that's way more important than my cloud of tags!



I found the video on the Brookston Beer Bulletin website. Also, here is a link to the Trumer website (where I couldn't find the original video).

Writing Update

A lot of people have been asking about the progress so far on my beer trip. Currently I’m back in Des Moines, the trip is over, and I started writing the book about my journey early last week.

The book is going to be split into chapters based on the cities I was in. Some chapters such as the one on Little Rock, Arkansas will be short (I only spent one afternoon in town at one brewery). Some, such as the Saint Louis chapter, will be much longer. While in Saint Louis I made it to six breweries and did interviews at each one.

Within each chapter I will be talking about what I did in the cities, the history of the breweries I visited, I will include parts of the interviews I conducted, some of the beer related history of the city, general stories from my travels, and a few other goodies.

After getting started I was already having some serious issues working on the first chapter on the topic of homebrewing. I got myself into a cycle of writing a few pages and then starting to edit. By edit I mean deleting absolutely everything I had written and starting from scratch again. It’s a nasty cycle to be in, even worse than writer’s block. Too many ideas, too many different ways to start, it’s not pretty.

Yesterday afternoon I had an epiphany; I didn’t have to start from chapter one. Instead I began writing about my trip to Boulevard Brewing Company in Kansas City and Free State Brewing in Lawrence, KS and so far it has been incredibly productive. In fact, things are rolling along so nicely that I’m going to get back to it right now!

One last thing, don’t forget to check out the facebook page for All Hopped Up. I’ve been putting up pictures from each stop of the beer trip.

I'm BAAACKK!!!!

It has been far too long. Nearly a month has gone by since I decided to put the blog on hiatus and simply enjoy myself on my incredible beer trip. I was spending far too much time writing a blog about my trip and not nearly enough going out and enjoying myself in these amazing towns I stopped in. It’s going to make for better articles in the long run because instead of hunkering down in a hotel room to write a

(the picture is of my friend Alyse at Rahr Brewing in Fort Worth where she got to sign a burbon barrel)

new post I went out to bars and brewpubs to talk to people about their local beers. No worries though, I was taking copious notes at each tour and recording every interview so I have more than enough information to work for each post about a brewery visit.

Just to give you a heads up about what is on the way my last post was about my visit to Trailhead Brewing Company in a suburb of Saint Louis, it was my thirteenth stop. Before I got back to Des Moines I made it to another nineteen breweries in five more states. Those include everything from the behemoth Miller and Anheuser-Busch facilities in Milwaukee and Saint Louis to tiny brewpubs in Champaign, Illinois and Saint Paul, MN. City breweries and rural breweries are represented. Those who contract out their brewing to other breweries, and some who brew by contract for others. The large, the small, the new the old, pretty much every type of brewery you can imagine.

I’m also going to be splitting up posts about the beer trip with posts about various other beer related topics. It’s going to be a hybrid between how the blog began back in July and how it was with posts about my beer trip.

Watch closely for new posts, they should be going up daily from here on out. Please ask questions, leave comments, and let me know if there is anything you would really like to see discussed on here.

For now, Cheers!