Brewing Diary

Check out our car!!!

We put some stickers on so you can spot us zooming around town. Not that our car zooms much, but hey! These aren't exactly go faster stripes, but Jack and Co. will be fun we think. Hooray!

Pick up a copy of the Weekly Dig this week (hey: every week!) if you can. Baby Tree is featured in the BeerAdvocate column. Hope you're enjoying this first seasonal, we've just brewed our second.

We're planning a beer social event, because we feel like we haven't been out and about enough. If anyone wants to suggest a venue, we're all ears. We're thinking Cambridge Common, hopefully in the next week or so. Watch this space!

Martha and I are needing to move between now and August 1! We're looking for a one bedroom apartment in Cambridge, ideally with a deck, porch, patio, yard or some place to cookout (and have a couple beers). Oh yeah, we have a cat too. If anyone hears of anything let us know okay?

Cheers

Its been a great few weeks for Pretty Things, and for great beer in Saint Botolph’s Town. Last week the Craft Brewers Conference was in town for the first time in 12 years. This is the national tradeshow and convention for the craft-brewing trade, so the city was filled from Fan Pier to Coolidge Corner with the best brewers in the country and beyond.

Many of us local brewers will have memories to tell the grand kids about, should they care. For me the most surreal moment was standing in Deep Ellum speaking with Cantillon brewer Jean Van Roy while he drank Jack D’Or. Or perhaps it was when Sam Calgione of Dogfish Head asked to pour Jack for a seminar he was on the panel for.

But it was also a great time to see old faces and friends. I haven’t been gone for too long but seeing people like Paul McErlean (Mendicino Brewing, Saratoga Springs), Todd Ashman (Fifty Fifty Brewing Co., California) and Pete Slosberg (of Pete’s Wicked fame) was enough to realize one of the reasons I moved back: so many great people in brewing here!

Today also marked the shipment of our first pallet of beer out of state. It could be one of those moments where everything changes and we move onto the next stage. But I somehow doubt this. Will we stop coming up with beer ideas late on a weekday night? Will I stop sketching the labels on our wonky dining room table? I guarantee every bottle will still be labeled by hand by a bleary-eyed couple during a long Saturday session. Helped by whoever we can rope in: this photo's of me and Jim, our long suffering DJ and friend! Thanks also to Marc who helped out this last weekend.

We’ve been thinking a lot about the future of Pretty Things lately. Where will this “project” take us? But like beer, I think it’s best enjoyed in the present.

Cheers from Dann

Couple of quick things to report today: First, if you're wondering where Dann's blog entries have gone, well, he's basically gone rogue. Rogue brewers are all over town this week! The Craft Brewer's Conference is in town and Dann's making the most of it and hanging out having fun.

He'll be back when he gets over it!

Anyway, we wanted to link to this blog that just came out: Food and Wine Magazine, no less. We're excited, it's a great little piece, so have a read here:

http://www.foodandwine.com/blogs/mouthing-off/2009/04/22/A-Fabulous-New-...

The writer had Jack D'Or at Hungry Mother's in Cambridge, which is a great restaurant if any of you fancy trying some fun local food. They've carried our beers virtually since day one: certainly since batch one! So we thank them for that.

Oh, and that's a new one: an egg with a mustache! I guess it beats lemon... Go Jack!

Last night we had our first ever Pretty Things beer dinner, hosted by VeeVee, Jamaica Plain.

It was a magical night for us: Seth, the head chef, brought together a team of fantastic chefs and produced an amazing evening of food. Danny, Brent and Kelly hosted and created a great, relaxing atmosphere. We ate spring grass-fed lamb from Vermont, local seafood, and really amazing cheeses. You can read more about the food, much more eloquently written

here

But we'd be lying if we denied that the highlight for us came from the beers. It's the first time that either of us has been able to have our new beer, Baby Tree, from a keg. Also, it was the first time we've been able to see our beers served sequentially, from great glassware, with wonderful food. It brought our whole project into focus for us, and I have to say we felt hugely proud of the beers that we've produced in 4 months. It was great to have them one after the other, and of course it fired us up for our next seasonal beer (I think Dann's going to brew it next week, so watch this space!).

The night felt like an arrival for us, and we were really excited to share it with old and new friends. We met the best people last night!

So: thanks once again to everyone who has been a part of our project up to now. Thanks for the help with promotion, music (DJ Bocktech), food (Dannyvee and his staff), website (Adam), labels (Wally) and all the rest!!

Okay, I've been reading through some comments online about the label of our first beer Jack D'Or. Remember Jack is the mustachioed creature standing knee-deep in the mash tun surrounded by water (see lower right). Perhaps it's because I drew him, perhaps it's because I'm a brewer, but I can't believe people don't instantly recognize him as a GRAIN OF BARLEY! No, he's not a lemon, not a bean, not an onion, not "some sort of root vegetable" as a friend put it.

The "give away", or what I though was a give-away was the slender curl at the top of Jack's "head". This is the acrospire, or the bit that the maltster forces the grain to grow in order to convince the grain to unleash its starch reserves. Or I suppose it's a lemon left to fester on the window sill!

I'll give you the fact that most of you probably aren't intimately familiar with a corn of barley. Also, the scale is obviously all wrong. Hops are about twenty times bigger than a barleycorn. If barley was that big compared to the mash vessel a typical beer would be made of less than one kernel, instead of hundreds of thousands or millions or whatever it is. Obviously the mustache doesn't help.

But don't spread the word, ask your friends and let us know: what do they think Jack D'Or is? My guess is still a barleycorn but who am I to say?

Dann