Homebrew to the Rescue!
To recruit participants for the Collaborator program, the Oregon Brew Crew held regular competitions to select good beers of interesting styles for Widmer to brew commercially on a small scale. A style would be selected and Widmer would furnish ingredients to those interested in brewing that style. In return, each was to deliver three bottles to be judged.
The winning beers were to be brewed in the company’s 10-barrel pilot brewery at the nearby Rose Garden Arena, here in Portland. Widmer’s pilot brewer, Ike Manchester, would then work with the brewers to formulate their beer as a commercial brew for a small production run of 10 barrels (310 gallons), which in turn would be marketed at selected local venues. Winning brewers each received a Widmer Brewer’s jacket, much like a high school letterman’s jacket. It was a satisfying venture for all concerned.
Widmer and brew-crew-member designers Jeff Brinlee, Jeff Langley and Ken Bietschek were shocked when their first product, Snow Plow Milk Stout (1998), went on to win gold medals at not one, but two, Great American Beer Festivals: 2002 and 2004. Widmer has since taken this beer into its regular seasonal production schedule as a winter beer. This award-winning brew featured dark chocolate malt and coffee along with lactose (milk sugar), plus the other malts usually found in this beer style.
Oregon Brew Crew member Noel Blake has been a leader in the Collaborator project right from the beginning. He has participated in no less than four of these brews.
Not since the days of Hammurabi has homebrewing been so highly regarded. It hasn’t always been that way, as many of us remember. The real reason homebrewers are so successful today is that there is so much information out there, along with a wide range of high quality commercial brewing ingredients on the market. If folks had had access to this much information in 1919, Prohibition would have been totally impossible. Pity that! The Prohibition era is where homebrew earned its old, bad, reputation: in the absence of commercial alcohol production, homebrew and home distillation became the major source of booze for the entire population.
Americans of that era only took to homebrewing because alcohol possession was illegal. Quality was not a requirement, nor an expectation. Brew quick, and drink it as fast as possible, to avoid getting caught in possession.
Today’s homebrewer is not of that ilk. The modern homebrewer brews his (usually he’s a he) beer to the highest standards of even the industrials. Quality is the key word here.
That’s not the end of it either. Craft brewers are producing many strange beers these days; and often a homebrewer will have done it first, before entering it in a competition. Homebrewers are still the cutting edge in much of today’s brewing accomplishments.
Ode to Michael Jackson
It was the legendary Michael Jackson (homebrewers were his favorite fans) in a speech at one homebrew conference, who called into question the sanity of non-homebrewers when he told us, “We are the sane people! The people out there are crazy.”
“We,” of course, are the homebrewers, and the rest of you are the great un-washed “them”—the crazies. I’m not sure I like that distinction. I have always been a bit leery of sanity. It’s not something I partake of, sans duress. I’ve often thought crazy people are the ones having fun—like me. They’re the ones who are fun to have around, like my friend Michael Jackson was. It was philosopher Alan Watts who defined sanity as a convention, something we agree upon. If the crazies are the fun people, then obviously sanity is a joke: and if that’s so, then the world is actually crazy and we are the only sane ones!
