Thank You, Corina Zappia

The NYC Homebrewersguild would like to extend our appreciation for your candid reporting of our humble guild. Thank you and we love ya!!


Guild's VP
AzianBrewer


Sleazy Sherm's Twisted Labels

Here's what she wrote about us:

Liquid City
Hopped Up
Hardcore brewing dudes make peanut butter beer in an NYC tenement apartment

by Corina Zappia
August 18th, 2005 1:35 PM

Bottles of "Sleazy Sherm's" homebrew
photo: Corina Zappia

Think of beer devotion like an onion: The top layers are disinterested Bud drinkers; the mid-level, microbrew devotees; and beyond that, exists the beer-fest goers. Peel back each level and the group gets smaller, till at the core you have only the most dedicated, the most steadfast, and the most zealous. These are the homebrewers.

This is not about that stud in your freshman dorm who rocked out with his $29.99 Mr. Beer kit. True homebrewers may start with beer-in-a-bag, but have since ascended to a much higher plane of expertise. They join clubs around the country, some with alarmingly cute names like "Barley Literates," "Dead Yeast Society," "Urban Knaves of Grain," "Foam on the Range," and "BURP" (Brewers United for Real Potables). They participate in nationwide contests, and some, like Brooklyn Brewery's Garrett Oliver, move onto full-time commercial careers. And they are not just a product of the suburbs, where there is the luxury of space.

Founded in 1987, the simply-named New York City Homebrewers Guild meets at Burp Castle every month to share their homemade creations, discuss recipes, and listen to guest speakers from nearby breweries talk about the craft. Of all the members, 45 to 50 regularly attend meetings and brew from home even if home is an L.E.S studio, or a one-bedroom on the Upper East Side.

Dave Witzel, the current President of NYCHG, is one of those guys. "I am able to do it in my tiny six-by-seven kitchen, where there's not really room for two people at once. For most of us, the kitchen is our heat source. And it's really a five-gallon bucket sitting in your living room at hopefully a constant temperature, as constant as you can get it. My wife doesn't want to be around when I do it, cause it takes up three hours and the whole place smells like wort."

Witzel admits it's a hobby that instantly ferrets out the casual beer lover (or those mildly curious about that homebrewing trend from a few years ago). "There's some equipment you have to buy, which is going to take up some room, especially in New York City. You gotta babysit the beer, be very clean, and sanitary and it still might not come out all that good."

To an outsider, listening in on a Q&A with a visiting speaker last Tuesday, a representative from the Chelsea Brewing Company as a bit like sitting through chemistry class, or eavesdropping on a lecture about aging prize Gouda (i.e., hearing statements like "Because with some yeast, if you drop the temperature 5 degrees . . . ," "What can I do to maximize the yeast potential?," or "The strain you're dealing with is made for high gravity.")

Part of the challenge is experimenting with new tastes. A business systems analyst during the day, Paul Lau socks away time to create beers he flavors with lemongrass, kaffir limes, or jasmine tea leaves. Phil Clarke, a freelance writer for the Ale Street News, wants to try a spruce beer, made from real pine needles. If this were a foreign car club, Phil would be the rock star with the million-dollar Maserati. He has the beer-club equivalent: A spacious Bronx apartment with a designated brewing room and a wife who's as much a fan as he is. Phil produces 80 gallons of beer a year, although he informs me the legal limit is 200.

To the outside observer, the members produce what appears to be a baffling variety of beer. Jeff, a software developer, brews everything from ale to hard lemonade to even sake out of a two-room tenement apartment in the East Village. He has no bathroom sink, but his greater problem is rodents. "You have to store your grains in metal tins. The mice in my apartment are super mice." His website details his experiments with spiced ciders, English beers and a peanut butter porter, made with real organic peanut butter he let sit out for a month, diligently scraping away the oil that rises to the top every three days. "Not very oily, like the others you've had, right?" he hopefully says at the meeting, proudly offering up his porter to the other members. Not very oily at all. And it tastes . . . like peanut butter.

Some admit they don't whip out the good stuff for people they don't know, or even less-interested relatives. They are almost sweetly bashful about it, sharing their creations only with those who would appreciate or understand. Says Paul: "I'll offer them Bud, Bud Light, and Heineken instead." Their motives for brewing have little to do with price or lack of variety, in a city that offers every kind of beer imaginable. "The reason why everyone brews is just so you can make the beer exactly how you want it. That's like asking a baker why they want to bake their own bread," bellows Phil. "You can buy a jar of Prego," pipes in Paul, to offer up his reasoning, "but it'll never be the way Mom makes it."

Sake Night at SOY

The NYC Sake Enthusiasts group invaded a tiny Japanese eatery, SOY in LES. It is a BYOS (*Bring Your Own Sake) night. So everyone came prepared with a bottle of sake and shared it with the group. We told Etsko the propriate of the lovely SOY that we are only going to be there for couple of hours but we stayed until 10:30 pm. Etsko is master of tofu cuisine; stuffed, stir-fried with chives or chilled. Other than vegetarian plates, SOY's Cod with Ginger Sauce is quite a catch of the evening. The buttery flavor of the cod fillet blends well with my earthy Sato No Homare, a junmai ginjo. Everyone were pretty much buzzed by the end of the event. We were introduced to umeboshi (Japanese pickled plum) with shochu. I have tasted quite a few brands of Japanese shochu but never mixed it with umeboshi. When it comes to use shochu/soju as a mixer, I always prefer the Korean soju. It is cheap and harsh. Perfect for Sojutini, Sojudrivers and Soju-Mary.


The Invasion of Sake Enthusiasts

That night the group also tasted Sawanoi, a junmai ginjo from Tokyo and Fukunishiki, a junmai from Hyogo-Ken.

Training Day

Had my first training with Big O yesterday. We started at 8 am from his apartment in Turtle Bay and ran crosstown to the Westside Highway. Running in the heat and humidity is no fun. And on top of that I am struggling with a pain in the neck stiffness. I threw in the white towel about a quarter mile from his place. We ran about 5 miles in all. The mercury surged up to 99 degree. I love summer in NYC. Hot and muggy.


King Kong Ain't Got Nuthin' On Me

True Hall of Famers

I am a 49ers fan since 1984. Without a doubt Joe Montana is perhaps the greatest quarterback in the business. His style and techniques are studied by coaches, linebackers and prospective NFL & NCAA quarterbacks across North America. His departure of the Bay Area led to a new beginning of a very talented quarterback who created his own legacy in the NFL history. Steve Young is the name of the game. I think til these days he is one of the most underrated Superbowl MVP. He doesn't have a passing stronge arm like John Elway, the explosive accuracy of Dan Marino or run like Michael Vick. What earned him the Superbowl ring is his quick thinking and scrambling skill. So who is the next Steve Young??? Alex Smith??? I don't think so! I going to leave the rest of the writing to sport writer Charles Robinson. Here is his commentary of the Hall of Fame induction of Dan Marino and Steve Young....


CANTON, Ohio – Someone send the footage of Sunday's Pro Football Hall of Fame induction to Terrell Owens. That thought kept going through my head as I sat and watched the proceedings in Fawcett Stadium.

How long has it been since we've applauded star players who love pro football more than they expect pro football to love them back? If you had to think hard about that question, then maybe you should have been in Canton, too.

For one day, the annual enshrinement ceremony encouraged us to remember the NFL at its best and not worry about the league at its worst. So we mothballed Owens, Ricky Williams and Sean Taylor. We forgot the image of Adam "Pacman" Jones singing the praises of his bling on an NFL Network broadcast and Jake Plummer giving the middle finger to fans. We even disregarded the eight first-round draft picks engaged in training camp holdouts, including two – Chicago's Cedric Benson and Miami's Ronnie Brown – who were supposed to debut in Monday's Hall of Fame game.

Instead, we took the equivalent of offseason aspirin and spent a minute to remember that sometimes star players can give more than they receive.

So we celebrated Dan Marino, who managed to rewrite nearly every NFL passing record while spending his entire 17-year career with one team, the Miami Dolphins. We paid tribute to Steve Young, who rose from the role of perpetual second fiddle on the San Francisco 49ers to win the affection of the Bay Area.

We got to know Fritz Pollard, one of the game's African-American pioneers, whose hardships should make it a felony to complain about million-dollar contracts. And we paid homage to Benny Friedman, who went against league trends and planted the seed of today's scoreboard-happy passing games.

Sitting in the stadium Sunday and seeing former teammates embracing and Hall of Fame inductees mingling in bunches, it was easy to suspect that emotion would carry the day. But there was an underlying message, and it was slightly similar to last week's Baseball Hall of Fame inductions when Ryne Sandberg and Wade Boggs were critical of individual players becoming bigger than their sport. If anything, Sunday's ceremonies in Canton should have pounded home salient points: Nobody transcends the game, nobody deserves exclusive rights to a spotlight and every current player should wake up feeling blessed.

It was a message that gave me pause. I watched the glowing terms used to describe these men, and I wonder what we'll say about Owens, should he be enshrined one day. More appropriately, I wonder what Owens would say about everyone else.

It's a shame T.O. wasn't there when former Dolphins coach Don Shula walked onto the stage and got arguably the loudest standing ovation of the day. Or when Steve Young's wife began to weep when her husband said it was most important to be considered a Hall of Fame dad and husband. And surely Owens would have liked to have heard Pollard's grandson Stephen Towns remind the audience of the tragic and embarrassing moratorium NFL owners placed on black players in the 1930s and '40s.

Obviously, training camp precluded Owens from attending. But I hope he caught the ceremony on television. Maybe he saw that for all the talk of statistics and greatness in football – for all the money being made – the truly impactful statements were about history, family and journey.

Nobody stood at the podium and said: "Thank God I was the highest-paid player at my position" or "I could have won a Super Bowl if it wasn't for my quarterback." Instead, it was a merry-go-round of tributes to former teammates, coaches, family and fans. And a remembrance that players don't become beacons in the NFL simply by standing on their wallets.

They get there by having appreciation for both history and their peers. They get there on the shoulders of teammates – even the flawed and less talented ones. They get there by having a special kind of reverence. That's what we saw from Marino and Young on Sunday.

Marino talked about his pride of being part of a great Western Pennsylvania tradition of quarterbacks, including Joe Namath, Johnny Unitas, Joe Montana and Jim Kelly. He looped his speech back to Shula several times and gave special thanks to Mark Clayton and Mark Duper, who caught so many of his touchdown passes. Then, in what will be a memorable twist among Hall of Fame speeches, one of his sons tossed Marino a football, and he weaved Clayton into the spotlight.

"Go deep, Mark," Marino said, imploring Clayton to stand and catch one last pass.

It wasn't the grandstanding kind of gesture, either. Truthfully, both Marino and Young showed a remarkable amount of humility for the accomplishments of Friedman and Pollard, who passed away years before being recognized for their pivotal accomplishments. Surely, not all Hall of Famers are this deferential to their family or coaches or forefathers. But they should be. Surely some are gleeful at being fawned over for their talents for one last moment. But that's not what Sunday was about. And that's precisely what made it such a feel-good day for the league.

"I've accomplished many things," Marino said, "but what I cherish more than any record I hold, fourth-quarter comeback, or any wins I was involved in is the relationships."

Like Young, I'm guessing Marino wasn't just talking about football.

"For me, it will never again be third and 10, late in the fourth quarter and down by four in Candlestick Park," Young said. "Nothing in life can be like those great moments. But with those experiences, and all the other good things that happened, life today is even better. With my wife Barb and my two sons, Braedon and Jackson, I have found the secret to life: It's loving others more than yourself."

That's a significant point. Too bad there are some people in today's NFL who still don't get it.

The Land of Midnight Moon

EZRyder, the Mrs. and I checked out Satsko last weekend for some sake. The three of us polished off a bottle of Meibo Yowanotsuki or "Midnight Moon" and munched on some edamame in courtesy of Satsko (The sake we paid for). One word, Chardonnay. This ginjo is on the rich side. I have never tasted a buttery sake like Midnight Moon. It is more like the Midnight Oil. By the way, what ever happened to that 80's Aussie band??? Yes, I will pair Meibo Yowanotsuki with that 80's band. By the way, Satsko is one charming lady!!!

Nama Is My Summer Fling

So, I have a new summer fling besides that redhead in my dream. Well, I picked up a bottle of Ohyama Nama Sake on Saturday night with the Mrs. The refreshingness of the unpasteurized sake starts off with a light scent of melon and a finishing taste of dry cider. I know I have been drinking a lot of sake these days. But beer is still my No. 1 passion. Since, I am training for the marathon and my big day, it would be wise for me to ease up the beer from now to November. Kaz Yamazaki of Prestige informed me that sake actually helps burn fat....What kind of crap is that??? Don't alcohol convert to sugar once downed the hatch??