I finally had a chance to watch the first episode of the new Brew Masters show on the discovery channel and was pleasantly surprised with what I found.

The show is well produced and presents very well, but it is somewhat of a Sam fest. Don't get me wrong Sam seems to be a great guy (only met him once or twice), but I was hoping to see a show that breaks out beyond what Dogfish head is doing. Hopefully this will happen eventually, but so far it has not. I haven't watched episodes 2-4 yet, but from what I hear and read their still focused around Sam and dogfish head. I will preserve judgment until at least the first season is over. The show is still enjoyable, even for an extreme beer geek like me. Its nice to see something beer related and interesting on TV.

Now for the fun part. If you watched the first episode you would know that it revolves around how the Bitches Brew came to be. In short, Sam was asked to make a beer by Sony for the 30th anniversary release of the groundbreaking Miles Davis Bitches Brew album. The episode shows how Sam rapidly produced a test batch and then put into final production in a very short period of time, so a lot of the drama was seeing how the Dogfish head folks were able to get it done in time.

One of the key parts of this was ensuring that the test batch was ready in time for SAVOR 2010 in DC. Spare the suspense, he made it of course. The crazy part about this was that John, Bill, and I were there. We were probably one of the first 10-15 people to try the Bitches Brew. We didn't know what it was about at the time, because if we did we may have hung around a bit longer. For us it was in and out, get the beer and move on as to not be in the lime light. In fact, after getting my glass I was asked by a women if I wanted to talk about the beer on camera after I made a comment to my friends about it. I gracefully declined a few times and went away. It's only after seeing this episode now that it is clear how close I came to be one of the reviewers shown in the episode.

To prove it I have pulled a small clip from the show where I am present (I hope there are no copyright issues with this, its only a 2 second clip). John and Bill are also on video but I have excluded then for now. Have a look, its a short clip :)

The event started off kind of bad because the live feed coming from CA was very choppy. The sound was not synced up and it dropped out a couple of times. It was eventually fixed about 30 minutes into the show.

Overall the creator did a good job on this documentary, though I think the content would better suited to a BMC drinker. I got the impression most of the people in the theatre were craft beer converts and the documentary was essentially preaching to the choir.

Going in I was hoping for more of a discussion about craft beer, but I guess the name really should have given it away. The movie was essentially the David and Goliath story, small versus big. The panel did there best to show that the craft beer movement is more about choice and innovation, but the movie was focused on the good versus bad theme, and this was played on throughout.

The documentary did highlight a few things that people are probably not aware of and should be.

1. The brewing industry giants are one top paying lobbyists in Washington
2. Beer distribution is forced to go through a 3 tier system (Brewer, Distributor, Retailer), which is very important to the big guys (e.g. BMC).

Simple fact is the laws make it hard for small craft brewers to start and survive. Then you have the big guys, who will do there best to takeover your business as soon as they see you gaining any market share.

So in the end I think it was worth it, though maybe not $15 worth it. The panel discussion at the end was cool, but a little short and best stein was not at his best. Not sure why they chose him.

Oh, almost forgot. The best part of the movie was when the video dropped out in the beginning and you heard the “cling, cling, cling” of someone's beer bottle falling to the ground. :)