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 :)

There was an radio article on NPR this morning that talked about Winter Beers. Was a pretty decent spot. Mostly talked about a guy in Philly that runs wine, cheese, and beer cafe called Tria. He also apparently has whats called "Fermentation School" where they teach about the differences in winter beers (at least in this case). There was a mention of Dupont Avec Les Bon Voeux, which I just happened to pick up at Perfect Pour a few weeks ago, so that definately gets me more interested.

You can find the article at the NPR website.

There is already a thread on beeradvocate about the piece, but not much there yet.

Saw this post on the AHA Teck Talk forum. Thought others might be interested. Also, here is the article from the website.

I caught a posting on beernews.org today about a broadcast of the Discovery Dirty Jobs show in Yakima county at Hop Union. Thought I would share in case anyone wants to watch. I missed tonights showing but I will surely catch one of the later broadcasts.

Here is the Beernews.og post:

Set your TiVo/DvR. The Discovery Channel episode of Dirty Jobs in which Host, Mike Rowe, travels to Yakima County, Washington, to visit HopUnion LLC, a major hop supplier, will air on the following dates and times (EST):

11/25 Tues 9PM
11/26 1AM
11/27 10PM
11/28 2AM
12/2 8PM
12/3 12AM

More info at The Brookston Beer Bulletin.

The discovery channel site has an interesting blurb on the episode:

    "Mike travels to Yakama, Washington to harvest hops, the main ingredient in beer...."

Very interesting, I had no idea hops were the main ingredient in beer. Here I was thinking it was water and malt sugar from barley, silly me.