Cheers!
Richard.

Feel free to stop by for a taste or two during the 4-hour window this coming Saturday. Can’t wait to see you.

Cheers!
Richard.

I’ll be live-tweeting the brew on our Twitter feed: @ESBAle.

We’ll be grabbing a couple of pints upstairs in the Mezzanine loft when we’re done brewing. Heads up – the Giants host the Phillies on Saturday evening (first pitch at 6:05pm) so the pub promises to be getting pretty busy as the afternoon goes on.

For those new to the 21st Amendment Brewery, you can access directions by clicking HERE.

Cheers! Hope to see you Saturday.

-Richard.

We have bottled our first ever pilsener which tastes good but not great… need to figure out how to tweak for better results. I’ll save some for you regulars, the next time we’re open.

With regard to email: for some reason, none of my outbound emails have been reaching their intended recipients. I am in the process of fixing that, but will resend emails using my personal account because some of you have been awaiting responses for a number of weeks now.

Looking forward to beating this thing and getting back to brewing soon.

See you at the ESB soon I hope… don’t forget, we’re also your home for the NFL once the Fall rolls around. We get every NFL game in the pub throughout the season (Miami Dolphins getting precedence over all other games of course).

Cheers!
Richard.

One of which was this past Saturday. We opened the doors from 11:30am – 3:30pm and tasted 9 different beers (3 of my own, 6 “guests”) so we could compare and contrast styles. I had planned on making a Rye ale but am glad I chose to postpone the brew given the number of people that joined us throughout the day.

So… given the demand (I’m now receiving multiple phone calls and emails each week about open hours) but keeping into account our supply (currently running extremely low), I plan on aggressively brewing in the months of June and July. We’ll be doing new batches of Daddy’s Chocolate Milk, B3 Bomber, and Addison’s Firecracker Red. I also plan on going back to the drawing board with Mummy’s Double Honey (last one took a lot to be desired) and a brand new beer that includes a pound of roasted rye and a generous (but monitored) helping of rosemary. We plan on crowning this one our Summer Rosemary Rye.

This will all lead up to some great open house events later in the Summer…

Apologies for the radio silence here… something I plan on remedying moving forward. For now, I’ll leave you with a short and sweet review by one of our newest “customers”, Dan Markham… check out his cool panoramic pic of our “Beer Garden”.

Cheers!
Richard.

I hadn’t planned on making a pilsener at first, but I was inspired when I visited Fermentation Solutions for the first time. I tend to get 75% of my ingredients locally at SF Brewcraft in San Francisco. The rest of the time, I’ll do one-off trips to More Beer in Concord. However, earlier this week I discovered a brewery supply store just minutes from my office down here in Campbell.

Fermentation Solutions is a family-owned store that manages to pack a lot of equipment and supplies into a relatively small space. Although the grains are primarily pre-packaged and pre-milled (I prefer to build my recipe onsite from scratch), the hop and yeast fridge was impressive and it had everything anyone would need to get started brewing beer at home. It also boasted the best library I’ve seen at a brewery supply store yet. I imagine, given the amount of equipment on display, they get more home winemakers than brewers but I know now that I have a store to stop at in a pinch on my way home if I want to bottle or keg or even flash-brew an ale at the end of the working day.

Looking forward to seeing how this pilsener works out.

Cheers!
RBH

Quick update on brews available at the ESB:

Vanilla Porter in the keg. First time brewing this particular porter. It was a variation of Quincy’s Winter Warmer and I think I used just a tad too much dark roast. That, partnered with the vanilla bean addition when racking, has accentuated a sourness at the back of the mouth after first sipping. This could be due to its relative youth (needs at least a month more in the keg I think) and I’m hoping that is the case.

Daddy’s Chocolate Milk. When in doubt, brew a stout. This one finished its time in the secondary this weekend and we’ve bottled/kegged equal amounts. Looking forward to sharing this one with friends and neighbors soon.

B3 Bomber Ale. Our second attempt at Bill Brand’s namesake ale. The first was so good we thought we’d play around with it the second time and added some Kent Golding hops halfway through the boil. This was in addition to the recipe and process followed the first time around. This goes into the secondary tonight and will be kegged on May 3.

We’re going to try our first Belgian Wit of the year this weekend.

Cheers!
Richard.

COMPLAINT FILED
Never has this support been more needed than it has been these past 48 hours. As some of you already know by now, my wife returned home on Tuesday afternoon to be greeted by Officer Miguel Granados and Deputy City Attorney Michael Weiss. They were responding to a neighbor’s complaint about having an “Open Bar/Brewery” on our premises.

For anyone that has visited the Elizabeth Street Brewery over the last 6 years, you know immediately that we are NOT a business or licensed brewery/bar. Something that was also immediately evident to Officer Granados earlier this week. He and I exchanged emails over the past 24 hours and the matter has been resolved. We will continue to brew much as we have done and will continue to invite friends and neighbors to come enjoy our beers with us as we try to refine recipes and work on our business plan.

Which leads me to the complaint. I do not know who filed it, nor do I need to for that matter. A number of friends and neighbors have questioned why the individual chose to go to the police rather than come and discuss it with me and my family first (something that had crossed my mind too). However, it also has to be pointed out that I didn’t go to each of my neighbor’s homes last December before I started to slap an open sign in the middle of my driveway inviting folks in for a beverage. If one were to visit this website and see the sign outside our home, one could easily think that we’re a professional operation, without investigating further.

WE’RE NOT A LICENSED PUB
I have received phone calls from frustrated neighbors who haven’t been able to find our pub or have no indication of when we’re open. Personally, I think that is the beauty of what we’re doing. Half the fun is discovering the place for yourself. We are a family living in Noe Valley that wants to share our passion with our friends and neighbors – that passion just happens to be beer. Plain and simple. We don’t request payment for what we do, we just want your honest feedback on the beer and ideas of what we can do to improve before we try to open a real brewpub restaurant in the neighborhood.

Having said all of this, I am going to discontinue the use of the sign outside our home. It is large and obviously offensive to some and unnecessary. If people truly are interested in knowing what we’re doing, we put everything right here on our website. I will be brewing over the next few weeks – behind closed doors – so that we can start organizing some open houses in the late Spring and into Summer and really offer you an array of great beers to enjoy with us. Remember to follow us on Twitter too: @ESBAle.

The ESB PUB CLUB
There are three new honorary members of the “Pub Club” – folks that are great supporters of what we’re doing and that have, in some form or other, helped further us along in our journey.

The first is Kelly, our first ever “regular” of 2009. The only person to attend every open house since December. Your support for what we’re doing is infectious and I thank you!

The second is Kristian, who not only joined me for beers for the entire duration that we were open on Saturday (bringing along with him a self-engraved bottle capper) but came back later this week and donated a CO2 tank for the cause. Huge!

Finally, an extra special thank you to Officer Granados for his understanding and openness in listening to what my wife and I are doing here in our home. So refreshing and incredibly heart-warming to be honest. We will be posting our email exchange to the wall of the pub for our friends and family to read when they visit.

So, for those of you following our exploits. Please be patient over the next few weeks as we remain “closed’ working on recipes… the fruits of our labor, as always, will be shared with each and every one of you when the time is right.

After a rather hectic week, I can’t wait to brew our next batch of Daddy’s Chocolate Milk this weekend.

Relax. Have a homebrew.

Cheers!
Richard.