Central valley or bay area members

[CptMidway]

Bakersfield here.

I have a Pivo Grodziskie that's crashing. Next on deck will be a Kentucky Common.

 

[bleme]

I'm moving to Visalia in July. I have a feeling I'll need to homebrew just to have good beer!

There is a ton of good beer to be had around Visalia and TCHOPS is an outstanding homebrew club!

Rozis on Lovers Lane and EZMart Liquor are the best bottle shops. I only go to BevMo if I am looking for imports.

For microbrews, you can hit Brewbakers, Sequoia Brewing and Barrelhouse in Visalia, Kaweah Brewing in Tulare, Rocky Hill Brewing in Exeter, or Three Rivers Brewing in... Three Rivers.

They also have great taps at The Planning Mill, Howies Pizza, Pita Kabob Gastropub, and PhD. Fatte Albert's Pizza in Hanford is worth the drive.

 

[rjs3273]

Has anyone been to Admiral Maltings in Alameda, CA? I like the idea of using locally grown and malted grain. I sent a message to them via their web page query form asking if they could sell in single sack quantities direct from the malthouse door, but never got a reply. I can well understand if they don't want to mess around with such small quantities but was wondering if anyone had done the maltings tour and if they said anything then about small quantity (50lb) retail?

 

[TwistedGray]

Monterey Bay here

 

[6Tap]

Has anyone been to Admiral Maltings in Alameda, CA? I like the idea of using locally grown and malted grain. I sent a message to them via their web page query form asking if they could sell in single sack quantities direct from the malthouse door, but never got a reply. I can well understand if they don't want to mess around with such small quantities but was wondering if anyone had done the maltings tour and if they said anything then about small quantity (50lb) retail?

Funny you ask because I called them today and spoke with Dave.

Short answer yes, they do he told me.

Would recommend callling them
In advance to check how much they have in stock.

Was told they are currently out of feldblume until 2nd week of October.

Sounds like they offer tours on weekends.

Only malthouse I know of in California.

I will make the drive in a few weeks
From the Sacramento area to check it out and buy some sacks
Of malt.

Looking forward to it.

 

[rjs3273]

Funny you ask because I called them today and spoke with Dave.

Thanks, 6tap. That's good news. At the moment I have grain left for one batch and then I'll be giving them a call.

 

[lupulinaddict]

Funny you ask because I called them today and spoke with Dave.

Short answer yes, they do he told me.

Would recommend callling them
In advance to check how much they have in stock.

Was told they are currently out of feldblume until 2nd week of October.

Sounds like they offer tours on weekends.

Only malthouse I know of in California.

I will make the drive in a few weeks
From the Sacramento area to check it out and buy some sacks
Of malt.

Looking forward to it.

I’m curious what the price is buying direct. Last time I was at morebeer they had bulk sacks for sale. Price I was around 70, I think.

 

[SanPancho]

Its not cheap. I am of the opinion you are likely to get similar quality going with the uk malsters, but at better price. But if your goal is to be local, then they're the only game in town(state).

 

[rjs3273]

Speaking as a Brit myself I will happily accept your suggestion that we produce great malt. I certainly do not, but it is nice to imagine my compatriots know what they are doing. I doubt it often enough.

I agree on the price. I don't expect buying direct will be any cheaper than retail at all. I just fancy the idea of going to do their malthouse tour, having a beer in their tap room and then bringing my grain home with me. I do think it is good to try and support local industry where I can though I doubt my principles are strong enough that I would ever get to the point of using them exclusively.

 

[rjs3273]

Thanks, 6tap. That's good news. At the moment I have grain left for one batch and then I'll be giving them a call.

Closing the loop on this, I finally made it to Admiral Malting. I definitely recommend it if you are in the area. There is not much to the free tour, but what can you expect; a steeping tank, a floor and a kiln. I have seen "floors" before! As brief as the tour may be, I am certainly glad I went and it was well worth the admission price (free). It's nice to see it all in person. The tap room has large windows overlooking the malting floor and you can sit and drink your beer while watching the barley do its thing. (It doesn't actually do much except sit there on the floor.) I couldn't say that I learnt anything at all new from the tour, but I enjoyed it and the staff in the taproom were well versed in their beers and keen to talk about the different malts.

I had not been to Alameda before either, which was an interesting town and worth a little walk around. The maltings is on the decommissioned naval air base where many of the hangars have been repurposed to civilian use, mostly distilleries and wineries it seems. Good views across the bay too.

If your main goal is to buy malt, I'd suggest trying to go in week-day working hours. We were there over a weekend and despite having called in advance to make sure they had the malt, when I got there none of the staff knew where to get it or what was available. (That's not meant as a criticism. They are really there to run the taproom and they did that well.) I did eventually get my sack after the fourth person I spoke to. I just kept asking different people until I got the answer I wanted. As SanPancho says above, it is not cheap. Talking to their sales office, they say they deliberately do not want to undercut the local homebrew shops that retail their malt, which seems perfectly fair to me.


Me looking decidedly shifty... 'The Rake'

 

[rjs3273]

I’m curious what the price is buying direct. Last time I was at morebeer they had bulk sacks for sale. Price I was around 70, I think.

Yes. About the same. They specifically say they do not want to undercut local retail stores, which makes sense to me. It's worth an afternoon out to see the malting anyway.

 

[6Tap]

Closing the loop on this, I finally made it to Admiral Malting. I definitely recommend it if you are in the area. There is not much to the free tour, but what can you expect; a steeping tank, a floor and a kiln. I have seen "floors" before! As brief as the tour may be, I am certainly glad I went and it was well worth the admission price (free). It's nice to see it all in person. The tap room has large windows overlooking the malting floor and you can sit and drink your beer while watching the barley do its thing. (It doesn't actually do much except sit there on the floor.) I couldn't say that I learnt anything at all new from the tour, but I enjoyed it and the staff in the taproom were well versed in their beers and keen to talk about the different malts.

I had not been to Alameda before either, which was an interesting town and worth a little walk around. The maltings is on the decommissioned naval air base where many of the hangars have been repurposed to civilian use, mostly distilleries and wineries it seems. Good views across the bay too.

If your main goal is to buy malt, I'd suggest trying to go in week-day working hours. We were there over a weekend and despite having called in advance to make sure they had the malt, when I got there none of the staff knew where to get it or what was available. (That's not meant as a criticism. They are really there to run the taproom and they did that well.) I did eventually get my sack after the fourth person I spoke to. I just kept asking different people until I got the answer I wanted. As SanPancho says above, it is not cheap. Talking to their sales office, they say they deliberately do not want to undercut the local homebrew shops that retail their malt, which seems perfectly fair to me.

View attachment 601261
Me looking decidedly shifty... 'The Rake'

Thanks for sharing your experience rjs3273.
I still plan to go there sometime and check it out.

 

[Northern_Brewer]

Any suggestions for an "interesting" LHBS or beer shop in San Jose or surrounds?

A friend sometimes makes business trips from the UK to Silicon Valley and has kindly offered to bring back some beer stuff. They're not into beer themselves, but are prepared to follow instructions within reason - so no waiting for 2 hours at a brewery, but they could grab 1-2 cans from somewhere downtown. Or at the airport would be least inconvenient, is there any decent beer at SFO?

So it wouldn't be anything terribly obscure - and that's OK, it would just be interesting to have some decent beer that isn't readily available fresh in the UK but I'm not really sure what. Do things like Pliny get down that far?

I know things like hops could get complicated - I don't want my friend to be stopped by sniffer dogs at the airport! - but some heritage hops or obscure yeast would also be good if there was a convenient LHBS that had that kind of thing.

Any ideas?
TIA

 

[rjs3273]

What a nice idea. I having a feeling I am going to completely fail on any useful suggestions, but I like the idea. It is tricky because you get used to what you know and see every day and often never realise it is unusual or unique. Just about everything these days seems to arrive at retail in sealed packaging and I would guess that anything I can buy in my local shop is available everywhere. Since I can buy yeast from all over the world, I just assume that other places can buy all the common yeasts from here. Maybe that is not true.

One thing that seems to be appearing more and more is exotically processed hops. I have not tried them all, but the concentrated hop extracts of various kinds (cryo-hops, CO2 extracts, hop powder, distilled hop oil, etc) are proliferating here. Are they also appearing in the UK? If not, they are small, light and easy to transport.

I am British, but been here >15 years, and trying to think about what I see as the biggest differences in beer, it is not the ingredients themselves. (As I say through, I have not brewed in the UK for a couple of decades, so very out of date.) I do however find the final beers very different. Particularly in IPAs, US brewers are getting wildly carried away (in a way that I love!) with hops, both in bitterness and late additions. If you want to try something different, and your friend can manage weight, I think almost any randomly selected IPAs would be interesting to you. They are very different from a British pub IPA. I don't really know San Jose so I cannot recommend any particular bottle shop that has a good range of singles, but hopefully someone else can chime in.

The more I think about it, this sounds like it deserves a thread of its own, just investigating what is unique or different in various places.

 

[btbnl]

Or at the airport would be least inconvenient, is there any decent beer at SFO?

So it wouldn't be anything terribly obscure - and that's OK, it would just be interesting to have some decent beer that isn't readily available fresh in the UK but I'm not really sure what. Do things like Pliny get down that far?

Nothing really at the airport, but provided they're happy to pack bottles properly and check their bag in, they should be able to get you some Pliny the Elder in San Jose. I believe it is available at Cazadores Bottle Shop, though it would be worth calling to find out which day they get it since many places sell out within hours of their weekly delivery arriving.

 

[Northern_Brewer]

Things have come a long way since you were here - you'll find multiple fruit IPAs and sours in a smalltown Tesco these days.

But the economics of bringing beer over from the States are pretty horrible unless you're doing it on the scale of Anchor/SN/Goose/Lagunitas, so it's mostly local interpretations of what brewers have read about and drunk on holiday, hence my interest in something classic like Pliny. News travels fast - it's been over a year since we had smalltown brewers making Brut IPAs for instance, but that's maybe one style that is new enough to be worth importing? But these days you only have to go to Manchester to get world-class DIPAs hopped at 24g/l from a brewery rated second only to Hill Farmstead, so big hoppy beers no longer have quite the novelty value they once did. Sure, I'd love to try some HF/Trillium/Treehouse beers, but this isn't the route for me to get them. And that's OK. As I say, something like Pliny would be more than interesting, to be honest even something like Two-Hearted would be interesting to try as they don't export here (think Bells showed up at a festival once, but that's it).

Cryo hops are a pretty good shout - for some reason there's a problem getting them in retail size over here, so about the only place you see them are Beerhawk, who are an online beer store that was bought by ABI and who now brings in Northern Brewer (no relation!) packs in bulk, so they replicate all the peculiarities of the US homebrew market like selling hops in ounces rather than 100g packs. I'm not the biggest ABI fan though.

Otherwise, we're pretty good for the mainstream stuff, if you look at somewhere like BrewUK you'll see we can get most of the big name liquid yeasts - White Labs, Wyeast, Yeast Bay, Imperial (and more unusually BrewUK also have Omega and Giga). So it's really just the little guys we miss - it would be nice to have some of the weirder kveiks from Escarpment and Maniacal for instance, and we don't see the Yeast Bay beta releases. I'm more into the historical side of things, so some of the "forgotten" old hop varieties would be nice - but again that might have to wait until I go myself, I'm not sure how comfortable airport security would be with hops, even if California is a bit more relaxed about these things than the UK.

@btbnl - thanks, that's just the kind of place I was thinking of - and they have a fairly recent stocklist online which is useful. Looks like you guys are far more geared to multipacks than we are which is a bit inconvenient, I'm trying not to overload my beer mule so single 12oz's would be easier. What are bars like for take-outs of single bottles?

Any others? I know they stay with friends somewhere like Mountain View, I'm not quite sure exactly but it's somewhere on that side.

 

[Positronic_Matrix]

Hello. I’m in the Dublin/Pleasanton, Livermore, Tracy, and Mountain House area. I’ve been a lurker on the forum for a long time but recently, after discovering BIAB, have I become an active brewer again. Young children necessitated a pause but now that I’m settled in a larger house with growing kids, my hobbies have restarted.

 

[GJOCONNELL]

I live in San Leandro (previously Concord) but work in San Bruno. I have a pretty serious Solera up and running (4 whiskey barrels, 1 BBL chronical, 2 Speidel 15.9 units) and a handful of SS brewtech buckets to make the beer world go round and round.

I also recently picked up a Grainfather after having a less than stellar experience with the Brewie+ Plus it basically crapped out of me within brews.

 

[Nate R]

I live in San Leandro (previously Concord) but work in San Bruno. I have a pretty serious Solera up and running (4 whiskey barrels, 1 BBL chronical, 2 Speidel 15.9 units) and a handful of SS brewtech buckets to make the beer world go round and round.

I also recently picked up a Grainfather after having a less than stellar experience with the Brewie+ Plus it basically crapped out of me within brews.

What have you done with your Brewie+? Have you read the thread here? I have a B20, and with my modest (or, non-existent) handymany skills have been able to repair the main issues.
For a few hours, and about $30 or so in parts, you can probably repair the issues fairly easily.

 

[Northern_Brewer]

A friend sometimes makes business trips from the UK to Silicon Valley and has kindly offered to bring back some beer stuff. They're not into beer themselves, but are prepared to follow instructions within reason - so no waiting for 2 hours at a brewery, but they could grab 1-2 cans from somewhere downtown. Or at the airport would be least inconvenient, is there any decent beer at SFO?

So it wouldn't be anything terribly obscure - and that's OK, it would just be interesting to have some decent beer that isn't readily available fresh in the UK but I'm not really sure what. Do things like Pliny get down that far?

As it happens, that trip all ended up A Bit Complicated and they weren't able to get anything for me, unfortunately on their last day I discovered that their local Whole Foods had Pliny but they'd just been there the day before and didn't have time to go back. But they're now going back on an extended trip of a couple of months, starting in Palo Alto and mostly around Silicon Valley but with a likely trip to Seattle (Redmond, cough).

So the brief is the same - what beer/homebrew stuff is the most interesting-to-someone-in-the-UK and that won't be inconvenient to find in the SW Bay Area?

They do go to places like Whole Foods, but annoyingly WF have put up an aggressive geofence so you can't check US availability from the UK any more.

 

[Homewrecker Brewing]

Are there many of you out there? I am in Manteca/Modesto area an work in Livermore area.

I know this is an old thread, but we have a club in the Ripon/Manteca/Modesto area if you’re interested.

 

[Homewrecker Brewing]

Just got all moved to Ripon... now to unpack all of these boxes... ugh. When we get all settled, it will be time for me to jump in!

Are you still brewing? Still in Ripon? There are several homebrewers in Ripon.

 

[landmissle]

Representing the finer citizenry of Modesto. Brewing my fourth batch for the sake of the Red Ale fans. While it's good to see the growth of craft beer over the years, I'm pretty tired of IPA this and that with a hazy twist to shake things up. Hence, I'll brew my own red ale; thank you very much....

 

[mggray87]

im in east bay, Brentwood. Getting back into brewing. About done receiving all my equipment and looking forward to the first brew!.