TAP NY and the Albany Brew Crafters

Just a quick post here to plug the Albany Brew Crafters, and drop off a link to an interview I did with a blogger at the 2013 TAP NY Beer and Food Festival.

I'm a founding member and the current Brewmaster General of the Albany Brew Crafters, a homebrewing club in Albany, NY. We've been around since April of 2012, and have about 25 paid members, and 30 regular attendees to our meetings. If you're a brewer in the area, you should really join up -- its a lot of fun, and there are some club members that make some great beer. Also, we have some fairly active forum-style message boards that are free to join.  We meet the second Wednesday of every month at 7:00 PM at The Ruck in Troy, NY.






My role as Brewmaster General took me to the 2013 TAP NY Beer and Food Festival this year. Our club set up a booth and mingled with the beer-schwilling masses. We met a lot of great people  and made some great contacts with local maltsers and hop growers. New York beer is really starting to take off, due in part to the Farm Brewery bill that came into effect in January. With the corresponding upsurge in farm breweries, which must get a specific proportion of their ingredients from regional sources, there has been a similar emergence of local wheat, barley, and hops in the local marketplace. Combined with the excellent line of local and not-so-local beers that the new-ish distributor Remarkable Liquids is bringing into the area (Evil Twin, Mikkeler, Stillwater, Omnipollo, and recently Rushing Duck), there is never a dull trip to the beer bar or store. (My trips to The City Beer Hall and The Ruck are becoming more and more frequent.) Its a pretty exciting time for beer enthusiasts in New York, really.

So, back to TAP NY...As the Brewmaster General of the Albany Brew Crafters, I was interviewed by a blogger for the TImes Union newspaper. Check out some of my 15 minutes of fame:



Finally, here's a link to Sonja's write-up on TAP, including this great picture of the Albany Brew Crafters: